When people ask me, during the academic year, whether I am looking forward to the summer break, I respond with an emphatic yes. Perhaps counterintuitively, I look forward to summer because it’s the time I get work done — it is sort of a reverse vacation time.<\/p>\n
Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy teaching. Yet it is a position that carries with it significant responsibility. Students spend quite a bit of time and money to take my class, and I need to make sure they get the most value out of it. That tends to take a lot of attention and focus.<\/p>\n
But during the summer, my research students and I get to just make stuff. We can explore and play, experiment, go off in new directions, try out crazy hypotheses, all without distraction. Summer is the time when I tend to work the hardest, but it’s an incredibly enjoyable sort of work.<\/p>\n
And that paradigm extends to weekends. Today I went into the lab — just me and a few students — and we got a tremendous amount of work done. It was fun and productive, and my mood at the end of the day was a mix of satisfaction and delight.<\/p>\n
So you could say that this pattern of reverse vacation time repeats within itself: weekends are to weekdays as summer is to the school year. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When people ask me, during the academic year, whether I am looking forward to the summer break, I respond with an emphatic yes. Perhaps counterintuitively, I look forward to summer because it’s the time I get work done — it is sort of a reverse vacation time. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy teaching. … Continue reading “Reverse vacation time”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18898"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18898"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18899,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18898\/revisions\/18899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}