The Deliberate Owl

How Our Bees Fared in 2025 (and How Much Honey We Harvested!)

2025-12-09T12:00:00Z

There is nothing quite like a golden spoonful of honey, right from the comb, spread onto warm sourdough bread.

It's one of the main reasons we keep bees!

Where we started this year

As a quick recap, we ended the fall of 2024 with zero hives. It was pretty disappointing! Fortunately, we did get honey, because the bees stayed until fall. But then, after our final honey harvest, our bees absconded.

Read about our bee journey so far:

Bees can abscond for numerous reasons, if they don't like something about the conditions of their hive. Our best guess is that the mite load was high, and we were slow to treat. We also may have been too slow getting the screened bottom boards out at the end of summer, so the hive could have been a little drafty in the fall as it started to cool off. Another option was that the hives were too full - we had queen excluders on each keeping the queen and her brood in the bottom three supers. The hives we harvested from were strong… too strong? A queen might decide to leave if she ran out of space to lay eggs.

Regardless, we will never know exactly why these bees left. But that's where we were at. Zero hives! But we weren't entirely starting from scratch, because we had all the frames full of built out comb from the previous years hives. It takes a lot of work for bees to build wax; already having frames covered in wax comb is a huge headstart for a new hive. They can put more energy into making honey right away!

Installing new bees

On April 19, we got our new bees. Randy picked up four nucs from a local store (we had pre-ordered them). It had rained that morning. The sun came out as he installed the new bees in our four hives.

We gave each hive a jar of sugar water and a pollen patty to give them a boost. In our area, flowers had recently started blooming: our maple, the Oregon grape, daffodils and tulips, one of our plum trees, dandelions. The crabapple trees looked ready to pop any day.

New bees!

Installing the bees in the first hive…

The queen starts out trapped in a box, which is plugged with sugar.

Into summer

As the months grew hot, the bees collected pollen and nectar. Of the four new hives, one in particular was fantastic. That queen was a keeper! Of the other three, one did okay, not amazing but not bad, and the other two declined over the late spring, with at least one of their queens leaving or dying. We took a few frames of brood and nurse bees from the great hive to give the dying hives a boost and a chance at re-queening. Both came back, but not strong enough to produce a ton of honey. Our growing season is pretty short all things considered.

Spot the queen? She has a blue dot on her.

Honey harvest

On the last day of August, we harvested honey. We pulled 4 supers from the fantastic hive, and a few frames from the other hives. Like always, we only harvest the extra honey, leaving plenty for the bees for winter. Two of the hives still looked weaker, and one had no evidence of a queen, so Randy merged them together.

We got about 12 gallons of honey! We also had six foundationless frames with beautiful comb. Most frames have a plastic sheet in the middle to get the bees something to build off of, a starting place. The foundationless frames don't have that, so the bees have to build everything. This is what you do if you want great big chunks of honeycomb to eat or share!

Uncapping frames for extraction.

Liquid gold!

Going into fall

By October, we only had one hive. This was disappointing! One absconded for unknown reasons; one died for unknown reasons (we found a dead queen even); one is ready to brave the winter. Clearly we need to work on our fall beekeeping. Same speculations as last year… Being an LINK election year, Randy was busy, and we probably should have checked on the bees more often in the early fall. Though, for some of it, I really don't know how much we can do. If the bees want to abscond, they're going to abscond.

On the bright side, since some bees left, we were able to harvest extra honey, since the bees weren't going to need it for the winter. We harvested another 5 gallons, bringing our yearly total to about 17 gallons, plus the frames of honeycomb. Not bad! Now we're just hoping our remaining hive makes it through the winter! We will see come spring…!

Why Have a Big Family? Weighing Opportunity Costs and How to Make it Easier

2025-09-02T12:00:00Z

When someone first referred to my family as "a big family like yours," I only had three kids. And I was surprised! Was my family of five really that big? We have friends with five, or six, or eight kids. Three? That's still on the small side!

When we had our fourth, I figured, okay, we're officially in "big family" territory. Four kids! Six people! Booth seating in restaurants was starting to feel cramped. Those "family deals" for four people (2 adults, 2 kids) were a joke. We bought a second fridge. A van would be all I'd ever drive, but without any space for extra passengers. And so on.

When I was younger, like many of my generation, I didn't have a plan for how many kids I wanted or when I'd have them. Just that I planned on some, sometime. More than one, certainly (gotta have siblings), and probably before I was thirty (given how fertility declines over time and all that). It was a good thing my husband was ready for kids when he was, reminded me we weren't getting younger, and asked me about it when he did, otherwise I might have put it off until—like so many of my generation—I "felt ready".

For us, it all worked out. We had our first at age 27. It felt young compared to all the people around me: ambitious academics, researchers, and entrepreneurs at MIT. Some wondered: "Why aren't you waiting until you have tenure?" (Assumptions: that I was pursuing the tenure-track life. That waiting made sense, at all.) And then I didn't feel done at two, though I had several people asking me if I was done, since I had both a boy and a girl (like, what? Gotta catch em all! Collect the whole set?). Honestly, it's pretty cool that we can just make more new little people who are my favorite people ever!

(Read: Can You Have a Baby in Grad School?)

"Feeling ready" for kids is overrated. People delay, or forsake the endeavor altogether, for reasons they can't always articulate. The reasons they do put forth remind me of the lengthening of adolescence, growing incompetence and uncertainty among youth: "Later." "When I'm ready." "When I find the right partner." "When I'm financially stable." "If the climate weren't such a concern." "Who would want to bring a child into a world like this?" You'll never feel your life is stable enough. You'll always be able to find reasons to delay. You'll never know everything you think you ought to… so why not jump in already and learn as you go?

Opportunity cost

The answer to "why not jump in?" is opportunity cost. I wrote about the opportunity costs inherent in motherhood earlier this year. As Catherine Pakaluk explained in her book Hannah's Children, you can't know in advance what having children is like. It's difficult to weigh the unknown experience of having children (or having more children) against the known quantities in your present life. The things you'd have to give up loom large; the benefits are nebulous and unknown. New parents always go in blind, so to speak. You can't be fully prepared, because you've never had the experience before.

Furthermore, many young people aren't told to have kids! Maybe you get that advice in more traditionally religious households. Maybe it's implicit if you have a bunch of siblings yourself. But so many people are only children, or one of a pair. They have little experience with young children. They may not be given much guidance on choosing a spouse or forming families.

In that earlier post, I also probed how your life changes. There's the common refrain that once you have kids, your life is over, you can't have fun or do your own things. You have to look forward to the day when your kids are bigger and you "get your life back." People talk about the bad parts of having kids: sleepless nights; tantrums; diapers; messes and chaos; lost time; time spent on chores and schooling and "kid stuff", like ferrying kids from activity to activity; dumb kids' show theme songs that gets stuck in your head, etc., etc.

People don't talk enough about how having kids means you get to share the best parts of life with your favorite people. (Key assumption: that the people whose kids aren't some of their favorite people are doing it wrong.) I love my kids. Most activities are more fun with them! Sure, there are plenty of activities I can't do with them yet (like hike a 10-mile trail up a mountain), but we'll get there. And we do other fun things in the meantime.

It's different fun than I may have had pre-children. I get to see them discovering the world for the first time. The first time they see a flamingo, or fireworks, or a balloon on a string. The first taste of ice cream.The wonder on their faces after hiking two miles up to an alpine lake with a waterfall. The love in my two-year-old's voice when he sees I'm mad and comes up to hug me, saying, "I'm making you not grumpy!" I get to share my favorite things with new people. I get to see them learn and discover and explore.

Instead of asking how many child-free years you get before you have kids, ask how many years you'll get with your kids, or your grandkids. How long do you have to know them? How many years might that be? If you have them earlier, and more of them, you have more time.

Plus, you will have time eventually to do kid-less things. As the kids get older, they may want to do their own things; you can leave them home when you go out; they move out eventually, too.

(Read: How Do You Do It? 5 Ways to Be Patient, Calm, and Improve Your Relationship With Your Children)

You can make it easier

I've had friends (each with one or two kids apiece) wonder at how anyone could have enough time for more children! How would a parent give each child enough individual time and attention? How can you manage all the chores? The laundry?

First, realize that you would have to cook, clean, do laundry, and take care of yourself and your home no matter what; adding a few more people doesn't change that part of the equation very much. Sure, there are more people making messes, and food needs to be prepped in larger portions… but there are also more people who can help out.

Plus, there are a lot of ways of making things easier.

You can opt out of some of the "bad parts" of childrearing, like dumb kids shows, some activities, and even some of the specific "kid stuff"—see my reviews of Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne and Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff for ideas.

You can outsource stuff you can't do or don't want to do. For instance, we have hired a lovely cleaning lady to come every other week, leaving me free to just do the daily upkeep. I don't have to fit in deep cleaning bathrooms around when I want to be doing activities with the kids or when the littlest is napping. I highly recommend outsourcing cleaning if you can afford it; it's one of the most common activities that women outsource when they can, probably because it's worth it.

I know other moms with many kids who employ mothers helpers, tutors, and other people to help them out. For example, if you homeschool and upper level math really isn't your thing, yes, you can outsource it! People forget that we're not supposed to do everything. We're also not supposed to do everything all alone. Having a large family is manageable when you remember that you don't have to do everything yourself.

In addition, kids don't actually need tons of your time, especially as they get older. The older they get, the more they want to be doing their own things and the less you have to follow them around making sure they're not sticking their fingers in outlets or eating rocks. They want independent play time, occasional input, and intermittent long conversations. They don't need you all day all the time.

For example, my 8-year-old will happily spend hours building with Lego or K'nex. He will spend ten minutes explaining what he built to me. Maybe he will come get me for five minutes here and there to help troubleshoot an engineering issue. But he doesn't need nor want me there for the four hours he spent building! That means those four hours I can spend on my own projects, or with the other kids, if they're not also engrossed in building and playing.

Even if you're homeschooling—yes, you can lead activities, read aloud, talk to each child about their interests, and so on at every age… and as the kids get older, they can also do a lot of work independently. Plus, some activities might involve everyone (like reading aloud), so the quality time is shared. Homeschooling tends to be more efficient than public schooling, so there are still plenty of hours in the day for free play time (i.e., possible project time for you!).

Sure, sometimes every child will want attention at the same time. That can be difficult, but it's also an opportunity for everyone to learn patience. (Life skills, anyone?)

(Read: How to Harness Patience, Expectations, Flexibility, and Relationship to Make Parenting Smoother and Less Stressful)

Lean into flexibility

Another way to make the most of your time is to lean into flexibility. Be opportunistic about when you take time for you. Lean into what's happening around you at home, or when you are out—the rhythms of your day. Figure out when schedules and rigidity work, and when they don't (temperaments, seasons, etc can all change the balance). Figure out when you can have your time.

For example, if I have the goal of reading to myself 20 minutes a day, and also the goal of reading a few books or chapters with my kids every day, I have to find the right moments, or it will be frustrating for everyone. I can't do my reading when everyone needs help getting breakfast or when they're tired and fighting with each other. I can't do their reading when the littlest ones are too tired to sit still or too energetic to pay attention or too interested in wrestling to let the rest of us sit while they play nearby. I don't want to interrupt a good imaginative play session (at least not without good reason), because that's valuable, too; and besides, if they're all engaged in playing, that's a better time for me to pick up my own book or some other task I need to do than to interrupt to read to them. Instead, I can read to them when they need a break, when they're starting to get restless with each other and clearly need a change of activity, or even during snacktime.

Some people do well with schedules and time limits. And we use those tools, too. When kids haven't learned yet to read clocks, I make use of visual timers so they can get a sense of how long they have before, say, we need to get in the car to go somewhere. Or we'll set a timer for a fast five minute cleaning/toy pickup session. We're not currently in a stage where we schedule in what time we start lessons every schoolday, because instead, we're in a stage with very little kids who aren't consistent with their wakeup times, so sometimes I want to sleep until 8 like the littlest one, not start on the days activities. Flexibility is key.

Parentification, or responsibility and love?

Large family life may look intimidating when you try extrapolating your current one or two kid life onto it, but things change. Tasks you had to do yourself are easier with help, even imperfect help. Older kids help with chores and with younger kids. (Chores that younger children do may not actually be done faster or better than you could do yourself, but they need to learn to do them, so let them take longer and learn the skills. It'll get better, I promise.)

Everyone has to help out to make the house livable. Responsibility is good. As Michaeleen Doucleff wrote in Hunt, Gather, Parent, and William Stixrud and Ned Johnson wrote in The Self-Driven Child, kids often want responsibility and do better when you give it to them. Requiring kids to do chores and help with the household teaches life skills and responsibility, and builds the family community; it's not an instance of parentification. (Some recent social media debates questioned that stance; parentification is a term properly applied to what happens when parents check out entirely and leave kids to raise themselves.)

And when it comes to siblings… same thing. Older kids want to help with their younger siblings. They love their younger siblings and want to spend time with them! My older kids (e.g., 8 or 6 years old) will take the 18-month-old on adventures in the backyard or on the tire swing. They'll fight over who gets to hold him in their lap.

True, they do not always want to help, and they don't necessarily want to play with the little one when I think it would be helpful. And that's fine! I rarely insist that the older ones watch the littlest; instead, I take advantage of the times when they volunteer to do so. Flexibility again! The times I do insist are usually for situations like "the 18-month-old just knocked a glass off a table, keep him in the playroom with you until I get the broken glass cleaned up", or "let me put these cookies in the oven for you, and then I'll come watch him" (and they're happy to watch him for cookies, haha).

I will, as a way of helping the older kids learn responsibility, remind them that if they take the younger ones outside, to keep an eye on the younger ones and shout if they need help. Or tell them, "keep an eye on the younger ones, and if you get tired of keeping an eye out or don't want to, bring them back to me and I'll watch them." They get to practice responsibly keeping an eye on siblings and younger kids, but they're not required to beyond their limits or interest. I'm not going to make them parent, but they will learn skills necessary for keeping an eye on a younger child, which can come in handy later. Plenty of kids choose babysitting as a first job!

Overall… having a large family is doable. The key is realizing that it doesn't have to be as hard as you think.

Tutorial: How to Write a Nonfiction Book for a Traditional Publisher

2025-08-05T12:00:00Z

So you want to write a book, but aren't sure exactly where to start. Here's a guide, based on my experience refining ideas, writing a proposal, finding an agent, and dealing with publishers for my book Grad School Life.

(Read: Why write a book? How do you meet deadlines? And other answers…)

The idea

If you're reading about how to publish a book, chances are, you already have an idea. You have something you want to share: a story, a question, a process.

You need to decide, however, if now is the right time to execute on that idea, and whether a book the right format for your idea. Ask yourself these questions:

What is my idea? How could I share this idea with the world? Consider formats such as articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and exhibitions as well as books. Is a book the best format for my idea? Keep in mind that compared to some other formats, books require a lot of time investment up front before you see any payoff.
If a book: Why this book? Why now? What do I have to give this book that other people don't? What makes me the perfect author for it? You should have satisfactory answers to all these questions. Reasons for writing a book might include: to further your career, as a side hustle, to bring in leads for your main business, and/or to share your idea with the world.

For me, I wanted to write. While many of the ideas that I put into the book could easily be shared in blog posts or articles, I felt that the whole would be more coherent and better as a single book rather than as a series of shorter pieces. Plus, I thought that many of the people who might benefit from my ideas—such as grad students and other academics—would appreciate having everything in one place, bound together. Academics notoriously like books, anyway.

If you decide that a book is the right way to share your idea, then you need to decide whether you want to engage with the traditional publishing industry or if you would rather self-publish or find an independent publisher. You can find endless debates about traditional versus self-publishing that cover all possible pros and cons to each method. The biggest factors involve timeline, creative control, marketing, prestige, and finances. Generally, you can get a book out faster and have more control over it when you self publish; you are also likely to pay more up front getting the book ready. You may get more help with marketing and more prestige from a traditionally published book; the publisher will take on the costs of getting the book ready, but take a large cut of sales.

It's up to you to do your research and evaluate what method will work best for you, for this particular book project.

For me, I decided that a traditional publisher made the most sense for my book Grad School Life. I knew a publisher would have connections to the universities and libraries that might likely buy copies of my book. Plus, I wanted to write and have someone else handle the rest of it; I didn't want to go into business as a publisher myself.

Step One: How to land a nonfiction book contract

Now that I had my idea, knew it ought to be a book, and had decided to pursue traditional publishing, I needed to land a nonfiction book contract with a publisher. How could I do that?

It starts with a proposal. Nonfiction is different from fiction. With fiction, most books are sold after they're written. Most nonfiction books, however, are sold on the strength of the proposal. (There are exceptions. Memoir, for instance, is usually treated more like fiction in the publishing process.)

The proposal

I spent a few weeks researching what goes in a nonfiction book proposal. Most publishing houses have their own favored formats, and if you search online, you'll find dozens of slightly different templates. I looked at a bunch when crafting mine. They all have a few things in common:

A short summary of your book idea
A longer, in depth description of your book idea
A list of proposed chapters, with chapter titles and a brief description of each chapter
An analysis of where your book might fit in the market, such as a list of comparable books and who the audience is
One or more sample chapters
An author bio

Sometimes, proposals may also include your ideas for marketing the book, details on your social media presence and platform, special connections or social media presence that you have that could promote the book, spin off ideas, and more.

Publishers use the proposal to decide whether or not your book is a good fit for them. It's a useful summary of your book plan that they can share internally throughout the publication process.

I spent a couple months crafting the proposal. The longest part was writing sample chapters. The hardest part was writing the short summary that I knew everyone would read first.

Hint, don't use AI to write the whole thing for you. You can use it as a tool to do market research and suggest comparable books or brainstorm titles… but do your own writing. Good writing shows the author's voice and personal style. AI doesn't have your voice. Your proposal is your first impression; write it with the same voice that you write your book. People who are trained in written words can tell when something has no voice.

Finding an agent

Agents are intermediaries between authors and publishers. As such, they have vast knowledge of the publishing industry, what's normal and what's not, and often extra legal knowledge about contracts, plus negotiation skills for getting you the best deal for your book. They have contacts in the industry, too, which may make your proposal more likely to be seen. My agent happened to be a lawyer as well, who specialized in the legal aspects of publishing, which I personally think is a very useful set of skills for an agent to have. My agent also helped me revise my book proposal so that it would have the best shot with publishers, and he handled submitting the proposal to publishers.

Having an agent is technically optional. For some academic books, taking the time to find an agent is probably unnecessary, especially if you know up front that you're going to publish with an academic publisher (such as a university press), and if you don't mind doing some research to make sure your contract is reasonable.

However, for anything but the most academic of books, I would recommend an agent. If your book might have a chance with a trade publisher, you need an agent. Without an agent, it may be a very long time before your proposal is seen, if it ever is; some trade publishers won't even look at a proposal if it doesn't come through an agent.

Personally, I wanted an agent who knew the ins and outs of book contracts, so that I would get a better deal. My book also has a shot with some trade publishers, though ultimately we went with an academic press.

Be prepared for a lengthy search process. You want to find the right fit for your book, and for you. You want someone you can work with. You want someone passionate about your book, who will fight for the ideas you're sharing, because it'll give your book the best shot. (Breaking up with a bad agent is a whole separate topic, which I haven't had to deal with, but others have written on it extensively.)

To find an agent, you go through the following steps:

Write a query letter.
Research agents who might be a good fit.
Send them your query letter.
Wait.
Interview any agents who respond positively.
If you find a good fit, great! If not, or if you did not get any responses, revise your query letter and repeat steps 2-5.

Query letters

The query letter is what gets your foot in the door. It briefly introduces you and your book. There are lots of guides to writing query letters out there, which I won't rehash here. All of these guides will tell you to be yourself, be polite, keep it professional, be relatively brief, and follow all the specific instructions each agent or agency wants you to follow.

Research agents

You can find lists of agencies online. You can also check comparable books to yours to see who published them and, usually in the acknowledgements section, who represented the book. I looked through lists of agencies that deal with nonfiction books. I checked out all their websites. I read agent bios and their blurbs on what kinds of books they preferred to represent. I looked at what books they had represented in the past. I wanted to get a sense of whether my book would be a good fit for their interests.

To keep track of everything, I made a spreadsheet. My spreadsheet had columns for the agency, the agency's website, the specific agent I intended to query at the agency, their email or a link to their contact form, what specific information they requested (e g., did they want the proposal right away? Did they just want a book summary and chapter list?), the date I made the query, the timeline within which to expect a response, what response I received if any, and miscellaneous other notes.

Query and wait

Once you have constructed a list of agents to query, it's time to actually send queries. I queried around 5 or so agents, then waited for responses before sending out another round of queries. If I got no replies within a week or two, I took another look at my query letter to revise before sending out the next batch.

It took me a long time to find an agent. My book was very niche and finding someone passionate about it took time. I sent 40-50 query letters. Perhaps that means I should have done better research up front into who might be a good fit, based on their states interests, types of nonfiction books they represented, and so forth

Interview and Decide

I had interest from a couple agents. I scheduled phone or zoom calls to talk with them before signing anyone on.

In the interview, you're looking for a couple things. Do you have rapport with this agent? Could you see yourself working with them, getting their advice, communicating with them about your book? Do they have the expertise you need?

There are lots of websites with lists of questions to ask during agent interviews; check a few lists and pick some of those questions.

If you interview more than one agent, be sure to follow up with everyone regarding your decision. Be polite and professional; no ghosting.

Finding a publisher

If you have an agent, this part is simple. (Simple does not necessarily mean fast.) First, your agent may ask you to revise your book proposal or suggest edits. My agent, for instance, recommended I include an additional sample book chapter. Then, your agent compiles a list of publishers they think would be a good fit for your book and sends queries on your behalf. All you have to do is wait. If your book covers a niche topic, it may take longer to find a publisher that's the right fit. It took around a year to find the right publisher for my book.

When an editor at a publishing company is interested in your book, they may reach out to set up a meeting. If you have an agent, they will reach out via your agent. Your agent will probably sit in on these meetings.

What will this meeting cover? The editor may request more information from you, ask questions to help them determine the fit of your book for their publishing house, explain more about their publication process, and, in all likelihood, try to sell you on why their publishing house is better than all the rest of them for your book. If an editor has gotten to the point of asking for any review, it means they're interested. They may not have the final say, however. A meeting with you may give them the information they need to sell the book to the rest of the publishing house.

When my agent was submitting my book to publishers, we had interest from someone at a trade press, who then requested a meeting. The editor gave us a lot more information about why they thought the book would be a good fit for their press. Ultimately, however, the publishing house did not pick it up, because although that editor really liked it, they did not have the final say. Often, editors will have a general meeting with all the other editors and the sales folks at the publishing company, and a book has to appeal to everyone as a good business decision in order for them to invest in it.

When a publisher is interested

When a publisher is interested in acquiring your book, the next steps can vary. It'll depend on the type and size of the publisher. Trade publishers have different processes from university presses; big publishers are different from small publishers. They might communicate with you via your agent or they might start communicating directly with you.

A university press was interested in acquiring my book. The next step was to send the proposal for peer review. Peer review is a very common part of the process at university presses. They want to ensure that the work they're considering is quality work, with valid methodology, no big red flags that only someone in the field might notice. Since editors are experts at editing, and not experts on the specific academic topics that university presses tend to publish, they rely on peer reviews to get expert opinions on potential books.

When the publisher had received a couple reviews on the proposal, they sent the reviews to me and requested an author response.

