Confessions of a Professional Dilettante
On abhorring routine
I really enjoyed this tweet the other day from a professor in Ohio, which really captures a particular aspect of the academic experience:
The one thing I would add is that, for me at least, this also applies to a lot of classes I’ve taught before. I say that because this term I’m teaching the exact same course (by number) that I taught last fall, but I’m doing it in a completely different way. Which means that despite being the professor of record for this same course last year, I’m once again living lecture to lecture.
This is actually a little bit dramatic, even for me, but that’s because I was acutely unhappy with the book I used last year, which presented the core topics in an order I found odd. So while I do have a complete set of materials from last Fall, I wasn’t very happy with the way that course went, at a level where it didn’t feel like it could be made vastly better with small and easy-to-implement tweaks. So I’m blowing the whole thing up, and trying out a very different text and pedagogical style, rather than trying to milk a few years out of a given collection of lecture notes.
That said, I think my record for re-using course materials is about four iterations of a given course. About the fourth time I’m going through the same set of class topics in the same order, I find myself getting bored, so I have to change things up in a moderately dramatic fashion— a new book, a drastic change in grading scheme, some trendy new technique coming out of PER. If I don’t, my personal boredom with the material can’t help but leak through to the students, which will inevitably undermine the class. I need to change things up just to stay where I am.
This is a fairly general phenomenon for me. While the title of this post might seem weird coming from someone who’s in his 23rd year of the only not-explicitly-temporary job he’s ever had, in a lot of ways, I am a professional dilettante. I can’t really settle into a consistent routine in much of anything— I need to rotate through teaching different courses, I can’t keep writing about the same topics for years on end, and I get frustrated with the limited set of dinner options forced on me by two kids who are, let’s say “less than adventurous” when it comes to eating. (Though The Pip is much improved on this front…) It’s been quite a while since I was genuinely trying to run a sustained lab research program, as opposed to bouncing between smaller projects as determined by individual student interests and availability, for reasons both good and bad, but the small-project model really does better suit my temperament.
I have the utmost respect for researchers who can really lock in on a single goal and pursue it for many years, particularly the folks in precision metrology kinds of work who will spend a decade of hard work to shrink the error bars on a measurement by a factor of two. I’m also really glad I don’t do that kind of work— I simply can’t sustain that level of focus.
I’ll also admit a certain degree of envy of colleagues who can roll out the same intro course over and over, with only smallish tweaks as textbooks update to new editions. Particularly when I’m writing out a brand new set of solutions for an entirely new set of homework problems, and barely keeping one lecture ahead of the class. But as stressful as it sometimes gets, I’m pretty sure I would rapidly begin to find that a miserable slog.
In a lot of ways, my “side hustle” as a writer of pop-science books and articles is the ideal gig for me. I can get obsessed with some topic for a period of weeks or months, follow that rabbit-hole as far as I can squeeze through, and then duck back out to do something else. Sadly, that’s not the most highly remunerative of careers, so it wouldn’t really keep the lights on if it were my only source of income. Happily, the stable long-term career I’ve found is probably the next best thing to being independently wealthy. I’m really incredibly lucky to be able to do what I do.
(Note to Self: Buy a Powerball ticket on the way home from campus…)
I do pretty regularly have to remind myself that this is a Good Thing, Actually, though. Particularly when I find myself living lecture-to-lecture while also juggling administrative responsibilities and two very active kids…
A side consequence of this personality-driven working style is that it frequently leads my blogging to tip over into this kind of noodle-y reflective wibbling, because it’s all I have time for. I’m kicking around some stuff about bigger themes in academia, but it’s hard to invest time in writing it up when I have to put together an all-new class four days a week. If you’d like to see whether I ever manage it, here’s a button:
And if you want to call me an overprivileged jackass for the above, I’m not sure I disagree, so the comments will be open:
This reminds me of my former career in technical theatre, which was ideal for me because it was heavily routine-based, but included a routine of blowing up the routine every 3 months when a new show opened. It was perfect, except for the politics and the peanut paychecks.
This reminds me of my first semester of grad school, where as a TA I was assigned to teach a section of the big mechanical drawing class. It was especially hairy because (a) I'd never taken the class as an undergrad (we had an "Engineering Communication" class where we went through the basics of it in about two or three weeks) and (b) they did not have a copy of the teacher's edition of the textbook, so I spent the entire semester frantically staying a class ahead of my students and doing all the homework myself before I could grade their assignments (fortunately, it wasn't very hard).
Of course, by the second semester I taught it, they did manage to dig up a copy of the text with the actual solutions to the exercises, but I barely needed them after surviving the trial by fire the first time around.