Last week was the halfway mark of my three month sabbatical. While I was dreading it a little - just as I dread hitting solstice and knowing the days are getting shorter - the time has felt generous so far. Unlike last sabbatical, when I front-loaded my effort and then burned out, this time I prioritized rest and recovery in June. I have a lot of capacity for doing very little, but there does come a point where you want to feel more intellectually productive and it’s nice when that energy can be properly harnessed. The book Laziness Does Not Exist is a good one for this mindset.

That being said, in June I did some reading, submitted a chapter proposal, and some research I’ll talk about at the end. I really enjoyed Paper Knowledge by Lisa Gitelman. It was helpful for putting me in the right mindset to work on digital edition stuff, but also for contextualizing some of my fun printmaking work. I’ve been mentoring a colleague in letterpress printing this past year and while a lot of it has been fun Friday afternoon craft time, it is still relevant to both our of work (she’s a Shakespearean).

July has been my dedicated month to work on the sabbatical project I proposed (Gertrude, the digital edition platform). It’s going well so far! Which is a relief. Last sabbatical was a bit rough. I couldn’t stop comparing my work to other’s. I wasn’t used to working alone. I kept talking myself out of the value of what I was doing and I was afraid of being called out by others in the field. I have a lot more experience and strategies for combating those doubts now, but it still takes constant vigilance.

For example, last week I was struggling with a feature and the code required to make it work in an automated way. I could envision what was supposed to happen, but couldn’t get the code lined up to achieve it. As I fell back on a less code-y method, I realized, oh yeah, this is the point. The point of this project is to create something with less complexity. Something that can be adapted by people who are at my level or below. My audience is all the other versions of my without at other institutions who lack access to web development time, either as a human resource or a time resource. I have to constantly remind myself that choosing the less slick route is the right choice.

Stepping back from the frustration also opens the door to like three other forms of this reminder. The reminder to value what you can offer. I’ve been chatting with an old friend in a new-ish job where she constantly feels like she should be a specialist (in part because of her PhD training), but really her job requires a generalist. Academia doesn’t make it easy to make that switch. But a student just told her, “hey it’s nice to have research explained by someone who knows the system but isn’t my professor.” Of course!

This reframing is truly the only way I was able to get in front of a classroom when I first started teaching and feel like I belonged there at all. Assuring myself that my generalist knowledge is valuable too. Students need someone to explain the things that no one explains. But it takes time to build up the experience of seeing students (of any age) struggle when everyone forgets to explain the now-basic-to-them steps.

So yes yes this is a lesson I have learned many times but it’s the reminding yourself piece that I keep coming back to. The nominal reason my friend has been learning printmaking is for a local fellowship run by our teaching and learning center. Tentatively called the “passionate novice” fellowship, it asks participants to learn something new, then reflect on that experience and its application to one’s own pedagogy. This is a super rich place for reflection and conversation! Pieces of our small group discussions keep resurfacing this summer. I had a frustrating night of art making the other recently where my second attempt at something was worse than my first. The next night I took a 90 min art class on a whim and it was full of great info and exercises. But you know, 50% of the advice was basically the same as what I tell my own students to do. Rapid prototyping. Timed exercises. Creativity in restraint. Totally familiar recommendations.

It’s like we are not as well-equipped to be both the teacher and the student. We don’t show the same grace to ourselves as we do to our students. Academics especially expect a lot of themselves. The specialist training makes it hard for folks to be not-a-specialist in a new arena, as my friend is experiencing. It’s a lot easier to do both after years of professional experience, but I haven’t yet brought that mindset to my newer art making endeavor. After a lifetime of teaching myself things (tldr homeschooled), I know that I often expect teachers to unlock all the mysteries of the universe for me, when in reality, they’re mostly just telling me the things I already know but in a new package. Maybe that’s the missing piece. We can’t magic up new framing for ourselves. We need to learn in community.

The last thing I’ll say is that I’ve also been spending a lot of time on some historical/archival research related to mpow. Tomorrow I’m visiting a far away archives to see material I haven’t seen before. I still haven’t figured out if any of this can become an article, but I’ve definitely journeyed a fair bit from where I’ve started. And I’ve had help from some really great archivists and local history folks. It’s been another instance of role reversal - I’m usually the research support not the researcher. We’ll see!