This part of the peer review process was familiar to me, having published a number of academic articles, which have a similar process. You write the article, you submit it to a journal, you get reviews back, and if the reviews are not too negative, you have the opportunity to respond to them and revise your paper. Both of my reviews were reasonably positive, with a good deal of constructive suggestions, which I was happy to take. In this case, the press did not request a revised proposal, simply a response to the reviewers explaining how I intended to incorporate their feedback when I drafted the full manuscript.

At this point, with the positive peer review and good response letter, the editor said they could acquire my book. If the peer review had not been positive or if I had not been able to address the reviewers' concerns adequately, the university press could have decided not to acquire the book.

Signing the deal

The publisher sent over a contract, via the editor who liked my book proposal and was going to be in charge of my book. The contract will specify details such as when you need to complete the book, how many copies of the book the publisher will send you when it's published, what your advance will be (if any) and how or when it will be paid out, who gets which rights (such as the right to publish in other languages or other countries), royalty rates, and so on.

The advance is money the publisher pays you to help cover your time while you write your book. It's money paid in advance of selling the book, thus the name. When the book starts selling, the publisher tracks how much they make; after your book earns as much as the advance, they will start paying you royalties on every book sold thereafter.

Advances for first-time authors tend to be pretty low. For a niche academic book, you may not even get an advance, or it may be a couple thousand dollars. Trade books may get an advance in the thousands or tens of thousands. Higher advances are generally reserved for well-known authors. But it varies.

My agent mediated with the publisher. This is where agents tend to shine! He explained the entire contract to me, told me which parts we could push back on (such as upping the advance), and suggested a few other changes to the contract.

Writing the manuscript

Once the contract with the publisher is signed it's time to write the book. At this point, you have an outline of chapters and several chapters complete from the proposal. Don't forget about optional sections, such as acknowledgements and dedications, if you want to include them! You have a deadline from the publisher. Get writing! My advice on getting the work done:

Reviews and revisions

What happens after you complete the manuscript and send it to your editor at your publisher?

The revision process varies by publisher. If you publish with an academic press, the process will involve these steps, but they may be in a different order, and they may have other steps, too:

Peer review of manuscript. This was the first step for me after submitting the manuscript to my editor. This can be a lengthy process; for my book, it took nearly half a year for my editor to find two reviewers and get reviews back. Your editor at the academic press uses the peer reviews to help guide you through revisions. The reviews are also used by the faculty board to determine whether your book is ready for production, or whether it needs more work first.
Editor feedback. Your editor will give you specific suggestions for how to make the book better. For instance, they mayhave suggestions for how to address points better, how to appeal to your audience better, clarify your message, and so on.
Faculty board approval. At an academic press, books need to be approved by the faculty board to go into production. The board typically reads an excerpt of the book (not the entire thing) and the peer reviews with your reply. Your editor may get a chance to argue on your book's behalf at the meeting. If the faculty board does not approve, you probably go into another round of revision. My book was approved, so I don't know for sure what happens if it isn't.
Further editor feedback based on the peer review, faculty board review, and any other thoughts the editor has.

You will likely be given a deadline by your editor for when to complete the revisions, but if you are not, you can ask for one. Sometimes having a deadline can help you get your work done on time!

Here's more details on how the process went for me: The book announcement, about the writing process, finishing the manuscript, the revision process, production and copyediting, and the cover reveal, pub date, and page proofs).

After you finish revisions

After you've revised from high level feedback and the manuscript is pretty much complete, your publisher will probably have a copyeditor go over the manuscript. Copyeditors will update sentences for grammar and to match the publisher's style guide, if they have one; they'll mark citations and footnotes that need more information; they'll go through your text with a done tooth comb for typos and other errors.

Then you'll have a chance to go through the copyedited pages and approve the changes. I approved almost everything.

After that, you'll receive page proofs. Page proofs have everything laid, and you are given the final opportunity to make edits. These can't be substantial edits - usually just grammatical or factual errors, or fixing typos and citations.

Some nonfiction books require an index. Mine did. Sometimes you do the indexing yourself; or it can be outsourced, or you can hire an indexer to do it for you. Sometimes the press does this for you or hires someone to do it for you.

After all these steps, you may see one final set of proofs before the book goes to press. At some point in the process, the publisher may get your input on cover design and cover copy; how much input you have will depend on the publisher.

While you're waiting on publication day

Then it's a waiting game. Your publisher may assign a publicist to work with you and may help make a marketing plan. With their help, or not, you can work on marketing, securing reviews, promoting your book on social media, and so forth while you wait for publication day.

5 Books Every Grad Student Should Read to Get Ahead

2025-07-22T12:00:00Z

Grad students are notoriously busy. But if you work smarter, you can fit in everything you need to do with less stress and more life satisfaction. Here are five key books that will help you manage your time, do more meaningful work, and be happier, too!

1. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss (Harper Business, 2016)

This is an A+ book about negotiating. Chris Voss was the lead hostage negotiator for the FBI. Every chapter starts off with anecdotes from his time in the FBI, giving the book a high paced high stakes feel. The stories are one of the highlights, but the skills you can learn from him and his discussion of negotiation tactics could change your life. Whether you're negotiating for a higher salary in a future job, with your advisor about which hours you want to work and how many meetings you should attend, or with your landlord over rent, this book has advice you can put to use right away.

2. Deep Work: Rules for Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport (Grand Central Publishing, 2016)

The book on working well and efficiently. This one changed how I worked during graduate school. This book has the why and how of getting quality work done. Newport contrasts deep work with shallow work. Deep work includes the tasks that you need time to sit and think to do, like writing, coding, planning experiments, synthesizing information, and so on. Shallow work is the sort of stuff that should be outsourced or automated, the stuff that doesn't take you specifically to do, such as emails, chasing down references, formatting things. If you had an assistant, their job would be the shallow stuff to free you up for more deep work time. This book is Newport's guide to creating more deep work time for yourself, developing the habits to support deep work, and task scheduling using his time block planning method. He describes the problems with switching between tasks frequently, why social media in the middle of your day is eating your productivity, and so much more.

3. Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans (Knopf, 2016)

This is the best career and life planning book that I have read! Burnett and Evans present a design-oriented approach to creating a life that you love living, so that you live coherently with your values and goals. They explain how a design mindset can help you evaluate your path; how to use design tools such as ideation, iteration, and incremental improvement; how to find great jobs that will satisfy you (including how to hold informational interviews!), and so much more. Every chapter has practical exercises that you can try to actually design your life. Read my in depth review!

(Read: The Incremental Method to Achieving Long-Term Goals and Getting Things Done)

4. Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being by Martin Seligman (Atria Books, 2011)

If you want to live a flourishing life, to be happy and fulfilled, have great relationships and meaningful work, Seligman's book will tell you how. Seligman is a leading researcher on positive psychology. This is the book where he explains what actually makes people satisfied and content with their lives, using the PERMA model: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. He includes exercises and self-reflective questions to help you evaluate your own life and help you consider what makes your life feel worthwhile.

5. Grad School Life: Surviving and Thriving Beyond Coursework and Research by Jacqueline Kory-Westlund (Columbia University Press, 2024)

This is the guidebook I wish I'd had when I started grad school. It's a pragmatic, up-to-date guide to thriving in graduate school while keeping a healthy personal life and preparing for your career—whether in academia or beyond. Unlike most other books on grad school, this one covers challenges both on and off campus. It shares candid, specific advice on personal finances, mental health, setting your own learning and career goals, maintaining friendships and relationships, and more. Plus, it's filled with concrete exercises to evaluate your situation and get started on next steps. There are detailed resource lists pointing you toward all the other books, websites, podcasts, and more you might need.

Read more about the process of creating my book here—and if you're interested, order it today!

Homeschooling Year Reflections (2024-2025)

2025-06-24T12:00:00Z

This school year, my oldest turned 8. My younger kids turned 6, 4, and 1.

My biggest change this year was adding more structure to our daily rhythms: namely, daily chores (morning and evening), and morning lessons.

Curious about what else we've done for learning? Read about our school years:

2023-2024: Our plan, and how it went

2022-2023: Our Plan, and how it went

2021-2022: Our plan, and how it went

Plus, my general advice on How to Homeschool in the Early Years

Life Skills: Chores

All the kids had previously been helping out in age-appropriate ways, such as emptying and filling the dishwasher, carrying food scraps to the chickens, collecting eggs, picking up toys, and mowing the lawn. But last year I bought a laminator, and I put it to use. I wandered around the house during the day taking pictures for our homemade chore list: dishes in stacks, tables unwiped, piles of shoes in disarray, unswept piles of crumbs, and so on. That way, even without knowing how to read, all the kids would understand what they needed to attend to. I also printed and laminated sets of initials so the kids could mark certain chores for themselves if they wanted to, or mark when they had done something that they all needed to do (such as brush their teeth).

As the year has gone on, we've been switching from Mom making the chore list in the evening to the 8-year-old making the list, so that he gets practice looking around the house to see what needs doing.

Having a list has been helpful. The kids have a place to check what they need to do, and I don't have to continually remind them.

Morning Lessons

My goal was to do morning lessons a couple times a week, and to do them in the morning before we went on to other activities. This didn't always happen; some weeks were extra busy with activities or sickness; sometimes we saved our reading for the afternoon.

I had a list of subjects to cover. On a good day we would do all of them. On other days we'd do some of them, and then pick up where we left off the following lesson period, so that nothing would get left out by virtue of being last on the list. These included:

Literacy
Math
History
Religion
Art

Literacy and language

Starting over the summer (after I picked some stuff up at a local homeschool curriculum swap), we began some classical education activities. We went through the book First Lessons in Language Education: Level 1 (https://welltrainedmind.com/p/first-language-lessons-level-1/) and started on Level 2. These books introduce basic parts of speech, some grammar, and related topics.

We did some poetry memorization from The Harp and Laurel Wreath (https://ignatius.com/the-harp-and-laurel-wreath-hlwp/). This book includes lots of Robert Louis Stevenson at young ages. It starts with short poems of a stanza or two, and quickly works up to three or four stanza poems. My 6yo loved this! We fell out of the habit later in the year, but memorized some prayers instead, so at least they were memorizing something.

The kids did handwriting practice. When I was little, I had to write a daily journal—only a sentence or two at first, often entries like, "I went to the park. It was fun." and "I went for a bike ride. It was fun." (I had lots of fun as a kid.) My older two kids got to start this too! We were inconsistent about it for the first half of the year, but got in the habit later on. My oldest liked to make up random silly sentences instead of writing about what he did.

Another literacy activity we like is making our own books. The kids make up the story. I write it or type it, then they trace it or write it, and then they can illustrate it! We're also in the process of putting together books about family trips we've taken, just as soon as I finish getting photos printed out.

We also use apps like Duolingo for practicing letter recognition and phonics. We might add some other phonics activities over the summer.

Plus, we read plenty. We read aloud chapter books and picture books. We read a book about famous men of Rome, and some historical fiction about Rome, because my 8-year-old likes Rome. And we're reading aloud the Little House books, too! We continued our subscription to Two Acre Books' library boxes, which are awesome collections of living books organized around a theme for each box (described further here).

Mathematics

As I've discussed before, we like keeping math real with board games. The kids also get to play games like the Logical Journey of the Zoombinis (a classic 90's game, lots of logic puzzles).

My 8-year-old began some regular math work, too, since we've decided it's important to learn math notation. We've been working on addition, subtraction, carrying numbers, talking about multiplication, and related skills.

As a fun practical math skill this spring and summer, my 8-year-old raised some basil plants for sale. He gets to count money, make change, learn about saving and spending—all good life skills!

History (and geography!)

Since we're involved in local civic life, I decided this would be a good year to start going through American history. That way, the kids would gain a little more understanding of why it's so important for Daddy to have so many meetings. But when I started looking at our books on the American revolution, I thought maybe we needed more context … so we went back in time to the European explorers who traveled across the oceans. My oldest loved the explorers! Starting there was a good call.

The explorers gave us a good introduction to geography, too! We have a giant world map on the wall, which was consulted frequently, and our globe basically lived in my lap next to the books as we read. We moved from there onto Jamestown, the colonies, the Indian wars and Europe fighting over North America, the revolution, and the founding of America.

Some of the books we read included:

Around the World in a Hundred Years by Jean Fritz
Magellan: First around the world by Ronald Syme
In Their Own Words: Christopher Columbus by Peter and Connie Roop
The Travels of Samuel de Champlain by Joanne Mattern
The Golden Book History of the United States (vols. 1-3)
Sections from From Sea to Shining Sea: A Treasury of American Folklore and Folk Songs
American Hero Stories 1492-1865 by Eva March Tappan
Tall Tales of America by Irwin Shapiro
In Their Own Words: Benjamin Franklin by Peter and Connie Roop
In Their Own Words: Paul Revere by George Sullivan
A bunch of other Jean Fritz books
Cornerstones of Freedom series books on the Mayflower, Jamestown, and the Revolution

Some of our history books

Another fun tie in: occasionally, Rand and I play Civ 6 together. In the game, different civilizations from history appear, with their kings, queens, and other leaders. There are natural wonders in the map, and great wonders you can build. These tie into our history and art reading—we look up the wonders and the civilizations with the kids. Plus, in the game, some abilities or bonuses that civs get make sense when we learn about them further. Portugal, for instance, has bonuses relating to seafaring trade, which, when we read about the Portuguese explorers and looked at maps of Portugal, made a lot of sense in context! Our 8-year-old likes seeing these connections.

Religion

For systematic catechesis, we went through the Baltimore Catechism Level 1, and started on Level 2. In addition, the kids are memorizing key prayers and we read aloud various bible stories as part of the evening read aloud book rotation.

This year, as we expanded our liturgical year traditions, we added a Jesse tree for advent! With every ornament that went up on the Jesse tree, we read the related bible stories aloud throughout December. It's a fun way to visualize the history and lineage. It was a fun art project, too. I drew the outlines for the images on each ornament, based on the examples from Catherine Gordon's blog, and the kids colored them in and added glitter, then we laminated them and tied them on strings.

Making Jesse tree ornaments

Helping make St. Lucia buns for the St. Lucia party

Art

We read a couple books about art history—one on painting, then one on architecture. Every chapter covers a couple related artists or a new architectural style. The book has a few pictures, but not enough, so after reading, we look up each artist or building mentioned, browse more work they've done, and view more art or architecture of that style. A lot of museums and archeological sites have good online portals for viewing the great works! Sometimes, we'll follow up with an art project of our own, such as making mosaics with beads.

We're pretty good about doing craft activities (such as weaving), but I'd like to find a good art for kids book that teaches the basics of drawing and color theory.

Bead mosaics

Color wheels

Adding fringe to a finished weaving

Music

We didn't do any formal music classes this year, but we continue to enjoy music as a family. We listen to music when driving, especially the Maestro Classics CDs (like the Nutcracker and Peter and the Wolf!). We watch ballets and symphonies online, and get general exposure to great music and music of all styles. With the warm weather, every city around here hosts music in the park, so we get to see bands play live all summer.

Forest school, nature, outdoors

We continued our weekly forest school group! We meet outdoors year around and various nature parks to enjoy the woods and rivers in the area. This continues to be one of my favorite things we do. The kids get plenty of free play time, and we do activities too—crafts, seasonal celebrations, survival skills, bushcraft, foraging, plant identification, apple picking, and more.

We also attended the Sudbury co-op intermittently, sometimes one day a week, sometimes one day a month. This past winter we all took turns being sick too much, traveled for a family wedding, and had family visit…. But we were happy to hug goats and explore the farm when we managed to make it out!

Can you find the kid?

Making catapults

Sawing wood discs to make wood cookie men

Painted, with arms and legs!

Mud puddle time!

Watching a bumblebee on a flower

And everything else, too

In addition to all that, daily life is an opportunity for constant learning. We have science kits and electronics kits that we go through. We went camping, and learned about cooking outdoors. We visited a nearby cave for a tour. We traveled for a family wedding, and learned about airplanes, and visited a zoo and an aquarium. The kids are involved in gardening and yard work, beekeeping, caring for chickens, arts and crafts, cooking and baking, food preservation, fixing things around the house or building things with Dad, archery and games at the park, shopping, playing games, attending community events, and so many other things, too.

Learning about acids and bases with ph paper

In the cave

Need ideas for your own homeschooling?

Read these book reviews and education posts:

How to Afford Homeschooling and Other Alternative Education on a Budget

Weaving Tapestry, Learning New Techniques, and Making Art

2025-06-10T12:00:00Z

I've been enjoying tapestry weaving lately.

It's such a slow art form, in some ways. You design the piece, or at least, have some idea of what you're working towards. Then you assemble it from the bottom up, line by line, like a printer. It's very different from painting or drawing, where you have access to the entire page or canvas at the same time.

(Read: Project: Tapestry Weaving on my Lap Loom)

With each project, I'm trying to learn a new technique, either for weaving or finishing. I learned to weave soumak, which was originally a rug-making technique that loops the weft yarn around the warp, and used it to add texture to parts of my tapestry. I learned a way of framing/mounting smaller works using canvas stretcher frames. In my most recent piece, I learned a new way to finish the warp ends by braiding them together.

Another fun thing: whenever I'm at my loom in the afternoon, my kids tend to pick up their projects and join me! My 8 year old, in particular, has enjoyed learning new techniques from watching me; he even made his own peg loom last year!

Soumak adding texture

Soumak for the hair

Tapestry mounted on a canvas stretcher frame that was covered in fabric

There are two layers of fabric in there: a plain cotton muslin followed by a nicer white linen

Braiding the warp ends

Braided!

My 8-year-old's current work-in-progress, practicing building shapes!

Here are some of my latest projects.

You Are My Sunshine

22"x29", cotton weft and wool warp, 2025

Some tapestry weavers sketch out everything they plan to weave in great detail ahead of time; others make a vague cartoon then see what happens. With this one, I had a vague cartoon and some general ideas about color and movement. Since I'm still learning techniques and practicing making the colors and shapes do what I want in the weft, my initial mental images differed from the final product, but that's part of what makes it interesting and fun.

I was inspired by a couple things. When I started planning it, I had recently seen a talk by Fen de Villiers about dynamic, vital art. His work features masculine virtues and brings earlier art movements such as Art Deco, Futurism and Vorticism into 3D sculptures.

I had also recently read a couple books on tapestry weaving, including Tommye Scanlin's reflective discussion of her nature-inspired Appalachian works, The Nature of Things. I had read Carrie Gress's book The Anti-Mary and Catherine Pakaluk's book Hannah's Children. I was thinking about feminine virtues and celebrations of feminine culture, and looking at dynamic art from earlier eras. And while I didn't end up with an art deco feel, there was some influence, especially when looking at colors for background versus foreground.

I will probably mount this one on canvas stretcher bars with fabric like the earlier one.

And a few in progress photos…

Ocean #1

9"x13", cotton weft, acrylic and cotton warp, 2024

This one was a study in textures! I went with a general ocean theme. I added fringe to the bottom and hung it from a stick instead of mounting it or braiding the edges.

Red Hills by the Sea

9"x12.5", cotton weft, acrylic and cotton warp, 2025

This is the one where I was first learning soumak, and trying out some of the techniques and ideas that fed into the larger tapestries.

Ocean Twilight

22.5"x31.5", cotton weft, acrylic and cotton warp, 2025

For this one, I wanted to try a larger piece focused on textures and colors more than shapes. I decided to approximately follow the design of the smaller blue ocean tapestry pictured above. Like in that one, I used a mix of cotton and acrylic yarns, which I collected mostly from yarn scrap bags at thrift stores.

Garden Year 7, 2025: Starting Seeds, Blocking Soil, Interplanting, and More

2025-05-13T12:00:00Z

Every year in the garden, I want to learn something new. I want to improve at least one thing and do at least one thing a little better than the previous year. There is so much to learn! Soil health, starting plants, watering, pruning, pests and diseases, preservation and recipes. It can be overwhelming if you try to learn everything at once. So I try to learn a little each year.

Seedlings getting ready

Read about my gardening journey so far:

2019: How we built garden beds
2019: Year 1: a 200 sqft garden!
2020: Year 2: What I improved
2021: Year 3's plan, dealing with pests, how it went, and why and how we preserved food
2022: Year 4's plan for planting, and how it went
2023: Year 5's plan with a bunch of new garden beds and a new seed starting setup, and how everything grew in the bigger space
2024: Year 6's plan, and how it went: with more tomatoes and flowers!

Wisteria in bloom

Spring: Soil Blocking

This spring, one of the new things I'm learning is soil blocking. Soil blocking is a method of starting seeds first championed by Eliot Coleman, an organic farmer in the northeast. Instead of filling lots of plastic seed trays with soil, you use a blocker to make a bunch of individual blocks.

I got two soil blockers: one 3/4" and one 2", so we can easily pot up the little ones. I considered also getting a 4" to put up the 2-inchers in, but from my reading it seems people have mixed feelings on that. Some prefer to use 6" pots or just make mud ball with their hands. If I decide I need it, I'll buy one next year.

For now, I love the blockers! I mixed up some soil, nice and wet, following approximately Eliot Coleman's recipe, but modified to use the fertilizers I had on hand, and using up a bit of leftover potting soil from last year. The little blocks are really quite small. It's easy to fit a ton of them on a small tray, making it easy to accidentally start too many plants. They germinate great. And they transplant into the 2in blocks easily, so there's that, too.

The first tray of little blocks

Tomato sprouts!

Blocking up…

My 8-year-old's basil blocks

The tricky thing was that since the blocks are so small, they tend to dry out quick. I had to remember to add water to the tray every day, and ideally, maybe even twice a day. Which, granted isn't that unusual; I would have to water seed trays in previous years pretty much everyday anyway.

Fortunately, I still had plastic lids for a couple trays, so I could capture some of the humidity, help the blocks not dry out as fast, and help the seeds warm up. I set the first two trays of little blocks on a sunny windowsill, since we hadn't quite perfected our new shelf setup….

Once the shelves were ready, I moved all my seedlings there.

The new shelf setup

For the last two years, I took over half our entryway with a large metal shelf on wheels (large: 5' long by 2' deep and 6' tall). Our entryway has tall south facing windows so it was a good location in some respects…. But also, it was in the way for months, and in easy reach of a highly mobile baby with a penchant for grabbing green leafy things. This year, we thought it would be nice to try moving the seed starting setup out of the house.

I was originally thinking about a smallish greenhouse space. We don't have enough land for a larger greenhouse for year round growing or in the ground beds. Instead, it would function mostly as an early season extender. One of my primary goals with a greenhouse area would be a dedicated space for starting seeds, potting up, hardening off, and generally getting my plants going, since I have limited space indoors. Randy suggested we try a garage setup this year, since it would get the plants out of the way. I'd be able to open the garage and wheel the plant shelves outside in nice weather. They'd be closer to the garden, too, when it was time to plant. It would also be easier to heat a little section of the garage than a freestanding greenhouse.

So that is what we are trying! We have a section of garage along the wall shared with the house set up so the shelves slide in. The shelves are metal, with the grow lights hanging from the underside of each shelf. We hung 6mil plastic sheeting from the ceiling down to the floor, overlapping at the front so we can get in and get the shelves out. We also added a sheet of mylar along the back wall to reflect back the grow lights. Randy fixed up an old electric wall space heater and set it on one of the bottom shelves, and that keeps it toasty.

Watering the plants is easier now, since I can bring the hose around to gently water larger plants, or quickly fill the watering can for carefully adding water to the block trays.

Seedlings under lights on the shelves

Just roll the shelves outside when it's warm and sunny!

We have a small thermometer tracking the temperature, and it has stayed plenty warm, even in March. I have it set to the high 70s/low 80s. It doesn't seem perfectly consistent. I haven't tested the setup in extra cold weather. By the time we had the shelves and heater set up, we were in the first false spring, and the cool days after barely hit freezing.

