More Academic Lockdown Reflections
My last set of reflection on the lockdown are now well over a month ago. In some ways it 
feels a lot longer and in some ways it feels like I wrote it yesterday. As I said then, time is a funny thing. So how have you been these last few weeks? Nah, it’s ok, I don’t really know how to answer that question either. Here are some rather rambling thoughts though on what it’s been like, on what’s been hard, on what has been quite nice and on what has helped keep me as sane as I ever am as we make our way through a very bizarre Mental Health Awareness Week in the middle of a global pandemic.
Time is a totally weird concept. No seriously it is. I know we all have days or weeks that feel endless and hours that race by in a flash. As a really bad runner, believe me I know that 30 seconds can last forever. But this is different. It’s like time doesn’t mean anything anymore. In some ways it reminds of summer holidays as a kid. Remember? The ones that stretched all summer, where it never rained and you cycled off into new adventures with your friends every day and it was always going to be like that. Except this feels like a more sinister version of that. More like time standing eerily still before the dementors attack in the playground while at the same time everything continues at a ridiculous pace. It’s like being in parallel universes at the same time. One where time has slowed to almost standstill and the other where everything has been accelerated. There is no normal time anymore. Things fly by, hours, days, weeks just gone and yet, somehow, nothing.
I think the initial drive for connectedness has eased a little. I think people are now craving actual contact, are maybe realising that face time etc just actually don’t do it. I am still perfectly happy not being sociable. But then I am also lucky. I don’t live on my own and Kath and I have enough space to stay out of each others way – so the not living alone doesn’t become an issue. Also, my Mum lives down the road and we have had some (distanced of course) conversations as we dropped of shopping and I am used to not seeing Dad often and just chatting on the phone with the occasional skype to see each other. All of this is sort of still within my normal range of not talking to people! So it’s not the not seeing people etc that I find hard.
What I do find hard are video calls. The new tech obsession I mentioned in April also seems to have calmed down a little. I had a nasty experience with Zoom which means I will never ever use that platform again (even if they fix the security etc, trust is gone) and have settled into MS Teams which I find pretty intuitive, the other platforms are just there to confuse me every now and again and make sure I don’t get too comfortable. Video calls are hard work. I don’t know whether it is because I take so much from body language and other non-verbal communication normally or what but I have to concentrate so much more to follow conversations and I find it much much harder to read people. There were several bits and pieces written on this which I was too tired to fully engage with!
So do I have a routine? Ha! You know me better than that. I was sort of beginning to settle a little bit: I was getting up at a similar time every day, starting with yoga or at least with some quiet time outside with a cup of tea, I was getting out to run short loops and I was working in sort of effective short little bursts. And then we ended up with some foster kittens for a few days. Cute and lovely as they were that was our routine gone. No yoga, no running, high levels of worry and anxiety (they were quite poorly) and completely random and inefficient working. Once they were gone I tried again. I seem to have a bit of a routine now, it seem to mostly involve putting off going for a run (I need to stop that, there’s a marathon on the horizon) and wondering what I can eat next though.
Interestingly it was marking that helped me focus on work stuff – it didn’t help me focus on marking of course, although I did get through the first batch quite quickly, but somehow it gave me purpose that translated into other areas of work and I made some progress. I wonder if it was because marking gave me a real sense of normality. When marking comes in I generally hide until it’s done. I have always been of the ‘just get it done’ school and tend to start and then just keep going for as long as I still feel like I can give the work the attention it deserves. Sometimes that can last for a very long time and sometimes that means one or two scripts at a time but for some reason I am quite efficient between scripts. When I am mid marking admin jobs get done because I can just do them quickly between scripts. I think the boost of seeing the to do list shrink a little as I ticked off all the tiny little things I had added to it helped.
The other thing that has helped is thinking about #100DaysofWriting (Google it) and I
didn’t do anything with it or start it for quite a while. However, even thinking about it and wondering whether I could commit to writing most work days for 100 days or at least commit to working on a research/writing project helped me make some progress and enjoy it. It’s little things, we’re not talking articles appearing out of nothing etc but just getting a paper closer to being finished, clarifying a point in my mind, actually reading something for the ideas rather than because I have to evaluate it for one thing or another… the little joys of academic life. Having an idea.
