It’s sad to observe that skepticlawyer aka Helen Dale has announced at Catallaxy that other demands on her time mean that she’s taking leave of the blogosphere, at least for now. It is, even on a group blog, very hard for many people who have demanding work commitments to combine them with blogging. Often getting involved in comments threads compounds the time demands, particularly when as Helen famously said, you have to spend your time herding cats. While comments threads can provide very stimulating discussion, the snippiness of them and the need to intervene to moderate the excesses of some can be fairly disheartening. I think generally bloggers do a great job, and do it for the genuine reasons that we want to engage in public discussion and in providing alternate views, but it is also realistic to note that sometimes blogging can take its toll on your reserves of energy, and the personal nature of some attacks can be enervating. So I think it’s a good thing that Helen brought these sorts of impacts and emotions out into the open:
I have not been happy with my blogging persona of late, and have formed the view that I am taking the whole exercise too seriously. My irritation with all and sundry probably bespeaks a few ishooze, and people who come here regularly and enjoy my writing deserve to know what they are.
But it’s a seriously bad thing that she’s leaving the blogosphere. And her tribute to its pleasures is a very well-considered one. Her voice has been quite a distinctive one. Too many bloggers parrot uninformed and uninformative partisan views, and she’s been a shining exception to that rule. Her sense of fair play and civility is also a great contrast to the pettiness and rudeness of some. Best of luck to Helen for all her endeavours, and I hope the final curtain hasn’t been drawn on her blogging career.
Just goes to show that blogging is seriously hard work – especially if it is going to be done regularly and well. It takes discipline and committment to keep a blog going, especially when it appears to fill up with people who are more into ad hominem attacks on other contributors than they are in engaging with the actual issue or topic under discussion.
BTW, am I the only person who has noted that blogs left of centre attract a large number of right wingers who specialise in slagging off others, while right of centre blogs escape this phenomenom? Or am I imagagining things? Just wondered, is all.
Anyway.
Cheers…
I can emphathise with SL, because my workload includes 18 face to face hours of teaching each week this semester, and it’s very difficult for me to find any time or energy for writing, including blogging, at the moment.
I’ll also just repost what I said on her thread at Catallaxy:
I can relate to that. Much less demanding with niche blogs and like minded souls.
Dear SL, Come back in whatever form, haunt us/hint at us/rernind us of the essentials, the nuts and bolts, the gravitas of your persona, your sceptic bottom line, just don’t leave us….
It’s pretty tough when you work 60-ish hours a week, as I am averaging at the moment, plus doing all the usual life stuff things and having some semblance of a social life/exercise/and down time.
Something has to give.
Yes, I’m sorry that great bloggers like Kate also don’t find the time to blog. Unfortunately, in the final analysis, it’s a hobby, and when work threatens to overwhelm the rest of one’s life, it’s more important to prioritise than it is when one has lots of time on one’s hands. Down time and relaxation is very important, and often the sorts of vulgar abuse that are prevalent in some quarters take away the pleasure of blogging:
http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=2636#comment-24105
The difficulty, as Kim and SL both allude to, is that a minority of self-obsessed vulgarians on an ego trip make it less enjoyable for the rest of us, and taking the time to moderate and sift the garbage is also a significant investment of energy which is often under-appreciated. It’s rare that bloggers get any comments on moderation other than whinges (and complaints are often couched in terms which assume that moderators are constantly doing nothing else or should be doing nothing else than reading threads) and there are few thanks for the effort that goes into maintaining those blogs which do provide a space for interesting and civil discussion.
Good riddance. Seriously.
Fake identities and plagiarism mixed in with analysis. Which bits were credible and which weren’t? When half the stuff you’ve done is bull**it, who can believe the other half?
Good whitewash.
Huh? Your meaning?
Oh, ok, your comment was caught up in spam. I think Helen deserves the chance to be evaluated on the basis of what she’s writing now, not the past. I, and a lot of others, have enjoyed her contributions to the blogosphere very much. There was, in any case, more than one side to the Demidenko-gate story, and I honestly don’t think it matters very much in addressing Helen’s current work. By all means, disagree with me, if you like, but I’d really prefer we didn’t go down that route on this thread. it’s not really the time and the place.
I’ll let it rest.
Thanks, SJ.
Good luck SL. Really appreciated the way you clarified and highlighted some of the gross injustices that David Hicks and other politically oppressed citizens have suffered. Have a great blog sabbatical.
What a scummy bit of crap that was from SJ.
Just sayin’.
Rob Says:
Talk to my middle finger, sport.
