The Best Kept Secret About Dissertations

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Gather round, my friends, and I will tell you the best-kept secret of dissertating.

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This is a secret I only learned in the last semester of my PhD as I was putting the finishing touches on the dissertation and sending it to my committee.

It is a secret I wish to God I had known much, much earlier because it would have saved me so much time and so many headaches.

If I could only give you one piece of advice for writing your whole dissertation it would be this secret, but not hidden, truth about dissertating:

DISSERTATIONS ARE A TRASH GENRE!

No, I’m not kidding.

Most dissertations, and I very much include my own in this, are awful.

They are not awful because you are a bad writer or a bad researcher.

They are awful because the genre is terrible.

A dissertation is a very specialized book that no one ever reads. You will read it. Your committee might read it. Your chair will probably read it.

That’s about it.

Imagine, for a second, how truly terrible your favorite book would be if it was written for an audience of five people one of which was the author and the other four were paid  to critique it.

Now imagine if that book had to tell its own story while simultaneously referencing most of the books in related genres and explaining how its story was different but still important.

On top of that, imagine if that book did not have the benefit of a professional editor and had to conform to a bizarre set of formatting standards.

See what we’ve done here? We’ve taken your favorite book and turned it into a trash fire.

When you write a dissertation, that is the genre you are writing in.

One of the biggest hurdles to sitting down and writing the first draft of your dissertation is the haunting question, “Will it be any good?”

This is not the right question. In fact, a lot of the most prolific authors openly talk (or talked, if they’re dead) about how the first draft is awful. You may have seen the following image, from time to time, on our site:

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When you’re sitting down to write a first draft don’t concern yourself with whether or not it’s good.

How would you even know?

Unless you’re Bruce Banner, you probably haven’t done this before. That’s part of why you have a committee! Their job is to tell you what’s working and what’s not. In reality, committees do this to varying degrees with wildly different success rates, but that’s a post for another time.

I said at the top of this post that I had one very important piece of dissertation advice for you. Here it is:

In the early stages of your writing carve out times to read dissertations in your field.

Search for 3-5 of them and read the introductions then, maybe, skim an interesting chapter. Don’t devote a whole lot of time to this but do devote some time to it.

I didn’t do this until the absolute end of my dissertating process when I was revising the pop-culture chapter and I wanted to see how dissertations in media studies were citing TV shows.

The first dissertation I tried to read was, shall we say, disappointing and, also, seemed to have no consistent way of citing the TV shows they were referencing.

I figured I’d just gotten a lemon so I found another dissertation that seemed relevant and read part of it. It was also not great (e.g. obvious spelling and grammar errors, some logical slight of hand) and it cited sources in a completely different way than the first dissertation.

At this point, I needed a tie-breaker so I found a third dissertation which cited their TV sources yet another way and was also generally bad.

At around this same time a guest lecturer assigned a dissertation in their field to my class to familiarize them with the material they would be covering. That dissertation was truly awful. Not only did it have the spelling and grammar errors I had come to expect but the person was less conversant with the strains of feminism she claimed to be critiquing than my 200 level students were. That guest lecturer had to cancel at the last moment and my students and I engaged in a “deconstructive exercise” where we tore that dissertation apart.

I also personally know someone who deposited their dissertation with a typo in the title, so . . .

At this point, you might be thinking to yourself, “But my dissertation will be different! Mine will be special–a joy to read.”

To which I would ask you, “Why, tho?”

I say this to you as someone who wanted my dissertation to be beautiful . . . to be delicious in the way that good writing can be both beautiful and delicious. I say this to you as someone who had some moderate success in this realm. I am proud of the work I produced and I love my dissertation.

I also say this to you as someone whose dissertation has been read by fewer than 10 people and that includes people who have only read portions of it.

There is a subtle, but important difference, in your dissertation being a joy to write and a joy to read. Your book should be, ideally, a joy to read. But your dissertation is not a book and it will not be read by a wide audience.

Let your dissertation be a joy to write but don’t worry about whether or not it’s a joy to read. To master the difference the absolute best thing you can do is skim 3-5 dissertations in your field to get a realistic idea of where the bar is for what your reader is expecting. After that, as much as you can, have fun with it.

