This past week, I have been substitute teaching for an adjunct in the program I administer because she had to fly to a foreign country when her father took ill suddenly; this will continue into next week.  She had enough time to prepare lesson plans, and I was able to meet with her before her flight out to pick everything up and talk with her about what she wanted to accomplish for the two weeks.  Considering the circumstances, this is going as well as possible.  Her students will be ready when she returns to make progress on the course’s major assignments and should not really feel too many effects from her absence.  This event, however, has gotten me thinking.  Are you ready for someone to take over your classes for a week or two?

There are many, many reasons why faculty have to cancel classes.  Sometimes, we’re sick for a day or two and can just play...

In my introduction to GTD, I mentioned the importance of a weekly review.  This is when you sit down with your action items, projects list, and in-boxes to review what needs to be added to your action iterms and to make sure that you are on track with your various projects  The weekly review is one of the most important aspects of the GTD process, but it’s also pretty easy to ignore.  I don’t do mine weekly even though I always feel more in control of my professional and personal life when I do it.  Often, before I sit down for this review, I’ll leave a comment on Twitter and Facebook saying that I’m doing it, and I sometimes get questions about GTD.  One question I’ve gotten a couple of times is what my project list looks like.  That’s a good question since I do not keep project lists but instead keep project files.

To back up a bit, a project in GTD is...

In March, I have two articles coming out in academic journals.  One is based on a conference presentation I did in 2005.  In 2006, I spent the summer turning that presentation into an article.  One journal rejected it, so I did some revising and sent it to another in 2007.  They requested a revise-and-resubmit, which I completed in 2008.  After a few emails, the editors accepted it in March 2009, saying it would be published in 2010.  I think that’s a somewhat typical story of how an article gets published.  Yes, it took a few years, but part of that was because I took quite a while to do my revisions and resubmissions.  If I’d been quicker, it might be out by now.  My point, though, is that I followed the somewhat typical process with that article.

The other article is the one that I think has a lesson for all junior faculty or anyone trying to publish.  As I...

It was just over a year ago that I received the final, official letter telling me that I had earned tenure.  In that year, I’ve happily answered a lot of questions about the process, questions people ask in hopes that the answers will relieve some of their own anxieties about the process.  The years between obtaining a job and earning tenure are stressful.  No one denies that, but in talking with people about the process, I’ve realized how little discussion there is about the deeper effects of such stress on our lives, bodies, relationships, and careers.

In the summer of 2005, the summer after my second year on the job, I started seeing a therapist to help me handle the stresses of the tenure process.  Before then, I was literally making myself sick every few months.  My stomach would tighten and turn to stone.  Soon after, I’d start vomiting.  Anyone who was reading...

In my email yesterday, I received a notice that I thought might appeal to ProfHacker readers.  Google has announced their Faculty Research Awards Program.

As they describe it, “The purpose of this program is to facilitate more interaction between Google and academia and also nurture stronger relations and partnerships with universities. The intent of the awards is to support academic research aimed at improving information access (defined broadly). Awards through this program are typically for one year in the range from $10K-$150K.”  Tentative deadlines are April 15, August 15, and December 15.  The application process does not seem too arduous, certainly not more than other national research grants.

Who’s thinking of applying?  Are there any other grants you know about that might appeal to ProfHacker readers?  Let us know in the comments!

As someone who teaches in a professional writing program, I have a checklist of certain sentence-level issues I expect my students to pay attention to during the editing process.  Some of these are particular pet peeves of mine or of those who will end up interviewing my students upon graduation.  I’ve been in this job long enough to have heard diverse employers criticize the same types of writing issues repeatedly.  One of these criticisms concerns overuse of the passive voice.

The passive voice cannot always be avoided (nor should it be).  There are some uses of it, though, that do deserve attention.  Think of the number of politicians who say things like, “Pollutants are being forced into the air we breathe.”  Or, “Our country’s values are being destroyed.”  I also hear it on the news when a crime has been committed, and the police need to be vague, so they...

If you’re on the quarter system, there’s a good chance you started back to full-time work yesterday.  Some, like me, started teaching brief winter session courses.  A lot of academics, though, are still comfortably on break, trying to find a balance between taking that break and making some headway on various projects.  While I’m sure it varies across disciplines, this is a prime time of year for various fellowship and grant deadlines.

Yesterday was the deadline for Ms. Magazine’s Writers Workshop for Feminist Scholars, but it’s still a couple of months until the March 12 deadline for the National Association of Television Program Executives Faculty Development Grant Program.  March 2 is when applications for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Summer Seminars and Institutes for College and University Teachers are due.  If your university is part of New...

Each of us on the Prof. Hacker team has our own history with a range of productivity texts and tools.  Organizing for the Creative Person: Right-Brain Styles for Conquering Clutter, Mastering Time, and Reaching Your Goals by Dorothy Lehmkuhl and Dolores Cotter Lamping is a key part of mine.  One of our regular commenters, Tria, turned me onto the book in the mid-1990s, and it has had a lasting effect on me.  The fact that it was first published in 1993 and is still in print today shows the book’s importance for a lot of people, and I’m betting some of our readers would benefit from knowing about it.

The book starts with an overview of brain research that led to Dr. Roger W. Sperry winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1981.  He pioneered research into the ways the right and left sides of the brain serve distinct functions.  In general, the left side of the brain...

This post continues the ProfHacker series on  disruptive student behavior in the classroom (see our first post on ways to handle students who are engaging in disruptive, off-topic conversations).   In this series, we present a scenario and offer a few suggestions from ProfHacker readers about how they handle similar situations.  Of course, ways of handling these scenarios will depend upon the discipline, the class size, and the culture of an institution, and we will try to include as many of these variables as we can.  What we are discussing here are behaviors that–no matter the discipline or the institutional culture–impede learning for other students.  This scenario comes directly from one of our readers who asked us how we’d handle something she encountered for the first time just this semester.

SCENARIO:  Before class begins, Lethargic Larry/Laura walks by, and ...

With Thanksgiving happening this week, we’re approaching the one-year anniversary of when I started growing a beard, which I did as a productivity strategy.  The week after Thanksgiving last year, I had daily meetings early in the morning all related to a particular program that had no scheduling flexibility.  In no way am I a morning person, which is why I often teach late in the afternoon or into the evening.  Last year, I had a class that ran until ten at night.  I dreaded the thought of having to be on campus and functional at a time when I would normally be sleeping, but it had to be done.  And for several days in a row.

Before the meetings began, I thought of things I could do so I could sleep as late as possible yet still arrive on campus at the right time and in the right mindset.  Going to bed early was out because I just end up lying awake for hours, and...