Kim:
Nicely put. Thank you.
SJ:
You said “Good riddance. Seriously. Fake identities and plagiarism mixed in with analysis” Jeepers, if you applied that criterion right across the paddock then the parliaments and board-rooms of Australia would be empty; the universities would be deserted; wild animals would make their abode in what were formerly busy newsrooms. No! Don’t do it! Don’t imperil the lucrative careers of thousands!
MickStrummer:
You are not alone. Progressive, unorthodox, social justice or – use a quaint 20th century term – left-wing sites do tend to attract fanatics, extremists and plain ordinary raving wing-nuts making anonymous offensive, bullying, purposeless and often manifestly libellous comments.
Talk to my balled fist, SJ.
Indeed. And nor would any of these places’ former inhabitants enjoy being called to account, twelve and more years later, for some of the things we did when we were in our early twenties. Especially if we had already been made to pay dearly for them at the time.
I’ve really enjoyed reading SL’s posts and comments, and will also miss her voice in the blogosphere.
Thanks everyone at LP. I must admit I disappeared off and braided my hair this afternoon, taking time to do a different style (which you’ll all see at the BrisGrogBlog if David Jackmanson turns up and takes some of his fabulous photographs), before checking in at Catallaxy again and seeing Kim’s trackback. I realise there are people for whom nothing I do will ever be worthwhile, and I have to say I’m sorry – for them. Some of them have emerged at Catallaxy, too, and my snippy responses indicate that I’m still not willing to wear it. Maybe I will be one day, but not just yet.
One of the things I’ve learnt through my time in both the sun and the shade – as PC alludes to – is that there comes a time when we must give each other credit for ordinary common decency. That is, we should rely on our interactions with each other as people. Not political animals, or persons with a history, or bloggers with an attitude. Just people. Do I want to keep associating with this person – or these people? When it comes to the regulars at Catallaxy, LP and Troppo, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.
But I do have to get that novel written.
Oh, for Chrissakes, Rob, you didn’t need to make that shot. SJ had already very reasonably agreed to drop it at my request. Try and resist the opportunity to act like children – that’s what SL and I are talking about with the whole herding cats thing. Let’s keep this thread free of it, please.
Very well put, SL. Sometimes I think people forget actual human beings with feelings sit behind these words on the screen. And what Dr Cat said!
Mark -18 hours face to face? You poor overtaxed freak! How do you survive? Clearly it leaves you plenty of time to wank. You sad tosser. Get a real job.
I’m going to resist the temptation to delete that lovely comment because it makes the point about what people have to cop for no apparent reason just for being a blogger quite well.
What this gentleman, who we’ve never seen here before, no doubt doesn’t appreciate is that at least 2 hours of preparation time go into one hour of face to face class content. Then there’s marking, keeping up with relevant reading, and probably 250 students emailing you. Teaching at any level is a job that’s very demanding and time intensive.
But, for reasons completely unknown, some yob from God knows where, prefers to zap in here at midnight on a Saturday just to dish out abuse. Great place the blogosphere, ain’t it?
I’ll second that, Kim. I’m in an occupation notorious for long hours and heavy demands (law). But I was a secondary teacher before doing the mature-aged uni law thing. And I can assure people that teaching eats law for breakfast in terms of sucking up every available bit of your time.
Thanks once again.
Pleasure, SL, and you really are a great loss to the blogosphere ranks!
A little bit of investigation demonstrates suggests that commenter probably came from the delightful J F Beck’s blog:
http://rwdb.blogspot.com/2007/03/too-much-work.html
Who has achieved one of his continuing goals in life by getting a link from timmy.
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/comments/no_time_to_blog/
Oh dear. Oh well, it takes all kinds, as my dear old mum used to say.
University teaching hours: 20 years you were expected to spend an average of three hours preparing for every one hour you were in class. Any less and you were regarded as not meeting a high enough standard. The hypothetical 40-hour (hah) academic week was, according to this template, made up of 24 hours of preparation, 8 hours of teaching, and 8 hours of marking, admin and research per week.
In reality, it was more like an average of four hours’ preparation per one hour of teaching; ten to fifteen (not eight) contact teaching hours; and huge pressure to do more research. And that was back before one had students emailing one at all hours of the day and night.
According to the orginal model, however, if Mark cuts no corners in any area of his responsibilities, then 18 hours’ tertiary teaching per week means an 80-hour working week.
20 years AGO.
At midnight, the brain turns into a pumpkin.
It’s a wonder anyone at all persists with blogging when people like J F Beck exist only to attack and demean and trivialise. Not to mention the charming commenters on blair’s threads. At what point does all the crap that we put up with become too much crap?
