Three flavors of learning

I’ve flirted on and off with #100DaysOfCode over the past few years, and always quit when I get to Javascript (which may never change, really), but I have learned some about the learning process itself by playing in that sandbox. In particular, reading about how other people have engaged with the challenge, I realized that one possible way to categorize learning experiences is to think of them as coming in three flavors: passive learning, active learning, and social learning.

Passive learning is essentially consuming content: reading books or articles, watching videos or lectures, listening to lectures or podcasts. This is a great way to get a lot of information in your head fast, but in my opinion is best paired with one or both of the other types of learning. You can make this more active by note-taking, summarizing, or teaching it to someone else, but the learning itself is still pretty passive.

Active learning is when you’re actually doing a thing: actually coding, actually writing, actually cooking, actually flying a plane, whatever it is you’re learning to do. This might involve activities structured by an expert to gradually increase your mastery, or it might involve jumping right in wherever you feel like it. Either way, the practice is taken on either independently or with a more knowledgeable other.

Social learning is when you’re learning in community with others. As with active learning (or passive learning, for that matter), the social aspect can be organized by a more knowledgeable other, an expert. It can, however, be 100% peer-driven. This might involve reading groups that take on a text together, hobbyists who engage in serious leisure in a social context, or individuals studying who answer questions for each other, for example.

I have an intuitive sense that the fastest and most effective learning will incorporate all three flavors, like a Neapolitan ice cream of learning, but any combination of more than one will be more effective than just one.

Image from blackillustrations.com

A quick note on MEXICAN GOTHIC šŸ“š

This book is SO GOOD, but I don’t feel I can write a review that does it justice. It is a pitch-perfect gothic novel and also super gross. After reading all the secrets revealed, I want to go back and re-read, looking for signs. Every layer of gross and spooky in this book has an even grosser and spookier layer underneath it.

I need to re-write my dissertation proposal, for myself.

I’ve been a bit stuck with my dissertation, and only partly due to parenting and chronic illness. I wasn’t quite sure what had me stuck before. I thought it was a need to develop a solid workflow. John Martin told me about a really cool writing tool called Gingko. It overwhelmed me at first because I could stand to see all those columns on screens at once, but once I found the keyboard shortcut for writing in fullscreen, I decided I would try using it to write my dissertation.

I started to get a new “tree” ready, and looked at another dissertation to help me model my structure.

But as I did that I realized…

Usually, a person’s dissertation proposal can become a significant chunk of the dissertation itself, with some expansion.

My dissertation proposal as originally written does not represent my dissertation as executed anymore.

I need to re-write my proposal, but for me.

In which I have a mid-life crisis and freak out about schooling as a societal... thing. Woo Dead Poets Society! šŸ“½ļø

I’ve been pulled deep into Dark Academia’s orbit, because it is the aesthetic I’ve been unknowingly building my whole life, and because of this I watched DEAD POETS SOCIETY for the first time in a very long time last night.

Sometimes I’ll watch a movie that I haven’t watched in a long time and realize that it is one of the threads woven into the fabric of my very being. It’s true of LABYRINTH. It’s true of Tim Burton’s BATMAN. And it’s true of DEAD POETS SOCIETY.

I don’t know when I first saw this movie, only that in the ten years between its release and my high school graduation, it came to hold a special place in my heart. It was a constant cultural presence.

On the day our textbooks were issued in AP English, our teacher pointed out that there was an essay introduction not unlike that written by the apocryphal J. Evans Pritchard, PhD. He said that we would not be ripping it out of the book, but that we should ignore it.

To keep from having the dull inflected practice of the Latin teacher’s declension lesson in the movie, my Latin teacher had us stand on the desks as we shouted verb endings. When I became a Latin teacher, I did the same thing. In my first year of teaching, my students O Captain My Captained me after I assigned DPS for them to watch on a day that I was out sick. I thought, “Well, I have achieved a teacher’s dream in my first year, guess it’s time to retire.”

When I started this viewing, I thought, “Surely it won’t be as amazing as years of distance have made it seem,” but it is. (Is it without flaw? Of course not. And yet, still stunning.)

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.

Mr. Keating said this and I held my breath. Here he had articulated something that lives at the very core of who I am.

I don’t want to spoil too much, though I feel like a 31 year old movie should be past the statute of limitations, but I’ll say this: a student dies in the film. And when the prep school administrator is speaking to the other students about this death in an assembly, here is what he says:

“He was a fine student. One of our best. He will be greatly missed.”

I got a little ragey. A fine student? I got a little horrified, as that’s kind of been my identity for much of my life. I got a little…

WHAT IS IT ALL FOR?

Why are people fine students, and why is THAT the thing you would remark on? This same character was kind, joyful, welcoming, compassionate. Isn’t that more important than being a fine student?

Looking at it from a realistic perspective, the administrator probably didn’t know the student well enough to know anything about him except that he was a fine student.

But in the moment, that’s not what mattered to me. I looked at myself and I asked myself, “Why? What was I a fine student for?” This character, I think he was a fine student out of duty, a sense of obligation to his family. When I talked to W. about it, he pointed out that I enjoy learning more broadly, and that there is value in learning. But I tossed back, “But you can learn a lot without being a fine student.”

I guess this is what it took for me to crack after devoting almost my entirely life to education in one way or another, especially my professional life. Here I am approaching the end of a PhD, and asking myself WHY DO WE EVEN SCHOOL?

There are reasons, and I’ve also been reading about unschooling, and I’m not going to break with school.

I just want to be sure it’s not the only remarkable thing in my or my family’s life.

šŸ““ Redefining my professional identity: From research assistant to doctoral researcher

For the first few years of my doctoral program, I defined myself as a “doctoral student” and “research assistant.” This seemed like an appropriate designation, despite my experience as an education and information professional, because I was taking classes. I kept calling myself that as I was working on my comprehensive literature review, because there didn’t seem to be anything better to call myself than that. It was very exciting when I got to change my email signature to “Doctoral Candidate” in December, because now I was someone who had met all the requirements for a doctoral degree except for the dissertation. But I kept the designation of “research assistant.”

