Productivity probs? Try this?

Last Monday was the Thanksgiving holiday here in Canada. (Americans: don’t freak out! It’s timed to coincide with the harvest.) My fella, D, came down on Sunday night to drink gin and eat leftovers; then, on Monday, we cooked turkey and stuffing and all the bits and pieces. We walked the dog and went to walk the escarpment stairs and ate the heck out of that birdie.

(Not my actual thanksgiving turkey. But you get the idea!)

Then, on Tuesday, D wanted to rest.

But I – ah, I.

I. Had. To. Work.

It’s a funny thing, this HAD TO WORK. After all: it was reading week. (No classes.) I had an overdue chapter to complete, but (as my therapist has helpfully reminded me) there is no such thing as an academic emergency. All deadlines wait, once you’ve graduated. (Nope: they really do.) Marking? Sure, but: see reading week.

Stuff. Could. Actually. Wait.

I just didn’t want it to. The truth is, I struggle hugely to relax on a weekday, regardless of the weekday. Weekdays are work days!!! This baffles D a bit. He works a shift schedule, and he’s also a naturally grounded and less anxious human being than I am. He asks, quite reasonably, why I need – REALLY need – to work on any given weekday.

(Google “work less, do more.” Yup.)

On Tuesday, then, I required a compromise. After all, I had suggested D spend Tuesday with me rather than heading home. Hilariously, he had misunderstood and thought I was teaching, so hadn’t brought a laptop to work on. It would have been total pants of me to work the day away while he sat on the couch trying to watch Netflix on my iPad.

So, I pulled out the countdown timer.

You’ll remember last autumn, when I decided to start a writing diet of 2 hours, or 1000 words, a day in the service of my nearly-due book manuscript. Sometimes I went by the clock in the upper right hand corner of my screen; sometimes I used a countdown timer. Two hours on the clock, and away we go. When the bell rings, that’s time – stop and pack it in until tomorrow.

I cannot properly describe how good it felt to work to that kind of hard and fast deadline! I realize that we are all different, and some of you are reading this right now and literally cringing at the idea of hearing the bell, finishing the thought, and that’s it. But for me, who has always been HUGELY deadline-driven, the gong was the most satisfying sound of the day. Whether I’d made enormous progress or torn out half my hair, I knew I’d had a good run of it, and could regroup tomorrow. And that felt amazing.

On Tuesday last, knowing I had to do some stuff (for me) but didn’t have to kill it (because reading week!!), and that D really did need me NOT to spend my whole day, or even half my day, tapping along on my computer, I said this:

How about I set the timer for an hour, and after that we take the dog for a trail hike, and then we have lunch, and then I set the timer for another hour, and after that we play some tennis and make dinner?

Turns out the timer works just as well for mundane admin and marking stuff as it does for the writing. In the first hour I answered a bunch of emails and dealt with a couple of outstanding peer review responses to authors I’m currently editing, sent a reminder message to one of my classes and some marching orders to a group of seminar participants. It all fit tidily into 57 minutes – probably because I was so motivated by the clock that I didn’t over-think the emails, and didn’t over-proof the responses or marching orders.

And then we went to the waterfall with Emma the Dog.

(The actual waterfall, Tews Falls in Dundas, ON. Not my actual photo. I was hiking!)

Anglo-American cultures have a problem with productivity: we are all apparently working 5-day, 35-to-50 hour weeks in order to seem respectfully “busy”. But recent evidence from New Zealand (and elsewhere) reveals that folks working 4-day weeks are at least as productive if not more productive than we are – and way happier.* Lots of us are wasting shedloads of time on snacking and making coffee and taking out the garbage and looking at social media rather than getting shit done in the time we have at the desk. That waste of time is why many of us seem to be working a lot but not getting any further ahead.

Now, look. I seriously get that some of us have way more work to do than there are hours in the day (hi, British academic friends!!). I often feel that way too. But D reminded me on Tuesday that it’s actually not as dire as I tell myself it is in my overcrowded brain. And the countdown timer reminded me that if I set a very clear limit on my work (maybe several clear limits several times a day, depending on the day), things are likely to go a lot better than if I wake up, make coffee, look at the Guardian, and go: fuck! I have SO MUCH WORK I need to get done!!!

So if you’re in the poop right now, give the countdown timer thing a try. It may surprise you the way it surprised me.

Cheers to more time!

