The commercial side

I think the gap between this post and the previous one couldn't have been bigger; the despair and starkness of the WWI trenches compared to the story of commercialization that I'm going to tell below. But hey, sometimes my life is just one big potpourri of unconnected things.
Being a project manager at an educational publisher means you have to know a lot about one very particular thing (your subject, in my case biology) and not so much about lots of other things. These include people management, design, finance, marketing, sales, editing, IT, and which business meeting point has the best dinner possibilities combined with the shortest walk back to the train station. We have specialised departments for each of the things mentioned above, with people who have actually studied in their subject, same way as I have studied biology. But they, lucky them, do not really have to know that much about my field to still be able to do their work on my books properly (although our editor now knows more about protein synthesis than she'd ever care to). I, on the other hand, am constantly learning about their specialities.
One of my least developed areas, I and anyone who knows me would say, is commerce. When I call something 'commercial', it's not a positive thing. I never listen to commercial radio stations, for example, or watch the commercial channels on TV. I don't know that I ever owned a piece of clothing that had it's brand displayed for all the world to see. So doing the commercial things that come with the job can sometimes be a bit difficult.
Yesterday was a case in point. We were at a biology convention (the biggest biology convention of the Netherlands) and not only did I have to man our stand (which means talking to the 650+ teachers who attended the convention, answering their questions, handing out free goodies, and on occasion try to get them to buy our stuff), I also had to give a workshop. To be honest, it was only a small part of a bigger workshop, and my part wasn't really that important, and if I hadn't turned up none of the 35 people in the workshop would have noticed. But still, for me it was quite a big thing, because talking in front of a room full of people is not my favourite thing to do.
Thankfully, it all went well. It went better than well, because everybody listened and participated in the short assignment I'd thought up for them, and when we went through the answers they even forgave me for not knowing exactly why something was the right answer at some points (it was about linking words in educational texts, not exactly my area of expertise). I was dead tired and had a pounding headache, but nobody else seems to have noticed that, which was good. My publisher did the other 80% of the workshop and she made the good points and gave the right answers to the questions, to which I added some small bits of info when I thought she was being a bit too brief.
And then we went back to manning the stand and talking to people in friendly manners. I have never had one of those trainings in which you learn to find out whether someone will actually buy your stuff at some point, and how to ditch them as quickly as possible when you know they won't, so some of my conversations may have been pretty useless in a commercial sense, but I had fun and being nice to people is something I like to do. But still, after spending 12 hours anticipating other people's needs, questions and wishes, I'm going to be the most self absorbed person ever for the next 24.
Anyway, it's nice to know I'm slowly mastering yet another part of the jigsaw puzzle that is professional life.

I made something

You can often see Internet memes captioned 'I made dis', showing proud (to our anthropomorphic minds) cats, dogs, or other animals and their offspring. I think the best example by far is this one, also because of the other word-joke included:

Anyway, as of yesterday, I have been walking around with the same feeling. Not that I have been making offspring, but I have been making books.
Now I've made stuff before: paintings, cakes, cookies, hand-crafted presents, and the like (this is apart from all the study-related stuff I've made, such as essays and endlessly transcribed editions of obscure medieval texts). I have even made books before, that is to say, I completed NaNoWriMo and other writing endeavours, and sometimes I've printed them out and handed them around.
But I've never really made a true book, with a cover and a title page and an opening and an ending and useful stuff in between. But as of yesterday, there are books in existence that I have made.
Not technically, of course, I haven't done any of the printing or putting-together. I'm not even that responsible for the content, as I haven't actually written a word that can be found in them. But I have managed the project that brought these books into being, from creating the concept, thinking up the graphic design, writing the texts, revising the texts, thinking up ideas for the pictures, then handing it over to the editors who made people draw the pictures and put it through to the typesetter who made it into a book file, which was then sent to the printer to be printed.
All these things were done by other people. But I am the only person who was involved in every step, and had influence on every step, and it is regarded by everyone as 'my' project, and hence when the books came in from the printer's yesterday they were brought to me and declared to be 'my' books.
This is not true at all, they were a team effort, a very nice effort at that, and I am very happy with the result. But still, I do have to agree that deep down, they do feel like 'my' books. Truly a 'I made dis'  moment, which I hope I will experience many times more, maybe one day even with human offspring involved.

Workaholic

Okay, okay, I'll admit it. I'm addicted. Not only to chocolate and reading and British humour, but also to working. My contract says I have to work for 24 hours, but most weeks I easily make 30, often more. Why? Because it's fun. I like my job, I like the people I work with, I like sorting out the difficult backlog and dividing projects up into smaller bits and seeing those smaller bits completed and finally the big thing completed and having happy co-workers and managers when the thing that they didn't have the time or energy for to fix is finally done. But it's more than fun, it's addictive.
I've always been that way, having things done and handing stuff in at least 2 days before the deadline. Whenever we got an assignment in which you could choose your own topic, I thought about it on the way home and e-mailed my topic to my instructor as soon as I got home. Even if it was week 3, and the essay wasn't due until week 16. And then I would finish the essay itself somewhere around week 14, when others were frantically trying to come up with a topic.
So it's the truth: I like to work. I like to be busy, to create things, to think things through, to solve problems. I'm a workaholic.

