Academic Sponges

When I think of a metaphor to describe my academic career, I sometimes think of a sponge.

I know that's not terribly pretty, and depending on your experience with sponges, it might even be slightly disgusting, reminding you of clean up jobs that you'd rather not remember. But think of it as a nice clean washing sponge or the sort that one might have used before the advent of the ubiquitous loofah sponge. You know, the ones the size of small dinner plates with all those lovely big holes in them.

Anyway. I sometimes feel like my academic career to this point has been like a sponge, soaking up other people's ideas. In classrooms, at conferences, reading books and articles, I feel like I always know so very little about what people are talking about that I just soak it all in.

As a sponge, every once and a while I get a poke, and some of what I've soaked up comes back out in the form of a conference paper or an article, and a really big poke (by my committee to some extent but mostly a self-imposed impatience to finish things) resulted in the dissertation.

Of course this creates a problem that I think I've mostly shed at this point, but that haunts me nevertheless. Because some of what I read wasn't necessarily smart or useful. Especially during my undergraduate career, some of the things I chose to read for research papers and the like wasn't always good.

Which has me wondering how I might integrate more critical analysis of sources into my classes so that my students don't base their research on shoddy sources. I'm thinking of incorporating a research proposal into my lit classes and maybe even the gen ed one so that I have the opportunity to engage in conversation with students about the sources they are considering useful to their projects and steer them away from the superficial or less useful ones. If nothing else, such an exercise should result in better research papers, even if it does little for the student's understanding of quality scholarship and ability to critically analyze sources.

At least, that's what I'm thinking.