Classes start here at Rochester College next week (in fact, one of my online classes starts tomorrow!).
With summer drawing to a close, it’s hard not to feel a bit exasperated at all that I wanted to accomplish, but didn’t get around to. But, rather than wallow in the list of things I didn’t get to, I’m making a list of all the things I *did* manage to accomplish.
Between early May and the end of August, I did the following:
- Taught three separate online courses (two of them were graduate level)
- Wrote and submitted three book reviews
- Wrote two conference papers and delivered those papers at the respective conferences (NAPS in May and the BYU Narsai Workshop in June)
- Translated one memra by Narsai in preparation for writing that paper
- Edited and re-wrote the Narsai paper for its inclusion in an edited volume (I’m actually still working on this…deadline looming in the immediate future)
- Attended and participated in a syriaca.org Digital Humanities workshop at Marquette University
- Added a bunch of texts to a forthcoming DH corpus project
- Translated three short apocryphal texts in Syriac and wrote introductions to them (to be included in the second volume of the New Testament Apocrypha, edited by Tony Burke and Brent Landau (putting the finishing touches on these this week)
- Wrote a proposal for an edited volume (invited by a publisher)
- Made a small amount of progress on a longer translation project that I will wrap up this fall.
And somehow, during all of that, I spent a lot of time on the road with the family on various “trips” (they aren’t really vacations when you travel with little kids!).
I made this list to try to turn around how I was feeling about my reflection on summer productivity, and I think it worked. Viewing it through the lens of how much I actually did (vs. what I didn’t do) is a helpful shift in perspective.