This summer, though, I started thinking about how that designation doesn’t really communicate much to anyone not steeped in academia. And also that it doesn’t say anything about what I do. So as of this school year, I started referring to myself as a “doctoral researcher.” This fits much better. I am doing what researchers do: I am running my own study as PI (my dissertation study) and I work in a lab with two other researchers, designing interview protocols, collecting and analyzing data, and writing reports based on the data. There is no part of my work that is really the work of a student. While I am technically assisting the PI of a research lab, the work I do is not so much assistive as collaborative. So.

I am a doctoral researcher.

For more thoughts on the distinction between a doctoral student and a doctoral researcher, see Pat Thomson’s blog post, “what’s with the name doctoral student?”

Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay.

šŸ““ Semi-structured interviews: Stick to only a few big questions, but leave room for follow-ups

One of my responsibilities in the Equity in the Making lab is to create an interview guide that will help us learn what makerspace leaders in the UNC system consider to be defining features of a makerspace. I originally thought this was going to be a survey, so I came up with a list of about ten questions and then in conversation with my colleagues on the project, added four more. I realized in that conversation, however, that it was an interview guide for a semi-structured interview, not a survey. I told my colleagues I’d take our list of questions and hone it so that it was “more interviewy, less survey-y.” What did that look like?

Each question was getting at a larger issue of the spatial arrangement of a makerspace, especially as it would relate to one of the five senses. The next phase of the project involves using VR to build an imagined “definitive” makerspace, so we want to capture the kinds of things that should be included in that VR environment; this is why I focused on sensory input specifically. The questions were designed to draw out specifics that participants might not think of as falling into these categories; for example, we might be hoping they’d talk about equipment and they would instead talk about the mood or vibe of a space.

I learned from Dr. George Noblit, who taught my advanced qualitative methods class, that if you’re doing an interview for about an hour, you probably should stick with a few big questions. He once gave us an assignment to interview another grad student using only these three questions:

  1. Before grad school?
  2. During grad school?
  3. After grad school?

I interviewed a friend and indeed, just those three questions took an hour for us to talk through. For my dissertation, I had 6 major questions, and that usually took 30 minutes to an hour depending on the participant. Dr. Melo said she wanted these interviews to run about 45 minutes, so I stuck with five questions.

I collapsed the original 14 questions into 5, but I then detailed potential follow up questions. This is, in my experience, the best way to be sure you get the kind of detail your hoping for if you’ve got a reticent participant. You start with the big question and see what they say. Then you can dig deeper if something they say is really promising, or bring in one of the prepared follow-up questions if they answer you quickly and you need more detail.

To see what this looks like, you can look at the interview guide for my dissertation. I’m setting up the EITM questions in a similar format.

In addition to the five questions I developed for this interview guide, I also added two more that I learned about in my qual classes, though I can’t remember if it was with Dr. Noblit or with Dr. Sherick Hughes:

  1. Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t?
  2. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?

These are some of the richest questions you can ask, so I highly recommend including them as the last two questions before the demographics questions in any semistructured interview. In the case of my dissertation interviews, my second participant answered that first one by asking if I’d like to know the specifics of which resources she uses, and of course I wanted to know that and then I incorporated that into every interview afterward. When I was doing a coursework project and interviewing someone about a project they were working on, they answered these questions with “Don’t you want to know why I’m doing this?” and “Wouldn’t you like to hear my plans for [the term of the project]?” and of course the answer to both was yes, and that probably added another 30 minutes to an hour to our interview. (This won’t always be the case. Some participants are more forthcoming than others.)

I hope this has been helpful. If you’re working on a semistructured interview project, how is it going?

Tracy Deonn's LEGENDBORN: Black Girl Magic, Dark Academia, and Arthuriana ON MY CAMPUS! šŸ“š

Publisher’s Summary:

After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNCā€“Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escapeā€”until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus.

A flying demon feeding on human energies.

A secret society of so called ā€œLegendbornā€ students that hunt the creatures down.

And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a ā€œMerlinā€ and who attemptsā€”and failsā€”to wipe Breeā€™s memory of everything she saw.

The mageā€™s failure unlocks Breeā€™s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows thereā€™s more to her motherā€™s death than whatā€™s on the police report, sheā€™ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.

She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the societyā€™s secretsā€”and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthurā€™s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far sheā€™ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society downā€”or join the fight.

What I Love:

Um, everything? Seriously, I’m so thrilled to share this book with the world. Everyone should preorder it, right now. It’s full of Black Girl Magic and Arthuriana. If you’re looking for a Dark Academia vibe, it brings that with its Secret Societies, but it gives it a distinctly Southern flavor that is missing from most DA media I’ve seen. It’s got a LOT of representation: a Black young scholar, a Black botanist, a Taiwanese-American young scholar, a Black father insisting his Black daughter take care of her mental health, a Black psychologist, men loving men, women loving women, men loving men and women (thus far only sequentially, no polyamory here), women loving men and women (same), nonbinary people, archers, swordfighters, staff users, African heritage magic, European heritage magic, and kiiiind of something that I personally anyway interpreted as a magical metaphor for chronic illness. Also, mostly the representation is nonchalant and/or joyful, rather than focusing on misery.

And that’s before you get into its unique relationship with its setting, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This book leverages the most interesting things about the school (i.e., its proliferation of societies, both public and secret) and reckons with the university’s cruel history and less-than-stellar attempts to address it. In May, I will finish my fourth degree at UNC, and between my two most recent degrees, I worked on campus for three years. Before I began my undergrad career there, it seemed like a fairly magical place; once I started, it turned fairly mundane and stayed that way until I picked up this book, which reminded me of the magic and mystery it held for me in the past and added new layers to it.

