Your advisor “never compares one with another,” that sounds great! I think comparison with others creates stress and takes away passion for work. You are lucky to meet such a great advisor!

I love this analogy. Monoculture made so much sense when our society was smitten with industrial agriculture and our progress in dominating global food markets. Now I much prefer the ideas of agroforestry and agroecology where biodiversity is exalted for its resilience and our crop systems can take advantage of natural symbioses in the soil and with other organisms in the ecosystem. Our tendency with industry is alway to simplify things down to the minimum amount of parts, to make hugely complex systems seem more manageable. The whole NPK fertilization scheme is an example of this. I think our educational system suffers from the same oversimplification. We want our organizations to run like machines, meaning our teachers and their curriculums become like mechanical components. Students are just inputs and outputs, hopefully somewhat smarter or more prepared for careers after graduation, but not paid any particular attention as individual learners. The quality controls are all standardized in the forms of quizzes and examinations.

There is certainly some sort of analogous “agroecological” educational model out there that embraces student diversity and individuality and is stronger and more effective because of it. Challenging yourself to learn more about diversity is the best step toward this model’s implementation. It is not necessarily going to be the easiest nor the most economical means to educate the masses, but it will certainly be the most affective from a systems perspective and probably the most fulfilling as well.

In higher education I feel like it is also more important to focus on your strengths than to try to multitask and be more productive. I know, for example, that my strengths lie in project work rather than examinations. I also know it often takes me a good deal longer to complete a given task than the average individual. Rather than fixate on my imperfections, I try to channel them and learn from them. Taking more studio-style classes and allowing myself plenty of time for assignments has allowed me to be successful, but it took a long path of self discovery to learn these things about myself and act accordingly. I think we need to focus on identifying individual tendencies in students and adapting our coursework to augment their strengths rather than forcing everyone to fit the hyper-efficient mold of an ‘ideal’ productive student.

Thanks for your post! I can definitely relate to a lot of what you shared. My program is also reading and writing intensive, and I had to re-learn how to read (and just skim) articles and books when I first started. I learned tips and tricks from other students because I just did not have enough time to read everything that was assigned. It is really interesting to reflect on these experiences after reading the articles for this week.

Good luck on your prelim!

Thanks for your post and for sharing the additional resources!

Thank you for posting this! I agree that it can be very hard to articulate these beliefs and describe experiences that demonstrate these beliefs. Thanks for sharing this statement! I really enjoyed reading it.

Thank you for your post. I think it is really important to continue to engage in conversations and to listen to other perspectives, both when learning about different cultures as well as when talking about microaggressions. I think that in both aspects, we need to continue to have conversations and to listen to the views of other people. Like you said, engaging in these conversations can help broaden perspectives.

Every day, I make a to-do list. Of course, I never complete it. So, the next day instead of creating a new list, I just add more activities to the list. At the end, I just tried to do the priority activities and I leave the others activities for another day. It seems to work so far.
Something, interesting that I noticed when I saw your to-do list is that mine only has work-related activities.

I also agree that anyone who wants to acknowledge diversity in a classroom should first be aware of its issues. Students would definitely benefit a lot when working with people with different backgrounds and cultures. It is always good to get out of the comfort zone.

I find multitasking helpful sometimes. I used to wash vials in the lab while talking with my friends over phone. To me, its depend on the difficulty of the tasks someone is performing.