Professional Reader

The lifestyle of a graduate student could not possibly be more different than the lifestyle of a public school teacher. The lack of structure in terms of scheduling [I spend very little time actually "in class"] combined with the fact that my primary respsonsibility is to read about 500 pages every few days and there is little to no accountability insuring that I get this reading done other than my own interest in being well-educated and getting something out of my degree, makes for a very self-disciplined regiment of alternating reading for prolonged periods of time with engaging in just about every form of procrastination known to man. While I am sure that those who work in offices employ these procrastination/time-killing strategies on a near-daily basis in order to get through the day, as a teacher, I never had the opportunity to really test the limits of my time-wasting abilities. This is compounded by the fact that a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of snood.com, which is wildly reminiscent of my underdgrad experience, which featured Snood in almost direct proportions with other forms of indulgence not-appropriate-to-discuss on a blog about education. I am exercising an enormous amount of self-control in not purchasing the full Snood program, instead limiting myself to the free-trial which I sincerely hope will expire in the next day or so.

Other preferred forms of procrastination include [and I'll limit myself to the Top 10]:
1) Reading excessive accounts of current events on the internet from various perspectives and being disgusted with world affairs
2) Painting my nails
3) Sending text messages about minutia
4) iChat [which I may have to delete from my computer]
5) Adding tedious html code to my MySpace profile
6) Daydreaming about iced coffee
7) Purchasing and consuming iced coffee
8) Checking my email and thoroughly outlining aforementioned activities to my friends who work in offices
9) Watching episodes of the West Wing that I have already seen
10) Brainstorming possible ways to blog about not really doing much of interest

Additional suggestions are welcome!

You see, the real problem is not that I am disinterested in the work. In fact, I am reading books that are really very interesting and feel like the amount of information in my brain is exponentially increasing at a rate I have not experienced, well, probably since my first year as a teacher. But the fact is, that in order for me to truly retain information that I am reading, I kind of need to copy it down. And my notetaking skills are a bit on the compulsive side, so this is very time consuming. This means that my reading-rate is very slow, and I get very impatient, especially when I feel compelled to Google any term/movement/phrase that I am unclear about, or just need some more context [my Sociology days were so long ago... need some refreshers sometimes]. Then as soon as the ol' laptop gets opened up, the distraction begins.

I have been doing most of my work on campus, because being in my apartment opens up a whole new set of procrastination activitiies involving cleaning and rearranging which would probably push me below reasonable productivity levels. There is a beautiful student center with an outdoor deck which makes for a nice place to read and drink iced coffee and listen to freshman complain about their roommates and how all the boys they like are gay [which the girls are very upset about and the boys are supremely delighted] and isn't there a lot of fat in a salad when you add bleu cheese? They come and go in waves as their classes run through-out the afternoon, and I pretend I have my own outdoor office with a view of the park. I should not complain.

I am greatly looking forward to visiting my former-sixth graders at school on Wednesday, hopefully curtailing the guilt-dreams I continue to have about them on a regular basis.

And now, having participated in Procrastination Stragegies #1, 3, 4, 9, & 10, I am going back to reading Margaret Archer's "Social Origins of Educational Systems," which outlines the history of domination and assertion in the educational systems of France and England in the 18th and 19th century [sounds scintillating, no?]