I’m trying to work out how to address this next bit without getting it wrong, but I don’t know how, so I’m just going to risk being called in/called out because it’s worth the risk. This book is an excellent example of the power of an Own Voices text, because it lets readers in on some of the daily considerations, slights, and trauma that a young Black woman has to deal with. Deonn handles these bits of narrative so matter-of-factly; they are everyday realities in Bree’s life and as a white woman, I understood better how persistent these experiences are than I ever have before. It’s not that I didn’t know, intellectually, that this is the constant weight a Black woman must carry; it’s just that it hits differently when it’s narration from inside a Black woman’s head, rather than explanation directed at me as someone who is privileged to not have the same experiences.

Also there are hot boys and swoonworthy romance but that stuff doesn’t take centerstage and that is as it should be.

I really can’t praise it enough.

What I Want More Of:

There is nothing missing from this book. There was one climactic part that was a little confusing for me, but a later part explained it. (And I understood what was going on in the climax, I just thought maybe I was wrong.)

Deonn is working on the second book now, so here’s a quick wishlist for what I’d like to see in it:

  • the Lady of the Lake
  • the Forest Theater
  • lots more of Sel

What I Need to Warn You About:

There’s nothing about taste that I need to warn you about - this book is fast-paced, simultaneously lyrical and plainly written, and I really believe it would be a rare reader who wouldn’t enjoy it. If you’re not into fantasy, I guess, then it’s not for you.

I will provide a content warning, though: LEGENDBORN contains instances of both covert and overt racism, slavery, and rape.

Bonus Links:

If you read this and are interested in the history behind it, check out these resources:

Old East This is Bree’s dorm.

Wilson Library This is the library where Bree has to hide behind a column and calm down.

The Order of Gimghoul (definitely totally not the Order of the Round Table, NOPE, just a secret society at UNC with a castle in Battle Park and customs based on the ideals of Arthurian knighthood and chivalry)

Unsung Founders Memorial Deonn relocates this from McCorkle Place to the Arboretum, but otherwise it is exactly as described in the book. More here.

Davis Library This is the other library mentioned in the book.

The Old Chapel Hill Cemetery Deonn adds a mausoleum section that isn’t really there, but otherwise her description of the cemetery is accurate.

Confederate Memorial and Julian S. Carr The tragic parts of this book draw on real Carolina history just as much as the fun parts do.

Davie Poplar I’m not saying I’m just saying that maybe possibly this might be a tree with a hidden door in it, if UNC’s campus had such things.

Final Word:

Go preorder this right now. What are you waiting for?

Book: Legendborn
Author: Tracy Deonn
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Publication Date: 2020
Pages: 512
Age Range: Young Adult
Source of Book: Digital ARC from NetGalley

I'm done with exfoliants and goals. #TeamLowBar

Recently, I squeezed some of my Shea Moisture African Black Soap Soothing Body Wash on a washcloth while I was in the shower, and then rubbed it across my upper arm, as one does when washing one’s arm. It felt like it was scratching me. It’s got oats in it, which act as a gentle exfoliant. It felt like scratching, though. I think my nerves are just done, you know? I think it’s probably a fibromyalgia thing, and now my body is just immensely sensitive to the tiniest stuff. My kid pokes me with his elbow in a way that I wouldn’t even notice in the past, and now his elbow is just the sharpest thing and OW. So my skin was like “No, oats are not gentle, actually, please stop using this.”

So I thought about it. I said to my skin, “Okay skin. You know what skin? We are done with exfoliants.” What are exfoliants for, anyway? I’ve never had a good experience with them, and I’ve been using them since I was in middle or high school. All they do is feel like scratching to a greater or lesser degree. And why would I do that to myself?

For the same reason we do all kinds of things: self-improvement. But you know what?

I’m already pretty great.

I’m letting go, for the length of this pandemic if not longer, of the idea that I need to be improved upon in any way: that I need to acquire some skill I don’t have that will suddenly make me employable, that I need to scratch my skin to make it healthy, that I need to eat cleaner than my doctor suggests or my medical conditions require.

Anyone who has worked with me will tell you that my talk about not being a perfectionist and working up only to my own standards, not perfectionism, is some kind of nonsense and that my standards are too high to be reasonable during a global crisis.

“I’m going to set the bar low,” I said to myself. “All I’m going to do is completely fix my kid’s eating and sleep patterns so they don’t make me crazier than I naturally am, enforce a school-like schedule for him, meditate, do yoga, read a lot about possible next steps in my career, and start embodying my middle-aged-version-of-dark-academia aesthetic more fully. It’s basically doing nothing.”

AHAHAHA.

Kimberly: that is not nothing.

Yesterday, I told W. that I didn’t really do anything with my time during M., just let him watch TV and play games and just kind of play. He said, “You built him a Thor hammer.” (There may have been an intensifying expetive between “a” and “Thor,” and he might have said “Mjolnir” instead of “Thor hammer.” I don’t remember.) And I said, “Oh yeah, I did, didn’t I?”

Apparently turning a box, tape, construction paper, and aluminum foil into a cosplay prop is doing a thing.

I have some cognitive distortions, is what I’m getting at here.

So. I took that metaphorical bar and I put it ON THE FLOOR.

This happens once in a while: I decide to just not be so harsh on myself anymore. Let’s do it together.

In that light, I’m getting rid of all goals that aren’t basic living needs or dissertating and graduating. I said I was doing that already, but I hadn’t really done it. But now, maybe I am? I’m declaring that I am. Hold me to it, will you?

Now I’m going to go lie in a hammock.

What I'm excited about today: public scholarship and #SocSciComm šŸ““

Today, I’m excited about:

Feeling bad, feeling better, and making it work with illness

“Have you ever felt pain in literally all of your joints at once?” I asked W. last night.

“No,” he said. “No, I never have.”

“Oh. That’s how I feel right now,” I told him.