Relevantly, this setup isn't the cheapest. The heater runs most of the time and it's not the most efficient heater. Next year we may revisit our heating plan. For instance, I may get a heat mat for germinating seeds, or a better space heater. Maybe we'll add insulations or a second layer of greenhouse plastic. If it doesn't sufficiently solve my problems, we will revisit the greenhouse idea and iterate as needed. For now, however, it's nice to have a dedicated spot for my seedlings that is not in my entryway!

Interplanting and succession planting

One of my goals this year is to improve succession planting and interplanting.

In February, I read Miraculous Abundance by Perrine and Charles Herve-Gruyer, which includes detailed descriptions of their interplanting and succession planting techniques. One of the Herve-Gruyers' most successful plots (in a greenhouse) produced over $200 of produce per square meter per year. Wow! Two years ago, I got 500 lbs of tomatoes from around 32 square meters, which, if you assume organic tomatoes might sell at $5/lb, comes out to about $75/square meter. The productivity of their plots is amazing.

Reading that book inspired me to double down on filling the garden to the brim. In previous years I have had the goal of improving my succession planting skills, but in reality, I have managed a second planting of peas and beans and not much else. But many crops could warrant a second or even third go—especially if I plant some shorter crops like lettuce or radishes, and if I actually get them in the ground in spring like I'm supposed to.

Baby radishes!

I have generally followed the square foot gardening approach to packing plants into my raised beds. I intersperse flowers among everything else and don't always divide beds strictly into this crop versus that crop. There's a little chaos in my gardening with some companion planting inspiration. I've planted corn and peas with my squash. I guess I need to sneak other vegetables in there too! For instance, the Herve-Gruyers' plant radishes around each cabbage, then harvest the radishes about when the cabbage starts taking up all the space.

As for succession planting, that is easier with a schedule…

Scheduling

This year, I got a new gardening book specifically about gardening in the inland Northwest. It has helpful scheduling suggestions. My favorite linked planting times to lilac bushes: when the lilacs are in bud, plant these; when they have leaves, plant those; wait to plant these until the lilacs are done flowering. Super useful heuristic given all the lilacs around!

To keep on top of my planting, I wrote out a schedule listing when to plant everything. When to start certain seeds, when to plant outside, when to start the next round for successive crops of some plants, and so on. I think this will help me actually get the most out of my garden space and stay on top of planting.

For instance, in previous years I've started seeds indoors but often haven't gotten around to planting anything outside until I'm also planting my starts outside in May. But there are many crops that are fine with cooler weather and/or are frost tolerant that could go out earlier. So this year, I planted various greens (lettuce, kale, arugula), peas, and roots (radishes, beets, carrots) in the ground at the end of March and through April. That way, some would be ready for harvesting by the time my peppers and tomatoes were ready to go in the ground!

Baby lettuce!

The first round of radishes about ready to harvest

So what am I planting this year?

We will have about the same variety of plants in the garden as last year. We have a couple new varieties of flowers and tomatoes to try, and some peas that are supposed to have purple pods. My 8-year-old picked out most of the new varieties. He's also planning on growing some flowers and produce to enter in the State Fair. Maybe I'll enter some produce, too! Wouldn't it be fun to be able to say I have award-winning tomatoes or rhubarb!

Here's a probably-not-complete list of what we have growing:

Vegetables and fruiting plants: onions (red, white, and bunching), a couple varieties of carrots, sugar snap peas, tomatoes (Amish paste, cherry, isis candy cherry, spoon, Barry's crazy Cherry, apricot zebra, white currant, black strawberry, costoluto, yellow, black krim, maybe one other?), pole beans, bush beans, some kind of purple beans, radishes, beets, celery, peppers(bell, some kind of purple pepper, jalapenos), kajari melon, early girl watermelon, zucchini, cucumbers,

Greens: kale, dock, lettuce mix, arugula, spinach

Herbs: basil, lemon basil, oregano, sage, chives, rosemary, dill, lemon mint, peppermint, spearmint, lemon balm, lemongrass, thyme

Flowers: zinnia, calendula, red clover, china asters, alyssum, marigold, petunia, nasturtiums, pansies, and all the perennials

Plus, we have perennials that give us food: asparagus, blueberries—we added more this year (bluecrop, Northland, liberty, Chandler, patriot, pink lemonade), red table grapes, plums, crabapples, Oregon grape, rhubarb

I've already harvested rhubarb! We made rhubarb barbeque sauce and candied rhubarb, since I've still got jam from last year's crop in my pantry. I've also harvested magnolia leaves and made pickled flowers!

Pansies and red clover that overwintered and came back strong

Overwintered kale

Magnolia

Rhubarb

Front flower garden

The flower garden is coming along nicely. Plants I've put in over the past two years are growing into their spaces. The tulips and other bulbs are just lovely, and a couple neighbors now refer to our house as "the tulip house"!

I'm planning on moving some of the perennials to the front garden area, as the soil has improved out there, I think I can actually grow some stuff. Since I have really been enjoying dock as a salad green and cooking green, I dug up and moved two from the raised backyard beds to the front. Since the variety I have is bloody dock, it has lovely red veins that make it decorative as well as tasty. I also started a few more from seed, which I plan on putting out front, too, when they're a little bigger.

I also have a couple echinacea plants and I might move some of those out front.

Tulips!

Grape hyacinths

Early spring flowers

(Read: Learning to Identify Local Wildflowers)

Spring garden prep

On the warm weekends in March, I tried very hard not to do too much yard cleanup, because I knew it wasn't quite time yet and it might snow again. Pollinators might still be hibernating in my leaf litter!

But by early April, it was time. I had a cubic yard of compost to distribute around my yard. I spent a day removing old plant matter from the garden beds, raking mulch to the side, adding a layer of compost, and raking the mulch back. I dumped some compost by all the flowers, fruit trees, and shrubs, too. And I had great help this year! As my kids get bigger, they get more capable and helpful! All morning, my 8-year-old didn't even let me help fill the wagon with compost or drag it through the yard. It was amazing. I could focus on the cleanup and compost spreading. It was great having help!

Sharing the bounty

The lemon mint that grows under the largest backyard crabapple tree is prolific and spreading, as mints are wont to do. It was there when we got the house. So, I am stuck digging lemon mint out of the lawn in a probably futile attempt to keep it under control. (All my mint family plants are in containers, because I know what they're capable of.)

I put a bunch of little mint plants in containers and sold them, $2 a piece. I advertised on Facebook marketplace and sold way more than anticipated, over four dozen!

Lemon mint, dug up and ready to share

That success inspired me to share some other plentiful plants, such as the calendula and spoon tomatoes that keep self-seeding all over the yard. My 8-year-old was in on the fun. He had—thinking of pesto—started a ton of basil seeds. He transplanted some into plastic cups and I listed them for sale. He's delighted to have sold a dozen to our friends. He also has sunflower starts for sale, started from seeds he collected from last year's sunflowers.

I also have a bunch of Bishop's Weed growing as ground cover in a section of my front yard. It spreads like crazy. It had spread into a 4x4' raised garden bed that was in the front, but, as it happens, that garden bed is falling apart and I wanted to remove it. (It wasn't new when my grandma gave it to us, and we got a good six years out of it.) I dug all the bishop's weed out, put it in 1-gal and 2-gal pots, and so far have sold over 40 of them. From one lady I sold some to, I guess it's hard to find, but in the right hands makes a wonderful ground cover. It does have pretty leaves.

My 8-year-old's basil

Bishop's weed

Grapes

One more new thing: Grapes!

Our plan, ever since expanding the garden two years ago, had always been to build a trellis beside the garden, between the second row of raised beds and the back fence. This year, we finally did it!

First, we relocated two fence posts to be the trellis anchors. Both posts had huge cement footings. Digging them up and hauling them across the yard was a challenge! But the posts needed to move anyway, and repurposing them for the trellis was exactly the kind of thing we would do.

Second, we put three t-posts in between the fence posts. We put eye bolts through the fence posts at either end, attached a stranded wire to each, clamping the ends and stretching the wire from post to post to post to post. A turnbuckle at one end of each wire let us tighten the wire after attaching it.

Finally, we visited a local nursery and brought home 9 new grape vines! They're all red table grapes. We have two other locations in the yard that might be good spots for grapes, so we may add another variety or two in the future…

One of the new grapes!

Trellising

While we were trellising, we also bought two hog panels and some u-posts, and set up two arches in the garden for vining plants to climb over. I've planted peas, beans, and nasturtiums nearby to start.

It's still early in the gardening season here. I'll be moving the rest of my starts into the ground over the next week or two!

Pickled Magnolia Blossoms

2025-04-29T12:00:00Z

Last year, I discovered that magnolia blossoms are edible! My magnolia is one of the earliest blooming trees in my yard and its pink flowers are so lovely. How delightful to find that I could add the petals to an early spring salad! They have a mild gingery-clove-pepper sort of flavor.

I came across recipes for pickled magnolia blossoms (e.g., this, this, and this), which sounded like so much fun. I didn't end up trying it last year, so this was the year! I went with a quick refrigerator pickles recipe, no fermentation required.

It's surprisingly simple.

(Read: Seasonality and Natural Rhythms: Why Growing and Preserving Your Own Food Matters)

Instructions

1. Collect magnolia flowers. Be gentle with the petals so they don't bruise. Only the petals are used in the recipes I found, so pull them (gently) off the flower center. I collected 250 grams of petals, which filled a large mixing bowl.

2. Rinse petals to be sure they're free of debris, bugs, etc. I spread them on a kitchen towel to dry.

3. Mix brine in a large pot. I used 2 ¼ cups rice vinegar, 2 tsp salt, and ½ cup sugar. Other recipes vary the proportions of salt and sugar slightly, based on personal preference for taste. Consensus is to use a milder vinegar, such as rice or cider vinegar, so that it doesn't drown the magnolia petals' flavor. You can optionally add spices such as garlic, anise, black pepper, red pepper flakes, or whatever strikes your fancy. I'd like to try this, but wanted to do the basic recipe first.

4. Heat brine until salt and sugar are dissolved, then stir in the petals. Some people will chop the petals up first, but I didn't bother. I also saw recipes suggesting you pack the petals into jars then pour the brine on top, but I thought it would be easier to make sure all the petals were submerged in the larger pot first.

5. Ladle blossoms and brine into jars, cover, and let cool. I filled four half pint mason jars, preheated with hot water, and put leftover canning lids on them. Note, I did not actually water bath can these. I'll be keeping them in the refrigerator. If we love eating them enough I may try water bath canning them so that I don't have to take up fridge space, but this was a small first batch.

6. Let cool, then refrigerate. Wait a day for the flavors to meld before eating. Recommended as a side for various Asian dishes or sushi, since the flavors act similar to pickled ginger. Delicious!

Motherhood, Children, and Opportunity Cost

2025-04-15T12:00:00Z

We were in the woods. I stood beside my three-year-old, wearing an infant, listening for my older two kids as they ran through the woods with some friends. I waited as my three year old patiently turned over a rock to see if there were any bugs underneath. Behind me was a small amphitheater, wooden benches inhabited by other moms and kids. Children explored in the woods around us, seeking insects and unusual-shaped leaves. We were also hunting wildflowers, since, as I had shared with everyone before that, I was looking for new flowers to add to my wildflower identification guide. A couple moms I didn't know well had joined our group for the day. One of them had two young kids, the oldest probably three or four years old.

I was with my son, so I wasn't really participating in the conversation, but I could hear the other moms talking about things they wanted to do.

"I look forward to getting my life back," the mom of two said. She laughed a little, but she didn't sound like she was joking.

I wondered what she meant. I wondered what her kids would think, if they heard her. I wondered what she felt was missing in her life, and why kids were an impediment. What were her kids taking that she wanted back? Was "her life" simply envisioned as life without young kids in tow?

Don't get me wrong. I empathize. Life with young kids in tow isn't all sunshine and wildflowers. In that mother's lament, I heard her regret, and longing, and an expression of the frustration many mothers face.

As Carrie Gress wrote in her book The End of Woman, there's an inherent vulnerability in having children, being dependent on external support and also being the one your children entirely depend on. There's joy at the new life you create and sadness at loss of the old life you had. Selfish independence grows into selfless care but there's a cost. And many are frustrated by the costs, by the tradeoffs they must make, by the lost opportunities. Is it any wonder that some mothers question whether they have chosen correctly, traded the right things, if the opportunity cost was worth it?

In the book Hannah's Children, Catherine Pakaluk related interviews she performed with women who each had five or more children, which is about 5% of women. One common thread was the acknowledgement that after you have children, you change. There's no going back. But in many ways, you expand your capabilities. You die to your old self but your new self grows.

In some ways, it seems obvious: You are never going to be the same person you were before you had children, because no one is ever the same person they were last year, or ten years ago. We all change. Looking forward to "getting your life back" looks backwards at who you were and what you had then, not who you are becoming and what you have now. Part of the problem, I think, is women compare themselves to men. After having children, many men seem to have the same things they did before, the same careers and hobbies. Women see what they lose in comparison. They don't look at the sacrifices of their husbands, such as the second job, long hours, or long commutes that trade time with family for money to provide food and shelter. They also don't look at what they gain, that men don't and can't gain, such as the relationship mothers have with their children. They don't see motherhood as positively as they could.

"Danielle [one of the mothers interviewed] suggested that the narrative about losing your identity as a full-time mother may come from a culture that doesn't treasure motherhood as highly as other things. …. mothering isn't just a state of being—it's also a practice, with definite skills, habits, and expertise. Mothers who dedicate themselves to mothering can grow as mothers, in the virtues of motherhood. Danielle worried about the logic of seeing mothering as essentially unskilled labor…. that caregiving isn't worth dedicating your life to. In contrast, if mothering is more like one of the great pursuits of human life, like summiting a high peak, then the grueling practice and hardship of preparation would be undertaken with a view to the worthiness of the goal. It cost you something, but "the dividends are there too."" — Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children, p187-188

(Read: The Best Reason to Have Children)

Opportunity costs

The women who choose to have more children, and those who look at what they gain as much or more than what they lose weigh their values differently. The opportunity cost is worth it for them.

"They ranked the next child more highly than the other things they could do with their time and resources. They embraced a scale of values in which something of tremendous worth was attached to having a child; that something was the kind of thing typically reckoned worth dying for: love for a beloved, love of God, love of eternal life, and the pursuit of happiness." —Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children, p146

It's easy to see how many women choose otherwise. In America, we're set up from the outset to face big opportunity costs. We enjoy education, work, training, and so on. Taking time to have a child means missing out on those things, on social life and career steps, and other things they enjoy. Plus, as Pakaluk explains, children are what economists call "experience goods," which means you can't know in advance what the experience will be. It's hard to guess, in advance, what you're missing out on, because the value is in the experience, like with dining at a restaurant. You're weighing the known value of your present life against the unknown value of having a child. Since so many people come from smaller families and don't grow up around babies or young children, they don't even have the experience of how wonderful a younger sibling can be to inform their decision.

People tend to do what seems best given the other options, given what they value and what's possible with the hand they were dealt. No matter who you are or what you do or what you enjoy, you will always be choosing some activities over others. Some decisions are easier than others.

(Read: How Do You Do It? 5 Ways to Be Patient, Calm, and Improve Your Relationship With Your Children)

Mother, writer, artist?

Life evolves when you have children. But it doesn't mean leaving your hobbies and interests behind. Yes, you may have to adjust your expectations about how much can be accomplished, how quickly, and when, and with how many interruptions… but there are ways of making time for what you value.

We tend to ask how working at some paid vocation or working outside of the home affects one's parenting. For instance, many academic mothers have reported being better able to bring their best self to their work, because of being mothers. They wanted to show their kids what they could do, they wanted to share their passion with their kids, they wanted to work harder while at work because of their kids. Their kids were motivating. They also found that they were better researchers, often more productive during work hours, so they could finish things and then go home.

As one of the mothers interviewed by Catherine Pakaluk explained, you are more yourself when you do your things, too. You bring yourself into the relationship you have with your children—you, with all your interests, passions, and hobbies, in and out of the home. It's a common theme. Working a paid vocation makes many people better parents by giving them space to pursue interests and goals outside the home, enabling them to find parts of themselves in their work.

My bio on one of my social media pages lists, among other things, "Mother, writer, artist". But when I'm a homeschooling mother, educating my children and managing my household, how much writing and art am I actually doing?

There's no doubt: I would certainly be doing more if I didn't have kids, or if I didn't have as many kids, or if I outsourced the majority of their care and education. I would have more hours. Time is always the limiting factor.

(Read: How to Harness Patience, Expectations, Flexibility, and Relationships in Parenting for a Smoother, Less Stressful Life with Children)

But would the quality be as good? Would I be producing something I was as proud of? What would I gain from producing more—more money from more books? Perhaps I'd level up faster. Perhaps I'd produce a work of art that would be remembered in art history books. Perhaps I'd change someone's perspective or spark an emotion that would change the world. Perhaps not.

Catherine Pakaluk asked, in her interviews, not how working affected parenting, but the reverse: how does being a parent affect your character and your outward-facing work? The women she interviewed all argued that you become a better person and grow in virtue by having more kids. They talked about the gifts they gained, the development of other-centered virtues, coming to value people more than autonomy or individualism. They gained ideas, perspective, meaning. Perhaps my art and writing are better because of motherhood, because of my understanding of human experience.

(Read: How to Consciously Be A Role Model in Creativity, Curiosity, and Crafting for Children)

Besides, I'm the only mother my children have. There is no replacement. They will also be forces of change in the world. There's no knowing ahead of time what change or what good art or books or children will produce. So I make art, and I write, and I probably do less of both than I would if I weren't also homeschooling my kids. But my kids also make art. They enjoy my interests and I enjoy sharing my interests with them. We explore the world together. We learn together. We have different fun than I would without children, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Many women focus on what they lose by having children. Let's instead look at what we gain.

Learning to Identify Local Wildflowers

2025-04-01T12:00:00Z

"Wait up! I just have to see if this is a new flower!"

I peered down at a yellow-petaled beauty. The leaves were shaped differently than similar flowers I had spotted, elongated and a slightly darker, more foresty green. The arrangement of petals seemed different, too. I pulled out my phone to capture a few pictures. As much as I wanted to identify it right away, it would have to wait—I was hiking with my kids and a couple other homeschooled families in a local nature preserve, and hiking worked better if I didn't stop to admire the flowers every five feet.

Woodland Buttercup

That yellow flower was one of over a hundred that I found and identified last year. I began taking photos of local wildflowers in March, when the first buttercups poked their yellow faces out into the sun. Every week, at whichever nature park my forest school group was at, I searched for more blooms. (Relad more about our group.)Our group rotates through various parks in our area, so I got to see the flowers popping up in the varying ecosystems—the rocky hills, the sunny meadows, the wet and cool cedar forests. When we returned to a park weeks later, I could see new flowers blooming, earlier blooms going to seed, and other buds holding out for warmer weather.

By the end of May, I had identified over eighty flowers. I had also misidentified one, but I fixed it later. By the end of the summer, I had over a hundred in a homemade laminated flower guide book, loosely organized by color (yellows and oranges, whites, blues and purples).

(Read: Book Review: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer)

My flower guidebook

Yarrow

Wild rose

Honeysuckle

Why bother learning about wildflowers?

My purpose for learning flowers was threefold. First, I wondered what they were! I wanted to know the names of flowers that grew near me, just to know. As Zena Hitz wrote in her book Lost in Thought, not all knowledge need be pursued for some useful end (read my review). Knowledge doesn't have to be instrumental.

Second, I want to learn more edible and medicinal plants. Becoming more familiar with local plants generally will make it easier to learn which ones are beneficial or even delicious if I taste them. It's trickier if I have to both learn to identify the plant and learn what it does at the same time.

Now that I'm more familiar with the flowers here, this year, I might branch out into how to use them. Or perhaps I'll start learning shrubs, trees, bugs, or birds!

Third, I want my kids to learn about local plants. I want them to learn about edible and medicinal plants, and also, I want the local plants to be familiar. Like a friends. Like home. Knowing the plants in our area will give them a stronger connection, stronger place attachment, like Melody Warnick described in her book This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live.

Red kittentails

(Read: A Poem For Identifying Ten North Idaho Conifers)

What are the benefits of learning local wildflowers?

When I see flowers whose names I know, I feel more connected to the area. A hike with pretty flowers becomes an opportunity for a treasure hunt, like on our trip to Glacier last summer. Many of the same flowers grow near us and in the park.

Exploring the national park was even more fun when I could spot flowers I knew and share them with my family. Since we were at higher elevations in a cooler part of the mountains, the flowers we saw were weeks or even a month behind the ones blooming at home---which meant I had had a chance to identify many of them at home prior to the trip! Some were in my homemade guidebook; others I recognized because they were lookalikes with flowers at home, or because they appeared in one of the wildflower books I had consulted in my identification quest (two of the books were specifically for flowers in Glacier and nearby parks).

I also paid more attention to the ecosystems we passed through. I noticed which flowers often grew near each other, and which I saw in different parks. Certain flowers liked the wet, shady, cedar forests. Others I tended to find in sunny, dry places, in rockier areas, or in meadows. Some flowers liked the woods; others the open skies.

Being aware of these ecosystems at home meant I noticed them when we visited Glacier, climbing through Aspen forests, up higher to places dominated by subalpine first, and even farther up, where the rocky terrain was spotted with shorter shrubs, stonecrops, buttercups, and yarrow.

Sagebrush buttercup

Tall bluebells

Mariposa Lily

(Read: Why Outdoor Time is Important for Kids)

What's the process for flower identification?

First, when I find a new flower, I consult my existing wildflower guide to see whether I already captured photos but forgot the flower. That has happened.

Then, I take a few pictures with my phone. I try to get photos of the flower head-on, of the leaves and stem, and the plant as a whole. I use some of the photos for my printed guidebook, and some just for the identification process. Depending on the context, I don't necessarily try to identify the flower right away. Sometimes I'm busy with the kids, or we're hiking, so I need to do some or all of the identification research later!

I generally use a couple apps for my first pass: PlantID, PictureThis, iNaturalist. I don't have the paid version of any. The apps don't always identify the plant correctly, so further research is needed. They can usually get me in the right ballpark, however. Sometimes they identify the genus but not the species correctly, or I can look up lookalikes for the suggested flowers.

I also check in a couple wildflower books for similar-looking flowers. Unfortunately, there isn't a guide specific to the Idaho panhandle. You can find books for the Pacific Northwest, which cover some (but also lots in Oregon and Washington that aren't here), or the Rocky Mountains (same problem). I had decent luck with a guide of wildflowers in Glacier National Park, since it's Western ecosystems are similar to many of ours, and a northern rocky mountains guide. But even those guides don't cover all the flowers found in those places - they just pick a few of the most common species.

After getting a potential genus or species, it's time to search online. There are a ton of useful websites with details about species and where they're found, what differentiates different species within a genus, and so on. For some flowers, a quick search is enough to confirm the species. For others, I've spent over an hour trying to figure out which species among twenty is the one I've found - for instance, with this buttercup.

Houndstongue

I don't bother with specific varieties within a species. It's too specific for my purposes, and not really necessary. The varieties also often hinge on technical differences I don't yet understand, or that require a magnifying glass to notice. Getting the genus and species is good enough for me!

Book Review: The Battle of the Classics by Eric Adler

2025-03-17T12:00:00Z

Why bother with a humanities education? What is the point of learning things that are not instrumental to other goals—i.e., learning for its own sake?