I was surprised to find that actually talking to some very select people on the phone also helped me feel better about work stuff. I avoid the phone when I can but just having a quick chat with people sorted some things out quickly and saved a bunch of emails and talking through a joint paper really made me sharper about the ideas expressed within it and it is now actually not far off finished. Overall I’d say that the first period of lockdown stopped me in my tracks in terms of capacity to do work and think about things. I got nothing done and I was exhausted. I think I am now in phase 2. I am getting some things done but it takes much more energy and headspace to achieve those things than it ever did before – so I am still absolutely knackered and have little capacity for thinking about anything. I still have trouble holding onto thoughts for long enough to finish thinking them and inefficient reigns supreme. If I am looking at one document and then need to navigate away from that to say a spreadsheet to check something I will forget why I have navigated to the spreadsheet and also what document I was in so I’ll go back to email say and then an email will send me back to another spreadsheet or whatever and I can go round that cycle several times before eventually doing the thing… It’s very much a try to ‘do one thing at once with total focus’ time and so I am constantly writing myself a note of what I am doing. It’s actually quite funny. I’m also talking to myself which I think Kath finds more annoying than funny. Somehow all of this makes work feel relentless – and that’s something I want to think about a little more and maybe write about in another post.
Every now and again my thoughts flick to the future. Sometimes this is prompted by emails from the university asking for or providing information and sometimes it’s just that my brain quite likes thought experiments. There are moments where I am anxious about what’s to come, about what the Law School will look and feel like come September, how it will all work etc. Mostly though I am just watching and waiting. There is all sorts of planning going on but the reality is that none of us know what September and the start of a new academic year will bring. The problem with that is of course that good teaching, whatever form it comes in, takes time to prepare and time is something we don’t really have. I don’t feel too worried about this. I have a lot of teaching experience in different structures and settings and can probably adapt pretty well to whatever structures the university and law school eventually settle on. I feel for people new to this job and starting on their teaching journeys. How do you prepare for September teaching when you have no clear idea of structures, delivery modes or patterns? It’s hard, really hard.
In fact all of this is really hard, it’s weird, it’s unfamiliar, it’s unnerving and there are no answers… We might be getting used to some of this but that doesn’t mean that it is no longer difficult or that it gets in any way easier. In some cases it may well be getting harder. Let’s not forget about that. Let’s remember that just because many of us are finding more and better ways to cope with the lockdown, it doesn’t mean that we’re finding it easy or that we’re perfectly ok in this. Keep being kind!
Society of Legal Scholars Day 2
As I outlined briefly yesterday, Day 2 started with me not running and having a slow morning gathering my thoughts and enjoying not plunging straight into my emails and not dealing with the day to day. I walked up to the uni in a gap in the showers and found the room in which my PhD student was presenting. The audience was almost non existent when I got there although a few more people arrived. There were three papers in the session and I struggled to focus on them. The first was probably interesting but was almost entirely read out which meant I lost interest within about a minute. The second was better but not something I knew anything about. The third paper was of course fabulous. It s a different sort of nervousness watching your students or mentees give papers. I really wanted the experience to be a positive one. I’m certainly biased but I thought her presentation was by far the best of the three and I was very proud of her.
Then I went back to Legal Education having missed a couple of papers I had marked – by people I know though so I can catch up with them later. This session was a bit problematic for me. The first paper was interesting and had lots of good stuff in about personalisation of teaching and feedback and also about student expectations etc but I have concerns about the approach, heavily reliant on Myers-Briggs personality type teasing but without being trained in Myers Briggs. It did make me think about how we can talk to students about where they are in their journey, their skills and knowledge to understand more what they need from us. And of course that’s different for each student. The second paper shouldn’t have been there and was just a bit of a car crash.
That made me think too though… what’s the responsibility of conveyors in ensuring the appropriateness of papers? Can they be checked more without filtering out non obvious gems? What’s the role of Chairs in putting both speaker and audience out of their misery? And how do you manage that sensitively because you never know what’s going on for the speakers in the background! Anyway, then we had lunch and then I found a quiet spot to catch up with some other stuff before the plenary session. As I sat there it suddenly felt unbearably noisy, and in spite of hiding away in a corner there were people everywhere… before I really thought about it I packed my stuff up and left. I checked my heart rate (whoa!) and breathing as I walked down towards the hotel. I thought about what to do. I had time to walk a little and then go back to the plenary but in the end I decided I needed time out.
I had a little rest, maybe even dozed off for ten minutes or so. Then I got my running gear on to head out. It wasn’t entirely successful as my legs are so tight. My ankles started niggling almost immediately but I managed a mile, then I stopped and stretched and then did another mile run/walk, stopped to stretch again and then mostly walked another mile with a few jogs thrown in. It helped. I felt well enough to go to Dinner. Dinner was just dinner with a quiz I had no interest in, a pretty good speech and good conversation on my table. By the end I was really tired but otherwise ok.
I slept well. I woke up just before 6 and lazily snuggled back into bed for a little while before deciding to go out and run. As I walked around the room though my Achilles niggled and my calves felt tight so I instead I did some yoga, had breakfast, did some more yoga and then slowly walked up to the uni ready to start the Day 3 with the AGM.