On fibro pain days, the pain is most noticeable in my fingers and toes. (On thyroid/autoimmune pain days, it’s in my knees and ankles.) There are 30 joints in each of my feet. There are 27 in each of my hands. (If you have more or fewer than 10 fingers or toes, you have a different number of joints.) I can feel each one a little bit as I move. As I type. As I walk. As I wiggle my toes. The pain isn’t intense, but it is pretty much constant. It disrupts my day.

I often don’t tell people how I’m feeling, physically, because I’ve gotten to the point where it’s a baseline of not great (but, like, kind of okay? tolerable, we’ll say) and I just assume they’re tired of hearing me enumerate the ways I feel not good. But I thought it might be useful to get specific, today.

So today, yes. I feel all the joints in my fingers and toes creaking. My knees, elbows, shoulders, same thing to a lesser extent. I can feel all of my cervical vertebrae stacking on top of each other. I have a headache mostly concentrated over my left eye. It’s like a migraine, but I think it might not be a migraine. All of this is, I believe, because my muscles just sit in a constant state of tension, without my having much control over it.

Please don’t suggest your favorite remedy: I have a plan of action and am working on it. My doctor gave me some advice and I’m working through The FibroManual: A Complete Fibromyalgia Treatment Guide for You-and Your Doctor.

In other news and kind of related, I got some really good work done on my dissertation yesterday, tackling a problem that I’ve been struggling with for about two months. I think a couple of shifts in my working process are responsible for this:

I’ve given myself permission to work in bed. All the sleep hygiene people will tell you that you should only use your bed for sleeping and sex. That’s all well and good, but I think that advice is for people who aren’t dealing with chronic pain. EsmĆ© Weijun Wang has a bed in her home office, which is brilliant, but I’m not about to buy an extra bed. (The home office doesn’t have room for it anyway.) Leonie Dawson was put on bedrest because of hypermobility problems and stayed productive in bed:

I did some reading of journal articles in bed the other day and it was brilliant.

I’m doing my thinking in a different space than I do my research and writing. I’ve been thinking while lying on a hammock, looking up at green leaves and blue sky. If you can get into nature for your thinking, I highly recommend it. But even if it’s just that you move from one chair to a different chair, I think that might work. Having my laptop in front of me, I feel like I need to be producing. But thinking time requires a different mindset. Lying on the hammock was more productive than many of the hours in front of my computer have been.

Next steps: So my next step is to embrace this mindset. I’m going to keep a backrest pillow and a lapdesk under my bed. At the end of my work time, I’m going to shut down my laptop, put it in my backpack, and carry it up to my bedroom so that if I’m struck with inspiration at 3 in the morning I don’t have to go downstairs to get to work. I asked for The Book Seat and got it for my birthday, so even when my arms are weak or achey, I can read.

I’m feeling really optimistic about the effect this set up will have on my productivity. We’ll see.

via GIPHY

From Parul Sehgal: In a Raft of New Books, Motherhood From (Almost) Every Angle

In this piece that is mostly a review of Jacqueline Rose’s book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, Parul Sehgal offers more titles to add to the motherhood reading list.

“Mothers ā€œare not in flight from the anguish of what it means to be human,ā€ Rose writes. She quotes Julia Kristeva: ā€œTo be a mother, to give birth, is to welcome a foreigner, which makes mothering simply ā€˜the most intense form of contact with the strangeness of the one close to us and of ourselves.ā€™ā€

Isnā€™t it pretty to think so? Recent books on motherhood, however, frequently and sometimes unwittingly, illustrate a different phenomenon: how motherhood dissolves the border of the self but shores up, often violently, the walls between classes of women.

Sehgal names some of these walls: pay gaps and maternal health outcomes, both hinging on race. She points out:

…so many of these books (almost all of them are by white, middle-class women) seem wary of, if not outright disinterested in, more deeply engaging with how race and class inflect the experience of motherhood.

The books listed in this article and in Elkin’s are a beginning. As a canon, the list has glaring gaps, most noticeably around race and queerness. The following articles seek to fill those gaps, and I’ll be discussing them in depth in the coming days:

From Lauren Elkin: "Why All the Books About Motherhood?"

I’ve been sitting on Lauren Elkin’s article asking “Why all the books about motherhood? for a year and a half and only read it fully for the first time today. It offers an immense reading list of books related to motherhood. Many of them are written by mothers, and so I think by default curating their writing counts as curating stories of creative mothers.

Elkin quotes Jenny Offill in an interview with Vogue:

ā€œEarly on, I took my colicky baby to one of those new-mothersā€™ groups. I wasnā€™t sure how to connect with them, but I desperately wanted to. But the affect seemed odd. The new mothers seemed to be talking in these falsely bright voices; all the anecdotes were mild ones of ā€œthe time she lost her pacifier on the busā€ variety. No one seemed to feel like a bomb had gone off in their lives, and this made me feel very, very alone. Gaslighted, almost. Why werenā€™t we talking more about the complexity of this new experience?ā€

This resonates immensely with my new mom group experience. I would go. I would not know what to talk about. Our babies would be cute. I would feel awkward. I would leave knowing it was good that I got out of the house, but only feeling a little less lonely. I didn’t know how to reach out. Maybe the moms in these books will reach me.

Elkin says:

The new books on motherhood are a countercanon. They read against the literary canon with its lack of interest in the interior lives of mothers, against the shelves of ā€œthis is how you do itā€ books, and against the creeping hegemony of social-media motherhood.

I welcome this countercanon.

From Hillary Frank: The Special Misogyny Reserved for Mothers

Despite receiving multiple rejections from radio station editors, journalist and author Hillary Frank kept her podcast about parenting, “The Longest Shortest Time,” going for three years before it was picked up by WNYC and then Stitcher.

She learned a lot making the show:

That parents can be civil with one another on the internet. That naming an episode ā€œBoobsā€ will make it your most popular one ever. And that there is a special kind of misogyny reserved for mothers.

