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| The new front of Birmigham New Street Station |
In many ways the weeks have not had very much going on in them. I worked Monday to Thursday, shopped Friday morning and normally slept some of Friday afternoon, then sat down on the evening and the rest of the weekend to get on with thesis. the only real diversion has been writers group on a Monday evening and towards the end I was not even finding the energy to write a piece for that, the last piece I took was a haiku and yes it did only have seventeen syllables. If you want to know more how how my thesis progressed it is on the blog http://jengiethesis.blogspot.co.uk/ .
Let me say here now quite clearly, if you have not submitted a doctorate you do not know how intense that last run up to submission is. I say this as someone who had talked several people through it, had read quite a few books and has quite a good imagination and I UNDERESTIMATED IT. I went through the anal retentive. I went through the stage when it took over my brain. In the end it was just a matter of keeping focussed on what I was doing. I allowed nothing to come between me and finishing. I suspect, although I do not know, that it is a similar type of focussed effort as that of a top athlete.
Work has been busy as well. I have done a lot of teaching. At some stage I will add up how much but for about ten weeks I had at least a class a week and sometimes two. Classes last 2.5 hours which is longer than most. I have stopped having feedback forms, I suspect people think it is arrogance but I do not think that I teach perfectly, I just think that I know at the end of the class whether I have succeeded or not. There are occassions when I walk out of the class on a high. If I do that then quite often I get unsolicited feedback telling me how marvellous it was, when I go out of a class feeling I have failed I get told how useless it was. It is not the material I teach, that remains the same, it is the ability to engage the class with the material.There are a number of things that change this. Sometimes it is simply how tired I am, other times it is whether I have had enough preparation time, how fresh the course is, how warm the classroom is or whether the technology works.
This is going to be short I realise as I am actually not really into writing at length at present. Indeed if you had asked me before I finished what I would have done after my thesis was submitted I think I would have said read some light fiction which has nothing to do with thesis. However it has come clear over the last few days that at this stage there are three things I find I want to do. The first is to exercise until I am physically tired, I suspect that this is in the hope that if I am physically tired as well as mentally then my body will not keep my brain awake but I suspect there is more. Then there is getting out of Sheffield into the countryside and the wilder the better. The orderly detail of towns and cities is too much like the regimented process of getting my thesis ready to submit. Finally I have found that the one task I settled to with some relish is redesigning my website. It has needed doing for two years but on Friday which was not a good day, redesigning it was all that I felt up to doing.
