Kimberly Hirsh

I was reading some of Jen Polk’s blog archives a while back and came across a post about a career coach giving her this visualization exercise:

She asked us to picture a skier on top of a peak, unsure of what lay ahead. After taking three deep breaths, I imagined myself as the skier and was soon stretching out my arms. I started to fly off the mountain top, and when I looked down, nothing was clear. I realized that flying, looking around, and exploring are what I need to do right now. That is the next step for me.

I found myself trying to imagine this, and I kept getting hung up on the fact that I don’t even know what a skier might see going down a slope, except what I’ve seen in movies. Trees? Bears? I don’t know. So instead, I pivoted the exercise to think of some more familiar experiences.

I asked myself: What if I were diving in the ocean? (I haven’t been diving but I have a lot more of an idea about what might appear if I were.) What if I were ambling in the forest without a plan? What would I do?

I realized that in both cases, I would trust my intuition and focus my attention on whatever seemed interesting. In the ocean, I would trust that whatever I find will have its own beauty and magic, even if it’s dangerous or scary, and I have ways of coping if it is dangerous and scary. Walking in the forest, I would amble about cheerfully, relying on my intuition to guide me to where I want to be, enjoying the filtered quality of the light, the greenery, noticing interesting plants and animals and either noting them to use later or if I had the technology, using a nature app to learn about them.

Just as this exercise led Jen to realize that she needed to spend her time in exploration, my responses to my altered versions of this exercise reinforce what I kind of always know to be true about myself: things go best for me when I follow my intuition and pursue whatever seems interesting.

What if you do some variation of this exercise? What will you learn about yourself?

_Image by PublicDomainImages from Pixabay_

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

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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’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.

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.

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._