Her success with the show didn’t halt the misogyny, but it does show that moms can create success in their creative endeavors. Not only did she keep the podcast going without outside funding for three years, she continued to host it for four more years before transitioning to the role of executive producer. She also wrote Weird Parenting Wins, " a collection of personal essays about parenting, as well as crowdsourced parenting strategies from the worldwide LST community" (source).

From Austin Kleon: Books on art and motherhood

During my sonā€™s first few weeks, I spent most of his naps reading about matrescence (the process of becoming a mother) and identity crises. What did I even care about anymore, besides keeping him alive? Writing? Performing? Iā€™d spent the past three years developing an identity as an improv comedian. Where had that identity gone? Would I ever get it back? Did I even want it back? What about all the other creative identities Iā€™d had before? Iā€™d been a writer, singer, actor, dancer, cross-stitcher, crocheterā€¦ Were those people still inside me? At some point in all of my browsing, I ran across Austin Kleonā€™s recommendations for books on art and motherhood. Iā€™m still on the first book on his list, but the fact that he could make a list gave me some hope that I could figure this out.

#TheSealeyChallenge Link Roundup šŸ“š

I’ve been looking for ways to read more books and talk to more people about them, so when the Book Riot piece, Will You Join The Sealey Challenge? came across my radar, it made sense to answer YES.

During the month of August, participants read a poetry chapbook or full-length collection a day for 31 days while sharing their reads on social media using the hashtag #TheSealeyChallenge, named after poet Nicole Sealey and coined by Dante Micheaux during its first year.

Here are several links where you can learn more about the challenge and find suggestions of what to read:

I myself will be reading a combination of library ebooks selected from recommendations linked in the Book Riot piece, e-chaps from Sundress Publications, and whatever I’ve got lying around the house. So you can expect that in addition to modern new-to-me poets, there will be some children’s collections of e. e. cummings and Emily Dickinson, one day of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and maybe even a YA verse novel or two.

Let me know if you decide to join in!

Welcome to Genetrix: Curating Stories of Creative Mothers

Yesterday, I talked about my project, Genetrix: Curating Stories of Creative Mothers and how I would be incorporating it here into my personal site rather than keeping it in its own place anymore. Today I’m posting the introduction to the project that I wrote a year and a half ago, with some notes afterward on things that have changed in the past year and a half.

How did we get here? Iā€™d been collecting articles and books about motherhood and art for months when Electric Literature published Grace Elliottā€™s ā€œWhy Do I Have to Choose Between Being a Writer and a Mother?ā€ in which she writes:

I am having such trouble finding narratives of women who are mothers and artists, or mothers and musicians, or mothers and writers ā€” stories in which women are both, without their struggle to be more than a mother overwhelming themā€¦ [I am] looking for a narrative in which creative women do not have to choose between abandoning their work or their children. I hope to find a story of women who live as men do: loving and ambitious, child-raisers and artists.

As a mother and a writer, this spoke to me on a soul level. Reading this immediately followed my participation in Kim Werkerā€™s Daily Making Jumpstart Live, two weeks of attempting to make something daily. In the course of that process, two weeks during which sometimes my two year old son didnā€™t nap, I found my relationship with creativity and making changing. At first, I had ambitions of crocheting rows and rows a day, preparing elaborate meals, maybe taking up woodworking. In the middle, I started to count mixing some chai concentrate with almond milk as my making for the day. But by the end, I was, in fact, chugging along with crochet, knocking out a giant doily shawl over the course of a week. Some days I could be a mother and a creative person, and other days I couldnā€™t.

Elliottā€™s writing and this experience confirmed for me that I needed to seek out the stories of other creative mothers. And my natural inclination is to share the stories I find.

What are we doing here? Like motherhood itself, creating and curating this project will be a process of trial and error. Iā€™ll be sharing links to blog posts and articles that inspire me and can serve as a launching point into our journey at the intersection of creativity and motherhood. Iā€™m hoping to include reviews of relevant books and media, and conversational interviews with actual creative mothers. But please tell me what you would like to see in this space. Iā€™m especially interested in ideas for how we can build a community of people interested in stories of creative mothers.

Who am I? Iā€™m Kimberly Hirsh, and Iā€™m a mother, performer, writer, and crafter. Most of my creativity these days is used to produce academic writing as part of my doctoral work toward a PhD in information and library science. If you want to get to know me better, you can check out my website.

Iā€™m a white, American, raised Christian but currently agnostic and a little witchy, chronically ill but without other disabilities, vaguely straight, monogamously heterosexually partnered, legally married, postgraduate educated, middle class cis woman. Iā€™m a full-time graduate student with a part-time assistantship.

My son was conceived after three years of PCOS-driven anovulatory infertility via intercourse with no medical assistance other than metformin, born of my body, delivered vaginally, and while the labor, birth, and aftermath definitely came with some trauma, it was relatively uncomplicated.

Iā€™m blessed/lucky/privileged to have my parents, my partnerā€™s parents, and our siblings all living close by and able to help with our son. He and I spend five mornings a week at a coworking space/Montessori School, but I am his primary caregiver. We live in a suburban neighborhood in a medium-sized city with many organizations and activities designed to support young children and their families.

A note on inclusionā€¦ All those characteristics and experiences mentioned above obviously affect my lens on creativity and motherhood. Iā€™m going to deliberately seek out perspectives different than my own, but Iā€™m also going to mess up. Please feel free to let me know when I do and to share stories and perspectives I miss.

Who counts as a creative mother? For our purposes, a mother is anyone who identifies as a mother. As for a definition of creativity, well, Iā€™m thinking here of writers, artists, performers, designers, architects, craftersā€¦ But that definition is a floor, not a ceiling.

