{"id":176,"date":"2012-06-08T10:29:22","date_gmt":"2012-06-08T15:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/dorer\/?p=176"},"modified":"2014-10-03T10:31:01","modified_gmt":"2014-10-03T15:31:01","slug":"retreating-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/dorer\/2012\/06\/08\/retreating-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"Retreating Forward"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #666666\">It is a beautiful Friday afternoon in June.\u00a0 What have I been up to?\u00a0 Most people (many of whom don&#8217;t work at a university) assume that I have the summer off.\u00a0 Nope, that is the time when other pieces essential to my job get done.<\/span><br style=\"color: #666666\" \/><br style=\"color: #666666\" \/><span style=\"color: #666666\">This year I joined five of my tenure-track colleagues and a writing scholar\/ mentor for a faculty writing retreat.\u00a0 It was a week of discussing the scholarship of writing, getting to know colleagues from other departments, but most importantly<\/span><i style=\"color: #666666\">\u00a0writing<\/i><span style=\"color: #666666\">!\u00a0 It was purposely planned at the beginning of June to jump start our summer scholarly writing projects.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><br style=\"color: #666666\" \/><br style=\"color: #666666\" \/><span style=\"color: #666666\">I have always been what Paul Silvia, in his book\u00a0<\/span><i style=\"color: #666666\">How to Write A Lot,<\/i><span style=\"color: #666666\">\u00a0refers to as a &#8220;binge&#8221; writer.\u00a0 I find that my schedule affords so little time during the school year to anything other than teaching, service and administrative duties, that I write a lot for a few weeks and then nothing at all for months.<\/span><br style=\"color: #666666\" \/><br style=\"color: #666666\" \/><span style=\"color: #666666\">I didn&#8217;t know exactly what I would get out of the writing retreat, but I had heard from veterans that they very much enjoyed it.\u00a0 And, when lunch is included for something I&#8217;m already required to do, why\u00a0<\/span><i style=\"color: #666666\">not<\/i><span style=\"color: #666666\">\u00a0sign up?<\/span><br style=\"color: #666666\" \/><br style=\"color: #666666\" \/><span style=\"color: #666666\">I&#8217;ve realized that I am glad I put down my dissertation and didn&#8217;t work on re-writing a piece of my data into an article right away.\u00a0 The topic consumed my life for some time and I needed to work on other projects so that I could be excited about it again.\u00a0 Being able to put all other work aside for an entire week&#8211; not answering emails or dealing with other administrative tasks, not doing anything helpful at home either, helps me focus.\u00a0 This focus nurtures my ability to analyze at my data with a critical eye.<\/span><br style=\"color: #666666\" \/><br style=\"color: #666666\" \/><span style=\"color: #666666\">My goal for the week was to get a good start on an article entitled &#8220;Virtual Collaboration&#8221; and to finish two short translations.\u00a0 And I&#8217;m shocked to report that I have finished the article, put the final touches the blog post about the royal visit, am almost done with this post, made significant progress on the translations and I have an hour left of the retreat to now think critically about my specific goals for the rest of the summer and next spring when I have a semester completely devoted to my research.<\/span><br style=\"color: #666666\" \/><br style=\"color: #666666\" \/><span style=\"color: #666666\">So, what do I take away from this experience?\u00a0 Sometimes you need to retreat to move forward.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is a beautiful Friday afternoon in June.\u00a0 What have I been up to?\u00a0 Most people (many of whom don&#8217;t work at a university) assume that I have the summer off.\u00a0 Nope, that is the time when other pieces essential to my job get done.This year I joined five of my tenure-track colleagues and a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/dorer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/dorer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/dorer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/dorer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/dorer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/dorer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/dorer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/dorer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/dorer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/dorer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}