Some of you have noticed that during January and February, I did not write a single blog post. The reason for that is that I was sick. Sick enough to not even want to take pictures of water for a while, and then still sick enough to take the pictures, but to only upload them to draft posts and not write the actual texts to go with that (even though in many cases that would only mean writing “look! how awesome!” or something like that).

Before I got really sick, I watched a couple of videos by one of my biggest and most awesome mentors, Marie Forleo. I always like her stuff and look forward to new videos every Tuesday, but this old one really hit a nerve with me. It’s about “burnout vs. time for a change”. Do yourself a favour and check it out!

In the video, Marie describes four “tests” that you can do to figure out whether you are burnt out (and urgently need a break from it all!) or whether it’s just time to move on and try something new. And two of those really resonated with me, and I’ll discuss them in my context:

1. The law test. The law test is what motivated the title of this blog post. Marie suggests I ask myself: If there was a law against blogging, would I protest it? And in the beginning, when I was very sick, my response was that I would actually be hugely relieved if there was a law against science blogs because it would take such a weight off my shoulders if I never had to write about oceanography ever again, and nobody else was allowed to, either. This really scared me, because even though that was what I thought at the time, I knew that it was completely unlike me to think that thought. Because I love blogging, and even if I didn’t, I would totally protest because I believe that blogging has an important role in science communication. But I realised that I really urgently needed to take some time off of blogging and social media and scicomm in order to find back to “real me”.

2. Time off. This second rule is about asking yourself when you last had taken substantial time off from whatever you are doing. And I realised: Never. I’ve been blogging for almost four years, and doing all kinds of other scicomm, and it’s something that I’ve really enjoyed all this time. But every time I walk outside and see a puddle or a lake, a river or the ocean, I want to take pictures and write about what I am seeing. But at some point, without realising it, wanting to take pictures and write about them had become having to do it, and having to do it became a burden that killed all the joy that I have always felt doing it. And that that meant that I really urgently needed to take some time off of blogging and social media and scicomm in order to find back to “real me”.

Are you seeing the pattern here? I did, so I took some time off. First I planned to just be gone over New Year’s, but then I got sick and it turned into two months away from the blog. And I am glad I did take that time off, even though I started to feel the itch to come back a lot earlier, because now I am back, and I am rested and full of new energy and new ideas, and I am excited to be back! :-)

P.S.: There are two more tests, the “80/20 rule” on how 20% of work cause 80% of stress, and “Natural strength” on whether we spend most of our time doing what we are good at and what comes easily. But the first two had given me all I needed to know already, so I am just mentioning the other two for reasons of completeness. You should go check out the video!

P.P.S.: I wasn’t sure whether I was going to write about being sick, and about being sick of blogging, but when I was looking through my saved drafts earlier today and thought about whether I should post them back-dated to fill the gap in my blogging record, I decided that no, I would not. I will leave that gap to remind myself that sometimes it is absolutely necessary to take a break, and that a break is not failure, but an opportunity to come back relaxed and stronger and more joyful than ever before. And that next time I should take the break a lot earlier, long before I feel like there should be a law against doing things that I love doing!

On finding my role in my new job.

As many of you know, I’ve changed jobs a couple of months ago, and I am now in a position where I advise university teachers on their teaching while also trying to do research on how to improve students’ learning. And sometimes I feel like I am caught between a rock and a hard place*, and I have been discussing this with many people at my job.

On the one hand, my scientific self, training and background (as well all my scientist friends!) hold me to the highest standards of science.

On the other hand, I have those people that I am consulting, that want an answer from me right here and now.

How do you reconcile those two demands? Yes, I want to do science right. I want to have a large population to draw from, I want control groups, I want statistics. I want to only change one parameter at a time in order to know exactly what is influencing what, and how. And I want to give advise based on science, not gut feeling. On the other hand, I do want to help the people I am advising to improve their teaching as quickly as possible. Which sometimes means relying on my gut, changing more than one thing at a time, not having control groups, and giving in to all the other practical demands of teaching and university life.

Given the description of the position that I hold, helping the teachers is more important than doing the research. Yet I believe that what we develop as “quick fixes” can and should be made available to a wider audience. Even though it is only a report of what we did and not a scientifically sound result.

Assuming for a moment that we should publish, there is the question of where to publish. The “real” scientists won’t want my kind of studies in their “real” journals, even if we do evaluations, but the teachers wouldn’t read those kind of journals anyway.