I mean check this out:
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/comments/no_time_to_blog/#227496
Dr Cat, Mark’s coming very close to that. He’s taken on two full time academic workloads to cover for colleagues on leave because he feels an obligation for their friendship. I urged him to be more selfish. I’d also urge him to consider following Helen’s wise decision and take a break from blogging. I’m sure he doesn’t need this sort of mindless and hurtful abuse at the moment.
CL has hopped in and done the right thing on Tim’s thread:
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/comments/no_time_to_blog/#227500
That’s very kind of C.L. indeed, and I’m sure will be much appreciated. A very nice antidote to the sour taste in the mouth those sorts of derogatory posts and comments leave. Good on C.L.
That raises the other issue, which sorta confirms your feelings about some aspects of this game, SL, even nice posts which try to celebrate your contribution get disfigured by some people’s pettiness and inability to refrain from point-scoring and low blows. It’s very heartening to see C.L.’s comment for that reason (among others).
Yeah, Kim, that was really quite surreal. It had an almost beautiful Marx Bros.-type quality to it: some random guy staggers in, delivers his one abusive line for no particular reason, then vanishes back into the night.
“It’s a sad and beautiful world,” as Roberto Benigni observed in “Down By Law.”
Dr. Cat — just out of curiosity, why does an hour of class time require 3-4 hours of prep? Isn’t the course already designed in advance (i.e., with topics scheduled for lectures, and pre-set goals to meet, etc.)? What takes up all that prep time? Not being skeptical, just don’t know.
I, too, will miss skepticlawyer — good luck to you with all your new projects! Thanks for your interesting work!
Mick Strummer,
While I think I qualify as a “right winger” (whatever that means these days) I hope I have not slagged off too many here. I can also assure you that there are plenty of left wingers who visit the right wing blogs – some purely to abuse.
Personally, I prefer discussing things more on the more left of centre ones – discussing things with people who disagree with me challenges me more.
j_p_z, I’ve done some tertiary teaching. Generally, if you’re responsible for a course, as Mark is for his, it’s up to you to write the lectures, prepare tutorial/seminar activities, work with students on assessment, organise a range of administrative things to do with teaching, marking, and often all sorts of things students turn to you for because you’re a helpful and visible face compared to admin clerks, etc, etc. Very few courses exist as fully written things, and often you’re just working to an outline. It would also be wrong, pedagogically, to lecture from someone else’s notes without adapting them, at the very least, to your own style, interests and goals in teaching. And you need not just to do the set readings but to read widely in your areas of teaching expertise in order to do your job properly.
j_p_z I did it part-time many years ago and used to spend all Sunday night preparing for my Monday 50 minute presentation.
Can I just mention that presenting for an hour is quite tiring.
I wonder what the relevant standards are for secondary school teachers these days. I’d guess a teacher/student ratio in the school of about 1:12 which I think most tertiary teachers in Australia would think is to die for.
You’re lucky these days if you have 30 students in a tute. When I was starting out at uni, 10 was normal, 15 the upper limit. When you’re teaching four courses, doing all the tutes as well as the lectures, every student enrolled in each course is your direct responsibility. So we’re talking something like 1:250.
SL – sad to see you go, but i completely understand. I barely have time to reply to most of my emails, let alone blog coherently. Between the art studio, consulting work, parenting, renovating, melancholic down times and the high maintainance hair colour, somethings got to give.
And it sure as hell aint gonna be the red dye.
Love to come to brisgrogblog with y’all and buy ya a drink!
Blogging may be a hobby, but that doesn’t mean it cannot augment your paid work so that overall productivity rises.
Certainly, this requires management skill, experience, a systematic workspace and the following of a writing process.
These being tools and techniques to help one cope with the gathering of materials, the synthesis of ideas and taking the required time to digest your thinking. All that effort before then facing the task of presenting your ideas to a panel of judges – your readers
Until you have all the right ingredients, then maybe one does need to be very considerate about how much effort to put into a blog. Especially mindful that only a select few of us reach the upper echelons of blogging where a media proprietor actually pays you to write it.
I suspect it’s likely that one must therefore be very clear about what the production of a blog will achieve in the short, medium and long-term. For example, any blogging I do in the next two weeks will need to help me prepare an essay for a university subject – a short term goal.
For stress relief, I recommend a book called “A technique for producing ideas” by James Webb Young, first published in the 1940s and still published today by McGraw-Hill.
A very concise 48 page, pocket-size book which clarifies the writing process like no other book I’ve read.
