Summer To-Do List
May. 29th, 2010 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ajnabiehMy wife is always so pleased when it gets to be the end of the semester: "Now you're on vacation!" she says.
"No," I say. "Now I have three months to do all the work I should have been doing since January." Am I right?
In any case, the semester is over, grades are handed in, papers are returned, and I'm faced with three months of gloriously unscheduled time. Hooray! I've been putting together my personal to-do list for the summer, and it looks like this:
1. Arabic! I haven't had a serious Arabic class, um, since undergrad (no offense to the professor in my grad school classes, but two hours once a week is not sufficient to really teach a language), and my vocabulary has gradually shrunk down to a really absurd level, and my grammar is all instinct at this point. Time to get back in shape. The plan runs something like this:
2. Articles! Er, my original goal was to finish revisions on the article I had accepted, get another chapter article-ized and off to a journal, and maybe work on turning a non-dissertation-related conference paper into an article. Except I finished the first two of those this week. Well, I'm doing very well on my goals, aren't I?
3. Chapters! My goal is to have a complete dissertation draft by September 1; that will require, er, a frightening lot of writing. As in, a chapter and a half, and the whole chapter still has a lot of missing fieldwork to do. But I have a plan. And a lot of vodka in the freezer. I'm sure that will help.
4. Reading! I swear, during the semester, I only read what I've assigned my students and things that are immediately relevant to what I'm working on (and very little of that). This summer, I'm aiming for big-picture reading. I've got Manuel Castells's The Politics of Identity to finish, which is related to the chapter I'm trying desperately to get done. I'm intrigued by the work of Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, and have his Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought out from the library. (Half-wondering if there's an article in comparing his work to Habermas's, and I haven't even read him yet.) I also have Foucault's Archeology of Knowledge that I started last summer, fell in love with, and then ran out of time to read through. But the prospect of reading Foucault on the beach makes me happy. And there will be other things that dribble through.
I've also read a lot of fiction in the past week, much of it just for fun, but some of it relevant to the topic of this blog, so look for a book post sometime in the next bit!
5. Course Design! I'm teaching a course called Gender and Politics in the Middle East in the fall. I've projected that I'll be teaching this course once a year (or maybe every other year) for the remainder of my academic career, and therefore am excited about getting to develop it for the first time. In theory. In practice, I usually find course development to be a headache, especially from scratch. So many variables! So little time! So many lacunae in my own knowledge, and yet not enough time or energy to read everything ever written on anything related to the topic!
So, what are your summer plans? Any big, interesting projects?
"No," I say. "Now I have three months to do all the work I should have been doing since January." Am I right?
In any case, the semester is over, grades are handed in, papers are returned, and I'm faced with three months of gloriously unscheduled time. Hooray! I've been putting together my personal to-do list for the summer, and it looks like this:
1. Arabic! I haven't had a serious Arabic class, um, since undergrad (no offense to the professor in my grad school classes, but two hours once a week is not sufficient to really teach a language), and my vocabulary has gradually shrunk down to a really absurd level, and my grammar is all instinct at this point. Time to get back in shape. The plan runs something like this:
- Work my way through all of Cowen. If I do the whole book--which is only 25 lessons--I'll have run through the entirety of the basic grammar of the Arabic language. I'm three lessons in now, and do not yet have a headache.
- Podcasts. The goal is 1-2 a week, just to keep me listening to Arabic. I'd like to catch up on ArabicPod, since I do really like those guys; I've also added a daily BBC Arabic podcast and a twice-daily World Radio Japan news podcast. (I looked at Al-Jazeera's podcats, but all of them are, like, an hour long. My brain maxes out around 15 minutes.)
- Provided I finish Cowen, working through Advanced Media Arabic, which I bought years ago and have never had the time/energy to be dedicated to.
2. Articles! Er, my original goal was to finish revisions on the article I had accepted, get another chapter article-ized and off to a journal, and maybe work on turning a non-dissertation-related conference paper into an article. Except I finished the first two of those this week. Well, I'm doing very well on my goals, aren't I?
3. Chapters! My goal is to have a complete dissertation draft by September 1; that will require, er, a frightening lot of writing. As in, a chapter and a half, and the whole chapter still has a lot of missing fieldwork to do. But I have a plan. And a lot of vodka in the freezer. I'm sure that will help.
4. Reading! I swear, during the semester, I only read what I've assigned my students and things that are immediately relevant to what I'm working on (and very little of that). This summer, I'm aiming for big-picture reading. I've got Manuel Castells's The Politics of Identity to finish, which is related to the chapter I'm trying desperately to get done. I'm intrigued by the work of Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, and have his Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought out from the library. (Half-wondering if there's an article in comparing his work to Habermas's, and I haven't even read him yet.) I also have Foucault's Archeology of Knowledge that I started last summer, fell in love with, and then ran out of time to read through. But the prospect of reading Foucault on the beach makes me happy. And there will be other things that dribble through.
I've also read a lot of fiction in the past week, much of it just for fun, but some of it relevant to the topic of this blog, so look for a book post sometime in the next bit!
5. Course Design! I'm teaching a course called Gender and Politics in the Middle East in the fall. I've projected that I'll be teaching this course once a year (or maybe every other year) for the remainder of my academic career, and therefore am excited about getting to develop it for the first time. In theory. In practice, I usually find course development to be a headache, especially from scratch. So many variables! So little time! So many lacunae in my own knowledge, and yet not enough time or energy to read everything ever written on anything related to the topic!
So, what are your summer plans? Any big, interesting projects?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-30 10:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-30 10:53 pm (UTC)