These are some of the questions at the core of The Battle of the Classics by Eric Adler, which I read with my book club.

Why it matters:

Currently, in most higher education in America, vocation and skills are highlighted over broader learning and moral development. The focus on vocational skills has steeply increased in the last two decades, especially since the 2008 housing crash. College is seen as a way to get trained for a job, not a path to self-improvement. A humanities education is pointless; it won't get you a high-paying job. So why bother with it? Why bother with any learning that won't help you make money and get ahead? In The Battle of the Classics, Adler argues that the humanities are still relevant.

Who should read Battle of the Classics?

Battle of the Classics may appeal to you if you're interested in the future of education, in particular if you're responsible for educating youth or if you homeschool, especially when it comes to thinking about curricula and what matters when deciding what children ought to learn. This book may appeal to you if you've studied the humanities (and are questioning your decision), if you're one of many who are wondering if funding the humanities is worth it—or if these subjects are being cut from school programs and you'd like a better argument about why they matter.

When I first read the description of this book, I didn't expect much. One of the women in our book club had picked it because she was reading it in an online book club, too. But I actually found it to be a thought-provoking look at the role of the humanities in education today. It led to a great discussion and dovetailed nicely with our previous book, Zena Hitz's Lost in Thought (read my review). Both books raised similar questions about the "crisis of the humanities."

(Read: Is Going to Grad School Worth It?)

Diving in: Why do the humanities matter?

When Adler explained the rise of the vocational focus in higher education, I was reminded of what Susan Cain pointed out in her book Quiet (read my review!): with the rise of extraversion over the past century, lauded personal traits shifted from the "serious, disciplined, and honorable" to "bold and entertaining." Marketability—in terms of a gregarious personality or in terms of job-oriented skillset—rose to the forefront. High school and college became about increasing one's marketability for jobs, not personal development.

Adler included a quote from Martha Nussbaum, stating that removing the humanities from education will produce "generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person's suffering and achievements." (p15)

Part of the importance of a humanities education, Adler argues, is to introduce students to particular philosophical works, great books, and ideas that will enable them to grapple "with essential issues in meaningful ways" or have "historic importance to culture and the life of the mind." (p15-16) Adler argues that it is the content of what's read that matters—the specific books and texts. Something about those great books shapes one's mind, not the mere fact of reading words on pages. Studying older masterworks enriches souls and is central to both personal and civilizational flourishing.

This is opposed to the more common view that the humanities ought to promote a certain ideological lens through which a topic is to be viewed, or a certain mode of inquiry. Under this view, the content doesn't matter so much as the method used to read it and study it. A humanities education is about the skills learned: critical thinking, pre-professional development, learning to be a thoughtful democratic citizen. Adler says this stance stems from the extreme relativism in today's society. You can't make judgments about what's good or bad, what's quality and what's not. It might offend someone if you pick one work over another.

As a quick terminology note, Adler uses the term humanism a lot. He's not talking about the modern humanist movement, which is more of an atheistic agnostic religion replacement group, but rather humanism as an intellectual movement of universities about the benefits or lack thereof of humanities education.

(Read: How To Start A Reading Habit)

A Brief History of the Humanities

The phrase "the humanities" comes from Latin: studia humanitatis, the studies of humanity.

"For Cicero, the studia humanitatis and artes liberales describe a lifelong educational program encompassing a variety of studies appropriate for a freeborn person. Such a program, Cicero argued, can serve to instill the crucial quality of humanitas in human beings." —Eric Adler, The Battle of the Classics, p37

Humanitas meant kindness, benevolence, mercy, and humanity as in the quality of being humane. It was both a moral and intellectual virtue, developed via exposure to particular high culture. The humanities were an education in culture, good art, and personal development; particular works such as Homer and Virgil were always studied. Later on, the Renaissance humanists took a more individualistic turn, focusing on strengthening character. The humanities were for helping shape students' souls. So much so that, prior to 1869, at Harvard University, the intellectual and personal conduct of students were considered inseparable. Students' personal character and discipline were considered when awarding grades.

Given how the humanities were initially conceived, it's understandable why a humanities education is no longer valued. First, humanism insisted on a particular intellectual and moral development, which, under the auspices of present-day moral relativism, wouldn't fly. Second, Aristotle had divided all subjects into the liberal or vocational, with only the liberal appropriate for the freeborn, aristocratic class to pursue. The humanities used to be the pursuit of the independently wealthy, the upper-middle and upper classes. Now, people like to think we don't have the same class distinctions (read Paul Fussell's book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System for a great discussion on that). If everyone is equal, then everyone works, and so everyone must pursue vocations and skills. The upper-middle and upper classes are studying business administration or law instead of classics.

As I read, I wondered about undergraduate versus graduate level programs in the humanities. Were both in crisis? My sense was that studying the humanities as an undergraduate might be more acceptable, since many jobs simply require a college degree. Once you have specialized in graduate school, you are often seen as overqualified for any non-academic or non-teaching position.

(Read: How I Built a Career From My Strengths—and How You or Your Kids Can, Too)

How the Humanities changed

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Adler writes, the professionalization of higher education began, copied after German research universities. The focus of universities shifted toward the creation of new knowledge, rather than moral or personal development. This coincided with the influence of American pragmatism, the rise of industrialization, and the Morrill Land Grant Act that donated public land for colleges of mechanical arts and agriculture (which Wendell Berry has written disparagingly about before).

In the late 19th century, two developments were key. First, in psychology, was mental discipline theory—the idea that the mind is a muscle you can exercise by studying certain subjects or performing certain kinds of tasks. For instance, learning math was held to improve reasoning ability. Learning Latin would improve memory. However, experimental research has since found little evidence that practicing certain subjects improves overall general abilities in the way proposed. But mental discipline theory was all the rage. It denied the value of specific educational content, the kind of specific content that a humanities education originally included.

The second development was an address given by Charles Adams at Harvard in the late 19th century railing against the requirement of ancient Greek in admissions to the college and in the college after. Honestly, it sounded to me that Mr. Adams was sore about his education and took the opportunity to rant about it publicly. But his address brought to the forefront the larger debate about the purpose of the classics.

In that era, learning languages was seen as useful predominantly for the instrumental purpose of understanding the science coming out of Europe. Thus, many academics argued about the value, or lack thereof, of classical languages in college curricula—since you didn't need them to understand current European science.

In the responses to Adams' address, those defending Ancient Greek argued that studying it helped one attain mental discipline. With the general academic shift toward relativism, mostly coming from the romanticists, Adams' critics couldn't easily argue that the texts themselves were special, beyond some preference the reader might have for them. Relativism prevented them from arguing that reading specific texts (some in ancient Greek) mattered because of those texts' "unparalleled ability to shape one's character" (p107).

Adler explains other factors at play. The scientific democrats, with their excitement about Darwinism, hoped to limit theological influence in colleges. Colleges were changing their focus as a result of industrialization. More people, and more social classes of people, began attending colleges. Removing Ancient Greek from admissions requirements enabled non-elites to join the freshman ranks. A Harvard president removed many course requirements, pushing academia further toward individualized curricula and custom courses and majors.

With the elimination of many requirements, some traditionalists worried that students would use the elective course system to avoid difficult work. They would choose easier classes with professors who inflated grades. They weren't wrong. Students frequently do that today!

Many liberal arts colleges have followed Harvard, eliminating many curricular requirements. When I attended Vassar College, there were notably few requirements: a freshman writing seminar, a foreign language, some percent of classes outside of your department, and some percent outside of your discipline (courses in departments were broadly grouped into four disciplines). Many students used this to choose easy electives, exactly as the early traditionalists feared. But some, like me, didn't. The role of motivation isn't to be discounted. I was motivated by learning, so I chose classes that covered topics I found most interesting, which were frequently with the tough professors that other people rated as hard graders.

(Read: How Schools Zap Kids' Motivation and Mental Health)

(Read more about how motivation works)

Babbitt versus the Romanticists

Not every thinker of the late 19th and early 20th centuries fell into the mental discipline and relativism traps. Irving Babbitt, influenced by classical, Christian, and Buddhist thought, wrote about humanism, New Humanism, how to learn to live the Good Life, and the benefits of a humanistic education. However, he didn't think students ought to merely receive wisdom from the ancients. He thought students ought to assimilate the best from the past into the present. We don't live in the past; we ought to adapt the wisdom therein to our current circumstances.

He disagreed with the romanticists, who generally believed that innate desires were all good, there was no general norm or values to aspire to, all was relative, and there was thus no need to improve character. The romanticists loved impulse and the particular at the expense of what is general and universal about humans and human life.

"Of cardinal importance to Babbitt's humanism, then, was the analysis of literary and artistic masterworks that would provide for the young the most compelling visions of the good, the true, and the beautiful." —Eric Adler, The Battle of the Classics, p172

This was about the point in the book where I began wondering every page what Adler's own opinions were about the purpose and value of a humanities education. Fortunately, the final chapter of the book gives us some clues.

Humanities and education today

In the final chapter, Adler argues for a specific, substantial humanities education that uses models of the past and masterworks of art, literature, philosophy and religion to shape young people's character and souls. He points out that at Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate courses is called "Psychology and the Good Life." He says that people want to learn the wisdom of the ages about common human experience and the human condition. But most people don't know how to learn it, and contemporary higher education doesn't help much. He writes,

"[O]ur laissez-faire course of studies has helped create laissez-faire Americans: rootless, isolated, utilitarian, and possessed of an impoverished view of the Good Life. To revitalize American society, we need to train students not just for service and power but also for wisdom and character." —Eric Adler, The Battle of the Classics, p213

I wondered how Adler sees a broad humanities education fitting into job preparation and making a living. Did he imagine a dual curriculum? Perhaps in the vein of new colleges like St. Joseph the Worker, that combine core theology and humanities with vocational training to give a solid foundation for both a good life and a good job. I also wondered how he thought of the purpose of humanities study in graduate education or beyond—while it may be valuable for the individual, how did it contribute to raising or keeping a family? There are limited positions in humanities academia. Perhaps he envisioned including humanities earlier, in the later high school and early college years. Or perhaps he's imagining a broader restructuring of society… Adler writes,

"If we aspire to produce future generations that are not only efficient but also happy and morally grounded, we must compel them to look forward and backward, outward and in." —Eric Adler, The Battle of the Classics, p209

Like Wendell Berry and others, Adler argues that we cannot focus only on what makes us happy. We must focus on what is actually good for people to be doing. Happiness is not the be all, end all goal. He asks whether we can create education that will encourage people to "improve the material conditions of the world and to improve oneself." (p217)

I was reminded of graduate school at the MIT Media Lab. Many people focus on questions like, what's the next Cool Tech to build? Can we make tech that does X, Y, or Z? Not as many people asked, should we? Adler is concerned that without the humanities, the world is left "in the hands of those who lack an ethical center." And I think that he is entirely right.

Adler argues that modern education is a danger to society. People get pragmatic, vocation-focused training… but they may not use it for good ends. He points out that many Silicon Valley tech giants, while making plenty of money, are not actually making the world a better place, but instead are increasing depression and anxiety, and contributing to overall misfortune. Numerous tech billionaires don't let their own children have constant access to smartphones or other technology, and yet promote it for use by other people's children? Gives you something to think about.

Adler ends the book with a proposed list of some possible texts to use in a broad humanities education that might shed light on human universals. Students are, after all, human beings first and foremost. He suggests texts drawn from around the world and throughout history. It's a starting point. What texts might you include?

Announcing My Candidacy for Mayor of Post Falls

2025-03-04T12:00:00Z

I'm running for Mayor.

I'm currently a Post Falls City Councilman, software engineer, husband, and father of four. I became a City Councilman because I want to ensure that Post Falls remains a place where future generations can thrive. In that role, I have worked to promote responsible growth, strengthen families, and cultivate a community that reflects our values. I bring my expertise in efficiency, problem-solving, and responsible leadership to government.

Now, I seek to lead as Mayor with a vision for a prosperous, family-oriented Post Falls—one that upholds American values, a strong moral foundation, economic opportunity, and the pathway to homeownership. I want my children and grandchildren to grow up here and enjoy the same quality of life we do today.

Our city is at a crossroads. We can either allow unchecked growth to shape Post Falls into just another suburb, or we can take a stand and ensure that our city remains a place where families can afford to buy homes, where small businesses flourish, and where our community values remain strong. I believe in President Trump’s vision for America’s Golden Age, and I will fight to bring that energy to Post Falls.

Why I'm Running

I believe in the promise of America as a land of opportunity, built on hard work, faith, and property ownership. Post Falls has the potential to capture that spirit, but it requires thoughtful leadership and strategic planning. We must not passively react to growth—we must shape it to reflect our priorities. Many families move to Idaho because it represents a future worth investing in. As Mayor, I will work to preserve and strengthen that future, ensuring Post Falls remains a safe, affordable, and thriving community.

My campaign is centered around several key priorities:

Growth Management – Tapping the brakes on rapid high-density development and refocusing on family-friendly homeownership.
Public Safety – Strengthening law enforcement and investing in resources to keep crime from spilling over from neighboring communities.
Fiscal Responsibility – Ensuring city spending remains efficient and sustainable, avoiding unnecessary tax increases on local families.
Supporting Small Business and Local Jobs – Cutting red tape, encouraging entrepreneurship, and ensuring Post Falls remains a hub for local business success.
Preserving Post Falls’ Identity – Promoting local culture, festivals, and traditions to maintain the city’s small-town charm.

(Read: 7 Principles to Guide Development in Kootenai County)

(Read: What Is Localism?)

The Role Of Mayor

The Mayor’s role is not merely ceremonial—it is a position of executive leadership with key responsibilities:

Setting a long-term vision for Post Falls that looks decades ahead, providing a structured plan for growth and development.
Building a strong leadership team by appointing qualified professionals to oversee city departments and commissions, ensuring effective governance and strategic decision-making.
Delivering results through efficient governance, working closely with residents, city staff, and stakeholders to implement policies that serve the community’s best interests.

If you live in Post Falls, I encourage you to join in my campaign and be part of shaping our city’s future. For more information on my platform and how to get involved, visit RandyForPostFalls.com or follow me on social media.

5 Books Every City Councilor and Engaged Citizen Should Read

2025-02-18T12:00:00Z

You have been elected to your local city council. Or, you are interested in local politics and are involved as a citizen. Perhaps you have been attending city council meetings, commenting on council policy, or proposing ideas to your representatives.

You want your city to be a better place—a place your kids a live, a place that will last generations. No doubt, you have some ideas about what changes are needed in your area. But how to implement them? And maybe you're wondering: is that really the best way? What else is possible? What else could be done?

You need two things. First, a vision. Vision covers what's possible, where you might go, and ideal cities that you want to emulate. Second, you need actionable steps that can take you in the right direction—such as ideas for specific policies or events.

Here are five books that provide both.

1. Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity by Charles Marohn

Strong Towns is a key text for anyone wanting to build better, stronger, more resilient towns and cities. It's a vision book. It lays out some of the key problems and big picture issues with how cities are currently built and run, especially regarding finances, infrastructure costs, and expectations of continual city growth. While Marohn doesn't have specific solutions on offer or specific next steps, his book opens up the conversation about what we might like to see in our municipalities and how we might get there.

Read a detailed review and more of my thoughts on the book.

2. This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live by Melody Warnick

Why do people live where they do? How can we help connect people with the place they live? In this book, Warnick describes how place attachment forms and what you can do to build up your connection to your city or town. Warnick's concrete ideas can help us build experiences, events, and places that draw people together, build community, and help people put down roots. The chapter on the identity of places, including city branding, could be especially useful.

Read a detailed review.

3. Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City—and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

This book presents a history of zoning and explains how zoning works today, which will help you understand how we got the zoning we have and what other options are possible or potentially desirable. Gray discusses the low hanging fruit of zoning reform and presents actionable suggestions for what a city might want to change.

Read a detailed review.

4. Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A couple years ago, I wouldn't have thought I would be reading books about zoning or parking. But here we are! This book shares a history of parking regulations and explains why we spend so much space and money on vehicle storage. There are some good stories in here! Grabar includes suggestions for improving the parking situation in cities, but much of it feels more applicable to larger cities than to smaller towns where parking is less of an issue.

Read a detailed review.

5. Sprawl Repair Manual by Gail Tachieva

Looking into the future at the sprawling areas in many municipalities, Tachieva presents a vision for what you might do to reduce sprawl, especially in blighted areas, through new buildings, modifications to existing lots and spaces, and relocating services. Even with "manual" in the name, I consider this a vision book. While implementation steps are provided for each suggested repair, many of the steps are large or require significant upfront capital or political clout to change relevant laws. A highlight of the book is the graphics and diagrams of different repair techniques.

Read a detailed review.

Header image credit: CC BY 2.0 JamesInOregon

How to Evaluate the Fit of a Graduate Program

2025-02-04T12:00:00Z

When you apply to graduate schools, you may have the opportunity to choose between multiple programs at different schools. How do you know which program to pick? How do you decide if a graduate program would suit you?

(Read: Is Going to Grad School Worth It?)

Admission to graduate schools

If you haven't applied to grad school yet, there are a host of factors to consider when deciding where to apply. Think about what you want out of the degree: are you looking to advance your career? Learn something new? Pursue qualifications and skills, or learn to conduct research? Who can you learn from in your field? Consider both who is competitive in the field and who might be a good mentor—these qualities don't always coincide. Where will you want to live—will you be willing to relocate or do you have geographical constraints? My book Grad School Life include an entire chapter on factors you'll want to consider.

If you have already applied to graduate school, but haven't been admitted yet, wait to decide until you hear back. That way, you can include factors such as available funding in your decision—and so you don't waste anyone's time learning about a program you may not even be admitted to.

If you have been admitted to a graduate program, you may be invited to campus for a visit day. On visit day, you may have meetings with professors, students, and administrators. Even if you don't have a scheduled visit, you can contact current faculty and students to ask questions.

Interviews with faculty and with current and past students

Interviews are one of your best tools. You'll want to ask current students about their experiences in the program. What do they think of the school, the department, their classes, and their advisors? Setting up interviews with potential advisors can be more difficult—professors are busy people!—but highly informative if you can get them.

Do a search for "informational interviews"; you'll find some useful questions. I've also included a vetted list of great questions to ask current students, potential advisors, and department administrators in my book, Grad School Life.

(Read: Can You Have a Baby in Grad School?)

How do I pick a graduate program?

The nebulous quality "fit" is the biggest factor. You will, of course, want to verify that the program meets your financial and personal concerns: do you have adequate funding for that program? Is it located where you want to live? But sometimes there are several equally good options that you will have to decide between, and that's where fit comes in.

Fit is demonstrated best through a story. I was admitted to several of the graduate programs that I had applied to. Before visiting each school and meeting the professors and students there, I wasn't sure which program to pick. I visited my top three.

At the first, the computer science department had the feel of old dudes writing pseudocode on whiteboards, underfunded programs, depressed graduate students, students who didn't seem like they wanted to be there are all—maybe they loved their research but the slog, the daily grind, the weight and oppressive feeling in the air got them down. They were grad students who didn't love their lives. One of the professors here talked about that feeling. He was a quieter sort, I think, and appreciated the slower pace of the department. He asked where else I had been admitted. I told him, MIT. Ah, he said. The pressure of such a high-status, competitive university can get to you. High status is often paired with high stress.

(Read: Deploy or Die: Moving Research Into the World)

The second school I visited was a better fit. The location wasn't ideal, but it had a better vibe. Big connections, big goals, an eyebrow are real world impact, not just students coding in basements. It was a little higher status and more competitive, which I liked. Students and faculty felt like they were driven to succeed.

A professor at this second school—whose lab I hadn't even applied to, but who read my application to the department anyway—invited me to his lab on visit day. He said he had had loved my personal statement (all that jazz about grad school being fun) and that I was exactly the kind of student he was looking for. I visited; his lab felt drab. He had a couple students packed into an office, quietly working at their own computers at their own desks, and they didn't seem obviously happy - or unhappy. They weren't animated. There was nothing about his lab that announced fun. Nothing whimsical. The professor's philosophy may have been sound; the reality in his lab didn't jibe.

Then I visited MIT. The energy at the MIT Media Lab was contagious. The people there felt driven, excited about their work, eager to impact the world. Did I want to be a big fish in a small pond, like I might be at the first school, or have the constant pressure to excel? The flair and sense of opportunity at the Media Lab appealed to me. I chose MIT. You might choose otherwise.

One of my undergraduate advisors put it this way:

If you find a lab where the graduate students are happy, most likely you will be, too. If you land in a lab where the graduate students are few and/or unhappy, you may well suffer. So job one is to find a happy lab doing stuff you want to do. This is hard, because you likely have to visit the labs themselves. So, when you get a chance to do that, formally or informally, take that opportunity.

You're looking for a program with the right vibe, and the best way to check out the vibe is to talk to people and/or visit.

Like this post? You'll find even more detailed advice about choosing a grad program, and managing grad school and life in my book, Grad School Life: Surviving and Thriving Beyond Coursework and Research. Order it today!

Deploy or Die: Moving Research Into the World

2025-01-21T12:00:00Z

When I was a graduate student in the MIT Media Lab, the informal department slogan was "demo or die". This phrase reflected the lab culture of turning creativity and invention into prototypes and tests.

Demo or die reminded everyone at the Media Lab to turn their big ideas into concrete, understandable, shareable things. Whether concept video or physical artifact, the output of an idea was not just written words and speculation about big questions.

In my first or second year, I don't recall which, the Lab tried to shift the slogan away from "demo or die". The new slogan was "deploy or die". I don't know why they kept the "or die," with its rather bleak connotations… Regardless, the point of switching from demo to deploy was to shift the focus from ideas to action. Were we really solving problems with our research, or playing at solving problems? Were lab members making short-term prototypes with possibly limited follow-through, or testing their ideas with stakeholders in the real world? The goal was to take research out of the lab, make a difference somewhere, somehow.

(Read: How Do You Decide What Projects to Work On As A Scholar?)

How I applied my research

For me, deployment meant taking cute, fluffy robots to public and private schools throughout the Boston area. I interacted with kids of all backgrounds, interviewed children and teachers about their use of technology and ideas for future technology, and thought deeply about the ethics of technology use in education. I took my research questions beyond the lab, into the communities of people who would actually benefit, the real stakeholders who might someday use the technology I created. Many of the questions I framed in my dissertation probed the broader impacts of the technology I studied: What were the ethical dilemmas around technology use with children, and in education?

Besides the practical applications of my work, deployment also meant writing public facing blog posts communicating my work and my ongoing questions. I wanted feedback and input from non-academics as well as the wonderful colleagues I worked with or talked with at conferences or who read my academic papers.

(Read: How Women Scholars Manage Stress, Goals, and Self-Care—and How You Can, Too!)

How can academic institutions encourage research impact?

The Media Lab managed to incentivize applied research in a way that few other institutions have replicated. Academic publications were only one of the lab's currencies. Publicly, such as on Lab social media, the Lab highlighted all kinds of impacts—sci comm, demos, videos, deployments, spinoff startups, policy briefs, installations, exhibits, and more. Faculty were given time off, up to a day a week, to work on startups and spinoffs sprouting from their research. My own advisor spent more than a year on leave as she founded a social robots startup.

By taking the public stance that this in-the-world work mattered, and would be rewarded within the Lab structure with press, funding, time, and so on, faculty and students were encouraged to pursue these activities. One of my favorite examples is Curious Learning, an organization that grew from a small team performing research studies on tech-enabled literacy learning in the field.

Deploy or die (regardless of that or die part) represented a useful and inspiring mindset. Research has a purpose. Knowledge is for some end. What kind of impact is your research having? When should your work have impact, and what kind of impact? Are you making the world a better place?