…From Justin
Kim, the 1:12 ratio, if that’s what it is, includes some specialist staff who don’t take classes at all, or not much. All terachers would get ’spares’ for correction and preparation. I doubt whether any would do more than 18 periods which could be 30-60 minutes, but typically 40, I think.
I’m very rusty on this and out of touch, but I think they would try to keep classes down to below 30, smaller in some cases. Of course if they offer subjects right through to senior they have to sustain very small classes at times, which means that other classes have to be larger.
In the 1960s the norm in Qld Uni was over 20 for a tute in classes like English or History. When I went to Adelaide where they had more money, I was told that 6 was the norm. It was expected that everyone in the tute engage and make a contribution. But when I did German honours for a while they were larger, possibly double. But that was more like a seminar and you had to give a paper auf Deutsch lasting at least half an hour when it was your turn.
This site once described me as a “deadshit”. It’s a wonder Kim is able to persist with blogging.
Huh? What does “this site” mean? If you mean someone in particular, say so. We don’t all agree on everything. If you’d like an apology, ask for one. What’s your point?
And of course, Mr Blair, you’d never write a negative or critical post about anyone, would you? Perish the thought.
My tutorials each have 25 students enrolled in them (although attendance is only close to 100% just before the exam) and each tutorial takes me around 2-3 to prepare – despite the fact that the problem and solution is already prepared by the course convener (and I teach black letter law which is more straight forward to prepare for than some other subjects would be). To actually prepare the content of the course in addition to preparing yourself to teach it is a much bigger task.
However, surely anyone who has attended tertiary studies would know that if they just sat down and thought about what they actually got from their teachers?
Anyway, I wish both SL and Mark all the best. I will miss both of their contributions to the ’sphere.
Everyone:
Damn!!! First SkepticLawyer and then Mark.
One of the problems with class-contact and preparation time is similar to that of navvying. The public see labourers in work gangs leaning on their shovels while their mates dig away and ….. having never ever been on the end of a pick and shovel themselves ….. imagine the labourers taking a momentary break are bludging and call them lazy. So too the public hear of academics or teachers having “only” 12 or 18 or whatever hours of class contact time and….. knowing nothing of all the time-consuming research, preparation, assessment, correction, etc. work that underpins the class contact work ….. shoot their mouths off about academic bludgers getting an easy life. Unfortunately this sort of public ignorance is manipulated and encouraged by certain politicians and commentators.
Anyway. Best of luck to SkepticLawyer and to Mark ….. may their absences be brief and reatful.
18 hours a week, that is over two and a half hours a day! i blame john W hoWARd.
Indeed, omar heidelberg, it is over two and a half hours of teaching time a day.
Purely analysing that as performance, that is the same vocal effort as a professional stage actor performing a full-run show. A one-man show, not an ensemble piece. A one-man show that includes large sections of improvisation, not just working on-script.
I challenge anyone who doesn’t think this level of vocal effort is physically exhausting to try an empirical experiment. Put a recording device in one corner of your living-room. Stand in the opposite corner with the book of your choice. Put the timer on for 30 minutes and read from the book at the level of volume you think you will need in order for the microphone to pick up your voice.
At the end of half an hour, see how tired you feel. Then listen to the tape. How well will you have managed to both project the required volume that you could be heard, and how clearly have you articulated the words so that they can be understood?
Not that easy, is it? Willing to try it again with having to write the 30 minute speech beforehand? And mark the assignments based on it from 100 students later?
Leave that one there too, Kim. Just for the record
JF Beck is a nasty little nattering nabob of negativity, a mediocrity of the negative fifth degree.
TT, exactly. I spent the last two years of my teaching career with a permanent throat infection, maintained by the combined effects of what you’re describing and the general stress.
JPZ, Kim answered your question about the 3:1 prep/teaching ratio, but I will add a more concrete example. Sorry for the lengthy comment but its length speaks for itself; academics and other teachers, at least, will be interested in this, and it might explain a few things to students.
Say you are a good and conscientious teacher, in a discipline that is dynamic and abstract and has ideas in it, like most of the humanities subjects.
*Ignores howls of protest from illiterate hordes*
Say you are teaching, as I was, 19th centuy fiction (ie, the fiction plus the history) as one of three subjects in any given semester. You have already put in the weeks it took to design the subject, order the students’ texts from the bookshop (something you have to do nearly a year in advance as per university schedules), organise the secondary reading from the library into multiple photocopies and the Reserve section (something you also have to do the previous year), put together a course reader (now an automatic student expectation, and if well done about a week’s worth of work).