Kim

*Click here to listen to all the dirt on episode 55 of Reasons to be Cheerful with Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd.

The Work of Experiential Learning

In my last post, about decolonizing my syllabus, I talked about a new class I’m teaching this autumn. Called “Toronto: Culture and Performance”, it’s an experiential learning course where my TA and I accompany our students on five trips to the city to see a wide variety of work, primarily made by theatre companies focused on intercultural labour (that is: on working across difference to embody the city’s proper diversity, as well as to represent that diversity complexly to audience members).

I pitched the class to my department about 18 months ago, and I was thrilled to get the chance to teach it. Better yet, I’m thrilled with the students I’ve got in its first iteration, who are smart, engaged, present, and committed. They come from three different programs across our faculty and their own internal diversity supports exciting class discussion. I’m also truly thrilled with and grateful to my TA, Courtney, who has already proved herself both heroic and indispensable. (Thanks so much, Courtney!)

So all is roses, yes?

Well, no. There’s a problem. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but it’s one I think we need to talk more about, and soon.

Everyone in the academy wants experiential learning right now, and all the time. It’s something students ask for at university fairs and expos: do you have internships? Can I do an exchange? Is there study-abroad? And with the rise of the cult of “creativity” (something linked to the post-industrial engagement economy), that means profs like me – who both care about our students’ experiences, and want our students to like and appreciate us (in person and, ahem, on the evals) – have our work really cut out for us.

Labour.

Nobody talks much about the insane amounts of extra labour that go into programming an experiential learning course – labour that is often high-stakes, emotionally amped-up; labour that is often foreign to lecturers not used to, say, organizing massive blocks of group travel or handling large amounts of money as a result.

I had a first taste of this experiential overload when I took 12 students to London for 15 days in the summer of 2017. What seemed an amazing teaching assignment quickly revealed itself to be logistically complicated, and emotionally profoundly draining. Teachers who have never run a study abroad class (and this was me until spring 2017, believe me) assume it’s lots of fun. (Whoa – free international travel!) Sure it is – but also it is not. From curating the students’ experiences, to running their debrief lessons, to arranging for, meeting, hosting, and paying the guest presenters, to protecting students fearful of harm in the big city, to protecting students from themselves (and oh yes, we had this too), it is mostly just appallingly tiring.

I could never, ever have predicted the total mind-body exhaustion I felt upon that course ending – along with, of course, feelings of sorrow at having to say goodbye to an amazing group of young women.

It took me more than a month to recover.

These feelings of mind-body exhaustion I’m feeling again this autumn. Though the logistics of TO:C&P are nowhere near as complex as the London class, the group is also more than three times as large.

Here’s what I’m responsible for: buying and receiving all the theatre tickets; booking all the buses and liaising with the bus company before each journey; collecting all of the students’ ancillary course fees; ensuring all the students pay those fees; and ensuring all the students get to and from our field trips safely and with every head accounted for.

But wait, there’s more!

Because Toronto is a two-hour-plus drive from Western, we need to leave ahead of our scheduled class time in order to ensure we are comfortably on time for each show. (The course runs Tuesday evenings, as a three-hour block, so that on our field trip days the show IS the class.) This means a handful of students (roughly 10) had conflicts with other classes and commitments in the late afternoon that required sorting. I worked with them on all of these, sometimes negotiating directly with other instructors to ensure students could be accommodated and still remain in both my class and theirs.

And more still!

Because the course was full for most of August, the cap having been doubled in July due to demand, and because 45+ tickets per order is a lot to ask of small theatres, I discovered that I had to book and pay (with the help of my also-heroic colleague in our office, Beth) for most tickets in advance. Naturally, some students dropped the course before the first field trip, and thus owed us nothing; I then realized I was stuck holding their batch of tickets and costs owing. So I now had to unload those tickets to make up the shortfall, lest we run a deficit. (I spent the first two weeks of September anxiously watching the course numbers each morning, praying students would stay with me so I wouldn’t have to do yet more salesmanship/fundraising. By this point, I WAS ALREADY PRETTY TIRED.)

Oh, yes. And of course: I also have to actually teach the course.

Now I know that the above list is going to sound weird to some of you – for example, those of you in Theatre departments who have a team of staff that assist with this kind of labour for field trips as a routine. It might also sound both odd and grim to those of you with really robust tools in place at your schools to govern how faculty and staff labour is allocated around experientially-driven courses.

