A colleague of mine invited me to her writing group, which meets every Friday from 9:15-10. It's several people from communication, speech sciences and then the two of us from applied linguistics. I actually knew two of them from orientation so it's a nice mix of newbies and people who have been at PSU for a while.
The weekly meetings are intended to support research productivity. Based on the book "How to write a lot", we formulate weekly goals, which we share with each other and then revisit the next week. This is supposed to hold us accountable. The book also encourages you to schedule fixed times for your research activity.
Today was the first time I went and I'm excited. I got back to my office and made a schedule for this quarter, scheduling fixed times for research and class prep. Trying to balance all the demands (teaching, grading, office hours, committee meetings, reading drafts of theses, reading the latest research...) is really difficult. I'm not new to this but what is throwing me off a bit is the fact that I have all new class preps, which is very time consuming. I also have to spend a lot more time working with students on their theses and cumulative projects. The goal of the group is not to read each others' work, which I've tried before and didn't find very useful.
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