Dissertating: A Tale in Three Parts

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Part the First: You Are A Good Writer

Those of use who make our living by writing seem to love nothing so much as talking about how difficult it is to make the words go.

If you are ABD in the humanities then you have likely written a research prospectus, your prelim exams, several seminar papers, and dozens of papers for your undergraduate course work.

It’s likely that many of the things you wrote were quite good. Good enough for a professor or two to look at undergraduate-you and ask, “Have you considered going to graduate school?”

Good enough for an admissions committee to say, “Yes! We need this person to be part of our program.”

Good enough for your seminar professors to pass you and good enough for your committee to declare you done with All But Dissertation.

So, then, why on earth would you need advice on how to write? Not only have you written quite a lot but it’s all been good enough to get you here.

Be that as it may, almost every academic I have ever met has an unhealthy relationship with writing.

There is a reason this is one of the most popular images in my academic social media:

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The hell of it is, the writing process described in the graphic works for an awful lot of projects. It’s possible (not advisable, but possible) to get through one’s MA thesis and prospectus this way.

It is not, however, possible to get through a dissertation this way.

Part the Second: But That Doesn’t Mean You’ll Be A Good Dissertation Writer

You know what I really, really, really hate?

I hate when people say that life in academia isn’t real life.

I wish I could say that I only hear this malarky from people who don’t work in academia but that’s just not true. I’ve heard it in near equal amounts from people who work in academia as those who don’t.

I once had a newly tenured professor tell me that graduate school is an extended adolescence.

With all due respect to that person: LIKE HELL.

In graduate school I: was diagnosed with a new mood disorder, was diagnosed with autoimmune disease, ended a long-term relationship, got married, buried my stepfather, and sat by my mother’s hospital bed when she almost died–twice.

Real life doesn’t magically stop for you just because you are in graduate school. Life continues to happen and through it all (unless you are on fellowship) you are not only expected to work for your graduate stipend but to write a book in an extremely specialized genre on top of it.

In addition, dissertating is a fundamentally creative process. And, like many creative endeavors, it can be difficult (almost impossible) to draw firm limits between what is work and what is life.

I can tell you with 100% confidence right now that every humanities graduate student I have ever talked to is doing their dissertation because it is deeply related to their personal life in some way. Sometimes the connections are obvious: I grew up adjacent to evangelical purity culture and I wrote a dissertation on virginity. Sometimes the connections are a little deeper such as someone writing about a favorite childhood comic or working on something related to a disease a family member had, but if you scratch the surface those connections between the scholar and the scholarship go deep.

Which is why, one of my favorite cartoons describing life, also very accurately describes what it’s like to write a dissertation:

Dissertating

Part The Third: Momentum

So, what can you do?

The writing skills that have gotten you so far can’t take you much further and real life keeps happening with no respect for your dissertation deadlines.

In addition, the nature of writing a dissertation is completely different from all of the writing you’ve done up to this point.

When writing papers for your course work, or even your prelim exams, there was a recommended amount of pages that a complete work should be.

That doesn’t exist with a dissertation. It needs to be thorough and well-argued and it takes as many pages as it takes. The most concrete advice I ever got in the way of how long a dissertation should be was at an after-hours event where a faculty member confided that they were reading a dissertation which had seven chapters, one of which was 100 pages long. “Don’t,” they said while looking at me very seriously, “ever write a 100 page chapter. That means you’re doing it wrong.”

And that was it. That was the most concrete advice I got on page length from faculty.

Much more helpful was when I asked recent graduates in my program, via a general Facebook cry of desperation, how long their chapters were on average. (The answer, if you’re interested, was 40-50 pages which I thought was very intimidating at the beginning and not quite long enough by the time I was done.)

Moreover, your other writing projects have had a firm deadline. Even if you could kind of fudge those deadlines, say, by getting a seminar professor to extend a deadline for a paper or taking an incomplete for a class, there was still a finite point by which the thing must be done.

That simply doesn’t exist with dissertations. It never has to end. As long as you can keep paying the school to stay registered for research hours and any fees associated with staying on the rolls you can dissertate forever. (Let me tell you right now if you want to dissertate indefinitely then this site is not for you.)