What has changed since January 2019? My son is three, almost four now, rather than two. Our Montessori/co-working space closed at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic and will not re-open in the time we had left to spend there. We are socially distanced from most of our family members, though my husband’s mother does come over most days to help with our son so I can get literally any work done on my dissertation at all. The many wonderful organizations and opportunities for families with young children in our city are not currently available to us, either because they are closed or because we are continuing mostly to stay at home, as I may be at higher risk of complications from COVID-19 if I should contract it.

Thank you for joining me. If you’re interested in receiving a weekly email that includes all of my Genetrix posts, please sign up here.

Curating stories of motherhood and creativity, esp. writing

Exactly a year and a half ago, I started a newsletter called Genetrix after reading Grace Elliott’s article, “Why Do I Have to Choose Between Being a Writer and Being a Mother?” for Electric Literature. It lasted exactly 2 issues before I got overwhelmed by my own perfectionism and stopped sending it out.

In March of this year, I planned to resurrect it, as an automatically generated newsletter with a feed from a tumblr. Then the pandemic happened.

But today, as I was reading Avni Doshi and Sophie Mackintosh in conversation about writing about motherhood, I realized that I need these stories. I crave them. And I know other people do, too. So I’m going to use the lowest-friction way to share them.

And that way is a category here at kimberlyhirsh.com devoted to them, with its own RSS feed that goes out to an automatically-generated newsletter. More and more, I think everything of mine is going to come from this one space, and I think it’s for the best.

Anyway, more on this project tomorrow.

A post-ac/alt-ac reading list

Posting this list of books here in case others might find it useful. It will probably grow with time.

Last updated: August 1, 2020.

Advanced Literature Review Tips

By far, my most visited blog post ever is my Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow and honestly, I return to it myself fairly often. I sent it to my EdCamp friend Allison Rae Redden when she was writing her first critical lit review in grad school. I also tweeted a couple more advanced lit review tips at her, and I wanted to gather those here. So here goes!

Make a concept map before you outline. If you haven’t concept mapped before outlining, go back and do that. (I scoffed at my prof who suggested this. I thought I was so good at lit reviews I didn’t need it. I was wrong.) I like to use bubbl.us, which I learned about from Dr. Summer Pennell.

Synthesize. It’s tempting and easy to just summarize studies, but putting them in conversation with each other is much better. Synthesizing the results of multiple studies is a good way to bring them together. Focus on grouping them by findings and briefly mention context and methods as you introduce each article.

Explicitly articulate critiques of studies. Identify gaps and point them out. I usually say something like ā€It’s worth noting that none of these studies address…" or similar. I try to be descriptive rather than speculative - noting what’s missing - without directly pointing to how a specific study could be improved, but that’s just me.

If you simultaneously synthesize instead of summarize AND provide a strong description of each study’s context, methods, and results, you’ll be way ahead of most people.

I hope in the future to provide more specific examples for these tips like I did in my earlier post, but I decided it was more important to go ahead and get this out in the world than to wait until I had perfected it.

Cross-posted to: Twitter

Creative Time as Meditation Time

What if we considered our creative time to be meditation time? Repetitive crafts like knitting, crochet, and cross-stitch can have that effect. (The scholar-librarian in me wants to track down a reference/link for this. The human in me is granting me a pass.) What if this wasn’t an indulgence, but a matter of health? What if it were like a dietary supplement or a daily medication?

I think the circumstances of my learning crochet help me think this way. I bought my first hook, yarn, and pamphlet while I was stopped at Wal-Mart to grab supplies to help with a migraine that was debilitating enough I had gone home from student teaching because of it. I took them back to my boyfriend’s house (I don’t think he was there, but I preferred his house to mine, always. Now he’s my husband and we have just one house between us) and in addition to my usual migraine remedies, I applied crochet. I think having it to focus on helped me ignore the pain, almost. So I really do think of crochet as an OTC migraine remedy.

If you aren’t motivated by the capitalist notion that your productivity is the highest good (I am, though I’m trying to break myself of it), what if you think of your creative time like food, exercise, or a nap? Something that, if you grant yourself the time to do it, will leave you renewed, with fresh vigor to apply to your other tasks?

This post is lightly adapted from a post in Kim Werker’s Community of Creative Adventurers. If you need a community to support your creative adventures, please come join us! You can join for free. We’ve got a forum and weekly Zoom hangouts. And if you choose to be a patron and support Kim’s work, you get access to her amazing classes and extra forums.

My new dream: To write and share helpful things

I think a lot about dreams. Following them. Achieving them. Making new ones.

The first dream I remember - one that felt aligned with my life purpose - was to be a big sister. I achieved that at age 4 1/2.

There was a very long time when my dream alternated between being a celebrated science fiction and fantasy novelist and being a Broadway star. I think that dream was, I don’t know, from maybe ages 8 to 18?

I toyed briefly with a screenwriter dream when I was in college, and then after that I kind of didn’t have a dream for a while. After a few years of teaching, being a librarian became my dream. And when I went to school to achieve that dream, I found a new dream: working for LEARN NC full-time, instead of in my position at the time as a graduate assistant. I spent a year working as a school librarian and then achieved the dream of getting a full-time gig at LEARN NC. I had that job for two years before it became clear that our supporting department’s priorities were changing and the organization would not be supported in the coming years, so I left for what I thought was maybe a dream, but was definitely an interest, getting my doctorate.

Getting my PhD wasn’t actually a dream and still isn’t, but it does remain an important interest, and one that I intend to achieve by May. But I still HAD a dream once I started on that one and confirmed it was more interest than dream, and that was to be a mom.

Of all the dreams I’ve achieved, that one was the hardest to accomplish. But I did it, and it has been every bit as fulfilling and exhausting as you might imagine.

So for 3+ years, I’ve been flailing a bit for a new dream. Was it to swim in a mermaid tail? Or with manatees? No. Those were more interests than dreams. (The difference between an interest and a dream in my mind/experience is the level of visceral desire involved. If you think in your head, “Wow, that’d be cool! I hope I get to do that!” it’s an interest. If you feel in your gut, “That would fundamentally change who I am and how I define myself in a way that I really want to be changed,” that’s a dream.)

