Training and productivity and teacher training

I ran 20 minutes Sunday, after the long ride on Saturday. Taking it easy, but not wanting to let up completely. I'm going to roust J to get his bike and run again when I post this. So, another 20min run today (Edit: 20 mins: Run four minutes, then a 45 second sprint, repeat with no rest).

Beyond the run, Sunday was also tremendously productive; I spent the day working over my first chapter draft and incorporating elements from the LOC trip. I don't know why yesterday was so productive, and I wish I did, so that I could be that way more often. I got a lot done, and much of it felt like good writing. Sometimes I just feel like I am slapping words down on the page, planning on letting them be bad until I have a chance to revamp them.

Perhaps it was a productive day because I don't normally work on my writing on Sundays -- but with today's self-imposed deadline for the chapter, I decided that I didn' t want to send it in as it was. Its still not great -- well, its still a first draft, frankly -- but the six-plus hours I put in really knocked out some of the uglier dents.

I wonder if you, gentle reader, have any tips for productivity, particularly in the creative endeavors. What kind of routines/habits/practices work for you, when you need to get the job done?

On a separate note, my advisor came and visited my class today. I took over the class when she got a teaching deferment; developed my own syllabus from the ground up and it ended up being a very different class than the one she would have taught. While I feel good about the class, it was good to get some affirmation from her. As a long-time teacher of dance, I feel comfortable in classroom situations; one of the critiques I have had of the post-graduate institutions I have attended is the lack of attention to teacher training. I wasn't a great teacher for a long time, and it took me a lot longer than it ought to figure out a style that worked. I think it wasn't until I became a manager in charge of training teachers at a dance studio that I really thought about my teaching as being more than a simple exchange of information, from the person who had it to the person who didn't. Now, I listen a lot more, engage in conversation, and try not to smack down answers that seem to be on the wrong track immediately.

Over the summer, I taught a class where I had to lecture 45+ minutes a day, four days a week -- and that was crazy rough. I find the dialogic model to be much more satisfying, both from a learning and an experiential point of view. On the plus side, my students are pretty darn engaged -- every single one (of 20) had something to say today. On the not-so-plus side, every student has a very different learning experience, and the conclusions they draw from the material are often more widely divergent than I would prefer. Which, I think, is me trying nicely to say that sometimes, even after the conversation, some folks just don't get it. I'm trying to be less judgemental about that. It aint always easy . . .