Last, but not least, for the reasons mentioned above and others, dissertating is significantly less structured than the types of writing you’ve done previously. Your committee likely will not hound you and that’s not because they want to see you fail but because they are people in their own right with busy lives and a lot going on.

What’s a grad student to do?

You can’t think of writing a dissertation the way you would think of writing a seminar paper or your prelims or your prospectus. So, how can you think about it?

Momentum is the answer.

Thinking in terms of page limits or deadlines isn’t helpful for many people because it’s difficult to enforce those on yourself and, at the dissertation level, no one else is going to enforce them for you.

On top of that, there are so many parts to doing a dissertation that don’t neatly fall into the traditional category of writing as sitting down at a desk and writing.

The advice to write every day is good advice, and you absolutely should write most days. However, I noticed early on for myself that I couldn’t write for half an hour if I hadn’t given myself at least 2 hours to read, an hour to type up my notes on the reading, lunch, and an hour to just kind of process things. That’s about 5 hours of stuff that genuinely contributes to the dissertation but is not writing, per se, for every half hour of writing.

Instead of writing every day I believe that people should focus on maintaining momentum every day.

Momentum can be a lot of things. Momentum can be networking at a conference, reading, typing up notes, organizing notes, formatting, editing bibliography, searching for a book/article. Momentum can even mean taking a day off for your overall health and sanity.

I believe that the concept of momentum is what people are really getting at when they track their overall word count. Even if it goes down on some days when you cut chunks the overall word count goes up over time showing that you are maintaining your forward momentum.

I would encourage you, dear reader, to set aside questions such as: did I meet my word count today, am I on track to my deadline, did I do enough, what is enough, etcetera.

Instead, replace them with two simple questions you can answer at the end of every day: Did I maintain momentum on my project today? And, how can I maintain my forward momentum tomorrow?

Pro Tip: I would often start the day with a list of three things I could do to maintain momentum on my dissertation. That way if my plans do to one thing, like write 200 words, didn’t pan out I could shift gears and focus on one of my other options, like editing the appendix, to increase my odds of having a successful day.

The Struggle Is Real

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On Tuesday I promised that I would share a post with you on Thursday about how to think about writing a dissertation because it is fundamentally different from almost any other writing project you can undertake.

However, if you check our archives that you’ll see there was no post on Thursday.

Started on Monday, now we here.

Yesterday, I had a bad mental health day. It was bad from the time I woke up to right before i went to bed and although there were some good moments in the day the overall day had a lot of unexpected curve balls.

As I was going to bed last night, finally feeling a bit more human, I contemplated just finishing and posting the draft I’d started for Thursday’s topic and hoping y’all wouldn’t notice that I was late.

Lord knows, as a grad student, I certainly used this tactic a time or two with my committee.

When I woke up this morning, though, I thought about all the times that my health had impacted my writing schedule when I was dissertating.

Sometimes it was physical health. Stop me if this one sounds familiar: It’s fall semester/quarter. Your students/classmates have the sniffles. You have grading to do and papers to write and a term to end. You are running on adrenaline and caffeine. You get to the end of the term. Hooray! Now, at long last, you can “catch up” on all that writing you put off while trying to finish things up over the last few weeks. But Lo! The minute you stop running off adrenaline you get sick. Your brain’s too foggy to read. You’re barely awake. You feel miserable and doing anything more active than laying on the couch with Netflix in the background is too damn much.

In interviewing grad students about barriers to their productivity I had dozens of grad students tell me that this exact pattern often ate up at least a week of their planned writing time while debilitating guilt and panic over the idea of catching up took out another week.

Mental health issues are just as debilitating but often more difficult to prevent or treat. For instance, I don’t know why I woke up already in a bad headspace yesterday. I do know that this time of year always exacerbates my anxiety and depression. It could also be residual exhaustion from the Kavanugh hearings and/or the ongoing stress of moving. I don’t know why it happened. I do know that I did all the right things: I used my UV spectrum light to help mitigate the effects of the weather. I took my escitalopram. I did restorative yoga and I called in sick to work. I took care of myself in the best way I knew how and, you know what? It was still just a bad mental health day and the writing did not get done.