Like this post? You'll find even more detailed advice about research and the world in my new book, Grad School Life: Surviving and Thriving Beyond Coursework and Research. Order it today!

Project: How To Make a Paper Mache Taxidermy Moose Head

2025-01-07T12:00:00Z

Sometimes, a wall calls out for a taxidermy moose head. My mom's house has such a wall: a tall, wide, brick chimney stretching two stories. The moose hanging there would gaze pensively, wondering at the strange lives of humans as he observed all the goings-on in the living room below.

I guess she never thought I'd take our joking about the wall's needs seriously.

This year for Christmas, I gave her a paper mache moose head in the style of a taxidermy moose for her wall.

Step one: Making the moose base

The first step was the base sculpture. I used cardboard from cut up boxes, a couple toilet paper rolls, scrap paper, newspaper, and masking tape to make a moose-ish shape.

The antlers were tricky and needed the first layer of paper mache to really start coming together.

Step two: Paper mache layers

I made a traditional flour and water paste. We actually subscribe to the local paper, so I had plenty of newspaper to tear into strips. Dip each strip, slide the extra paste off with your fingers, apply to moose.

I applied several layers over the entire moose to build up the structure. The moose balanced on extra cardboard boxes for support as each layer dried. When the antlers and face had enough structure, I added a flat piece of cardboard as the back mount. I embedded a piece of wire around the back mount for hanging.

Antler

The back mounting piece before attachment

The wire on the back

Step three: Painting the moose

When the paper mache was dry and felt sufficiently sturdy, I painted the moose. I used some of my kids' tempera craft paint. I painted a base layer of brown for the fur, lighter brown for the antlers, and darker brown for the mounting board. The paint was on the thin side, so everything needed at least two layers to cover up the newsprint.

Step four: Modpodge to seal the moose

When the paint was dry, I painted a protective layer of matte Modpodge over the entire moose.

Step five: Profit

When the moose was unwrapped on Christmas, much anticipated laughter ensued. And now the moose proudly hangs on its own brick wall!

Honk! Learning from a Dynamic Public Music Festival

2024-12-24T12:00:00Z

The street felt alive with sound and motion. Horns and vibrant brass blared against a backdrop of upbeat percussion. Big band, boom band: People of all colors and types thronged, many dressed in bright colors with faces painted, adorned in festival-ware. Somerville, a suburb of Boston, was a multicultural area and here that fact shone clear. Energy thrummed. Laughter pealed.

I don't remember how Randy and I heard about the street festival, called HONK!, or whether we just happened upon it on our way through Davis Square that weekend in Massachusetts, over 10 years ago now. We wandered along the side streets adjacent to Davis Square for several hours, listening to band after band. Each had their own dynamic sound and feel.

HONK! is an annual festival for activist street musicians and marching bands that play music for a cause. Many of the bands were from the northeast. Some traveled from across the continent. It's a preeminent example of city culture done well: parades, music, people, connection, community.

The festival came up in conversation recently because Randy and I were talking about local city culture. We live in a tourist area—lakes and mountains and resorts. What other culture can come from North Idaho? How do we build up local culture? The experience at HONK! had stuck with Randy as an amazing cultural phenomenon (me, too, but Randy even more so).

(Read: Seven Principles to Guide Development in Kootenai County)

We couldn't replicate the festival here—and we wouldn't want to. Many of the bands, while engaging and exciting, lean into activism that isn't a good fit for our area or many local audiences. But what if we could capture the same energy and participatory atmosphere? What kind of music experience could be created that has a North Idaho in flavor?

Every city in our metropolitan area already holds "Music in the Park" events all summer long. There's a street music week in June and concerts in Sandpoint. Art on the Green brings music and other art to the public annually.

If the right person who was already connected to the local music scene was inspired, they could create a local festival for participatory music and street music. Perhaps it starts more pop-up, with anyone and everyone invited to set up along a street. One of our friends hosts an annual Hootenanny where everyone is invited to play, sing, and dance. Could that happen at a larger scale? What if local marching bands were invited to play, too? What else could we add?

It's a fun, and worthwhile, thought experiment. We're in North Idaho to stay. We want our kids to want to stay here, too. One piece of making the area appealing is culture. So there's more to think about: what art, music, intellectual life, and so forth do we want to see? How do we build it here?

(Read: Book Review: This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live by Melody Warnick)

(Read: How We Are Intentionally Building Strong Community Ties)

Header image credit:Chris Devers, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Can You Have a Baby in Graduate School?

2024-12-10T12:00:00Z

Yes, you can have a baby in graduate school. But it's probably going to be hard.

Why it matters: Grad students are on average 33 years old. They're often in their prime family-forming years. Many are thinking about marrying and starting families—and some delay these valuable life steps because they're afraid they won't be able to manage everything.

Why is it hard to have a baby in grad school?

It's hard for several reasons. First, the academic system isn't set up to support women with young children. It wasn't designed to. The system is changing, slowly. In many places, however, it's not changing fast enough. (Read more about how we can fix the system.)

Second, it can be tough to have babies no matter what your situation in life. Babies are demanding physically, emotionally, and financially. They are also amazingly worth it—but it helps to be prepared.

Graduate school is also a highly demanding time in your life. Grad students are typically overworked and overstressed, so adding a baby into the mix can be difficult. Again, however, it can also be incredibly rewarding. Many women—and student parents in general—have reported that they work harder, more efficiently, and with greater purpose when they have children.

What kind of support can you get for a baby in graduate school?

The most critical components to success are a supportive advisor and supportive department. Without these, you will probably have a difficult time. It's not impossible, but you will be fighting for yourself and your time more than in other cases.

What kind of support can you expect? Flexibility is a big one: flexibility with regards to time-to-degree, your general schedule, meetings, classes, etc , so that you can accommodate your infant caretaking. Babies are notoriously on their own schedule. Financial support: do you get paid time off? What kind of health insurance do you get from your program or school, if any? Social support: is there, for example, a new mother's meetup group on campus? Is there an on-site nursery or daycare?

Some schools will have good parental leave policies that enable you to take time off when you have a baby. Some policies will not be so good. Find out what the policies are at your school. When I was at MIT, for instance, I was given 2 months off by the school, and an additional month by my department, which is considered very good on the scale of parental leave policies.

(Read my story about how I managed my first baby as a 4th year PhD student!)

How to manage time and energy with a baby in grad school

Besides support, you also have to manage your own time and energy. Many people will warn you that you will feel fatigue during pregnancy or that you won't sleep much with an infant, making it hard to get everything else you need to do done. That can be true, but not necessarily. It depends on how you prioritize your time as well as on the temperament of your child. I found, for instance, that having a baby helped me let go of habits and activities that didn't serve me (such as scrolling on social media) in favor of focused effort on what mattered—time with my child and finishing my dissertation.

Read more about productivity and balance as an academic parent:

Like this post? You'll find even more detailed advice about managing grad school and life in my new book, Grad School Life: Surviving and Thriving Beyond Coursework and Research. Order it today!

Book Review: Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman

2024-11-26T12:00:00Z

We live in an attention deficient era. Adults and teens often cannot read a book because they can't focus on reading more than a couple pages at a time. One explanation is that people's use of technology, phones, and social media has decreased people's ability to attend, as well as leading to deficits in social behavior and social connection.

How do you tune back in? How can you train your attention and deal with distractions?

(Read: Four Reasons Why Boredom is Better For You Than You Think)

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman (2013, Harper) explains why attention matters for everything. Attention mediates our interaction with the world. We attend constantly, but not always to the right things. To what we attend, how well, and for how long, are questions Goleman explores,.with an eye for improving our focus on what matters.

Goleman examines focus (attention, awareness) at three levels. First, the level of you, an individual. Here, he discusses general awareness, open spacious awareness, and self-awareness. He draws on neuroscience to explain how focus and attention work in the brain, including your subconscious versus top-down attention. He questions whether mind wandering is the mind's default mode, and examines the role mind wandering has in creativity. Goleman discusses how immersion in our senses, following mindfulness meditation techniques, can quiet the mind's chatter. We stop thinking so much about ourselves, our worries, our self narrative, and stay instead in the here and now. We stay present. It takes training or practice to get good at it, to really be in a mindful state, with the mind quieter than usual.

(Read: How Reading Books Can Help You Reclaim Your Attention)

Then, Goleman zooms out. How can you use your focus to accomplish things? He talks about flow, willpower, sustained attention, and self-control. Flow is the feeling of optimal focus when you're working at the right level of challenge, not so easy you're bored and not so hard youre stressed or overwhelmed. He explains biases in our thinking that come from the bottom-up attention system. Regarding self-control, one interesting point was that attention regulates emotion. Selective attention on something can distract and calm an agitated amygdala (the emotion center of the brain). This can work especially well with toddlers.

At the third level, he zooms out further to examine your focus on other people, awareness of others, empathy, and their behavior. Goleman describes how cognitive empathy (such as theory of mind and perspective taking) shares neural pathways with executive attention. Rapport with others can be important for learning. Goleman also discusses organizations and systems, including how people are often bad at systems level thinking, and how improving your systems awareness can improve leadership and strategy. For instance, Goleman writes that winning strategies either exploit (i.e. do one thing really well) or explore (i.e., try out new innovations in new domains). If you can do both, you'll do even better.

Goleman talks about the role of gut feelings in decision making. He argues that in general it's good to trust your gut, since it's a subconscious process using information your mind has gathered up. But Adam Grant, in his book Originals, argued that gut feelings are only useful if you're an expert in the area—otherwise, what is your intuition actually based on?

Finally, Goleman talks about leadership. The big thing for great leaders, he says, is long term focus—decades or longer. Part of the reason for that is that when looking long term, leaders are more likely to make decisions based on the long term health of the company, their employees, the supply chain, and the environment. It's not just about maximizing profit—it's recognition of the company as part of a larger system, and the health of the broader system matters to the company.

Inner, outer, other focus

At first, I thought it was odd which kinds of focus Goleman picked to discuss, but for any nonfiction book like this, you need to cover enough aspects to make it a book, and I guess the grouping of "inner, outer, and other focus" reasonably covers all the stuff he wanted to talk about. He also uses the terms focus, attention, and awareness pretty interchangeably.

Overall, Focus is a well-researched book packed with information. Of the fields and information I was already familiar with (such as the psychology of attention, flow, and empathy), I didn't think there was anything overlooked.

Read this book if you're interested in psychology, business psychology, how people work, optimizing your attention, or understanding yourself and developing self-awareness. If you've enjoyed books such as Quiet by Susan Cain, The Expectation Effect by David Robson, or The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, try Focus!

Suburban Backyard Gardening 2024 Recap: Tomatoes, Flowers, and More! (Year 6)

2024-11-12T12:00:00Z

Around our suburban homestead, we're preparing for winter. The last of my green tomatoes are ripening to pink. We've switched from salads to soups and from mornings outside in the sun to reading by the fireplace.

This past year, we had a wet winter that felt, for the most part, mild, but an early deep freeze without insulating snow made it a harsh one. Spring turned into summer fast, with a heated July. Some of my plants took a while to establish themselves as a result of the dramatic temperature shifts. Raspberries were about on schedule, but many other plants were a week or even several weeks later than typical.

This year, I didn't try anything big or especially new; I didn't add new garden areas or many new plants. Instead, I had a baby, and tried to plan the garden to be less work than in previous years, since from past experience, gardening with a tiny, mobile human who wants to taste rocks and grab flowers can be a challenge!

Read about my gardening journey so far:

2019: How we built garden beds
2019: Year 1
2020: Year 2
2021: Year 3's plan, how it went, and why and how we preserved food
2022: Year 4's plan, and how it went
2023: Year 5's plan, and how it went.
2024: Year 6's plan

Garden goals

My gardening goals this year were: (1) improve crop rotation; (2) keep better records of what grew where and how it grew; and (3) reduce garden work because of the baby.

It's unclear how crop rotation turned out… As described in my spring post, I did move crops to different garden beds and interspersed peas, beans, and clover among many of my other crops. It's a multi-year project so I'll update on how it's going next year—the tomatoes will be the real test.

Record-keeping is in progress. I have a decent planting map written down but I don't think I updated it after finishing all the planting. Still to do! I have photos of the garden throughout the season, so the main task is transferring that information to paper.

I did manage to reduce garden work! More on that below…

The first beds we put in, which I used for tomatoes for too many years in a row, and this year were full of flowers and other things! Plus, raspberries along the fence and our giant rhubarb plant.

Back beds on the first of July

Tomatoes

Tomatoes are the main reason I garden! Picking sun-warmed tomatoes off the vine for a summery afternoon snack reminds me of being a kid again.

This year, tomatoes took a while to get going. They felt slower than in previous years—and when I checked my photo records, they actually were slower, several weeks behind. As a result, we got a lower yield than anticipated (but still plenty).

I put in about 50 tomato plants along the back row of garden beds. This was fewer than last year, when I had at least 64 plants. I tried to plant more large tomatoes and fewer small ones, to minimize the amount of picking work that needed to be done regularly throughout the end of summer. More Amish paste, roma, black krim, yellow, costoluto… lots of nice fat tomatoes. I also had a dozen or so cherry, candy, black strawberry and spoon tomato plants. The ratio turned out well—I didn't have to spend an hour every other day picking tiny tomatoes this year, and there were still plenty of the smaller ones for snacks, salads, and hungry children wandering through the garden.

Last year, I grew around 500lbs of tomatoes. I canned a ton of them—puree and jam. I also dehydrated some, and of course, we ate plenty of tomato soup and tomato sauce during the summer.

This year, again, I weighed the tomatoes as they came into the house. We got approximately 300lbs. This is less than last year's crop, but given that I had fewer plants overall, it took longer for them to get going, and the soil wasn't as perfect (last year, it was a new 50/50 compost topsoil mix; this year, it had been used before by tomatoes), a reduced crop was to be expected.

I dehydrated as much as I could. I picked dehydrating over canning because it's the more interruptible activity, and with a highly inquisitive mobile 8 month old, I am interrupted often. I froze a bunch of the tiny spoon tomatoes in quart freezer bags for later use in rice or other dishes.

We also tried to use more for meals. Tomato soup and grilled cheese is a favorite! We especially liked making it with the big yellow tomatoes and candy tomatoes, which resulted in a very sweet creamy soup. I used a very simple (read: lazy) recipe: half a pot of tomatoes, a handful of basil leaves, some butter and olive oil, a container of meat broth (chicken or whatever I had on hand), salt, and some cream swirled in at the end.

We pulled the last green ones off the vine October 14-15. Our first frost was the evening of Oct 17. I was so glad I had opted for fewer cherry, candy, and spoon plants this year—clearing out the garden went faster! I also had great help. My 7-year-old did most of a 4x12 bed himself! The younger two kids mostly hung out and snacked on the tiny spoon tomatoes, which is helpful in its own way… About half our tomatoes came in during the late summer months; the other half we picked these days in mid October.

One of the first green tomatoes, in early July

Some of the first tomatoes and last raspberries, in late July

Dehydrating…

Spoon tomatoes!

One of the big yellow ones… over a pound!

Green ones, ready to ripen indoors

Squash, melon, cukes, peppers, etc

My squash, melon, and cucumber plants were slow to get going. I heard from a few other local gardeners that theirs were slower, too. In my case, the plants didn't do well early, something about the cold then the heat, but if I had replanted them or planted them later they may have done better. Oh well! It was a lazy gardening year.

The squash got powdery mildew at the end of September. This happens every year, probably because I have overhead watering. Maybe next year will be the year I add drip watering…

I got a couple good zucchini, and one pie pumpkin that we turned into pie. It was delicious. The peppers were slow, so we didn't get a lot.

Our tiny misshapen corn. Enough for one side dish though, and it made the kids happy!

Rhubarb

The rhubarb is one of my favorite plants, because it has been so low effort and so productive. It's enormous! We harvested over 20lbs of rhubarb from this plant this year, including one single stalk that was over a pound.

Flowers

Every year, I want more flowers, and this year was no exception.

I had many volunteer flowers from last year's calendula, snapdragons, pansies, and black-eyed susans. In fact, last year's calendula was incredibly successful at reseeding itself; I moved over 50 baby plants to other parts of the yard, and could have easily moved 50 more had I had time. I easily had at a 8x6 area full of calendula, spread between three beds and the pathways between them. I collected a lot of the flowers and dried them for tea and other future uses. With all these, plus a few of the front flower garden plants and my annual zinnias, I had plenty of flowers to cut for bouquets from late spring through fall.

Like in prior years, I shopped a local nursery's fall sale to add more perennial flowers to my front flower garden. I picked up a couple dozen plants for infill. The front is definitely improving. I had something flowering all season, from the first crocus buds on to the start of fall. But I did not always have as many plants blooming any given day as I would have liked.

One of the big challenges with that front flower garden is the soil. That stretch was, for a long time, a row of evergreen privacy trees. I doubt any work was put into the soil during that time. That section also tends to dry out in the hot summer sun. Mulching and additions of compost seem to have helped significantly over the past couple years, but it is still a work in progress.

Front flowers

Baby calendula that I dug up and moved.

Thyme!

A shady bed that I'm planting shade plants in.

Some of the front flowers in late June

Lavender

Some of the pansies and daisies interspersed in the rest of the garden

Calendula!

Roses out front

St John's Wort came up in my front yard, so I left it there

Backyard bed flowers in late June

Cosmos

Front flowers in July

Calendula for drying for tea

7-year-old checking on his sunflowers

Sunflower!

Pansies for candying

Sugaring…

Backyard flowers at the end of July

More flowers

Echinacea

Front flowers in September

Greens and herbs

My greens grew well! I love the bloody dock and arugula in salads as well as cooked. I dried some kale for winter use. I love that dock is a perennial. I may move one (or more?) of my dock plants to a new location out front; I think their pretty red-veined leaves and dark stalks of seeds would be a statement in the front flower garden.

I planted a bunch of herbs, as usual. The cilantro bolted early; the basil was slow but in the late summer we got a couple wonderful batches of pesto out of it. My oregano and mint supply is huge… I have two kinds of oregano, and we have lemon mint, spearmint, peppermint, and lemon balm. Chives continue to grow in their pot. I have several large thyme and sage plants as perennials in the front flower garden. We dried a bunch of herbs for later use.

I added echinacea this year, and let a couple mullein plants that popped up stick around, since they're a useful medicinal plant.

Sage and kale to dry

Baby asparagus. We haven't eaten any of these yet!

Chopping up echinacea to make stuff

Salad! Kale, mint, wood sorrel, dock, swiss chard…

Leeks and onions

My onions were tiny but tasty. Many were so small I could have saved them as seed onions for next year, but we decided to eat them all instead. Since this was my first attempt at growing onions from seed, I'm just happy that something grew and that we got enough tiny onions for an entire meal.

The leeks were a fun addition to a potato leek soup. Again, however, they were on the small side. Something to figure out next year! I'll definitely try growing these again, as they're a good addition to my crop rotation.

Peas and Beans

I felt like I planted far too many peas and beans, but when it came time to harvest and eat them, I felt like I didn't have enough! Lesson learned; keep planting peas and beans everywhere. I remembered to do a second planting of peas, and could have done more if I'd had more seeds sitting around. We mostly snacked on the peas and put them in salads; the green beans we cooked with garlic and basil.

Peas in early July

Some of the beans

Carrots

This was the first year my carrots actually did okay, in that I got more than one carrot. Garden-fresh carrots are so delicious; I wish we'd had more. I planted a lot of carrots but didn't get that many (enough for the occasional salad and a side dish or two). I suspect the small birds living in my yard have been eating the seeds. Again, something to figure out and improve next year.

Carrots

Berries and fruit

I think we finally have enough raspberries! By the end of raspberry season, the kids were no longer eating every berry they found and I had enough to add to bowls of vanilla ice cream, granola and yogurt breakfasts, and fermented lemonade soda.

Our blueberry bushes did not produce a ton of berries this year. Of the three liberty bushes out front, one gave us berries but the other two did not. The backyard bushes (one patriot, one bluecrop) might get too much shade… I'm wondering if I should dig them up and move them somewhere sunnier. A project for the spring…

We also got about 60lbs of plums off our green gage plum tree—twice as many as last year! Our bees did a good job, I guess! I dehydrated a bunch and made plum sauce.

One of our bees pollinating the raspberries

Plums!

So many plums…

My grandma's garden

We had the opportunity to plant a few things in my grandma's garden, about a 45-minute drive north of us. Unfortunately, we didn't go out to the beach near her as often this summer (opting for beaches closer to home, since the baby was frequently grumpy in the car), so we neglected that garden. Oops! I had known going in that I wouldn't check on it every week, so we had opted to plant predominantly squash and potatoes, which don't need as much effort week to week. I intended to harvest them in late September, given that frosts start earlier up there, but the kids got colds, so we had to delay.

The garden area

Ready for planting

With baby plants and potatoes in!

Plans for next year

I made a list last year of all my future garden plans, and because of the reduced effort that I put into the yard and garden this year, most of those things are still on my future list! For instance, I still want a greenhouse. It would be especially nice for seed starting in the late winter and early spring. I have a south-facing spot in mind in the yard, but it's a big project that can only be done when the soil isn't frozen… maybe next spring or fall.

I would also still like a drip watering system, which might help especially in the later season September, October preventing powdery mildew, which shows up everywhere. We also didn't get the grape trellis or grapes in along the fence by the new garden beds, so that's a spring project, too. I have a spot in mind for a few blueberry and lingonberry bushes; I want ot put in more bulbs and other flowers; there's always more!

Next year, I'll also be continuing my crop rotation project. I've had tomatoes in the newer garden beds for two years. That means the beds on the other side of the yard have had a two year break from tomatoes. It might be time to move some of the tomatoes back, and give some of the newer beds a rest. Given how many tomatoes I want to grow and where my trellises are, I'm limited in how I can rotate. But we found a few more crops we like that we can add to the rotation (such as onions and leeks), so we'll keep at it.

As we move into winter, there is more yard preparation to do. I'm collecting fallen leaves to mulch the garden beds; my seven-year-old wants to collect crabapples for jelly; we're getting ready for snow…

Beekeeping Year 2 Recap: Splitting Hives, Harvesting Honey, Readying for Winter

2024-10-29T12:00:00Z

There's nothing quite like spreading a gleaming spoonful of honey and comb, just scooped from the hive, onto a slice of fresh, warm bread. Our kids don't know how good they have it!

Mmmm….

Our bees were busy this year! This was our second year as beekeepers. Last I updated in May, Hive #4 was strong coming out of winter. Hive #3 was dead, and we had just split Hive #4 to restart that one. Hives #1 and #2 were on a slow decline so we had been attempting to split Hive #4 again to restart them as well.

The Hive #3 split was successful! We found a new queen in June; she was soon laying eggs and the hive was buzzing away. Hive #3 and Hive #4 stayed strong all summer and produced a great deal of delicious honey—more on that below.

The splits into Hives #1 and #2 were not successful. Though we made several attempts in early summer, neither hive really got off the ground, though they did requeen. Neither #1 nor #2 produced honey for us this year; neither grew strong enough to make it through winter. That's disappointing, but from what we've heard from other beekeepers, is on par for our area. Some years are great. Some are not.

We put screened bottom boards in all the hives this year for the summer to help with air flow and mite control. When the bees groom themselves, the mites fall off. If they fall all the way out of the hive through the screened bottom onto the ground, they're not likely to make it back in. With a solid board, however, they're likely to climb right back up onto the bees. We tried a powdered sugar treatment to help with mite control, too: dump powdered sugar at the top of the hive, it gets on the bees, they are triggered to groom themselves, more mites get cleaned out. It's unclear how well it worked since we didn't have a control hive to test against… fortunately, this beekeeper has written in detail about the process and effectiveness.

