Let me begin this post with three events from my life this week that may initially seem completely and utterly unrelated.
Event 1
Earlier this week I received one of those reviews academics come to dread: the one that tears most of your writing to shreds and makes you momentarily question your value as a scholar. Luckily the review ended up being an r and r (revise and resubmit), but my initial reaction to the review was disappointment and sadness. This article has been seen by many eyes and been revised many times over, so I suppose I was not expecting a review quite like that.
Event 2
My 3 year old daughter is in gymnastics right now. She just started classes at the beginning of the year, and she adores her teachers (who are fabulous). The naive spectator in me watches her classes and sometimes ignorantly wonders why can’t they just learn to do a backflip or handstand right now. But then I look back on my years as a figure skater and remember that muscle memory and strength take time to build, that each little movement requires repetitive daily training for it to be perfected. Each adorable little jump over a foam hurdle, monkey swing on the parallel bars, or sit up on a beam is a building block that will help my daughter in later years should she decide to pursue gymnastics. Great athletes do not happen overnight, but rather through staying the course and committing to disciplined emotional and physical training.
Event 3
Later this week I found myself rummaging through a box of old figure skating VHS videos my mother sent me a few weeks ago. I have bronchitis again, and my medication is keeping me wide awake. I looked through the box for a video I knew existed but had not seen since the competition was held back in 1994. I popped it in my VHS player (yes, I still have one) and started watching it. This was my first USFSA competition, which in non-skating jargon means it was a more competitive event than the ones I had done prior to it. If you placed well at local USFSA competitions, you had a good chance of moving on to regionals and eventually nationals if you were truly talented. I was 14 years old, and very nervous. The first of my performances was nice, except that my axel jump was very weak and slow. Still, I managed to place 3rd in my group, and I was very proud of that.
The second performance, however, was a complete disaster. If you watch my body language, you can tell I could barely breathe when I stepped out on the ice. I saw my mother and grandmother through the glass window as I took my position to start my program, and from thereon the performance went downhill. It was my first time doing double jumps and axels in a “real” competition, and I let my nerves and emotions take over my body. My legs turned into jelly and I could no longer feel them by the end of the program. Figure skaters who have competed know what I am talking about. And despite the fact I spent the entire ride home from that competition crying about it (and forgetting that I placed third in the artistic skate), I learned a lot from that performance and kept competing for another 4 years.
So how are an r and r, my daughter’s gymnastics’ classes, and a failed figure skating competition related? Though I decided that jumping was not for me (I grew 3 inches during the time I was learning and working on my doubles and grew tired of injuries), I continued to skate and compete. When I look back at all my skating videos, there is a part of me that is surprised that I continued to put myself out there open for the world to judge and critique. That in and of itself is a feat to be admired. There were many mistakes and errors made in later competitions, practices, and tests, but I kept on skating.
The same goes for academia. I have had failures, harsh (and by harsh, I don’t mean “constructive criticism” or helpful) words thrown at my work or at me personally, and many teaching moments that were less than stellar. Katherine Mangan’s “Traits of the ‘Get it Done’ Personality: Laser Focus, Resilience, and True Grit” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 5, 2012) discusses some of the qualities that are necessary for enduring such experiences and succeeding in academia. The first and perhaps most pertinent to this blog post is resilience. One of the academics cited in the article compares the writing process to an athletic event:
“A scholar who plugs away on a book month after month, refining a thesis and deepening her understanding of a complex topic, needs the same kind of determination that an avid soccer player displays in persevering through injuries and losses, says Angela L. Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.”
I put my daughter in gymnastics because my mother put me in figure skating at the age of 2. I loved it, and competed for the first time when I was 4. I stopped taking regular lessons at 6 when our local rink closed down, but got back into it when I was 11 (a little late in the sport of figure skating). I still skate and have coached little ones from time to time. Skating taught me the value of routine, discipline, and commitment of which Mangan’s article speaks. I spent many years getting up at 4am (as did my poor mother) heading to the ice rink, skating before school, getting dressed and eating breakfast in the car on the way to school, and then heading back to the rink after school.
I had a very limited amount of time to finish my homework, but because of this, there was no way of procrastinating – it simply had to be done in the short time frame allotted for it in my day. From skating, I learned discipline as well as understood how skills and talents are, for the most part, learned behaviors that take patience, time, and perseverance to perfect. This is a lesson I have taken with me in my academic career, and it became an even more important skill when a new time suck was introduced into my life: children. Skating taught me how to visualize positive longterm outcomes, even if they seemed light-years away. That is how I managed to finish my book – working on it day after day, devoting all the moments I could squeeze out of my day of teaching, other academic responsibilities, and parenting.
That brings me back to that r and r. As I watched video after video of my skating last night and my body age from 12 years old to 18, I witnessed an incredible change in both how I skated and how I handled myself. The pang of disappointment and failure seemed to lessen after skating for years – you can see me laughing off a close run-in with the boards of the rink or minor stumble as I neared 16 years of age, and I suppose the pang of rejection will lessen once I am a little more of a seasoned academic.
tenure.track.mama 