Why am I telling you all of this?

Well, first, because if you are in a PhD program and deal with a chronic illness of any type I want you to know that you are not alone and that your dream is not impossible. During my PhD program, I was diagnosed with anxiety and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. I had likely had them for some time before my PhD but they became increasingly debilitating and, therefore, increasingly noticeable throughout my PhD.

My own illnesses were, in fact, part of what inspired this business. I didn’t want people to go through their PhD program thinking they were failing at all the things when they were sick.*

Second, the adage, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is so incredibly true when it comes to health and writing.

Most academics I know tend to think of their bodies as giant meat suits they use to carry books from the library to their office.

But that’s so far from the truth. The origins and perpetuation of that myth are a whole other set of topics. What’s important to know here is that feminist, queer, and disability studies have all clearly proven that our bodies are critical in working with our brain to shape what we perceive and what we think, how we process and how we make meaning.

The thing is, I can’t tell you how to take care of your health and I know there can be some structural barriers to doing that in grad school (like difficulty making an appointment with CAPS which is underfunded absolutely everywhere).

I can tell you that taking the time, daily, to do what works for optimizing your mental and physical health is a long-term investment in your writing.

For me, this often means ensuring that I get between 8 and 10 hours of sleep and doing somewhere between 5 and 20 minutes of yoga.

I can also tell you that even when you are doing your best there will be days when you just can’t write. There will be days when the thing you most need for your health is to stay far away from writing and that’s okay. Those days are, also, an investment in your long-term writing success.**

In summary, if you want to write well then do everything you can to be well–including practicing compassion towards yourself.

*PhDepression is something I foud via Twitter. They are doing some great work talking about mental health in grad school. If you know someone struggling to balance mental health and grad school I would recommend checking them out.

**Loss of interest in things you used to enjoy is a sign of depression. If you find yourself needing to take a lot of days off from writing it might be time to have a loving conversation with yourself about whether your health is in jeopardy or if grad school is still the right path for you. All the answers are ok and you are brilliant no matter what you do.

 

 

 

 

Do It For Love; or Dissertation Advice Conveyed Primarily Through GIFs of Elle Woods

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Congratulations!

You were admitted to a PhD program, you completed your course work, you survived your prelim exams, you defended your prospectus and now you are, at long last A. B. D.

That moment can feel like this:

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Embrace it. Celebrate it. Take at least a week.

Then, right before you feel really ready for it, begin dissertating.

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It is impossible to describe to you just how difficult writing a dissertation is. Within this difficult process the most difficult part is writing the first draft of the dissertation. Within that difficult process the most difficult part is writing the first chapter.

This is true no matter who you are. It’s true if you’ve written a lot. It’s true if you’ve been published before you start writing your disertation. It’s true if you like to write. It’s true if you’re good at writing. It’s true for everyone.

Previously, we’ve discussed how your prelims are the last big exercise you go through as a consumer of knowledge. Your dissertation is your first big exercise as a producer of knowledge. Nothing in your academic life can quite prepare you for it. You have, after all, spent well over a decade as a student and now you are being asked to create new knowledge. It’s a little bit of magic and a whole lot of difficult.

You may enter with an Elle Woodsian sense of confidence but throughout the process you will feel like this:

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And like this:

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Feedback from your committee will have you like:

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And that is all not just in the realm of normal but damn close to a best case scenario.

You will want to quit.

Statistically, many people do quit.

There are many good reasons to quit and no part of this business exists to shame people who leave graduate school. What we are here to do, however, is to help people who want to get through their programs minimize unnecessary difficulty.

To that end, there is one thing you can do before you ever start dissertating that will help you cut through all the bullshit that dissertating will throw at you:

Love.

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I know, I know! It seems cliche and unhelpful to simply say that love will get you through dissertating, but it’s true.

There were many, many moments throughout the dissertating process when I wanted to walk away. What kept me from walking away, every time, was the love of my project. Simply put, I wanted to be the person who did my project. I didn’t want to bequeath my research to someone else and go do something else.

