Document, document, document

The single most helpful piece of advice I have gotten from the internet has been to document everything that you ever do for your work.

Earlier this year, I was putting together some documents for updating my teaching dossier, and I was sort of losing my marbles trying to remember what I had actually done since I started my new job. Besides standing in a lecture hall and talking with students, and grading piles of assignments, what was I filling my days with? I knew my days felt quite packed, but when I looked back at my CV, it really didn’t look like I had a lot to show for what I was putting out.

I started leafing back through my emails and notes, from writing things down, and I began feeling a bit more relieved.

Student thanks you at the end of the semester and says [insert good thing] about class? Ask if you can put it in your dossier. Take on advisory role for senior thesis? Write that in the CV. Participate in this professional development seminar? Put that down in your service list. Sit on this committee? Put that down in your service list. Someone compliments your lecture style / assignment? Get that in writing.

While I’m not the best practitioner of this tip, it’s a really useful one and I highly endorse it! But I’ve started thinking a bit differently about it.

Yes, often it’s just nicer to get everything down before it’s done, and you’ve forgotten about it, and to keep your things up to date. The largest draw for me, though, is being able to look back and realize that yes, I’ve actually achieved quite a bit! From preliminary analyses to student resource-building to organizing an event, a lot of the smaller things don’t actually make it onto a CV for various reasons (they didn’t pan out, they’re still in progress, etc.) so I don’t have something to show for it. I’ve previously told people that if you won’t celebrate your small steps, other people won’t celebrate them for you… so I’m trying to take it to heart.

On that note, I want to make a note of writing more regularly here (I know I’ve said this before), because I think it helps facilitate my thought process on stepping back and seeing how many pieces are being juggled at a time. Because I have a lot of these dangling pieces that I see to their ends at various times, I never know how things will turn out, and it can be a bit disappointing to seem like I’m floundering along. Perhaps it’s a bit of self-affirmation, perhaps it’s a bit of taking a breather.

So here’s to a fall where I remember that new preps are actually tiring, that my job isn’t to make people happy but to make sure people learn, and that you can’t reinvent the wheel every time.