So I'm sure by now you've noticed...its been a bit dark around here lately! First it was my comprehensive exams, and then it was the upgrade to MT4. And lately? Lately its been class prep time. When I made my previous promise to resume full schedule blogging, I forgot one key scheduling element. I'm teaching Comparative Public Policy for the first time this semester, and although I had solid plans for all of my lectures for the first half of the semester (i.e. up to and through comps) the second half was much less clear. We are now well into that second half, and the details of those lectures has taken far more time than I had expected.
All of which has led to a realization. Although I'm busy, I'm no more busy than I was when taking a full course load. But blogging is proving to be far more difficult now. In the past, even in the midst of the end of semester paper writing crunch, I always had plenty of time to blog. Blogging, it seemed, was a great distraction from paper writing. I never quite understood it, but it always felt like it was using a different part of my brain. When I got tired of struggling with the academic stuff, I'd switch over to my blog and write for a bit. After 30-45 minutes I was usually ready to get back to work, and quite often I'd find whatever had been blocking my progress had been removed.
But it just doesn't work with lecture prep. And the reason, I'm fairly certain now, is that prepping a lecture is like writing a blog post. Like writing a paper, it requires skimming, synthesizing, and summarizing a massive amount of data. But unlike writing a paper, it assumes that the attention of your audience is fleeting, and that unless you do something to keep them interested, they're likely to drift off and rarely if ever come back. As a result, prepping lectures requires me to engage the same part of my brain as writing a blog post. Which means that at the end of the day, when I'm done with my prep and ready for something else, blogging is often the last thing I feel like doing.
Tonight is a bit different, but in general, that seems to be where I'm at. Unfortunately for my blog, it looks like the time between now and the end of the month will be heavy with lecture prep. I'll do my best to make it around here at least 2-3 days per week, but I can't promise more than that. Eventually, however, this semester will come to an end, and my load for the Spring is much, much lighter. So hang with me, OK? I may be sporadic, but I'm not gone for good!
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