Blog Post #6

I am the product of my schooling: an idea reconfiguring, information regurgitating, language-processing machine. I am incapable of independent thought—the ideal citizen! I am a color commentator. I do well on tests and can write essays. I know how to use a semicolon. I clear bureaucratic hoops with the grace of a gazelle. I am punctual. When I elide prose, I can pass for a poet. I spent years learning and relearning how to be a student. I have no marketable skills. My prose is clear and error-free. I will never leave school because I have evolved to survive in an academic habitat. If I learn to wear socks-with-sandals and plaid button-ups in a spectrum of eggshells, creams, and off-whites, I may be a successful professor. I have nothing original to say. I can combine old ideas prettily and in various metric patterns. Sometimes in rhymes, but I try to be subtle. I know which lies to tell in what contexts. I work for the approval of authority figures, real or imagined. I stand against intellectual yardsticks on tiptoes. I measure myself against my peers, real or imagined. I am enlightened beyond concerns with physical beauty. I am intensely superficial regarding intellect. I can never hope to satisfy my own ideals.

BP6: Nial "The Wild Turkey" DeMena

Depends on my mood: There are days when I'm working on my annotated bibliography and feel like an independent scholar, then there are other times when I'm sitting in my office doing schoolwork like a dumb student, and even times when I try to ask around like I'm collaborating. I don't find it necessary, except when asked, to define the various Nials because as I know, a Nial divided against itself cannot stand. The many shades of academic Nial--pissed off at his busy-work Nial, proud private tutor Nial, scholarly Nial, creative Nial--have to work together seamlessly in order to get to the PhD,  job, then tenure future-Nial.


As of writing my post, I am somewhere between scholar, student, and professor. I'm working on a seminar paper (scholar) while I fulfill my requirements (student), and I will go back to and finish my four major assignments for pedagogy tomorrow (professor). Nevertheless, I prefer independent scholar Nial because he isn't and can't be hampered by administrative work, busy work, or teacherly concerns. He is just focused on his ideas which, despite what everyone tells him, he still believes is his sole, driving reason for coming back to school. 

Just like Robert, I know my future success / career is contingent upon scholarship and teaching. But there is also a curious side of me, like Quinn admits to, that believes in the ghost of smells as a phenomenon. 

My boy Jim Leigh, trailer-park supervisor Sunnyville, will take me out:

Quinn, (Cynthia Q White) Blog Post Six

Quinn identifies herself as a writer. She likes Robert's confliction. She understands that a weekend of designing assignments can make you feel like a student, e.g. Jamie. She likes to freak out when she finds the wrong things (lobster) in the right places (mailbox). Student goes without saying. Quinn, as a poet, is a student. She will spend the morning researching which kinds of glitter are fatal if inhaled. Fatal glitter. So, wait. Quinn's a researcher! She's focusing on writing a book of fun poems. It will be called Pear and Cheeseburger. Hopefully by publishing a book, her career prospects won't be too grim. She will pluck her eyebrows and go on a speaking circuit in which she reads poetry in the voice of Foghorn Leghorn, which is to say, Quinn won't be making a lot of money anytime soon. But she'll be having fun. And this research class has helped her to navigate Virginia Tech's databases and she's consequently found some inspiring books of poetry. For example, Russell Edson's The Clam Theater, in which Quinn found a recipe card for lobster. Quinn got pranked. She loved it. Finding that recipe card in such an apt location made her day. She wrote a poem about the person who put the card in Edson's book. It's not a great poem.

Blog Post 6 - Hockman

I like to think of myself as a collaborative teacher and researcher but always a student. I will not devote this blog post to a philosophical tirade, but you reader should know this: We are always students of every thing.

For purposes of our graduate student positions, I currently most associate with being a student. Although I have spent much time working professionally since my bachelor's degree, I find myself falling back into the student "grind." I worry about grades (oh geez too much!). The stress of keeping up (and sometimes not)with readings, assignments, and collaborative discussions proves at times a challenge. I am in awe and have much respect for our instructors and faculty, so I am anxious in their offices and weird when I smile and wave in the hallway. Yes, you are right; I am a child. Oh, and calling them by their first names?! Still trying to get that straight. My teachers (and some peers - definitely friends) are equivalent to celebrities.

Now, how do I see the teacher and scholar thing fitting in? My advisor Paul Heilker keeps me sane. I am very grateful for his encouraging words as I bud into a scholar and young researcher. Writing this blog makes me ask, how do we define a "scholar"? I define researcher as someone who actively does research in some capacity. But a scholar? Should I assume this to mean someone that can take the research to a higher level of thinking and creation? Wikipedia defines scholarship as "the body of principles and practices used by scholars to make their claims about the world as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly public."

What about when I am on Christmas break and I read an article that enlightens my being, I then unconsciously us that knowledge in my life at a later date? Do I have to directly share this material to be a true scholar or engage in true scholarship? There is a reason for this tangent - At this point in the semester, I am reconciling the academic scholarship requirements with my personal scholarly inclinations and ruminations. Were I to pursue academe as a career, I would assume this reconciliation a continual, asymptotic process.

