Day 11: Tracking Workload (Im)balance
Plain text for personal life. BOLD for teaching (which also includes advising and class prep). ITALICS for scholarship. UNDERLINE for service. STRIKE THROUGH for university-afiliated things.
Early rising because I could not sleep well; breakfast; return to the conference room to make sure that all of the presentation tools were available; taught the sessions (we started talking about publishing and then zines and then creating a mini-zine to a larger zine/chapbook sized); lunch; back to teaching basic book art (Venetian blinds and images and text); ended the session to watch Dan Reynolds's speech (phenomenal, which brought into the space politics, support of LGBTQIA students and transgender students specifically; Black Lives Matter in the class; creation of courses; social justice work in adopting materials; being guided by the 17 year old within and the students in our classes); had some snacks at the afternoon reception; went back to the room to rest; went back for dinner where I literally sat at a table and the only thing anyone said to me was "it's a nice dinner"; left early; had a glass of wine and watched the sunset; spoke with a former student who was bright and visionary and expressed her commitment to social justice work, which very well may lead her to being an administrator someday to be a part of transformative and collaborative and communal education; thought " #whatsavedme "; was invited to connect with Commission members in the Director's cottage this evening; tried to do the recordings answering questions from a group of students in Illinois who read my book in the undergraduate creative writing class with Professor Curtis Crisler; tech failed me; attempted to do some uploads for my methods class; tech failed me again
Tonight: going to work on my agenda tomorrow; maybe go to the commission gathering this evening; go to bed early.
Highlights for today: talking with one of the session attendees, Laura, who shared her journey to get to Asilomar and that more people need a conference like this. In addition, what I learned from her and others is that it is helpful for the teachers that attended my session to have something that is artistic, hands-on, and that leads to work they can bring to their classrooms immediately. A number of them have talked about how they will use strategies to create Zines in their classrooms as assessments for their students, mostly alternatives to the essay or stepping stones into an essay, which is really exciting! Maybe it's too simplistic to teach teachers about doing small anthologies or zines, the technical aspects of doing them with their students, but maybe not. And honestly, with all the prep for this session and with all the stress of this week, it's nice to also be a part of a collaborative arts group in creating some cool pieces and thinking about how to bring this into the classroom.
Gotta take some pictures tomorrow.