From this blog I’ve learned that a lot of people (who wouldn’t necessarily read scientific papers on teaching oceanography) are following and enjoying this. And every week I get feedback from people who “spent at least an hour on your blog yesterday” (thanks Joke), “stalk my blog for inspiration and ideas” (thanks Jonathan), who have to tell me their experiences with one of the experiments right away and are typing with fingers red and blue from food coloring (thanks Kristin), who “aspire to be as creative as [me]” (thanks Fitz) who ask when I’ll be publishing my book or youtube channel (thanks Torge), who advertise my blog through various media (thanks Geli!!! And Kim and others), who tell me that after reading my blog they need to go and buy corn starch right away (thanks Ingrid). And this is just a random collection of feedback I found browsing my inbox.

This is amazing feedback and it means a lot to me that people find reading about my teaching helpful for their own. And that makes me think that maybe publishing results of my research on teaching and learning in this or some other blog would be so much better than trying to get it into journals where it doesn’t really fit and isn’t even really wanted. And where it would most likely not be found by those people who would use it as inspiration for their own teaching**. On the other hand that means that it would never be used by people who do research on teaching and learning, and that those two worlds – the scientific and the applied one – will continue to exist on parallel trajectories, next to each other but never intersecting.

So what to do? I’ll leave you to ponder this dilemma while I travel to Bergen to do some “real” science and meet some friends. Talk to you soon!

—

*neither the rock nor the hard place are too bad, though – this is still my dream job! ;-)

** “inspiration” means here that they consider it and either take it as is, or modify it, or reject it and come up with better ideas themselves. For me this blog is about inspiring thinking about teaching, not about me telling people what the solution is…

Adventures in Teaching and Oceanography has been around for a full 6 months today!

Adventures in Teaching and Oceanography has been around for a full 6 months today! Can you believe this? On the one hand it feels like I have had this blog for a very long time, because writing this blog is not actually that different from doing experiments for fun, and I have been doing that for a very long time (plus SO MUCH happened over the last 6 months!).

On the other hand, this is the one-hundred-and-fourth post published on this blog. You can easily assume that more than one hour per post went into doing the experiments and writing the posts. For some posts, it was substantially more, but for some maybe a little less. But let’s stick with one hour for simplicity. This means that I’ve put about 120 hours in over 6 months – that is the typical amount of work in a student help’s contract. I can’t decide whether that is a lot of time (about one work day per week!) or not (hey – if we hired a student help, we could do a lot of outreach for not a lot of money!), so I’m not going to comment any further. In any case, while some of this time happened on the job (and isn’t it awesome when people pay you to develop and conduct experiments with students? And some of the experiments I couldn’t have conducted at home for lack of appropriate tanks), all of the picture prepping and writing and planning happened on my own time for fun. And it is so much fun! Happy half Birthday, dear blog! :-)

Happy Valentine’s day!

The rose is red, the violet’s blue,
The honey’s sweet, and so are you. […]

I originally wrote this post to announce me starting my new job. I didn’t post it then, because it was quite a big transition and in the end I wasn’t prepared to deal with it in public. I didn’t really have any time at all to adjust – I sat in my office in Norway until late one Friday night, grading the exams my students had just written, and then the next Monday I started at another job in another country, just like that.

Now I have already been in this job for 2.5 months, and I am really happy. I am in the job that I have been describing to people even though I didn’t know it existed until 8 months ago when I found it advertised, applied, got the offer, accepted the offer and all this time couldn’t believe my luck. And it is not in oceanography.

It is not all completely new, and it is in fact closely related to the things that I enjoyed most at my old job and that I spent plenty of my evenings and weekends on: Thinking about how to improve teaching, developing materials to support student learning, and evaluating if that goal has been met. And if it hasn’t been met – back to square one and start from scratch!

I am not doing this in the context of oceanography, instead I am responsible for mechanical engineering, ship building and related subjects. But I don’t feel like that is taking me too far away from oceanography – after all, I studied ship building and marine technology as a minor subject when doing my Master’s in oceanography. And the physical basis is the same anyway. So if anything, it is complementary to oceanography.

Nevertheless, it is all new and rather than a “postdoctoral fellow in physical oceanography”, I am now a “coordinator of teaching innovation” (doesn’t sound too bad either, does it?). But being an oceanographer, going on awesome cruises every year, showing experiments to my nerdy friends and their nerdy friends at every opportunity has for the last 12 years been such a big part of who I am, so even though this new job is my dream job, I am sad to be closing this awesome chapter of my life.

But even though in the future I might not have the opportunity to go on cruises as regularly as I would like (but pssst – there is something in the planning there!), and even though some posts on this blog might change topic ever so slightly (from playing with water towards playing with water and ships, but I’ll also spend 10 days in August just doing the kind of tank experiments you know and love from my blog, and you bet I’ll be blogging about that!), I can’t imagine any of the rest will ever change.

Because I am, and will always be, an oceanographer at heart. <3

[…]

Thou art my love and I am thine;
I drew thee to my Valentine:
The lot was cast and then I drew,
And Fortune said it shou’d be you.

Gammer Gurton’s Garland (1784)