Society of Legal Scholars Day 1
I am trying the conference thing again. It’s probably better than spending the next week or so in the office with everyone around me trying to absorb the pressures of the start of term. Still I am conscious that depression has kept me on the sofa much more than I would like and that anxiety levels have been generally high. I am working on the re-set but it’s not easy. So when I set off yesterday it didn’t seem like a great idea to be heading into people and give a paper based mostly on personal experience and reflection.
Travel was a bit irritating because the trains into Bradford and then back out to Preston didn’t match at all. I sat at Bradford interchange for 40 minutes watching the world go by…. that’s another story! Then I got on my little train and pootled towards Lancashire through the familiar northern landscape. It suddenly felt important to be staying in the north. Safer, less pressured, more familiar. I watched the hills and fields come and go and longed to be out there breathing the fresh air. I went over my paper. I stared into space and then a few blokes with dogs got on the the dogs were scary and I hoped they would get off at Preston so I didn’t have to go past. I was also suddenly very aware of my own privilege, of what having a job and a secure income at a level where worrying about money isn’t a thing really means; how rare that is in these northern towns I was passing through. I felt both lucky and powerless.
Preston. I walked from the station to the hotel to leave my bags and realised that some time out before people would be good. I found a Costa coffee and had a peppermint tea and bar of dark chocolate. I like Preston. It’s real. It’s a bit of a dump of course, there’s the university and there’s poverty and not much else but the people are real, they are friendly and welcoming and I couldn’t help smiling all the time. I belong in towns like Preston (or Keighley), it feels right. I slowly walked up to the university passing huge building sites and lost in my thoughts. I registered, I bought books, I chatted to one or two people and then it was time for session 1 and my paper.
The session started with Caroline Strevens (Portsmouth) ‘Challenging Assumptions:revisiting the Law Curriculum’ and her paper was packed full of fabulous ideas centred around self determination, motivation, mindsets and teamwork being the answer. I do think self determination theory is useful and it can tell us something about how universities get things wrong by undermining academics and their intrinsic motivation and how we get this wrong with our students too and basically force them to focus on extrinsic motivating factors… I am not sure about teamwork being the answer. I don’t know enough but as an introvert and someone who quite likes working alone and did as a student I wonder…
Then it was me. My paper reflects on two of my publications from 2008 and 2009 both written in the 2007/08 academic year and suggests that I was perhaps rather naive then and got some things wrong, not least arguing for a time turner to make the academic job doable. Instead, I suggest in this paper, we should make better use of an invisibility cloak and marauderers’ map (I do indeed solemnly swear that I am up to no good) to help us do things our way and defend against the dark arts (of neoliberalism, managerialism , marketisation, metrics, ranking, the glorification of busyness…) I am actually really looking forward to properly writing this one up.
The third paper in the session was be Steven Vaughan (UCL) and was, as always, a treat. I love the way Steven presents, it appears easy and effortless and pulls you in. The paper was one I had heard before but that didn’t matter. Steven told us about his work on the structure of LLB programmes and in particular the core subjects. I have often asked why the core is the core. In fact I ask my students and part of me loves the fact that we don’t really know, that it seems to be a historical accident and one which we can’t rally justify on pedagogical or legal grounds. The core is the core because it’s what was predominantly being taught when the core was decided but there were other subjects in contention too. What I find utterly fascinating though is that colleagues often find it impossible to imagine something else. That when you ask them to design a law degree starting with a blank page they start with what they now understand to be the core but they can’t articulate why.
I can write about what I would put in a law degree another time but for now let’s just say I’m not wedded to the core, I wouldn’t teach in the current modular silos and I am not sure I would make anything compulsory other than a sort of legal skills, methods etc course. I see logistical argument for first year compulsory modules but I am struggling for pedagogical and legal ones. But I digress.
I had coffee, there were too many people, I briefly considered going back to the hotel but then just went to the next legal education session instead. It wasn’t a great choice. The papers were just not really my thing. The first was by Roland Fletcher (OU) about apprenticeships and I think I was tired and stopped listening properly. The second was a panel on workplace focused law degrees and while what they were doing seemed quite interesting there is something about the focus of law programmes on providing legal experience to the exclusion of all others that annoys me. It perpetuates the myth that what we do is about our students becoming lawyers and that a degree is/should be about employability. Of course I am being unfair here, they might be doing all sorts and just sharing this particular aspect. I would have liked more on the literature and context though rather than just a ‘here’s what we are doing’ sort of thing.
I went back to the hotel, dumped my bag and checked in and then went back for drinks and dinner. They were fine, conversation was easy because I was with people I knew and people I was content to just listen to. The entertainment folk singing went on for a few songs longer than I felt happy with and I was glad for some air and me time on the walk back. I slept badly. I woke early. I wondered about going for a run but it was raining cats and dogs and the bed was comfy and I felt achey. I didn’t want a battle in my head, I wanted a slow morning. And that’s what I’ve had. Nearly time for SLS Day 2 now!
My Conversations 