On particularly bad days the thing that I always turned back to was my project. When I was writing the rest of the BS just seemed to fade away.

Being able to pick a project you love, or a project that has elements you love, is one of the great privileges of the humanities. I’ve spent a lot of time with STEM and social science grad students and their projects are often dictated by what lab or research group they get in which is, itself, dictated by what lab and research group get funding which, of course, is influenced by a whole nexus of factors.

While I loved the topic of my dissertation I’ve known people who have a genuine love for the practical applications of their research or the methods they’re using or where their archive was located or the population they were working with.

You don’t have to love every element of your project but I can promise you that your dissertation journey will be a helluva lot easier if you love something about it.

Loving something about your project will make you happy, even in some of the darkest moments of dissertating and

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Well, that, and they’re much more likely to finish writing their dissertations.

Now, it’s possible you reading this and thinking, “Fucking great. It’s great to know this now but I already defended my prospectus and there was nothing in there that I loved so how the heck am I supposed to love something about my dissertation?!”

It’s a fair question.

Remember, your dissertation is supposed to change between when you defend your prospectus and when you defend, well, your dissertation. Even if your committee has already approved a prospectus on a project that feels doable but doesn’t have elements you love I promise that there are still ways to add a little of that most magic of ingredients to your project.

Again, it doesn’t have to be the subject material. It can be a whole host of things. It can even be the sheer challenge of it.

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On Thursday we’ll be discussing how to think about writing–a crucial step into turning that ominous blank page into a first draft.

Until then, think about what you love about your project and remeber

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Super Roundup: Teaching Resources

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General Topics–Some favorite topics that can be covered in most intro level humanities courses.

Reproductive Justice–An excellent, open source primer.

Reproductive Justice–Another excellent, open source primer, but more concise.

Hankivsky – Intersectionality 101 – 2014–A primer on the concept. After this, I usually have students do a short writing exercise in class or as a Blackboard quiz to have students illustrate their own intersectionality by coming up with a metaphor. Many students choose one from the reading and explain how it pertains to them and some students come up with very original ideas. Either way, it seems to help move the concept from theory to praxis.

Cassandra Among the Creeps–A great piece about how men reject women’s pain and women’s testimony to further patriarchal institutions. Perhaps particularly important if you are teaching about the Kavanaugh atrocity.

Capitalism–I wish this weren’t true but students are just more willing to hear criticism’s of capitalism from a white guy billionaire. Luckily, we have one offering some important critiques. I like to note that this talk was given in 2014 and since then the US government has doubled and tripled down on tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.

Income Inequality–Why, and how, it’s bad.

Wealth Gap–Last Week Tonight is a gift from the gods of teaching. It’s funny and, at the same time, is an example of what good research and critical thinking skills look like. It’s also 30 minutes at most so it fits even into a 50 minute class. I like to show this video the day after the Income Inequality video above. If the first clip illustrates the harms of income inequality this one does a pretty good job of explaining the politics of why it persists in the US and how it’s getting worse.

Last Week Tonight–Well, since I mentioned it . . .

Police Militarization

Food Waste

Gender Pay Gap–This one is short (under 8 minutes) and you can play the whole thing or the fake ad for LadyBucks starting at 5:57. However, I would really encourage showing the whole thing because there’s something about the line, “If someone takes a dump on my desk the size of the dump is not the issue.” I know it seems weird but if you are teaching feminist, gender or women’s studies in any way that one analogy in this episode can get you so much traction. Time and again students will want to bring things back to, “But women are almost equal in X,” or “But things in X are so much better for women than they were Y years ago” and something about being able to say, “Remeber, if you take a dump on my desk the size of the dump is not the issue” really forces them to focus on the ideology behind inequality. Listen, I wish there was a more eloquent, less scatological, way to get students to viscerally understand this concept but I just haven’t found one. In my 8 years of teaching about gender and sexuality this is the thing that gets the point across the most.

Miss America–This is another one where you can show the whole episode or the mini-pageant that sums up most of the main points of the episode which starts at 12:30 (but I would show the whole episode because it’s amazing).

Sex Ed–Yet again, you can show all 18 minutes or the summary clip starting at minute 17:53.

