#i can finish all the interview setup stuff and email all the finalists before 12

[whentherewerebicycles]

ok today I:

went to the grocery store

drove back home because i forgot my credit card lol and then returned to actually purchase the groceries

completed a bunch of small admin tasks

answered emails

brainstormed a teaching demo with a friend

had a 2 hr writing workshop / life check-in with one of my students

did light syllabus planning between meetings (including making some decisions about the course structure, which two of my students are going to help me workshop)

reached out to one of our potential fall panelists

compiled materials to circulate to the interview finalists

spent almost two hours creating mentoring materials for a student (a kind of how-to guide for the “gathering phase” of a new research project). it took me foreveeeeeer because i had to write through my own practice as a researcher in order to understand how and why i do it, and in the process i accidentally produced a detailed six page essay, which i had to then go back and slash down to 3/4ths of a page because no student will read that much text lol. ANYWAY i am trying to remind myself that this is how it went when i was first learning how to teach writing! i had to do SO much metawriting-about-writing, and then ended up passing only about 5% of that material onto the students. and even though it sometimes felt like a huge exhausting waste of time it turned out to be really vital to my own learning process!! so i think/hope something similar is happening with teaching research.

anyway i feel like i have truly USED MY BRAIN today and now i am going to fully give myself over to not having a single thought until tomorrow morning.