But today I found it. I was reading Derek Sivers’s description of his book Hell Yeah or No in which he writes that after selling the business CD Baby and realizing that rather than just building a business again he could make a real change in his life,

For the next ten years, I wrote for hours a day in my private journal, asking myself questions and answering them. Then often taking experimental and radical actions based on these thoughts.

The thoughts and experiences that seemed useful to others, Iā€™d share on my website, which are now collected here in this book for you.

I read that and I thought to myself, “I want to write useful things.”

Then I thought about the word “useful” for a moment.

I decided no, that’s not it.

I want to write helpful things.

It might seem like a small distinction, but to me, if something is useful, its value is defined purely by utility. What can you do with this information? Something that is helpful might be useful. But its value might be defined by something else. It might be defined by how it makes you feel: less alone, understood, moved. That’s a little different than useful.

Writing these things, of course, isn’t enough if they just stay with me. Rather, I want to write them, but I also want to share them.

So that’s the dream.

I want to write and share helpful things.

Let’s get started.

šŸ“ŗ Netflix's Babysitters Club: Response and Link Roundup šŸ“š

I binged the Netflix Babysitters Club series last weekend. Growing up, I was not a Babysitters Club obsessive like many of my peers. They were one of the many series on offer that I enjoyed. The main thing about them that thrilled me was that, unlike many of the other books I read, they were books that other kids had also read and would talk to me about.

So. Not obsessive. But I’m still filled with nostalgia for them. And, unlike many of my peers seemed to do, I read them mostly in order, so the Netflix series sticking with the order for the first few episodes made me really happy. I told W. the other day that much as women older than us did with Sex and the City, many girls my age strongly identified with a particular BSC character. (In case you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, the main characters on SitC were Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, and you could buy lots of merch that proclaimed things like “I’m a Samantha.” In case you’re curious, I’m a Charlotte with aspirations of being a Carrie.) Lucy Aniello, director of the Netflix BSC series, describes herself as “a Kristy with a Stacey rising” (and in case you aren’t familiar with that, it’s a reference to astrology. I’m a hard Mallory with some Kristy tendencies, who wished to be Claudia but was too good at school and bad at art to come close. (I did wear coordinated-but-mismatched earrings and hide candy all over my bedroom, though.)

I loved the show. Its tone is amazingly perfect. The performances are great. I would like Alicia Silverstone to be my co-parent, please. All of the things done to update it are beautiful and none of them feel weird. I don’t have a lot to say about the show itself besides that.

What really hit me this time around was Stacey. When I read the books, I was relatively poor, unfashionable (though not without style), and the only big city I had ever been to was Miami. Stacey was so far out of my reach. (By the way, the costume designs on the new show perfectly evoke the original characters; of all of them, though, Stacey’s outfits look the most like I think Stacey’s outfits should.) I was sickly, catching every virus that came my way and maxing out my 10 allowed absences before I started being considered truant, but I wasn’t ill.

Life is different now. Now I’m diagnosed with four chronic illnesses (two mental), with another one undiagnosed but likely. While illness doesn’t define me, it strongly shapes my experiences and decisions. And watching Stacey deal with that moved me so thoroughly. Stacey’s not wanting anyone to know about her diabetes, because then she won’t be a person anymore, she’ll be a sick person. Fearing the consequences. And, the point that actually brought me close to tears: after Stacey goes into insulin shock on the job, her having to face a room full of clients (along with her fellow BSC members, blessedly) and listen to them say things like “Do I even want her watching my kids if something like this could happen again?” (I’m paraphrasing here.) Y’all, the impact of chronic illness on work and hireability is real, and to see it in microcosm for a twelve-year-old was every bit as affecting as seeing it for an adult would be, if not moreso.

Anyway. That was a new perspective. A part of me wants to go read the books again and pay close attention to how my feelings about Stacey are different now.

So. I didn’t have a lot of insight to offer on the series, just my personal response, but if you want to read more about it, here are a bunch of interesting and relevant articles:

Who will I be? 2020-2021 edition

On my last birthday, I set out a list of things that described who I wanted to be in the coming year. I’m pretty satisfied that those describe who I have been this year and who I will continue to be. So a couple of days ago, I asked myself again, Who will I be next?

So here’s who I want 39-year-old Kimberly to be:

I want to be someone who brings all of herself into play as often as possible. I want to pick up parts of me that I’ve let lie fallow for a while and nurture them again. As Austin Kleon says, “Don’t throw any of yourself away." See: Me taking CS50x. Me remembering that OH RIGHT I LOVE MUSICAL THEATER.

I want to be someone who connects with her friends. I spend more time than is fair to anyone feeling like people don’t respond when I reach out, but when I take a look at myself I see that I, too, am prone to not responding when friends reach out to me. So I want to be a more responsive friend, to respond to my friend’s bids by turning towards them, not away from them. And also to remember that when people don’t respond to my bids, it’s not necessarily because they don’t want to be friends anymore.

Loftier:

I want to be a civic hacker.

I want to start a microbusiness (the business will be called Kimberly Hirsh; I’m currently considering two possible income-generating projects for the business called Kimberly Hirsh, and may end up pursuing both of them).

Not so lofty:

I’d really like to be a doctor of philosophy by my next birthday. šŸ¤ž

How to Celebrate Kimbertide (AKA my birthday, AKA Bastille Day)

About 10 years ago, when I shared that I usually take at least a week to celebrate my birthday and consider it a season, my friend Dr. Alison Buck suggested that I refer to this season as Kimbertide, and so I do. I usually plan several different celebratory possibilities so that if friends can’t make it to one event, I still get to celebrate with them at another. (If you have questions about why a woman as grown as me still celebrates, you can email me and we’ll talk about it.)