Checking hives…

Fully capped and ready for extraction!

Honey Harvest

We harvested honey from Hives #3 and #4 in early September—17 frames from Hive 3 and 17 frames from Hive 4. This is more honey than we took from the hives last year!

To improve the process this year, we made an uncapping tank, like this, with a queen excluder in a plastic bin.

After much use!

Uncapped and ready to spin!

We also upgraded our extractor to a motorized stainless steel extractor. The hand drill-powered 5-gal bucket extractor worked okay last year, but it wasn't meant for a larger backyard operation.

Some friends brought their kids over to see the process. We had a good day of it and extracted about 10 gallons of honey.

Checking frames

Collecting frames to extract.

Our new extractor holds up to 8 frames!

Honey pours from the extractor

From the extractor through the strainer…

Honey with chunks of comb!

Liquid gold!

This is about ten gallons.

The Case of the Missing Bees

When we checked on the bees later in the fall, we discovered that Hives #1 and #2 were completely dead and both Hives #3 and #4 had mysteriously absconded. It's a bummer! We thought we would be heading into winter with two strong hives. We have no clue what happened, and there's no way to know. One week the bees were there; we harvested honey; then when we next checked in, no bees. Bees may leave for all kinds of reasons—mites, disease, overcrowding, lack of forage, invasion by beetles or ants or wasps, among other reasons.

We're disappointed. But, so it goes up here. One beekeeper we've talked to, who has 12 hives, sometimes has 2 survive a winter, and sometimes 10. Sometimes it's a good honey year; sometimes not. He also told us that since this was Hive #4's second year, it would probably be a good idea to requeen that hive next spring anyway, since the queens do get less productive with age.

Anyway, since we didn't have any bees who needed the remaining honey stores in the hives, we decided to harvest the remainder. We got another three gallons, bringing us up to 13 gallons total.

Plans for next year

In the spring, we will get new nucs to restart all the hives. It won't quite be like starting from scratch, however, because over the past two years, our bees built out the wax on a lot of frames in a lot of supers. We can give the new bees all these frames, which will be a big head start, since they won't have to make that much wax.

It's always an adventure.

4 Years Blogging: Why write?

2024-10-15T12:00:00Z

This is post #162 for me! Not a particularly special number, except that it marks 4 years writing at the Owl.

How does writing fit into my life?

I read a book earlier this year about the challenges of writing memoir, Writing Hard Stories by Melanie Brooks. Brooks wrote that the act of writing our stories down, whether or not anyone ultimately reads them, can be helpful for us, to integrate our experiences into ourselves, to make sense of what has happened in our lives and our place in the world.

"Writing is a way to organize your life, give it a frame, give it a structure, so that you can really see what it was that happened. —Melanie Brooks, Writing Hard Stories

Blogging often is like writing memoir. Writing about life, stuff that has happened, stuff I'm learning about—it forces me to organize my thoughts into a coherent story. You give yourself a narrative arc. You give it all meaning. I've written previously about how blogging is a way of putting thoughts into words, taking a first stab at ideas, reflecting, and synthesizing. Reflection is part of learning.

This year, I've blogged less than in the two years prior, but I've also been working on several other writing projects, on and off. More off lately—more on that in a minute. But every time I take a morning to write, I feel more me. I'm always happy to get back to the keyboard.

Sometimes, I feel bad that I'm neglecting other projects or activities to take the time to write… but then I remind myself that no, writing is good for me. No matter what your hobby—art, writing, crafts, baking, sports, exercise, etc—you ought to have a thing you do for you. Especially mothers, especially mothers who predominantly stay home with their children, especially homeschooling mothers, since they can too easily get all wrapped up in their kids' education and activities, and forget about their own interests. Writing is one of my things.

As one mother interviewed in Catherine Pakaluk's book Hannah's Children described, you are more yourself when you do your things. Your kids learn that those things are part of who you are. You should take the time for your things. And so I keep writing.

That writing journal…

Earlier this year, I tried out the idea of a writing journal. As it happens, that idea went nowhere—oops! I think the problem was twofold. First, I started in the spring—late March. But spring is when my indoor projects (like writing!) wind down, and outdoor activities ramp up. Here in Idaho, the warmer months are spent gardening, at beaches and parks, hiking, camping, adventuring. Time spent on reading, writing, crafts and art wanes. So, shortly after starting that writing journal, I was not actively working on leveling up my writing skills. I was just trying to get words in for the blog and my book projects. Honestly, in the mix of things, I actually forgot I had a writing journal.

The second problem was that I'd set it up as a digital journal. I'd done that intentionally so I could record from my phone, since I do most of my first drafts from my phone, but I think something is lost doing that. I need to switch to paper.

Why share all this? Usually my posts share the success stories (like writing 50,000 words). It's also important to share the struggles! The struggles are where we learn the most.

(Read: My Experience Writing Morning Pages as a Parent with Young Children)

How to Homeschool in the Early Years: Preschool and Kindergarten, Ages 0-7

2024-10-01T12:00:00Z

Thinking about homeschooling? Already started, but feeling overwhelmed? Maybe you're wondering: How do I start? What curriculum should I use? Does homeschooling always require top notch organization and planning skills? How much do I have to schedule in?

Here's the good news: When your kids are young, homeschooling can actually be really easy and incredibly fun. I'm talking ages 0 through 7, ish, depending on your individual kids, your style and temperament, and your level of comfort with letting conventional schooling not be your guide to how education ought to work.

I was homeschooled from kindergarten on and I'm homeschooling my own kids. My oldest is almost eight. Here are seven principles for Homeschooling in the Early Years!

1. Protect playtime—don't dive into academics too early

The job of young children is to play! Playing is how they learn!

(Watch my TEDx talk: Kids Can't Be Taught But They Love to Learn and read about the process of preparing it!)

Reserve more time for playing than you might initially be inclined to reserve. If you attended a conventional public or private school, preschool, or daycare, or if you're pulling your kids out to start homeschooling, you may be thinking you need a lot of structure, activities, curricula, and maybe even some worksheets. You don't. Not initially!

Independent free play time is where children learn. They use play to internalize information, to assimilate ideas, to try out concepts, to work through new information, to integrate everything they're encountering in the world into their existing mental models, and to generally better understand the world. For young kids, playing is learning.

Spend some time quietly eavesdropping on your kids at play. You might catch them incorporating aspects of daily life, books you've read, and things you've talked about into their play. For example, when we were reading aloud Lord of the Rings last winter, I would find my kids fighting orcs, escaping black riders, battling giant spiders in dark tunnels, feeling earthquakes as the tower of Barad-dur collapsed… They integrated the story into their play. After a day at a farm apple picking, their teddy bears live in an orchard. After we went camping as a family, the kids packed up their toys and set off for a camping trip in the backyard. And so on.

Finland doesn't require kids to start formal schooling until age 7—including formally learning to read!

But what about academics? Reading? Math? We learned basic math through board games. We read a lot, talked about letters, and played the Duolingo reading app for phonics practice. You don't need to do much formal stuff at these ages, unless your kid happens to enjoy it. Some kids do! Some kids don't! I know families who keep a couple books of letter tracing, simple math problems, and that sort of early work around because their kids genuinely enjoy them. But don't expect or force your child to enjoy them, because not all children do. If you do want to do some formal stuff, try to keep it in bite-size chunks and give plenty of movement and playtime before and after. Follow your child's lead. When they're ready, do it. If they don't seem ready, don't do it yet. Children aren't developmentally identical.

Children grow up fast. Enjoy the playtime years.

Curious about what else we've done for learning? Read about our school years:

2023-2024: Our plan, and how it went

2022-2023: Our Plan, and how it went

2021-2022: Our plan, and how it went

Rainy day at the farm means big puddles!

2. Read to learn

One of the best ways to give children fodder for play is to read. Read picture books, read short fiction aloud, read non-fiction, page through encyclopedias about nature or trucks or whatever your kid likes, read about history, read biographies, and more. We always read in the evening, and we read other times too, depending on the day and what else is going on.

Reading books covers many academics: social studies, literature, history, etc. You can easily incorporate geography: we keep a globe by the couch where we do most of our reading. Whenever a book mentions a place, we find it on the globe.

Then, if you feel like it, you come up with extra stuff based on the topics in the books: relevant art or craft projects, a field trip to a museum, or even look up stuff online (videos, virtual museum tours, and so on). Or just read the books. It's up to you—play to your strengths! It's okay to emphasize the stuff that interests you. I personally like arts and crafts, so we often do that sort of thing.

Right now, for instance, with my 7-year-old, I'm reading a book about art history. Every time we learn about a new art technique (mosaic, carving stone, pottery, etc), he lights up: "I think it would be fun to learn to carve stone!" I'm not sure yet how we'll manage to learn every different technique (we probably won't), but it is so fun to see him inspired by what we've been reading. For every chapter, the book has a couple pictures of relevant art. We look up each artist mentioned, browse more work they've done, and view more art of that style. A lot of museums and archeological sites have good online portals for viewing the great works! Sometimes, we'll follow up with an art project of our own.

This summer, I learned that there is a million-year-old limestone cave about a 2-hour drive from us. It's not a huge cave, but even 2000 feet of cave is big when you've never seen one before! I checked out a bunch of books from the library about caves and rocks, we read them all, then we went and toured the cave. We have plans now to print out photos we took of the cave and the kids in the cave, write down our story about our adventure, and assemble it into a little book.

Reading can work well as a "break" activity; my kids will just about always sit for a book and take a rest from other activities.

3. Teach values and character

When children are young, it's a great time to fill them with good values. You can explicitly talk about virtues and values, and you can read stories with characters who exemplify the virtues you value. Here are a couple of the books we have been enjoying lately. The books about knights are especially popular with my sons:

The Children's Book of Virtues edited by William J. Bennett
The Children's Book of Home and Family edited by William J. Bennett
Young Lancelot by San Souci
Young Arthur by San Souci
In the Time of Knights by Shelley Tanaka and Greg Ruhl
King Arthur: The Sword in the Stone by Hudson Talbott
King Aruther and the Round Table by Hudson Talbott
Saint George and the Dragon by Margaret Hodges
The Crystal Mountain by Ruth Sanderson
The Squire and the Scroll by Jennie Bishop

(I found many of these books recommended in the parenting book Knights in Training by Heather Haupt.)

Now is also the time to develop good habits: daily hygiene, helping around the house and yard, learning what foods are energizing and nutritious, developing independence and responsibility. Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff had useful advice on some of this (read my review).

4. Don't be too busy

Sometimes I see families with activities scheduled every day of the week—sometimes, multiple activities a day. Plus typical life errands, grocery shopping, etc? They're out of the house on the move every single day! Who can keep up?

Give yourself space to live life. As Michaeleen Doucleff wrote in Hunt, Gather, Parent (read my review), you don't need to entertain your kids all day. They are capable of finding things to occupy them. Boredom is good. Kim Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting (read my review, advocates for a quieter approach to life, too.

Kids need space to process their experiences, wind down, play, recoup, reset. Don't you? After a busy out-of-the-house social day, I like to schedule a quieter day. If we're going to have a busy afternoon and evening, I like us to have a slower morning. Find a balance that works for you.

5. Add rhythms to daily life

Scheduling is assigning times and durations to activities. Rhythms are general patterns and habits we follow. If you're a scheduler, schedule away! My mom was a scheduler when homeschooling my sisters and I. She had binders with lesson lists and weekly assignments; we started school at 8am every weekday, and always started with math. I'm less of a scheduler, but I do like rhythms: daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms.

Some people like rhythms for their school day, starting with morning baskets or a beautiful thing a day. Some families institute daily quiet time, often midday, often when a younger sibling is napping. If the older kids get in the habit of having quiet time, you get daily quiet time! Some families have habits like a 10 minute tidy or 4 o'clock tidy to keep the house from becoming a disaster zone.

Weekly, I like having some activities that are consistently on certain days of the week. For instance, our forest school group meets every Friday. Mass is on Sundays. That way, as the kids learn to read a calendar, they come to know what to expect from any given week.

Seasonally, we like to do more outside activities in the warmer weather, and more indoor stuff, crafts, and reading aloud in the cooler weather. That isn't to say that we don't do crafts in summer or don't go outside in the winter, but by November, the days of spending every waking hour in the grass or mud are gone. We have other seasonal activities: the kids know we go blueberry picking in July and apple picking and fall. Beach days in summer, sledding in the winter.

Find rhythms that work for you and your family. Recognize that rhythms will change with stages of life, too.

6. Find community

You can't homeschool alone. Your kids need friends and you need friends. How you set that up can vary widely. Some families bounce around between different coops, groups, and activities every year. Some stick with the same things for years on end. Some choose to do more academic activities together in more formal co-ops and groups, leaning on each others' strengths to teach or lead different subjects. Some like their regular playgroups and do more academic work at home by themselves.

As a kid, I remember doing all sorts of things. Friday park days, Wednesday history group and art group, a theater group, and others. We did a lot of activities consistently with the same kids from an early age on up, through high school years.

I'm trying to be consistent with my kids, too. We have been in our forest school group for over four years now. We are on our third year of a Sudbury-style co-op at a farm. We see the same families from these groups and our wider church community at events, weekend BBQs, parties, park days, and playdates. And so on. We may add more regular "academic" activities or groups as time goes on, too.

Where do you find community? In my area, most homeschool activities are coordinated through Facebook groups. There are groups for different co-ops, playgroups, meetups around different interests, curriculum swaps, and more. How do people in your area coordinate? Look for groups online—maybe they're on Facebook, maybe some other social platform. Go to the park during the day when school is in and talk to whoever you see there—chances are, they're homeschoolers. Ask any homeschoolers you meet about the other activities they do and how they found out about those activities. This can clue you in to what's common in your area.

7. You don't have to do the same thing every year

Every year is a new year. You can reevaluate. You can add or subtract activities. You can switch curriculum or ditch curriculum or try curriculum. You can try a new co-op or quit a group. Iterate to improve..

Sure, sometimes you feel you have to commit because you have to pay for the subscription or sign up for the year or buy the whole curriculum. But even then, if whatever you're doing isn't working, remember the sunk costs fallacy and move on.

Make yourself happy, too. Play to your strengths. Don't stress so much about what you're not doing. If you're not a crafter, don't do crafts. (Or find a co-op or group where someone else leads them!) Homeschooling won't look the same for everyone—and that's the beauty of it!

So what activities count as homeschooling?

Here are some ideas for activities you can do that are homeschooling:

Free play
Pretend play
Playing outside
Board games
Reading books
Audiobooks
Podcasts
Videos about how things work (factories, chainsaws, horseback riding, whatever!)
Library visits
Grocery stores
Helping around the house (home ec? Life skills?)
Cooking with you
Art projects of all kinds: drawing, coloring, painting, finger painting, play dough (basic sculpture!), outside chalk drawing, cutting and gluing paper crafts, etc
Outings: zoos, parks, vacations, museums, art shows, music in the park, hiking, beaches, etc

A lot of these may not sound like typical school activities. But when children are young, they need playtime and experiences more than they need to sit still and listen. Playing is how children learn.

Need ideas for your own homeschooling?

Read these book reviews and education posts:

Book Review: Homeschooling with Gentleness by Suzie Andres

How to Afford Homeschooling and Other Alternative Education on a Budget

So you want to write and publish a book?

2024-09-17T12:00:00Z

byJennifer Barr, Jacqueline Kory-Westlund, Alex Lancaster, Emily Monosson and Bryan Quoc Le

This post originally appeared on the Ronin Institute Blog on April 7, 2023

Questions, answers and other thoughts from Ronin Research Scholars and writers

In January 2023, the Ronin Institute hosted a Research Skills 101 workshop for prospective authors curious about how to come up with a book idea, write a proposal and find a publisher. The Ronin Institute community is rich with scholars who have published in different disciplines. This workshop included six authors who had published books on topics from food science to coding and whose publishers included academic presses, self-publishers, and commercial trade publishers.

(Read: Why write a book? How do you meet deadlines? And other answers…)

Our panel included authors Jennifer Barr: To Clean Mother India: Sanitation, Caste, and NGOs during the Clean India Mission (Routledge 2023); Jaqueline Kory-Westlund: Grad School Life: Surviving and Thriving Beyond Coursework and Research” (Columbia University Press 2024); Alex Lancaster and Gordon Webster: Python for the Life Sciences (Apress 2019); Bryan Quoc Le: 150 Food Science Questions Answered (Rockridge Press, 2020); Emily Monosson: Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic (Norton, 2023) and Arika Virapongse who helped run the panel. Below is an expanded summary of the panel’s Q&A.

Most people do not make a lot of money as a book author. Most authors write because they cannot NOT write—because they have a message to share—not because they want to get rich.

(Read: How Do You Write and Publish a Non-fiction Book?)

How do you self-publish?

As there is a lot of interest around self-publishing, during the panel discussion we fielded many questions about this: who owns ISBNs, the pros and cons of self-publishing on Amazon, experiences using print-on-demand companies etc. One option, especially for authors who are working on technical books (such as programming or technology) is Leanpub, which focuses on e-Books. At the time that one of the authors on the panel published with them, Leanpub shared 80% of royalties with authors (it may be different by the time this post is published). They also handled all of the payment with the readers as well as the delivery of royalty payments to the authors. There are also many print-on-demand services, and one panel author used Blurb.com to good effect (there is also lulu.com).

Copyright exists immediately upon creation of a work – in the United States, at least, there is no longer a need to “register” a copyrighted work for it to be covered by copyright. In most self-publishing scenarios, the author retains copyright and creates camera-ready versions (e.g. PDF, or other e-book formats like .epub or .mobi) to the self-publishing platform (there also exist open-source solutions that allow you to generate multiple formats from a single source document, such as Calibre). Some platforms have internal tools that allow you to write your book in their markup language, and their production systems will generate those multiple formats for you. But beware of platforms or tools that require you to sign an exclusive contract or that require you to assign copyright to the publisher. It’s a good idea to scrutinize any book contracts carefully, potentially even getting a lawyer to review them.

If you would like your book to be featured in a library, some panel authors were able to do this by donating a book, however, some libraries may not accept self-published books. Most libraries also care about the quality of the printed version of your book, such as having a high-quality cover and pages. One benefit of self-publishing is that you can typically fix mistakes in the text. As the author, you can also print books on demand and set your own retail price–for example, if you want to give your book to participants in a workshop.

Helpful links:

Self-publishing platform: Leanpub
Print on-demand platform: Blurb
Information on how to obtain ISBNs: ISBN US
Open-source self-publishing software: Calibre

Do you need an agent to publish a book?

For some kinds of publishers, it helps to have a literary agent i.e. individuals whose business it is to sell books to publishers. Namely, if you want to publish with a large trade publisher, you almost always need an agent. Academic presses happily take submissions from authors without agents, but you may get a better deal such as a bigger advance or better royalties if you have professional representation. An agent can also read the contract and ensure that it is the best deal for you (and them) rather than just for the publisher. If you do not have an agent, it may be good to have someone you trust who has experience with publishing contracts read over that contract. While many contracts are “standard” in terms of royalties and responsibilities of the author and of the publishing company, it can be good to have a legal expert confirm that! And even if a contract or clause is “standard”, “ it may not be what you want – so good to beware.

How do you find an agent?

Look at other similar books and see who is acknowledged, or search online sites where agents seeking clients are listed. In directories or on their own sites, the agents will list the kinds of books that are of interest to them. Acquiring an agent can take many many tries, but don’t give up! Rejection often means just a bad match between a topic and an agent’s interest; it doesn’t necessarily mean that your idea or your book are not worth publishing.

Helpful links:

Finding agents on Publishers Marketplace

How do you write a book proposal?

Most non-fiction books are sold based on the proposal you write. Publishers use the proposal to decide whether or not they want to publish your book. For fiction books, on the other hand, as well as most memoirs and creative non-fictions, publishers generally require a complete manuscript draft. The proposal explains what your book is and why a publisher would want to publish it. There are lots of books and websites out there explaining how to write one. You can also ask someone you know if they are open to sharing a successful book proposal with you as a model. Most publishers will also have relatively specific requirements for the proposal, so make sure you meet all of them.

A fairly common outline for a nonfiction proposal to a trade publisher consists of: title; pitch; overview; who you are and why you should write this book; competing books and how well they have sold; table of contents; and the first or second chapter. The title is often the first thing an agent or publisher will see and sometimes just having a title can help frame the book for both you and your agent or publisher or reader. So it can be helpful to take some time and come up with a powerful title. (That said, once a book is sold, the publisher may work with you to create an alternative title that they feel will be better for marketing.)

How do you find a topic?

Writing a book is a long and sometimes arduous process. Pick a topic that you would be happy engaging with for at least three years. Look at your scholarly interests and your hobbies: what could you imagine thinking deeply and writing in depth about? If you have a topic you think is interesting, useful, or that you are passionate about, a good first step is to look at competing books. What else is already out there? When was it published? Are there two or twenty similar books? Even when there are seemingly similar books – yours will be different! If so, how different? What do you have to add to the field or discussion or topic? Publishers and agents will want to see this information to better understand your book’s potential market and audience. When there are a few good books, that can mean the topic is of interest and there may be room for more.

Do you make money from your books?

Most people do not make a lot of money as a book author. Most authors write because they cannot not write—because they have a message to share—not because they want to get rich. How much money you make depends on where and how your book is published. Self-publishing provides a greater return per book sold, such as 30% or more of the purchase price. Traditionally published books have a typical royalty rate of 10-15% for hardcover books and 7.5-10% for trade paperbacks. Audiobooks can pay 25% of net and ebooks around 35%. If you are paid an “advance”(i.e. your “advance” is royalties you make from selling the book paid to you in advance of selling those copies) by the publisher, then you need to earn back the advance before you see any of the royalty money. Usually even if you do not earn back the advance,, you do not have to pay it back! How big is an “advance”? Amongst the panelists, the “advances” from academic or trade publishers ranged from $2-20K. Writing books is generally not a way to make a living. Instead, you might want to think about how you can leverage your book to serve your other income-generating purposes, such as being seen as an expert to help bolster your consulting business, bring you more clients, or get you your next job or promotion.

Your publisher or agent may also be able to market and sell you books to foreign publishers or to an audiobook publisher, which might provide some additional income. But again, it’s not really enough to live on unless you’ve got a blockbuster!

(Read: What Does It Mean To Be A Scholar?)

How do you market your book?

It helps to have some good reviews. You can ask friends, family and colleagues who might read your book to post reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and other sites to get the word out. You might also ask someone in the field to review your book and publish it. Publishers will sometimes provide an advanced reviewer’s copy of your book in digital format so that you can easily offer a free version for your reviewers to read (and don’t forget to thank them in the acknowledgements!). If you have a publisher, they may also help market the book to some extent, arranging for interviews for you to do or sending out blurbs and catalogs that include your book to libraries and booksellers. But even if they do, you, the author, still have to do quite a bit of the work from the review to giving local book talks (or book launches) to placing your book in bookstores if that is where they are most likely to be sold. Unless the book becomes a great seller, most of your marketing is most likely to happen in a burst – at its release, and then it’s up to you to keep it going.

What are the pros and cons of a big trade publisher vs academic vs. indie?

Sometimes the smaller the publisher, the more attention you will get and the longer your book might “live” or be kept in print. Larger publishers may have an edge on the initial marketing, but there are plenty of books at smaller presses that have received a lot of attention – so it really comes down to Topic, Timing, Writing and Marketing by the publisher or by you.

