Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Examinutiae

I count 110 days until I'm taking qualifying exams. Over the past 24 days, I have read and annotated 19 units--books and articles combined. I'm not making any distinction between books and articles for now, even though I know that I need an hour for an article and ~6 for a book. My notes for each are roughly equivalent coming out at around 1-2 pp. The first 19 units fit in while teaching two online courses together enrolling ~50 students (my fall will not be so engorged...with teaching, but, of course, the fall will be babyful, so the formulas are all amiss). Because I'll lose my mind if I work constantly, I took fifteen minutes to monkey around with my lists as a bar graph. When I paste the sets into a spreadsheet, Excel tells me there are 169 items in my three lists combined.

I think of it like a fundraising chart:

Holy smokes. Bleak friggin' outlook for being exam-ready by November. Unless! I glanced through the remaining 150 items (remember, 110 days or 2,640 hours, however you want to break it down) and I have read 56 of them. I know 56 out of the 150 remaining. I simply need to dash out a few reliable notes. Remainder: 94 units in 110 days. If one-third are articles and two-thirds are books, then I'm amping up for 403 hours of grindstone. Tack on another 50 hours for annotating the familiar 56 units and it comes to 459 hours. Just over five hours per day, not counting weekends. Or, more my style, eleven hours one day followed by a day on the couch reading fiction and watching television...and again and again. Well, and I have some expendables built in, so I could drop ten units without offending anyone or read super-selectively, etc. But given that I haven't had what I would characterize as a remarkable working month (even take it to six weeks), I guess that it still seems possible to be exam-proof in the fall.

Bookmark and Share Posted by at July 19, 2006 11:00 PM to Qualifying Exams
Comments

Okay, but you recognize that it's completely all right if you don't get to all of them. Or do all of them the justice you may feel they deserve. And that everything's going to be just wonderful, regardless.

Signed, the woman who often forgets these things

Posted by: susansinclair at July 20, 2006 11:47 AM

Yeah, I'll grant that this is mostly self-parody, even if I haven't done enough to be explicit about it as such. If I blog about it from time to time, I'm more likely to come close and to leave a trail of the pleasurable absurdity in reading so intensely for the official purpose of a scant few hours of writing (when the value ultimately lies in the exam process's deeper rhythms and structure).

Posted by: Derek at July 20, 2006 12:27 PM

Now I'm thinking I want a fundraising thermometer graph for all my work. Like, amount of cleaning to do, or papers left to grade...

Posted by: susansinclair at July 20, 2006 10:49 PM