Medicaid Gap–If I’m teaching about the 2016 election, or if I were teaching now with the midterms approaching, I would 1000% show this video. “Economic anxiety” was listed as a reason that a lot of people voted for Trump in 2016 and that anxiety, when it was located, was often tied to healthcare costs. This video lays out, in detail, how Republicans exacerbated the healthcare crisis by refusing free money and voters, who did not know this, were angry at the ACA for not working.

International Women’s Day–If you happen to be teaching on March 8th then this is for you.

Student Debt–This may fuck them up a bit but they do deserve to know.

Paid Family Leave

The 2016 Election

GOP Rape Advisory Chart–Difficult, but essential, to read and to understand the misogyny of the US and the Republican party.

Welcome to Leith–Very hard to watch, but important to understand how white supremacy has been flourishing in the US since well before 2016.

“White Working Class” Narrative Is Nothing But A Racist Dog Whistle--A great piece about the myth of the white working class and the supposed economic anxiety that supported Trump.

On Men

The Lonely Legion–An incredibly important piece about why men are lonely, how women act as emotional bandaids, and why this makes men vulnerable to radicalization by white supremacists and misogynist groups.

Men Just Don’t Trust Women. And This Is A Problem.–An honest piece from one of my favorite authors.

Comedy Clips

As I mentioned earlier, I often begin class with a comedy clip vaguely related to something we’re talking about that day. Pedagogically, I do this because laughter releases serotonin which helps the brain store material in long-term memory. I also use a lot of these clips to remind students that we can bring a sense of lightness to serious subjects. It’s also a quick way to get students’ attention and can buy you an extra 3-5 minutes at the beginning of class if you need a moment to catch your breath for any reason. With that said, here are some of my favorite clips to begin class.

Let’s Generalize About Men–I love to use this clip to convey the absurdity of generalizing and also to cut through the sense of tension students can bring to class when we are talking about men or masculinity.

Very Adult Lesson on the 4 Sentence Types–Very much what it sounds like. You will know if your class can handle this type of comedy and it’s not appropriate for all institutions (I’m looking at you Christian colleges). I will say, it’s impossible to forget the sentence types after this clip.

Unlearn Toxic Masculinity–We don’t deserve Nore Davis. This routine touches on everything from what it means to be woke to student loans. ❤

Treat Nazis Like You Treat Women–‘Nough said.

On Growing Up Religious & Abstinent–If you’re teaching about sex-ed in the US this is a great one to start the day with.

Not An Alpha Male–Again, a great way to cover types of masculinity. Also, racism.

Aparna Nancherla–Is amazing and you should show all of her clips in your class at some point.

Ivan Decker–I will never not show this routine in a class.

Matthew Broussard–I love to use this clip before talking about sexuality to introduce students to using correct anatomical terms.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Inside the Duggars’ Dark World–My piece on the Duggars for the Ms. blog. It’s also about Christian Nationalism and misogyny.

Indiana’s Dangerous Anti-Abortion Laws are Mike Pence’s Legacy–Another piece for Ms. (always honored to work with them) that’s mostly about Christian Nationalism, misogyny, and state power.

Review: Dirty Computer–I got to co-author a review of my favorite artists with one of my favorite people and someone published it!

WTF: Dissertating

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The dissertation.

If you want to go from ABD to PhD, or abd2phd, then you have to write a dissertation.

You can do all the other things we’ve discussed from prelims to teaching to service work and if you don’t write the damn dissertation then you don’t get the damn PhD.

As my partner and I transition out of academics into other types of jobs I’ve become acutely aware of the fact that academics often refer to umbrella categories rather than specific job duties.

Take our September topic of teaching as an example. Teaching can include but is not limited to: project management, training, presentations, content creation (Blackboard or Moodle or other), curating content (putting together a course pack), and procedure writing (creating syllabus policies). Yet, we refer to it all simply as teaching.

Similarly, what we normally refer to as “dissertating” involves research (which may itself involve grant writing, travel planning, and so on), writing, editing, revising, and, ultimately, defending.

For our October series on dissertating we will specifically be focusing on how to write a first draft of your dissertation. This assumes that you have completed enough research to start writing.