Uren Blog 6

To hell with Jamie. That guy came to an MFA program to study fiction writing and he identifies as a writer first and a student, scholar, teacher, and collaborator only after (in that order, it seems). I knew I was going to say in this post that I wish I could identify as a writer first, since that’s primarily what I’m supposed to be doing here. Three years to write, right? But while all the real writers take workshops and, you know, write, I don’t. Here’s why I’m not a writer, but a student or scholar or teacher.

It’s because I’ve already given up the hope that my paying career will have anything to do with writing fiction. So even though I’m here to write and I’ll write some creative thing for my thesis, my head’s not in it because I am scheming for the future. My future is scholarship and teaching. In just two years, I’ll need to have the most stellar scholarly writing sample possible; probably it would be good if I’ve published or at least presented papers in my proposed field by then. You have to go to the best place—in fact, I’ve picked my favorite (a whole freakin’ center for psychoanalytic studies, folks)—and that means stiff competition. There’s just a lot of work to do if I’m going to get where I’m trying to go, and not much of that work has to do with creative writing.

Creative writing is where I am. And I’ve never been good at living in the here and now, to coin a phrase. Or maybe I am, because right this weekend I’m designing a freshman writing course and I might identify as a teacher first. In a couple of weeks, as I dig through texts and write a short paper on Marxism (or something), I’ll probably feel like a scholar. And next semester, if I can stick to my plan of mostly setting aside the future and immersing myself in the creative work and the creative community that I’ll largely—if temporarily—leave behind in 2014, I’ll probably feel like a writer, too. Maybe I can join Jamie, after all. Although, there’s one more reason that I might refract my identity away from “writer”: it’s too scary, too uncertain.

Blog Post #6: Dana

For the past __ years I've been told that I'm a student, and I think I adhere to that role pretty well. Merriam Webster defines student as, "scholar; learner: especially one who attends a school," and I'm definitely that. (Please take note that you are especially a student if you attend a school, because nothing gets you a label quite like thousands of dollars to academe!) Regardless, and given the generous wording of this question, I've also been assigned other aspects of my identity: teacher, collaborator, and independent researcher, none of which I feel entirely comfortable owning to.

I believe that when we talk about self-labeling, or the attempt to self-label, what we're really considering is an issue of comfort within a role. We've individually envisioned our own theoretical check-sheet for "what it means" to be a teacher, scholar, collaborator, etc, but we also know that these definitions can be broadened and compacted accordingly and are not just limited to the graduate or scholastic world. The malleability of these different titles, as Robert points out, can change according to the task at hand, or how our egos are feeling on any given day. While I’d like to identify as all of the above, and while I know I meet certain criteria that allows me to identify as such, teacher and collaborator are not roles I’m comfortable with. I recognize the obvious overlap between independent researcher, scholar, and student, at least for the purposes of what I do, but I’m not a teacher because I'm creating a syllabus and I’m not a collaborator because I yoink someone else’s research in order to support or refute my own. In order to identify as teacher and/or collaborator I will need to legitimize (whatever that means) myself over time by founding those roles on principles of reciprocity. At least, that's how my theoretical check-sheet sees it.

Jamie Rand: Blog Post 6

Through the past few modules of this course, the course material has addressed different sides of your identity here at Virginia Tech: student, teacher, independent scholar, and research collaborator. Which of these identities do you most associate yourself with? Feel most comfortable with? Or do you think that separating these identities out is a false dichotomy?

Of the four options, I associate myself most with being a student (the stack of books next to me and the list of assignments to complete this weekend speak well to that fact). Also, since I've been one form of student or another for the last twenty-five years or so, I'd probably have to say that it's the one I'm most comfortable with.
You mention that it may be a false dichotomy, splitting those identities, and I have to agree with that. In my (admittedly limited) experience with post-graduate academia, I've come to think that all four of those occupations (for lack of a better term) overlap. As a student, I'm learning how to teach; as a teacher, I'll be learning from my students; as an independent scholar I'll be doing research for my personal work that I share with others, and as a collaborative researcher I'm like the fat kid who's the last picked for dodgeball. Which is my way of saying I'm not very good at it and no one wants me on their team.

Honestly, the "identity" of academia doesn't much figure in to what I do as a fiction writer. Most of my day is spent alone staring at a screen and trying to figure out what comes next in my story. If it demands that I write about something I don't know much about (and stories are slave-drivers that way, I'll tell you what), I hop online or I go to the library to do some research. But the research I do is scrawled notes surrounded by questions marks (?? old sisal ropes--soaked in kerosene to keep them flexible, can i use this???) and it's likely stuff no one will ever really want to read.

My point, through, is that I think of myself as a writer first, not as anything else. The student/researcher/teacher/scholar identification is secondary. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not. What it means to me is that I have more resources now than I ever have to help my writing--I'm surrounded by people who know more about how to write and do research concerning that writing than I do or ever will. It means any research I actually end up doing can have some depth to it, not this mile-wide-inch-deep stuff you get from Wikipedia or Google.