You did this while you were working on the massive grant application that every academic is now expected to put in or participate in as part of a group.
Semester begins. You are teaching one Victorian novel a week, average length 4-500 pages. For this subject, you have to give a lecture (50 mins) plus a two-hour seminar per week. If you are an academic’s bootlace, much less a good academic, you (re-)read the novel and at least some of the secondary material in the weeks before you are teaching it so that all is fresh in your mind, as well as searching for any new critical perspectives or important articles that have come up in the last twelve months.
The class has 30 students in it. (See Kim’s comments on numbers.)
After each class you spend another 20 minutes talking to students, for whom you are also required to provide two hours of office consultation time per week.
During the week you spend an average of another two hours talking to, emailing, and otherwise being consulted by individual students from that group. If a student comes to see you in a terrible state (examples from the files: pregnant; pregnant girlfriend; being sexually harassed at work; cancer of the cervix at 23; crisis about childhood trauma of rape by father during civil war in former-Yugoslavia, and I had to ring Counselling myself after that one), add in a few extra hours.
You have a constant schedule of guest seminars, VIPs to duchess about, and research group, departmental, faculty, and university meetings.
You need to maintain the records, grades and so on of each subject you teach.
You need to mark all their essays and assignments, of which there will be at least 2 per semester, ie essays or papers: 60 pieces of work at, say, 2,500 words each, to mark per subject per semester. If you are actually teaching writing, as I also was, then of course it’s much more.
You must maintain your research record and keep giving seminars and conference papers about your own work. At any given time you are expected to be working on an article or a book.
Since the university workplaces were fully computerised around 1990 or so, you also have to do all of your own record-keeping, typing and other administrative work of a kind that was formerly done by secretarial staff. You are also expected to maintain cordial relations with students who bombard you with emails at all hours.
If you are a woman, you spend extra time mopping up the tears of students who have been upset by your male colleagues, resisting sexist manoeuvres in workplace competition, dealing with constant low-grade sexual harassment of various kinds from some of the male academic staff, and periodically cleaning up in the tea-room before the fridge/microwave/sink starts to walk away by itself, to say nothing of the teatowels.
Now multiply that by the (average of) three different subjects one teaches at any given time, and you have the academic’s working week. This is what it was like when I was still doing it, and I gather it is now worse.
The trolls who have galumphed into this discussion would of course pour scorn on an example from teaching literature in any case, but it seems foolish to be concerned for a nanosecond about what the likes of Damian Whateverhisnameis thinks about literature. Or about anything else, really.
I resigned from my academic job at the end of 1997 and I gather it is even more difficult than it used to be because of the desperation about raising money. Which Australian academics are, of course, now also expected to do themselves.
That’s about the sum of it, PC. My standard question of aspiring law students is now ‘do you like to read? A LOT’.
Regardless of the value judgements that the likes of SJ care to make about SL, the fact she’s had a very intense and problematic engagement with the OzLit and Punditocracy establishment and then went on the law trail in some of Australia’s more remote and atypical regions means she brought a far more interesting collection of life experiences and pointed prose to the table than so many of the smudgy carbon copy bloggers and commentators that infest Ozblogania.
Yeah you were a definite original SL. But why am I using the past tense? Of course, like Mark, you’ll be back too.
I disagreed with you often Helen, but I enjoyed the calm and civil tone you brought to discussion. the likes of JF Beck should take note. (What’s with a blog that’s all about other bloggers and having primary-school level fights with them? That’s just sad.)
P.Cat, we have to administer the course website as well now, moderate discussion board postings etc.
Ew.
PC thanks for taking the trouble to spell that out. I was once invited to apply for an academic job, which I declined. They must have been desperate, but for me it was a lucky escape.
In the fray, I forgot to wish SL all the best. Typical!
What Nabs said, and like him I hope you pass this way again.
I haven’t been able to make the intertubes work much since yesterday (hotel wireless? Ha!) so haven’t seen the rest of your comments until now. Many thanks once again.
Maybe when I get my civility mojo back (to pinch an idea from my namesake above), I’ll make a return. But not before.
Pavlov’sCat:
Well put! You touched on a few issues of inefficiency that could have been expanded even further ….. Such as the “cost cutting” folly of not having a cha-wallah or tea-lady [they used to perform many quite valuable non-academic tasks in addition to tea making and washing up]. ….. Such as precious time squandered preparing ridiculous submissions for things that should happen automatically.
Grrrrr!
SkepticLawyer:
Have fun, Be rested [when you can]. Be inspired, ….. And come back,