A month or two ago I was having dinner with my partner and my department chair. For a whole variety of reasons, everyone in my department had been having a grueling semester and my chair has repeatedly encouraged me to set reasonable boundaries. At some point the conversation turned to summer plans.
When I declared that my intention was to do as little as possible this summer, my chair turned to my partner and asked, “do you believe him?”
My partner laughed.
Of course, they were right to be skeptical.
One consequence of blending my hobbies with my employment is that there are fewer clear boundaries between work and rest. I can read a book on the history of eating in the United States like I did this weekend because I’m interested in the topic and one part of my brain will be mining the pages for anecdotes or chapters that I can use in a class next semester. The fact that I continue to treat my research as a second job because of the nature of my employment also means that these “off” months are prime research periods and the breathing space of summer is ideal for class prep.
This happens almost every summer. Class lets out and the weekly rhythm that carried me through the semester vanishes, leaving me feeling adrift and struggling to create a new routine. The nature of my contingent employment the past few years contributed a healthy dose of anxiety that cut into my rest as well.
Despite my ambitious goal of doing nothing this summer I am finding that my schedule is rapidly filling up. For instance, in the next month or so I am expecting to:
- Complete some horribly overdue work that I am deeply ashamed to still have outstanding.
- Read Erik Jensen’s The Greco-Persian Wars: A Short History with Documents and write a book review of the same.
- Spend a week as a reader for AP World History.
- Write and deliver a conference paper on Ionians on the Sicilian Expedition.
- Receive copy-edits on my book manuscript.
- Complete the two-week digital pedagogy training that I started last Thursday.
And these tasks don’t include several article and chapter proofs that I am expecting, probably a bit later in the summer, or various goals I have with respect to preparing my courses for the fall semester. Maybe this is why a little voice spent the entire weekend insisting that the summer was already over.
The languid pace of summer provides a stark contrast to the work I need to do. The trick will be finding a balance that embraces the rest encouraged by languidity with the discipline of routines and the flexibility provided by having few scheduling commitments.
Toward this end, here are my goals for the next few months beyond what I listed above.
First, I am hoping to recharge my mental batteries by spending more time reading this summer, both because I have found that reading is the part of writing that gets most squeezed during the year and because I am teaching several classes next spring that will require me to brush up on the topic. Toward the second end, I compiled a list of Roman history books to work through this summer. I am making good progress on this list, having already finished Jared Benton’s The Breadmakers and nearly finished Kathryn Lomas’ The Rise of Rome. The length of that list and one on of volumes on Persian history that I am going to compile this week is going to cut into my academic reading time, but I am also looking forward to digging into James Romm’s The Sacred Band and Jennifer Finn’s Contested Pasts, as well as Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner’s Clear and Simple as the Truth. We’ll see what I get to after that.
On the non-academic front, I am less structured about my reading roadmap and will invariably read more than these, but I am particularly looking forward to reading Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, Kapka Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, and Ken Liu’s Speaking Bones. My current read is also worth mentioning with these, Agélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, translated by Ursula Le Guin.
Second, in the realm of teaching, I am aiming to convert several of my classes to Specs Grading. I have a rough outline for what each class will look like with this, but part of the system requires clearly connecting grades as determined by detailed rubrics to specific learning outcomes. This means spending time drafting each of those syllabus components so that when the calendar flips to August I am not caught with nothing ready. For a secondary goal, I should also draft a rough syllabuses for the spring to save myself some headaches later.
Third, no summer to-do list without be complete without at least a nod to hobbies. I have taken up running again and hope to make this a thing. Beyond that, I have two concrete plans: to finally crack open the Arkham Horror card game Edge of the Earth campaign and to fulfill my resolution for this year of spending more time with my burgeoning photography hobby, probably with editing software and a storage and sharing platform (either Google photos or Flickr—I am currently doing research to choose which).
That’s it. Easy-peasy. Actually, when I list everything out like this it seems like a lot—and not for the first time; I have a long history of setting entirely unreasonable expectations for what can be done in a given period of time. Then again, except for the tasks in the enumerated list above there will be little consequence if I don’t accomplish all of these goals, and that should be the spirit of the do-less summer.
Noodlings 