Topics we will address are what enough even means in the context of researching and writing a dissertation draft, how to deal with the anxiety inherent in the process, and what to do when the words won’t go.

We will also address how to break down the overwhelming imperative of “Write an original book” into doable steps and share all the best practices and things we wish we’d done sooner in writing our own dissertations.

If you have a particular dissertating topic you want covered and don’t see it listed here then leave a comment or use the Contact page to send us a message!

October?

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Y’all, how the hell did it get to be October so quickly?

We had so much planned for our September series on teaching but, you know, life happens.

In addition to the emotional toll of the Kavanaugh hearings, which we shared a little bit about here, the majority of our team moved during the month of September throwing our lives, and our timelines, into chaos.

We want to deeply apologize to those of you who were hoping for more detailed teaching advice. We were excited to talk about teaching with you as well and deeply disappointed that we didn’t meet our original posting goals.

Like most of the topics we cover on this site, we could spend months talking about the ins and outs of teaching.

And we plan to.

If you’ve wanted a deeper dive on any of the topics we’ve covered in the past (e.g. prelims/fields, being a first-gen or working-class PhD, task management, wonder & flow, and, yes, teaching) then it is my great pleasure to announce that we will be revisiting all of these topics and going into greater detail over the next calendar year.

On Wednesday we will be announcing the new topic we’ll be covering for the month of October–a topic we are so excited to share with you!

But we aren’t quite done with teaching yet. This Friday, in lieu of a regular weekly roundup we will be sharing a super roundup of teaching links and resources we’ve found helpful over the years.

Last, but never least, we want to offer a special thanks to all of the new followers who joined us during our summer series on rest and over the month of September! We are so glad you are here and want to celebrate you. To do so, we’re putting together a giveaway for the month of November. Leave a comment and tell us what item you would most want to win in an abd2phd giveaway!

FDT and FBK

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Y’all, I’m so tired in all the ways a human being can be tired. The change of seasons and this Brett Kavanaugh bullshit has got me exhausted and the only thing I’ve been doing for days–when I’m awake–is trying to find little things that don’t make me miserable. So, you know, I rewatched all of “The Good Place.”

I have, noticeably, stepped away from our Septemeber series on teaching. Every day I wake up and tell myself, “Write about how to teach intersectionality today. It’s more important than ever with all of this BS going on.” And every day I wind up eating cookies and watching Sailor Moon to not think about the interesting times we live in.

If I learned one thing in my teaching career it’s that  it can be incredibly powerful to bring your whole self to the classroom.

Of course, you shouldn’t do anything that you’re uncomfortable with but the quickest way to build trust in the classroom is to be vulnerable there–to model how to connect lived experience with classroom concepts.

If you, like me, are struggling right now–struggling to get out of bed, struggling to teach, struggling to exist–then I would encourage you to take that into the classroom. Chances are, a lot of your students are struggling as well and would appreciate a chance to talk about it.

We hear a lot these days about how our digital spaces are increasingly becoming echo chambers because of our ability to mute or block people who have differing views. Because of this, our classrooms have become even more important cultural spaces. They  are places where students are taught how to critically evaluate their opinions while also interacting with people who have different views and different life experiences. This can be incredibly important.

I know it certainly was for me when I was a young, extremely conservative student.

So, in light of all of this, I have just a few resources to share. The first category are things that help us get up and do shit. The second category are some teaching resources for your classroom.

Stuff That Makes Me Hate the World a Little Bit Less:

FDT, Part 1

FDT, Part 2

Wednesday Morning

Oh My God

Join The Fun!

Trump Is A Clown With a Knife

Stuff to Encourage Class Discussion, Hopefully:

Safe Spaces–I love this piece for explaining safe spaces to students: what they are, what they aren’t, why folks need them, and how they work. (Bonus Points if you can guide your students towards understanding that “man caves” are safe spaces for white men.)

Jokes Seth Can’t Tell–I love this regular segment on Late Night with Seth Meyers for introducing an example of people owning intersectional identities and how in-group and out-group language works.