What are the cons of distributing or using Amazon as a publisher?

If you are merely using Amazon as a storefront, rather than as a publisher i.e., “here’s a file of my book, sell it”, then you’re less entangled with Amazon (the corporation) and you can sell elsewhere too. But if you use Amazon for certain publishing services, then, depending on the specific service you use, it is possible that you may only be able to sell on Amazon and may miss some of your potential market. As a publisher, Amazon can be similar to commercial publishers.

Once you write, who reviews your work?

Finding people to read drafts of your book can be tough. The best reviewers are those who have some expertise/interest in the topic that you are writing about. Keep in mind though, reviewing a book takes time. Asking friends and family might elicit simple encouragement (“the book is great!”), but that’s not necessarily constructive (or, it may be just what you need). You could also try offering some incentives like a gift certificate for a book or leaning on your professional academic community who often enjoy reading the latest edge in their area of expertise. Asking strangers or people you don’t know well can be hard. Also, you want to trust that a reviewer will offer helpful critique and in a way that doesn’t discourage you. One option is if you interview or review other people for your book (and quote them or paraphrase or write about their work), then you can ask them to review that particular section or chapter. They have a vested interest in what you have written and may be more inclined to read.

If you are taking an academic publishing route, a formal peer review is likely to be a part of the publication process. Your publisher may ask you for potential names of people qualified to review your manuscript; in that case, supply the names and contact information for people in your network or scholars you admire. However, ultimately, the publisher is the one who will be selecting your peer reviewers. Try to clarify with your book editor the role of the peer review at manuscript submission: will a bad review make them reject the manuscript? When peer review is at its best, it is an invaluable way to learn from people in your field and improve your manuscript.

If you wrote and published a book again, what would you change?

Emily said she would take more time on her books and think about their structure and scope differently–in particular, how she gathers information, covers topics, and integrates them to tell a story instead of focusing on, “got to get this out!” She would also hire a fact-checker and manage the sources of information (papers, interviews, etc.) in a more organized manner (at least, that would be the goal!)

Other advice

Some publishers will want you to have a “platform,” which functionally means an audience you’ve already built who would be interested in your book. You can get this through a blog, publishing academic papers or mainstream articles, or having social media followers, for example. But do not be scared off by not having one! Many books are published by authors with little or no previous platform. Just give it a try.

Yet more helpful links:

General information about writing: The Open Notebook (Much of this is free, they also published a book.)
For science writers, the National Association for Science Writers is a good network: National Association of Science Writers (May need to join.)
For science and environment, management, policy etc the Society of Environmental Journalists Society of Environmental Journalists (May need to join.)
For agents and other information: Writer’s Digest: Writer’s Digest Top Agent Websites 2020 (May need to subscribe for a month or two as long as you need.)
For good general information: Publishers Marketplace (May need to subscribe.)
Or you can try a consultant and teacher like Susan Shapiro
A blog with more information on this panel by Jacqueline Kory-Westlund

We are happy to answer questions if you want to send them in the comments!

Like this post? You'll find even more detailed advice about writing, managing grad school and life, and more in my new book, Grad School Life: Surviving and Thriving Beyond Coursework and Research. Order it today!

How Can We Fix the Academic System For Women?

2024-09-03T12:00:00Z

While I was in full-time academia as a grad student, September meant the switch from summer work (research studies, writing papers, writing code for robots) to semester work—more research studies, more writing papers, more code, and also classes, group projects, paper reading groups, meetings, and other campus clubs and events.

In my fourth year at MIT, September also marked the transition from second trimester to third, and a ramping up of preparation for the biggest change in my life. I had my first child in grad school. Although I did get a couple questions like, "Why aren't you waiting until you have tenure?", parents make up at least 10% of the grad student population.

(Read more about my journey having children in grad school, and beyond)

With the start of the academic year, I've been reflecting on work I do now and how my life in September is radically different than it used to be—even three years ago! I'm also thinking about balance in academic life, because my book Grad School Life: Surviving and Thriving Beyond Coursework and Research came out a few months ago.

My firstborn, in the lab looking up at some of our robots.

Systemic Problems: Academia is Failing Women

Academia has an ingrained, usually implicit assumption that either you have no family (like the monks who built the ivory towers of yore) or your family comes second (which has been fine for most men, since women traditionally did the child-bearing and child-rearing). These assumptions often place women in a difficult position—especially women with families.

For example, there's the "baby penalty": Men with kids are 35% more likely to get tenure than women with kids. Having kids changes or ends women's careers more often than men's. Women are outnumbered at high academic ranks, despite their often higher levels of productivity. Part of that is due to the leaky pipeline: Although women make up more than half of the graduate student population, they're also twice as likely to leave academia after having kids—around 43% of women leave, compared to only 19% of men. Only 44% of tenured women have kids, while 70% of tenured men do.

All these statistics are well-known. They're increasingly discussed alongside calls to action, one of the most common being a call for better parental support policies, such as paid family leave. But these statistics also reflect a truth about reality: that "having it all" is a myth.

What usually falls off the radar is opportunity cost. You can "have it all" only at the expense of something. (And no, we can't just sacrifice sleep.) Time is finite. It is literally true that doing some things means not doing other things. Taking weeks, months, or years to give birth, care for an infant and/or small children, and recover physically and mentally can put women behind on the career ladder. Time spent with family is not time spent chasing grant money. On the flip side, long days in the lab and the library, long nights drafting papers before deadlines, and traveling for conferences and talks will all cut into time with your family. Academics often work 60+ hour weeks (though there is some debate and efforts to quantitatively verify that number).

The more women try to have it all, the more we fall behind. And that's because of the system.

(Read: How Women Scholars Manage Stress, Goals, and Self-Care—And How You Can, Too!)

Why should we fix the academic system?

The statistics I cited above show that the current academic system isn't working for a lot of women. It didn't work for me. It's time to change the system to better suit women, rather than assuming that women can and should mold themselves into the existing structures.

We should want to fix the system because diversity in academia is valuable. Women will ask different questions than men. They will pursue different research interests and interrogate research questions in different ways. Diversity leads to innovation. There's plenty of research on this, and also common sense: on average, women and men are interested in different things. People who are interested in different things will study different things.

Second, many women want one or more kids. Like me! When I started grad school, I didn't know for certain that I'd have kids during school, but I was sure I wanted them. Academia will not be fixed by assuming that women will choose to forgo or postpone families. There's a biological reality to when you can have kids and the fact that most people desire them (Surprise: Children are desirable! They're fun! They're the future of the human race!) Grad students are, on average, 33 years old, and women's fertility peaks before that. I know many academic women who have struggled with infertility. I also know women who have had several children into their 40's.

Third, women with careers who want to have kids will have kids sometime during their careers. There's no other time to have them. Some people, like the ones questioning my decision to have kids while still a student, probably think waiting is less stressful. I doubt being an early career researcher is less stressful than being a grad student. There's no ideal time to go on maternity leave. Or, glass half full: there's no bad time! Solutions I'm looking for will enable women to raise their children while continuing to build their research careers, if that's what they want to do.

(Read: Productivity and Balance as a Parent: Challenges, Ideals, and Strategies)

What kinds of systemic solutions do we need?

Women face different challenges in parenthood than men. Being a new mother who just gave birth is very different from being a new father who didn't (just ask a new mother). The physical recovery alone is tremendous. There's a reason why men use their extra time during parental leave to write more papers and get ahead, while women mostly just… recover. Sleep, eat, rest, feed the baby, snuggle the baby. These differences need to be taken into account in any potential solutions.

I've seen many calls for improved parental leave policies. While that would be great, a lot of mothers would rather have the option for part-time, remote, or other more flexible work arrangements than just the straightforward full-time-off then full-time-back. The wage gaps are mostly driven by a quest for flexibility rather than sexism. The changes we need should not try to make women's lives more like men's lives, such as attempting to hide all evidence of baby-making away in three-months paid leave, because most women don't want that. Rather, we need to adapt the entire system to better align with the kind of lives women want to lead.

At the core, the issue isn't about women working while having kids. It's a broader issue: a devaluing of motherhood. A devaluing of the work of caring for and raising children (mentioned here), a devaluing of the contributions mothers make to society, whether in the home or out of it. Staying home is associated with a lack of status. Any changes to the academic system must acknowledge all this. I have a lot to say on this topic that you'll be seeing in future posts. Below, my ideas are actionable, but without a change to culture at large regarding how motherhood is perceived, these measures can only go so far.

(Read: What Does It Mean To Be A Scholar?)

Change Research Culture

One place to start is with the workaholic research culture. For example, Lisa Barrett recently wrote about the problems with the publication arms race—the idea that to succeed in academia (specifically for her, in psychology), you need to churn out 5-10+ papers a year, each containing reports of multiple experimental studies, all entailing enormous amounts of work and funding. She suggested some ways to start changing the culture:

"Each of us, the next time we’re on a search or tenure-and-promotion committee, can commit to reading applicants papers instead of counting them. Each of us, when sitting down to write the next manuscript, or even better, to design the next set of experiments, can ask: Will this research contribute something of substance?"

Quality work doesn't have to be done (and perhaps shouldn't, and can't, be done) really fast to be quality. Changing our expectations from quantity to quality would mean that scholars who opt to work fewer hours (say, 40 hours a week instead of 60, or part-time instead of full-time), and as such produce fewer publications, would still be seen to be contributing meaningfully to their fields. Women can be committed to their scholarly work while also being committed to their families.

We need to normalize and promote motherhood in academia. For example, Sarah A. Birken and Jessica L. Borelli suggested in the Chronicle in 2015 that women ought to stop doing "women's work" (such as teaching and service) unless it's what they love to do; stop promoting workaholism and instead lift up balance; and stop hiding the realities of motherhood, such as pumping milk or picking up the kids. Normalize taking time off for family. While most institutions let women stop the tenure clock and take a reduced teaching load when having a baby, some women feel like they can't take advantage of such policies right now. We could also add provisions to grants and fellowships that allow the use of some funds for childcare or other household help, so that women could spend less time on chores and more quality time with their kids and on their work.

(Read: Is Going to Graduate School Worth It?)

Sometimes this is what working with a baby looks like!

Create Part-Time Opportunities

Given the desire of many parents for flexibility, let's create more part-time research opportunities. A few part-time positions exist now (including a cool dual-career couple who share one full-time faculty position), with generally positive results.

Funding agencies should create more grants that pay out less money over longer timelines for part-time research. We could set up shared lab spaces or shared offices for part-time faculty. Build co-working spaces that include childcare (here's one). Reduce or remove teaching loads for part-time research faculty. Pay the part-time faculty a little less each, and use the money to hire an extra admin or lab manager to help them out, freeing up their time for actual research work.

(Read: How Do You Decide What Projects to Work On As a Scholar?)

Support Independent Scholars

Not everyone wants or will get a job at an academic institution. What if it were easier to be an independent scholar? This may also fit in with the part-time and flexible work option.

That's the issue a few organizations, such as IGDORE, are tackling. They enable independent scholars to join forces, so to speak: creating new academic networks, helping administer grants (since many funding agencies require an institutional affiliation), helping independent scholars find funding in the first place, and more. They're even forming independent IRB systems for human subjects study approval. One problem they haven't solved yet is library access, though the push toward open access publishing may help. The scholars in these organizations are at the forefront of reimagining what the academic world could look like.

Mothers Make Valuable Contributions

These changes would be a start, though there's plenty more to change to get us to a place where children are celebrated as boons to one's creativity and motivation, rather than treated as obstacles to advancing one's career. As Patricia Maurice wrote, having kids makes you a better faculty member and a better person, and being faculty can make you a better parent.

Women can be highly productive researchers and amazing mothers simultaneously. Let's fix the academic system to make it easier for them to be both.

Project: Tapestry Weaving on My Lap Loom

2024-08-20T12:00:00Z

After we finished our garage-to-living-room renovation project, I found myself staring at the walls. New room, new decor! While some of the walls are taken up with windows, the pantry door, a bookcase, and religious art, there are several undedicated spaces available. What to make?

I got out my tapestry lap loom. I hadn't used it in years. I remembered the basics of warping a loom and weaving shapes, but I wanted to learn more techniques. I read Rebecca Mezoff's book The Art of Tapestry Weaving. I bought wool yarn. (If I'm going to spend a lot of hours touching the fibers, might as well be nice to touch, eh?) And I set to work.

Here's what I made.

Sunrise #1. 9.75" x 12.75". Wool and cotton.

My goal with this tapestry was to learn or practice a couple skills:

How to warp the lap loom with double warp threads on each peg to increase the epi (ends per inch)
Changing colors, blending colors, and building shapes
Mezoffs meet-and-separate weaving method
Starting and ending a weaving properly, with a header or a row of double half hitches

I also intend to learn how to mount and frame smaller tapestries like this for hanging. This one is medium-small, not as small as some people make (I'd like try that, too, though!), but I think it would benefit from being hung within a nice frame. Some people will attach the tapestry to linen or cotton covered canvas stretcher frame or foam board, with space around the tapestry, kind of like how paintings or photos are matted before being framed. I'll experiment.

(Read: How I Made A Linen Wrap Skirt With Rainbow Embroidered Flowers)

Twining at the start of the warp to even out the warp spacing.

Waste, double-half hitch header, and start of the first shape.

Building up the mountains.

Building the sky.

Close-up of the finished sky—changing and blending colors!

This is only the third thing I've made on my tapestry lap loom. I got it as a teenager when taking a weaving class with my mom.

This is what I made first: a little purse/bag. I wove the strap on a rigid heddle loom.

Then the loom was in storage for a long while. A couple years ago I finally pulled it out and made this wall hanging from scrap fabric.

Then, my son made this wall hanging, which I love. I helped sew on the buttons. This was his first big weaving project! He did most of it at age 6. Since, he's done several other projects.

I've already started another project. Pretty fun. I've been enjoying fiber arts lately—read about my first crochet projects and how to crochet a water bottle carrier!

Book Review: Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz

2024-08-06T12:00:00Z

"I sensed that I belonged to a broader community of human beings than the community of scholars. What was the point of studying philosophy and classics? What conceivable difference could it make in the face of the suffering world?" —Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, p11

It can be easy to assume that all our reading, learning, and studying must be in service to some other end—getting a raise, switching careers, leveling up in skills at work or at home. Pursuing knowledge for its own sake, especially esoteric knowledge, with no instrumental purpose in mind, can feel like an unreachable luxury or simply pointless.

Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz (Princeton University Press, 2020) argues that learning is of value even without a marketable end goal. It's a book about the love of learning, the point of learning, and what learning is when pursued for its own sake. I started the book in agreement with Hitz, and I enjoyed her arguments, as they reminded me of the importance of pursuing the intellectual life and one's own interests.

One interesting thing about this book, for me, was the humanities perspective. I have read plenty of popular science nonfiction, plenty of books aimed at the business, psychology, and parenting audiences. The way Hitz interrogates her subject is different. She shares anecdotes and reasons from examples to universals. Instead of saying, "Studies show…", Hitz references Aristotle and meanders at the question. For instance, when discussing motivation for learning, instead of asking what science says, she looks at examples of people learning and wonders, is that good? Is that learning for its own sake? Why are people learning in thee cases? What are the counterexamples? It's a different way of looking at the same topics I've been reading about, and I found the change of perspective refreshing.

One highlight was the prologue, during which Hitz shared personal stories. It was more memoir, less argument. I like seeing others' intellectual journeys—here, how Hitz went into academia, out of it, and back—because it helps me reflect on my own intellectual journey, my own path through academic circles, and reminds me of what I liked about academia, what I miss, and why I'm glad I left.

(Read: Why I Left Full-Time Academic Work and What I Do Instead)

Disconnect of academia from life

On the topic of academia, Hitz explains how disconnected her work felt from the struggles of real life. I remember feeling that too, even though my work was more practical and applied than hers. The MIT Media Lab, where I attended grad school, was also different from most of academia in its commitment to building things for the world. People tossed around the catchphrase "demo or die" (and later, "deploy or die")—emphasizing that projects needed to be realizable, not just theory; needed to impact the world, not stay in the lab. Even so, social robots and AI often feel completely unrelated to daily life in Idaho, in a smaller city, homeschooling, hanging out with crunchy mamas and homesteaders, far from the high-tech world and academic society that immersed me in Boston. It has been difficult to find an intellectual community of the sort that permeated MIT. As Hitz described, grad school was uniquely a place of intellectual life.

Hitz also discussed how competitive academia felt. I think the competition is far more pronounced in some fields than in others—especially in the humanities, as Hitz found. I didn't experience as much competition and I think that is because my field, human-robot interaction (HRI) was (i) small, (ii) newer, (iii) highly multidisciplinary, and (iv) difficult without a team effort. Many people knew each other well, having studied together as students, or having trained each other's undergrads or grads students or postdocs at different stages of their careers. Doing a successful project requires a mix of technical and nontechnical knowledge, managing robots, computer systems, design, experimental protocols, psychological or educational theories, and more. It was hard to know everything or do everything by yourself. In addition, unlike Hitz, my research was often motivated intrinsically, learning for the sake of learning rather than for the sake of academic achievement. Many of my projects and side projects were sparked by wondering how things worked, hunches about behavior and human psychology, a drive to understand how people work.

(Read: How I Built a Career From My Strengths—and How You or Your Kids Can, Too)

(Read: Why I Went to Graduate School)

Diving in: Motivation for learning and teleology

Hitz spent a large portion of the book exploring people's motivation for learning. Why learn? She distinguishes between learning for instrumental purposes and learning for the sake of learning. As noted earlier, she takes a humanities approach, meandering instead of pointing at the psychological science of learning and motivation. I expected her to discuss extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation, since that distinction is almost exactly what she's talking about, but it never came up—perhaps because the theory comes from outside her expertise. She's a humanities scholar. Hitz even wonders at natural needs people have that might lead them to learning for its own sake, which sounded a bit like self-determination theory to me, but again, psychological science is not her ballpark.

(Read: What is Motivation? Two Theories You Can Use to Understand and Manipulate Your Motivation)

(Read: How Schools Zap Kids' Motivation and Mental Health)

Hitz finds it easy to understand extrinsic motivation. Learning for an instrumental end, such as getting a raise, switching careers, or leveling up your skills in a sport, has a clear purpose. She struggles with intrinsic motivation—the whole book is her struggle to understand intrinsic motivation. Hitz writes,

"We tend to think of the objects of our desires as items in a restaurant buffet—perhaps some of this, perhaps some of that. But our desires and their objects are more like rivers. They have a force and pressure all their own. Once we set out on them, they pull us along in a particular direction, opening up possibilities to us that we did not expect or choose." —Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, p31

She argues that something in us wants to learn for its own sake, "even if we embark on that learning for the sake of some smaller end" (p29). And this telos, this final end that we are drawn toward, is why we pursue learning for its own sake. It's why we are intrinsically motivated to pursue leisure activities. She asks, what is that ultimate end for humankind? What is our personal highest good that we are drawn towards? She suggests that we are drawn toward whatever we think happiness is; of course, our views of happiness could be wrong, misguided, and ultimately dissatisfying. She describes Aristotle's views:

"Do you work for the sake of work, or as Aristotle argues, do you work for the sake of leisure? And what does count as leisure? Leisure is an inward space whose use could count as the culmination of all our endeavors. For Aristotle, only contemplation—the activity of seeing and understanding and savoring the world as it is—could be the ultimately satisfying use of leisure."—Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, p36

I mean, of course Aristotle thought contemplation was our end goal; he was a philosopher and contemplating was his favorite thing. Hitz, however, is a Catholic convert. She doesn't outright say that God, and attempting to understand God, are humans' telos, but I think that is exactly what she means. Since she is writing toward an academic, i.e. generally secular audience, she mostly keeps her faith to herself in the book. Instead, she says that learning is to escape the world of ourselves to whatever is better.

"Perhaps we ought to think of intellectual life as having not so much an object as a direction: toward the general past to the specific, the universe will beyond the particular, the reality behind the illusion, the beauty beneath the ugliness, the peace underneath violence—we seek the pattern instances, the instance hidden by the pattern." —Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, p94

Hitz argues that our inner life is a place of retreat and reflection, withdrawn from the world, a source of dignity, a space for communion with other humans. She says,

"From the space of retreat, emerges poetry, mathematics, and distilled wisdom articulated in words or manifested silently in action." —Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, p185

and

"The social use of intellectual life lies in its cultivation of broader and richer ways of being human." —Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, p188

Throughout the rest of the book, Hitz discusses the role of seeking truth, how her theory plays into politics, what good work is, the virtue of seriousness, ways to achieve a good life, how service to others improves oneself, and much more.

(Read: Four Reasons Why Boredom is Better For You Than You Think)

The usefulness of wildflowers

I read this book at a good time. This year, I developed an interest in identifying local wildflowers. Is this useful? I don't know. But I think Hitz would say that the usefulness or uselessness of the information doesn't matter. I'm pursuing knowledge, which can be a good in itself. I have some instrumental uses in mind: I want to learn which plants are edible, and what other uses they may have. I want to be able to teach my kids about these plants. But also: I simply want to understand more about my local ecosystem.

Each new flower I find is a puzzle to solve. Which attributes are present? What lookalikes does this genus have? Which species are present to Idaho, per the Idaho Fish and Game website—and thus, is my tentative identification even reasonable? It's satisfying to find an answer, even if sometimes it is a tentative answer. For a couple flowers, I nailed the genus, but it's too hard to distinguish the species. Too many exist in our area that have highly technical differences that are not easy to spot with an untrained eye. Besides, as David Chapman wrote somewhere in his book Meaningness, the categorization is inherently nebulous. The category boundaries can get fuzzy, especially when looking at varieties within a species.

(Read: How to Start a Reading Habit)

(Read: What Does It Mean to Be A Scholar?)

Lost in Thought Book club reaction

My book club enjoyed Lost in Thought immensely. The book prompted deep thinking and a good discussion. I highly recommend it as a book club pick! That said, the consensus was that the book was hard to get through. Hitz's writing style was heavily "erudite academic"; it was excruciatingly clear that she had previously written elite humanities papers, and would have benefited from clarity and brevity. The prologue, with Hitz's personal stories, was a highlight for everyone.

The book includes a list of discussion questions, which you can also find here.

