" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

Our sit­ter is on vaca­tion this month, so I’m on full-time mama duty and it’s been amaz­ing. If you’re a grad­u­ate stu­dent or an adjunct, com­mon wis­dom says you can kiss your career good­bye once you repro­duce. My advi­sor sug­gested I fol­low in her foot­steps and wait until I have a lav­ish tenured posi­tion at an elite uni­ver­sity before the big breed. But since I didn’t go “straight through” (doc­toral pro­gram imme­di­ately after col­lege), I’m not 27, and can’t afford to wait until like, never, for a tenure track posi­tion I hurled my well-laid plans into the wood­chip­per and got preg­nant. Fast-forward eigh­teen months and I have a kinetic tod­dler and I’m still work­ing on my first chap­ter. But have I aban­doned all hope in this month of full-time tod­dler care? Am I out of the aca­d­e­mic game for­ever because now I change dia­pers and chop hot dogs into tiny lit­tle Triv­ial Pur­suit pie-sized pieces? The short answer is: sur­pris­ingly, … no.

The past three weeks have been my most pro­duc­tive all year. The mas­sive time-suck that over­shad­ows my work and fam­ily life isn’t the kiddo, it’s the TA-ing. My pro­gram offered me a 6th year teach­ing fel­low­ship so I had to TA. I put the kid in day­care because I thought it would afford me the time to teach and write, but my teach­ing pit­tance paid for day­care which only gave me time to pre­pare for teach­ing. This daily ouroboros left me with over­whelm­ing teach­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties, a stag­nant dis­ser­ta­tion, and guilt about pay­ing for day­care despite my uneven pro­duc­tiv­ity. But since my teach­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties ended, I’ve felt free to do my own work. And know­ing that I have t-minus 2.5 hours and count­ing, I get straight to work and don’t stop until the baby wakes up. I did this 5-days a week for three weeks and made amaz­ing progress.

But it wasn’t just the free­dom from teach­ing, I also changed my process. After this dis­cus­sion on #PhD­Chat, I decided to set my lap­top aside and return to hand­writ­ing my notes. I used to write this way and then decided to try and type every­thing on my com­puter. I thought I was skip­ping an unnec­es­sary step since my process looks like this:

1. Hand­write notes
2. Tran­scribe onto lap­top into a draft
3. Print draft and revise
4. Repeat step 3 until sat­is­fied with final draft

I thought if I skipped step 1, I’d save time, but instead I inter­rupted my nat­ural way of writ­ing. Return­ing to hand­writ­ing allows me to own my words. I imbue typed words, yes, even my own, with some mag­i­cal author­ity and I have a hard time return­ing to my typed notes. Hence, I have over 40,000 words and not a chap­ter to speak of.

While I haven’t com­pleted my chap­ter draft, I’m feel­ing opti­mistic about fin­ish­ing — moreso than I felt all year. Let’s just hope my 6-week sum­mer class doesn’t dis­perse my momentum.

tl:dr: teach­ing can be a big­ger time suck than par­ent­hood. So long as you work on your dis­ser­ta­tion every day, you’ll get it done.