But I suspect for others, it will ring painfully true. Because what happened to me was the same thing that happens all the time in the modern university: an instructor gets a cool idea for a great, stimulating course, sets about creating it, and discovers in the process that systems that ought to be in place to support this kind of creative teaching really are not in place, or are not as robust as they need to be, and probably can’t be funded properly anyway.

Often, of course, it takes the front-end labour of running these kinds of courses once or twice before their system-altering needs become clear; then (if you are lucky), your unit innovates to help you out. But just as often, in my experience, you innovate and are told what a good job you’ve done, and are then invited to do it all again, more or less all alone, again.

Welcome back, invisible teaching overload.

I want to stop here and say that I am very well aware that I am enormously privileged to be able to teach courses like the ones I describe above. In the case of the London course (“Destination Theatre”), I had administrative help from the Student Success Centre on campus, as well as from our international learning team, which funded the course’s development very generously. For TO:C&P, I received monetary support from all of the participating departments, and that allowed me to cut the students’ auxiliary fees almost in half. I also want to acknowledge that I am a salaried and tenured professor and therefore hardly poorly compensated for my labour in any case.

Third, I want to recognize that I’ve had a lot of words of support from different folks around me these last few weeks, and we will certainly be debriefing the class, discussing future best practices, and hopefully implementing at least some of them to streamline the work and take some of the liability out of my hands next time.

But the fact remains: I made an experiential learning course and got dropped into an abyss of labour I had not really expected. Why?

Because we style experiential learning as “fun”, not as “work”.

This is a familiar song in the neoliberal university playbook. Please source and deliver internships! Please create value-added courses with exciting field trip components! Please develop a study-abroad capstone – so cool to go abroad with students! In other words: please take on the extra work “creativity” requires in order that we can be seen to be delivering happy info-sumers primed to make their own mark on the engagement economy, where experience is everything. We will love you, LOVE YOU, for it! Even if the resources we can offer you aren’t really sufficient relative to the work expected of you, and even if there’s no way we can acknowledge in your ordinary workload what an extra lot of logistical, organizational, and emotional labour the course will generate.

Obviously, this is not a problem unique to my university, where, to be honest, though my faculty is cash-strapped to the max, squeezed hard, and in real pain, my chair and my dean really did their best by TO:C&P. Rather, this is a problem of the moment we are in: profs far and wide have become university “entertainers,” curators of exceptional experiences in an economy where the arts is valued hypothetically for its power to undergird a “creative” economy, but is rarely valued monetarily to match. This remains especially true in the arts programs that support some of the most exciting experiential programming on our campuses, where the squeeze from dropping enrolments in the age of STEM-ification has meant fewer resources with which to be ever more spectacular. STEAM success stories aside, we remain poor cousins in flashy costumes, exhausted from all the late-night stitching.

I’m sketching here the link between my current fatigue and a systemic problem that is far too complex to solve in a blog post (as if anything every got solved in a blog post!).

So, what can we do, on the ground, right now?

I’m going to say we can share our stories. We can talk openly, and regularly, and both inside and outside our departments, about the massive amounts of extra work that cool new course I created has made, and for whom. (My TA is doing a lot of the in-course logistics, and I am so, so grateful to her, but that also means she has less time to do pedagogically more thoughtful work, and I’m painfully aware of this.) We can repeat the course’s (fun! but also complicated!) story to the administrators we know. We can say it to our union reps. And we can share it with our students. We can let them know the work behind the glittering curtain is not nothing; we can invite them to press the university, through their student unions, for more support – and for more transparent, easily accessible, visible and equitable support – for experiential learning course development across all units.

Thank goodness I now see, finally, a light at the end of the tunnel. TO:C&P is up and running: the shows are fun and the students terrific, and almost all have paid their fees. I’ve offloaded enough tickets to break us even, more or less. I can breathe again.

But with that fresh air also comes the gratitude of knowing I’m tenured and salaried, not on contract. I can’t imagine the precarity of doing all of this extra work without job security; I can’t imagine finding the courage to speak up about under-resourcing under those circumstances. Which means that the effort we put in now – as securely employed teachers – to draw the labour of the university’s experience economy into the light, and to demand it be better funded, will be of enormous benefit down the line.

Because I bet if I was a contract instructor assigned to this course, I’d really appreciate how much fun it is to teach, too.

I’m going to bed! See ya,

Kim