"To read and inquire as a free adult is to take on the awesome responsibility of allowing oneself to be changed." —Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, pp.79-80

Lost in Thought Book club discussion questions

In addition to the provided discussion questions, here are more:

Is it important to cultivate an intellectual life that is a refuge from daily life? For instance, to read and think about things that have absolutely no obvious relationship to your career or current events, versus purely for joy? Why, or why not?
Is useless learning valuable? Should education be practical, in schools or in daily life?
In the prologue on page 9, Hitz describes the competitive culture of academia in the humanities. If you have spent any time in academia, what was your experience like?
In the prologue, Hitz reflects on the amount of reading, thinking, and learning she did during her childhood. When and how did your hidden life of the mind begin?
On page 40-42, Hitz describes the lack of leisure time in many modern lifestyles and says leisure thrives with "free time, exposure to the outdoors, and a certain mental emptiness." What is your lifestyle like? Do you have time for leisure? What challenges do you face in making time for leisure? What activities do you do for leisure?
On page 53, Hitz discusses the world as something to be escaped. She poses the question: what would it mean to escape the world? What kind of refuge from it is possible, if any?
On page 64, I was reminded of the research on boredom and creativity. Quiet moments are needed for memory to form, for connections to be made, for ideas to take root. What has your experience been with boredom, worldly cloisters, creativity, and the life of the mind? There is a quote from Einstein about how "modern methods of instruction" seem to strangle curiosity and inquiry. This seems to be true still—and relates to the research on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, and the problems of motivation in modern schools, and the success of homeschooling and unschooling. And later, on page 67, Hitz links separation from social pressure to the pursuit of what matters instead of the pursuit of worldly things. What about you? Why do you pursue the activities or learning that you do?
On page 65, Hitz talks about failure and inwardness. Has failure been a road to inwardness for you?
Hitz quotes Einstein regarding resisting social pressure, and links this to his ability to be inward, to have a meta view or vantage different from others who are in the thick of things. What has your experience been with resisting social pressure? Do you agree or disagree with Hitz?
Throughout the first chapter, Hitz provides examples of an interior life often cultivated in extreme circumstances. How do we develop an interior life or inwardness in our mundane lives?
On page 97, Hitz relates a quote from Irina Ratushinskaua about the benefits of a turbulent life. Do you agree that when things are easy, people lose their love of life? Why or why not?
At the end of the first chapter, Hitz asks whether the pursuit of understanding or learning for the sake of cultivating our capacity to love is more primary, and she does not answer this question for us. What do you think?
On page 147, Hitz asks, "If we love truth so much, if our happiness consists in joy in it, then why aren't we all happy? Why are the surfaces appealing at all?" Why is it that pursuing spectacle trumps the love of learning and seriousness so often?
Hitz mentions the busy listlessness, acedia, that is characterized as often by hyperactivity as by loafing. She suggests simple, effective activities that can bring us back to the real world: knitting, cooking, chopping wood help bring us back to the real world. I was reminded of Jordan Peterson's advice to make your bed in the morning—a simple task to complete. Do you agree or disagree with Hitz that simple activities can bring us back? What has your experience been?
On page 177, Hitz describes Dorothy Day's activism and love of reading, and the connection she made between reading books and understanding life. What is the point of reading for you?

Book Review: Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles Marohn

2024-07-23T12:00:00Z

Detroit was the first American city to redesign itself around automobiles. They built commuter suburbs, ran highways through neighborhoods, and tore down buildings for parking lots.

Detroit was also the first American city to radically collapse. In his new book Strong Towns (Wiley, 2019), Charles L. Marohn, Jr. argues that these two facts are not a coincidence. Rather, the maintenance debt accrued by Detroit's rapid, sprawling growth came due, with drastic and devastating effect.

Buy the book here (affiliate link, I may earn a small commission at no cost to you): Strong Towns

The wealthy left the city center for new suburbs. Land in the city center that should have been redeveloped and risen in value was abandoned instead. The idyllic cul-de-sacs were not financially productive—in fact, the opposite. When neighborhoods declined, the wealthy moved away again. The city could not handle the many miles of failing infrastructure and falling land values. Collapse, Marohn says, was inevitable.

Marohn's profound insight is that Detroit is not an outlier. All our cities copied Detroit's development pattern, with a few years lag. Most are insolvent and carry debt they can't pay off. Unless we act, says Marohn, all our cities will share Detroit's fate.

(Read: Book Review: Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray)

Fighting back: building resilient, adaptive communities

Despite this bleak picture, Marohn has a hopeful vision. He draws on his background in civil engineering to explain how American cities got into their current predicament. His discussions of the post-WWII boom, infrastructure spending and debt, and present insolvent cities are clear and approachable. He relates stories from his work with city planners and municipalities around the country to paint a grim picture, and then brings in hope: his ideas for how we can avert disaster. His vision shows Strong Towns that are resilient and adaptive, a prosperous America, populated by close-knit communities invested in vibrant, local life.

I picked this book up because I've lived in the suburbs. I've lived in a big city. I now live in smaller-town America. I've experienced remarkably different interactions with local communities in each place, and seen vastly different kinds of government interventions, public projects, and approaches to finance.

I had some hunches about what might make a place successful, and wanted to know what Marohn thought. What is the key to building and sustaining productive towns and strong communities? To answer that question, we need to understand complexity.

(Read: What Is Localism? 7 Ways Localism Benefits Communities)

Cities are complex, not complicated

Engineers are generally trained to see cities as "a collection of roads, streets, pipes, pumps, valves, and meters," asserts Marohn. Cities are considered complicated but ultimately predictable machines. And thus, city planning is reduced to zoning. Cities are not allowed to evolve naturally.

Marohn argues that we are fooling ourselves if we think we can simplify the complexity, interdependence, and interrelations of a human city into a model that follows straightforward, mechanical rules. The misconception that cities are complicated machines, rather than complex, adaptive systems, is why everywhere is Detroit. Marohn is on point with this insight.

Perturb a complex, adaptive system, and it will change, becoming more resilient. Perturb a fragile, complicated machine, and it will break. If we treat cities like complicated machines, when change comes along, the cities will break.

Change is inevitable. People often seem to assume that things will stay the same if only we don't touch them, if only we regulate enough, if only we stamp out natural change patterns. But change is the only constant. Marohn argues that the key to fixing our cities is to embrace change—to harness it in service of making our cities more resilient. Treat them like the complex systems they are.

(Read: America Needs Strong Towns and Community, Not More Infrastructure)

Over-abundance now means overlooking consequences for later

Marohn explains that we have been able to treat cities like complicated machines, rather than as complex systems, because ever since WWII, America has had an abundance of resources. "For complex systems, an abundance of resources destroys the need for adaptation." Cities could throw resources at their problems without thought for long-term consequences. They could assume that they would keep growing—that they would keep having an abundance of resources.

When I was in grad school at the MIT Media Lab, a popular lab slogan was, "Fail fast and iterate." That is, learn from what didn't work to do better. The problem is, if you have an oversupply of resources, failing doesn't hurt very much. You don't have to learn or adapt. You can just throw more resources at the problem.

Resources and continuous growth are what Marohn says cities currently bet on—and that they're wrong to do so. I live in a rapidly growing area right now that will, no doubt, experience many unanticipated problems as a result of that growth. But if that growth continued indefinitely, everything would probably be fine. Debts could be paid off by future growth. That's what we do, after all: borrow from the future to build now. Assume we will become more prosperous and that everything will pay for itself. Disaster only strikes if growth slows.

But will growth always slow? Marohn says it will. Cities should be stable without needing growth. But his statements did not adequately address, for me, the question of why growth cannot necessarily continue indefinitely. Although I agree with him—stability without need for growth seems like a good idea—I wanted to see more examples and evidence backing up his view.

(Read: 7 Principles to Guide Development in Kootenai County)

Little bets for big wins?

Marohn is skeptical when it comes to higher levels of government. He's a proponent of subsidiarity—the idea that problems should be solved at as local a level as can actually solve them. Local problems, local solutions. His advocacy for Strong Towns rests on the ability of complex systems to learn and adapt.

Imagine a company making a new product. They test it out with users. They ask for feedback. They observe where users have problems. They tweak the product. Test it again. Get more feedback. Observe more. This iterative, human-centered cycle of development is the kind of collaborative, iterative approach Marohn says will work for towns. In short, you have to deeply understand people's experiences and daily lives to know where the pain points are and to see what small changes might improve things.

Part of the problem right now is that our regulations, city codes, and zoning don't allow cities to adapt. Marohn says this needs to change. I'm on board with that. He talks about allowing neighborhoods to naturally evolve only to the next level of developmental intensity, rather than making big jumps.

His discussion of the natural evolution of towns reminded me of times in college when I rode a train from Poughkeepsie to New York City. The train rambled first through open countryside. The fields were gradually built up, brick buildings appearing on farmland, apartment buildings rising out of suburbs, the train chugging further into the city until the apartment buildings were dwarfed by high-rises and skyscrapers in the dense downtown. The gradual flavor of the change was important. It felt natural. And that's how towns should feel.

In accompaniment with little bets, Marohn says we need to allow cities to contract. Decaying neighborhoods should be abandoned in favor of financially-productive areas. Focus the little bets on areas that will really show something for the investment.

(Read: Book review: Sprawl Repair Manual by Gail Tachieva)

(Read: Book Review: Retrosuburbia by David Holmgren)

Local investment and iteration for improvement

Marohn presents several inspiring stories from cities he has worked with to show that "little bets" can work. Investing in small things that fix problems for people right now can turn a block around. Citizens become partners in the transformation. In a myriad of ways, small actions can improve social connection and financial productivity in our places of being.

While the stories are inspiring and Marohn's goals are on point, I felt like I didn't come away with a clear next step. As a concerned citizen, if I want my town to be a strong town, what can I do today? Do I need to read up on my city's budget report? (I did look it up and scan through it.) Do I need to start attending city council meetings and argue for repealing regulations? Initiate a new neighborhood potluck, turn my yard into a playground for local kids, read up on tactical urbanism and the Better Block Foundations' placemaking? It would have been helpful to end the book with a list of clear suggestions for ways ordinary townsfolk could start changing their neighborhoods for the better.

Overall, I found Strong Towns to be pragmatic. I believe Marohn is on the right track with his little bets and local investments. His statements that local governments do not exist to cater to individuals' preferences, but rather to ensure the prosperity of the town, had me nodding along in agreement.

If you are frustrated by the fragmentation of community in modern society or skeptical of federal-level interventions, and want a glimmer of hope, Strong Towns will appeal to you.

This post originally appeared on Erraticus on Feb 17, 2020.

Tutorial: How to Make a Camp Sink/Dishwashing Station with PVC (In Three Easy Steps!)

2024-07-09T12:00:00Z

For a recent camping trip, we put together this easy yet awesome camp sink/dishwashing station! It only took an hour or two to cut the pieces and assemble, and saved us time and hassle at the campground.

When we decided that this would be the year we started tent camping as a family (with four young kids!), I knew I wanted to build this sink. Washing up after meals with only a spigot isn't my idea of fun.

I went on many weekend camping trips with girl scouts as a kid. One mom always brought along her PVC dishwashing station. It made cleaning up after group dinners a breeze. (Well, as much of a breeze as hand washing dishes by lantern-light can be, I suppose.) With girl scouts, everyone had their own sets of reusable camp dishes, so there was a lot to wash. Even if, now, we decide to bring disposable dishes or plasticware to make cleanup faster, there are always pots, serving spoons, and miscellaneous other dishes that will need to be cleaned.

The camp sink I remember was a basic three-bin station. For ours, we elaborated on that basic design, landing on this functional and easy to assemble dishwashing station, complete with paper towel holder, towel bars, and lower shelf for storage. I also hung a hand sanitizer bottle from one of the towel bars.

Step One: Collect Sink Materials

Supplies needed:

6 10" lengths of 1/2" PVC (666" needed total, plus some extra for inefficient cutting)
8 caps
8 3-way corner connectors
4 3-way T connectors
8 4-way corner connectors
8 5-way connectors
3 plastic washbins (we used 12qt Sterilite bins from Walmart, dimensions 15" L x 12 ¾" W x 8 1/2" H)
1 wood board (we used a scrap piece approximately 9"x36")

Most of these supplies are readily available at your neighborhood hardware store.

However, we had to order the 4- and 5-way connectors online. The hardware stores by us didn't carry them because they aren't a standard plumbing fitting. They are readily available via numerous online vendors for the hobbyists who want to build stuff with PVC.

Tools needed:

Measuring tape
Pen or pencil for marking lengths
Chop saw or hacksaw.
(Optional) PVC glue

Step Two: Cut PVC into sink-sized pieces

We used the chop saw, but you could use a hacksaw. The PVC lengths needed are:

10 3in
18 11in
14 13in
16 16in

If you're using the same size bins we used, then the dimensions listed here will be fine. If you are using different-sized bins, I recommend cutting and building the top layer first to ensure your bins fit. Below, you'll find lists of which pipe lengths are needed for each layer of the sink. Adjust as necessary for your bins.

The 16-inch pipes are all for the vertical uprights. If you want a taller sink, make these pipes longer.

Step Three: Assemble Sink

We started with the top layer to make sure the bins fit. If you're using the same size bins we used, then you can assemble from the bottom up with the following assembly instructions. If you are using different-sized bins, I recommend cutting and building the top layer first to ensure your bins fit.

Bottom, middle, and top layers before assembly

Bottom layer: Use 3-way corners for the corners of the rectangle. Along each of the rectangle's short sides, use a 13in pipe (2 13in). On each long side, connect a 11in pipe, a 3-way T, an 11in pipe, another 3-way T, and another 11in pipe to the other corner. (In total: 4 3-way corners, 4 3-way Ts, 2 13in pipes, 6 11in pipes.) See the pictures.

Bottom layer

Bottom layer with uprights

Middle layer: Connect 8 16-in pipes as vertical uprights. Then add the middle layer of connectors. Here, you need 4 4-ways for the corners and 4 5-ways for the central connections, like in the photo below. 4 13in pipes go across on the short side (the shelf will rest on these), and 6 11in pipes are used between connectors on the long side. Then add 8 16-in pipes as uprights again.

Middle layer

Adding the middle layer to the bottom.

Middle shelf, before uprights

With the middle shelf and uprights.

Top layer: For the top layer of connectors, you will need 4 4-ways for the central connections, and 5-ways on the corners so you can add the towel bars and paper towel holders. 4 13in pipes go across the short sides, and 6 11in pipes are used between connectors on the long edge, just like in the middle layer.

Top layer

Before the final uprights are in

On each short end of the rectangle, at the 5-way corners, attach 3in pipes horizontally. Add a 3-way corner to add each and put a 13in pipe across as the towel rod. Attach one paper towel holder 13in pipe vertically at one corner, with 3in pipes vertically at the other uprights. Cap all the uprights. (In total: 10 3in pipes, 4 3-way corners, 4 13in pipes, 8 caps.)

Ta-da!

Sink setup in the garage, without the caps on the ends of the uprights.

Trash bag hanging

Close-up of the hand sanitizer hanging edge at the campsite.

How Do We Fix Sprawl? Book Review: Sprawl Repair Manual by Gail Tachieva

2024-06-25T12:00:00Z

Our suburbs are broken. As Charles Marohn wrote in Strong Towns (read my review), most cities are insolvent. Sprawl—an urban growth pattern with car-dependent, fragmented, single-use areas, such as congested highways, strip shopping developments, oversized parking lots, and cul-de-sac residential—cannot be maintained. Shopping malls become defunct. Traffic increases despite bigger connector roads, wider arterials. Pedestrian and bike safety is low.

(Read: America Needs Strong Towns and Community, Not More Infrastructure)

While this story isn't the case everywhere, it does describe an increasing number of cities and suburbs in America. As the infrastructure built over the past fifty-some years begins to fail but replacements can't be paid for, and as more people migrate out of blighted towns, more and more cities will share this story. Sprawl wastes water, energy, land, and time.

Sprawl has been linked to increased air and water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, loss of open space and natural habitat, and the exponential increase in new infrastructure costs. Social problems related to the lack of diversity have been attributed to sprawl, and health problems such as obesity to its auto-dependence." —Gail Tachieva, Sprawl Repair Manual, p1

Sprawl looks like this:

Separated, car-dependent, single use areas

Housing separate from commercial

Garage-dominant facades

(Read: Book Review: Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix it by M. Nolan Gray)

What's the solution to sprawl?

According to Sprawl Repair Manualby Gail Tachieva (Island Press, 2010), there are two directions a sprawling place can go:

Urbanize, increasing density and creating mixed-use, walkable, complete communities.
Devolve, returning to green space: agricultural or natural land.

The book focuses on the process for densifying and repairing areas. There is some mention of which spaces ought to devolve, but strategies for implementing de-densification are not presented. The strategies for densification and repair generally aim toward making areas more balanced in their composition of living, working, and gathering places.

(Read: 7 Principles to Guide Development in Kootenai County)

Sprawl repair leads to complete communities

The goal of sprawl repair is to create complete communities: areas where you can live, work, and get some basic needs met within a reasonable distance, and without driving nearly as much as we all do today. Complete communities are pedestrian-friendly, support mixed use and (in denser areas) transit, without oversized parking lots and wide stroads filling the vistas.

Some people worry that sprawl repair will be all about creating density. However, as Tachieva explains, many of the repair techniques in this book are not so much about creating density as about moving density to more reasonable locations. The question she asks is, how do you take a sprawling area and make it more complete? For instance, that may involve adding extra buildings to help create structure and spaces, adding civic buildings, removing or adding commercial spaces, and creating new green spaces and open gathering spaces such as parks. In rural sprawl, repair involves re-platting lots and clustering buildings together to make a small hamlet, with a community square, instead of disparate roads of disconnected houses.

A big component of what makes an area feel nice to walk through is having defined edges and spaces, an idea explained in beautiful detail in Christopher Alexander's books (The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language). Thus, part of repair is creating those spaces by filling in along roads, hiding parking lots at the backs of buildings or in alleys, and adding trees where you might walk or bike.

Example of repairing suburban sprawl with infill and defined spaces.

The practical details: What's first in the repair process?

The first step of the sprawl repair process is mapping the city. What areas are ripe for redevelopment? What roads could become walkable main streets? Where might a transit line run? What areas are better left as is, or reverted to undeveloped space?

Once you have this high-level plan, you can dive into making changes. Tachieva explains repair at every scale: regional sectors, communities and subdivisions, shopping centers, individual blocks, different types of roads, down to individual buildings, such as McMansions, big box stores, gas stations, suburban houses, and more.

Once you get the feel for it, the chapters on how to repair specific parts of sprawl feel a bit repetitive. What's deficient? Usually, civic space, connectivity of streets, and mixed use. How to fix? Add all that stuff, so you get a complete neighborhood. The exact implementation protocol may vary, but the gist is the same.

A highlight of the book is the graphics. There are plentiful examples in each chapter of the problem sprawl and different ways of repairing it. For each chapter, I found it interesting to imagine places in my area that fit the sprawl description, and to imagine how it would look and feel with different repairs. I liked, for instance, the example of repairing corner gas stations to actually have nice curb frontages on the corner to be a corner store instead of just a big ugly mass of cement.

(Read: What Is Localism? 7 Ways Localism Benefits Communities)

Example of rural sprawl repair.

Repairing parking

One big piece of the sprawl pattern is excessive parking. A key aspect of fixing frontages in parking is moving parking to the middle of blocks, underground, or in structures so that parking is not the first thing you see along the edge of the road. This makes for a nicer pedestrian experience, in particular. In addition, increased mixed use development can lead to reduced parking needs overall, because different uses (e.g., residential, commercial) use the parking at different times of day, thus allowing buildings to share parking.

(Want to learn more about why our parking lots are the way they are? Read my review of Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar)

Tachieva suggests municipalities subsidize the construction of parking structures, since they're expensive and unlikely to be built otherwise, thus freeing up surface lot space for redevelopment. I liked the idea of including retail or service-oriented frontage along the ground floor of some parking structures in downtown areas.

However, I wonder about finding funding for parking redevelopment projects. It's not like most cities have extra cash on hand. Maybe there are grants that might cover such a thing? Also, the experience of parking in a garage isn't fun - it's annoying and cramped. Convincing people that we ought to have more garages is an uphill battle. One helpful incentive, suggested by Henry Grabar in Parking Paradise, is to make garage parking free, while street parking is metered. People will be more likely to pick the free option, and will be disincentivized to keep driving around the block in hopes of finding a free street spot.

Is higher density desirable for families?

One question that Sprawl Repair Manual does not ask is whether densification and mixed use are necessarily desirable. Yes, sprawling areas are not beautiful, nor pleasant for pedestrians or bikers, nor generally financially productive. However, one analysis suggests that higher density is associated with lower fertility rates. Housing that accommodates non-families (singles, students, etc) can disincentivize families from living in an area. Think of it this way: Who wants to raise kids in an apartment? Not me!

One sprawl repair tactic is to allow densification in urban core areas—which includes building apartments and infill with townhouses and student housing, all of which many single-family suburbia residents actively dislike. Families, however, often seek suburbia because of yards, play spaces, parks, safer streets, homes large enough to accommodate their family sizes. I wonder how implementing the tactics in the book would affect demographics. Many of the suggested infill structures will be built by large developers and rented out. If we want to promote home ownership instead of rentals, what do we build? Tachieva did not specifically address how to create owner-occupied and family-friendly neighborhoods.

My main question is around housing types and infill structures. I can see how many of the other repair tactics would be beneficial. For instance, all the tactics that fix streets and roads to make them safer for bikers and pedestrians would be helpful—cars will drive slower, it will be safer for children to be outside. With additional mixed use, civic spaces, and parks, there are more places for families to be and they don't have to drive as far to get to useful spaces.

Tachieva did mention, briefly, that in areas where property values are falling, or where there are deserted or blighted properties, you can replat lots into larger parcels, enable the creation of family compounds, introduce urban agriculture, remove houses, and add civic spaces or green areas. These might contribute to family-friendly areas.

(Read: Book Review: Retrosuburbia by David Holmgren)

SmartCode, sprawl repair, and my local area

One key issue where I live is that property values are not falling. People are moving here. Property values are going up. Many sprawl repair techniques are easiest to apply when property values have gone down. It makes it infeasible, maybe even undesirable, to attempt any repair at the block scale, especially in residential areas. That said, perhaps at the building scale, large McMansions can be converted into multi-family housing or duplexes, since housing is in such high demand.

However, Sprawl Repair Manual specifically lists the SmartCode zoning system as an ideal or model that cities could copy. The City of Post Falls actually adopted SmartCode 15 years ago! But then, people got mad because that zoning allowed a developer to build a three-story, mixed use apartment complex in a downtown area… where, I think, that sort of development actually ought to be built. (As opposed to locating taller apartments in arbitrary locations based on where a developer happens to get some land). While some people in the city have been trying to eliminate SmartCode after that incident, other projects downtown are still using the zoning.

Another interesting building-scale repair Tachieva suggested was to modify the existing frontage such that the garage and driveway no longer dominate the street view. For example, you could add a wing to the front of the house, convert the garage into living space, add a detached front building, and so on. This is exactly what we have done recently in converting our own one-car garage into additional living space!

Suburban house repair examples.

How do you actually implement sprawl repairs?

The sprawl repair process requires buy-in from a lot of people—from homeowners to HOAs to city councils and even state legislatures. Some of the repair techniques and implementation steps are infeasible without significant political clout to change zoning codes or state laws. For many projects, significant capital upfront is needed to purchase large buildings or tracts of land, so that a unified vision can be built moving forward. Thus, with the exception of the final chapter on building-scale repairs, there is little in the book that feels immediately actionable.

The lack of small, actionable steps is one of the big differences I see between this and the Strong Towns methodology. Strong Towns champions little bets and incremental development: doing whatever we can to strengthen our cities. Sprawl Repair Manual is a vision book. It's a guide for people who want to tackle big changes over a long timescale. It feels both bigger, and narrower in scope, at the same time. And in that, Sprawl Repair Manual is an important book. We need a vision of what to strive for. Repairing and strengthening cities is a long-term endeavor. As Tachieva writes,

"One of the goals for this manual is to demonstrate that there is good news. The tools presented here offer hope to those who recognize that sprawl must be and can be fixed. Suburban residents should not be worried—sprawl repair not only proposes ideas for regenerating their failing surroundings, but promises to enhance rather than obliterate their way of life. Most places will remain suburban in nature, but they will offer expanded choices for living, working, and socializing. Sprawl repair creates places for those who want to tend a garden in a quiet village and for those who are drawn to the liveness of a town center." —Gail Tachieva, Sprawl Repair Manual, p277

Read Sprawl Repair Manual if…

This book may appeal to you if you are interested in localism, Strong Towns, urbanism, and urban planning; if you dislike stroads; if you want to understand how to fix dying cities and suburbs; or if you are involved in civic affairs in your municipality!