Growing Up Poor–If you’re teaching in the US then it’s going to be incredibly hard to get your students to acknowledge, let alone talk about, class. I use comedy clips almost every class period to get things started and this one is, far and away, the perennial favorite. It can also spark some good dialogue about class differences.

Potato or Nazi–My favorite way to start a conversation about imperialism and cultural appropriation.

 

Using #MightyKacy to Teach Privilege

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Earlier this week I said I would share my favorite lesson to teach students the concept of privilege. Understanding privilege is essential for understanding, well, pretty much anything else. However, a lot of students are initially resistant to the concept of privilege and the idea that they have it.

I was one of these students. When I was a junior in college and first learning about the concept of privilege through my work with the Bonner Leader’s program I was deeply uncomfortable with the concept. It felt as if someone was trying to tell me I had not earned my place at the institution. It felt like my hard work was being invalidated. I really, really, really could have used this article.

There are two fundamental truths of teaching (which no one ever tells you, for some reason). The first is that all of us teach first to who we were as students. The second is that the best teaching is a balance between earning your students’ trust enough to fuck up their day a little bit.

I’ve designed this lesson on privilege to do both of those things, reaching through the resistance students like me had to the concept of privilege and destabilizing their day the more they think about.

This lesson is adaptable to most humanities classes, is a stand alone, and can be adjusted to fit the length of your class period. The lesson as described below is designed to take up one full 50 minute class period.

First, have your students watch this video of Kacy Catanzaro, or #MightyKacy, at the 2014 Dallas Qualifiers. This is the first time that a woman completed the American Ninja Warrior qualifying course. The video is fun to watch and exciting whether you’ve seen it 50 times or it’s brand new. Have students watch it twice. The first time just to watch it and feel the excitement. The second time students watch it, when they know what to expect, ask them to listen to the commentary and watch the audience. You know your class best so if you think they need to then have them watch it a third time, possibly taking notes on the phrases that stick out to them.

After you’ve had them watch the qualifiers hit them with the 2014 Dallas Finals.

Have them repeat the same process they went through for the qualifying video with the finals.

After watching the videos guide students through discussing what they heard from the commenters and the fans.

They may notice a lot of different things from the fact that Kacy picked up some fans and a hashtag between the qualifiers and the finals to the fact that her BF and training partner calls her “one of the most talented athletes I’ve ever worked with.”

Guide them towards the observations the commenters made about her body–particularly about her “wingspan,” places her weight or height is a disadvantage, and so on.

These comments hint at the fact that the course was not built for Kacy’s body. It was built for a taller, heavier body.

This is privilege.

Privilege doesn’t mean that you hate individuals who are not like you. In fact, you can enthusiastically support them as individuals just as the commenters and fans enthusiastically support Kacy’s progress through the courses.

What privilege means is that the structure (in this example, the obstacle course) is built for certain types of bodies rather than others.

This doesn’t mean those other bodies can’t make it through the course–only that it is more difficult for them to do so.

Similarly, this doesn’t mean people who have the bodies the course is made for will automatically make it through the course, but it does mean they won’t face extra obstacles just by being who they are.

If you like, you can take this lesson even further.

The American Ninja Warrior obstacle course is made for certain types of bodies–but whose?

If you ask students who the course is made for they will tentatively answer, “Men.”

But #NotAllMen

If you have any Ninja Warrior enthusiasts in your class they will likely know that American Ninja Warrior is a popular spinoff of the original Japanese game show. That does not explain, however, why ANW became an American sensation when other Japanese game shows, like the brilliant Hole In The Wall, did not.

The answer can be found in, of all places, WWII. After WWII Japan dissolved it’s Army and the US established a strong military presence in bases all over Japan. Competing in the original Ninja Warrior became a popular pastime for American soldiers on leave in Japan.

American soldiers who liked competing in the show, and their families who wanted to watch them, created a market for an American version of the show.

Thus, the American Ninja Warrior obstacle course isn’t built for every male body. It is built explicitly for the bodies of American soldiers.

In essence, we have the glory that is American Ninja Warrior because of the United States’ military and cultural imperialism.

This is the other lesson of privilege: being a member of the American armed-forces doesn’t guarantee you will make it through the ANW obstacle course but it does increase your odds because the structure was, literally, built for you.