This year, obviously, is a bit different. At first I was going to try to coordinate a number of virtual activities, some synchronous and some asynchronous, but instead I’m going a bit more free form. So instead, I’m providing a menu of possibilities for fun things you might do to celebrate. If you do any of these, I’d love it if you comment here and share a link!

  1. Bake something. Bonus points if it’s cupcakes. I’m going to be making myself chocolate cake using this gluten-free vegan mix and vegan frosting that I discovered at Target. I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to have a gluten-free, corn-free, potato-free cake mix that I don’t have to create myself. And canned frosting! That’s something I never thought I would eat again. (If you know me, you know that I tend to be a cake and frosting snob, due to having a strong obsession with cupcakes when I was getting my MSLS. But more than a cake and frosting snob, I am a tired doctoral candidate looking for something easy to make as an activity with my kid, so. Mix and can.) I’d love to see what you bake!

  2. Cosplay. I’m planning to spend tomorrow morning painting the belt buckle for my Kitty Pryde cosplay. You can go elaborate or casual. Whatever you want. Closet cosplay is always a good option. My favorite fandoms are anything Whedonverse, X-Men, and Disney. I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to wear tomorrow. But if you dress up, SEND ME PICS!

  3. Have a Darkwave Dance Party. You can put on this Spotify playlist created by my friend, author Nathan Kotecki/DJ Twentieth Century Boy. Grab a little video and tell me where to find it! Or just do it and tell me you did, you don’t HAVE to make a video or anything. Alternately, you can attend the Zoom party [Facebook link] he’s hosting tomorrow night, which may be more just strange and a little less dark.

  4. Watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m probably going to watch “Once More with Feeling” in the next couple of days, because I’m just feeling that vibe right now. (Hulu is probably the best place to stream BtVS.) Never seen it before? Need a starter episode? The double pilot is a solid introduction, but if you can’t commit to more than 45 minutes, you can jump in with the Season 1 finale “Prophecy Girl,” Season 2 Episode 7 “Lie to Me,” or Season 3 Episode 11 “Gingerbread”." If you want to have the full Kimberly Hirsh experience, start with Season 4 Episode 8, “Pangs.” (I’m pretty sure that was the first episode I ever saw. It’s possible it was an earlier one but I think what I’m recalling when I recall bits from the earlier episodes is probably what was in that night’s “Previously.")

  5. Watch The Little Mermaid. For my ninth and twenty-ninth birthdays, I had The Little Mermaid-themed parties. For my thirty-ninth, I might try to talk my kid into watching The Little Mermaid, The Little Mermaid II, and the prequel. (Well, maybe not the prequel.) I’ll be all IT’S MY BIRTHDAY! and he’ll be all I WILL WATCH ANYTHING YOU’LL LET ME!

  6. Play a game. Video or board, your choice. I’m actually thinking about trying to pull together a Jackbox games remote play, maybe for Sunday, 7/19, around 2:30 pm ET. Let me know if you’re interested.

  7. Make something. My go-tos are cross-stitch or crochet, but you make whatever sounds fun to you.

There you go, seven ways to celebrate my birthday/excuses to do something fun. Thanks for joining me!

Schmidt, from the TV show New Girl, saying, 'Can we just take a moment to celebrate me.'

My Favorite People with Weird Internet Careers

I started reading Because Internet, by Gretchen McCulloch, this morning. I first became familiar with her work when I listened to her on an episode of the Fansplaining podcast. I’m not quite sure what pointed me to her Weird Internet Careers series of blog posts, but I have read and re-read these posts, working toward building a roadmap for myself to have a Weird Internet Career. Because it seems like of all the people in the world who could have a Weird Internet Career, I’m one of them.

In her bio for the book, McCulloch says she “lives in Montreal and on the Internet.” Me too, Gretchen. I mean, I live in Durham rather than Montreal, but also on the Internet. We are of a kind, Gretchen McCulloch and myself.

So. Go read those posts. If you’d rather read them all smooshed together in one Google Doc, you’ll get a link sent to you after you sign up for Gretchen McCulloch’s newsletter.

Do you know of any people with Weird Internet Careers? Here are my favorites, besides Gretchen McCulloch.

Kim Werker - Kim Werker started the online crochet magazine Crochet Me back in the early 2000s, which led to an offer to be editor of Interweave Crochet. She did that for a few years, and moved on to other work. She is a freelance editor who probably gets most of her clients from Internet interactions. She is a speaker and instructor. You can sign up for her latest class, Crochet for Challenging Times and get access to an ever-growing library of instructional videos and patterns, as well as access to a class-specific forum on her Community for Creative Adventurers, which she crowdfunds through both Patreon and the community software. Use code STUDENTLOVE40 to get 40% off the cost of Crochet for Challenging Times through the end of July. Now’s a great time to buy, since the cost of the course is going to increase in the future. Kim has a lot of other classes you can find on her website. too. And if you join her online community, you can jump in on video calls, which are a great source of delight and help to stave off loneliness in these super isolated times. Kim has also edited and written books; all of this has been fueled by stuff she does on the Internet.

Austin Kleon - Austin Kleon’s first book, Newspaper Blackout, was the result of him posting a newspaper blackout poem on his blog every day starting in 2005. He is one of the most generous people online and has four other books you can check out, videos of him that you can watch, and is currently experimenting with doing more online speaking.

Leonie Dawson - Leonie Dawson is a freaking rainbow hippie goddess, artist, writer, and multimillionaire. Her career started because she was a blogger; she created custom artwork for clients she met online, hosted women’s retreats for Internet friends to meet in person, and for many years offered a subscription community that included access to everything she made, including ecourses, ebooks, and meditations. Now she offers several ecourses and, like both Kim and Austin, is immensely generous.

So these are my favorite people with Weird Internet Careers and the thing is - NONE of them monetize their blogs through ads. While they might do some affiliate marketing, it’s unobtrusive and not their main source of income. I’m thinking if I want to have a Weird Internet Career, too, these are the models I should look to.

Who are your favorite Weird Internet Careerists?