Which is nice, most of the time, especially for your co-workers and group mates. It's sometimes less nice for your blood pressure, or the amount of sleep you need, or your social life. And sometimes it's less nice for you yourself, when you get a burn out or suddenly find yourself at 2 am working on some report that isn't due until next week, realising you haven't seen your friends in over a month and haven't cleaned your toilet in even longer.
I've never found myself there, I do seem to have some sort of track-keeper that goes off when I've been working too much, and makes me relax and take my mind of things for a while. Also, as I mentioned before, I really like my job, so it doesn't always seem like 'work'.

The thing is, when I don't like doing something, it really hits me hard. When I try to find excuses not to prepare things, or arrange things, or contact people, which makes that I find myself unprepared or grumpy or sleepy at an important moment.
This was the case with my teacher training. I liked doing it while I was doing it, teaching, but the whole preparation and filling-in-forms and reading difficult didactic textbooks really wasn't my thing. So I didn't put any time, or energy, or effort into it. I just tried to wing it, which is not something you can do in front of 30 12-year-olds. At least not until you've had some practice.

So I quit. This is really weird for me, because I hardly ever quit anything studywise or workwise. Actually, make that never. But for the first time, work was costing me more energy than it was giving me. It made me grumpy and demotivated and tired and trying to avoid the work I had to do. So quitting was the only way forward.
And I feel really good about it. It feels like a weight has been lifted, and I'm finally free to move again. Ironically, the first thing I did was accept a really big assignment from my publisher, which I will have to do in my own time. But that's okay, because I like doing it. And now, I can do what I like to do 5 days a week!

Teacher training

First of all, I am clearly not dead. Dead to the world, maybe, as we moved more than 3 weeks ago and still do not have any connection to the Internet, which is the main reason for my looooong silence here, but certainly not dead. On the contrary, I have been very very busy.

The good news is that my dissertation has officially been finalised and discussed and graded, and that I will pass my MA degree cum laude, or with honours, or whatever the equivalent English term is. Which is very nice, but mostly to me personally, as in the job market today everything that counts is experience and good ideas, and not so much whether you passed with flying colours or just scraped by.
So apart from my officially-3-days-a-week-but-actually-5-days-a-week job at the publisher's, I'm also doing a teacher training internship. This is a sort of basic course that the university offers for everyone interested in education and possibly becoming a teacher one day. It consists of a 3-hour seminar and a one-day-per-week internship at a local (or not-so-local, if you're unlucky) secondary school. I was lucky, I got a school that is a 5 minute bike ride from my home.
It is, however, kind of a weird school. As our local supervisor told us: this used to be the school you went to if you couldn't make it at any of the others. It's a bit go-happy, with more emphasis on children being happy and expressing themselves (looooots of music and art going on) than getting high grades. Kind of hippiesque. Also, very badly organised, with some students muttering about room changes and lack of information and what not by saying: "Well, you know, it's the <name of school which I won't mention>". For example, we'd prepared two lessons for last week Monday, only to hear on Friday that there were no lessons for those classes on that day, because they had the day off. Something they'd just decided, somehow, and forgot to mention. Finally, few digital advances have made it into this school, so I'm just using a blackboard and a crayon, and digital whiteboards or whatever can be found in just a few of the rooms, which are usually booked. So all great fun.

Now I'm taking the course and doing the internship to see whether teaching is for me. Many people have told me over the years that I would be good at it, that it would totally suit me, and I've always told them no. Most of my family is in education, most of them complain a lot about it, and I didn't feel like it was my thing. But then another teacher told me: "You'll never know, unless you try!" Which is really true. I've never stood in front of a class and explained something to them, or told them to get to work, or whatever. Who was I to say that it was not for me?
Well, now I have stood in front of a class and explained something to them and told them to get to work. And I'm not sure what to think of it.
Let me start by saying that at this school, there is somewhat of a pact between teachers and pupils. Teachers don't get too angry or strict, and students don't let things get out of hand too much. Everybody accepts one another, but nobody really goes out of there way (the spirit in some of these classes amazes me: there are the big-mouths who know everything and make fun of everything you try to teach them, but when someone puts their hand up and tells you they got the answer wrong or don't understand something, the big mouths just shut up and let you help them. Never ever, when I was in secondary school, did you put your hand up and tell the teacher that you didn't understand. Not in front of the rest of the class).
Now I'm wondering whether the fact that they did as I told them (even though they clearly didn't want to) is in part because of they're used to not making things too crazy and being polite to others. At the end of the lesson our coach (their real teacher) asked them what they thought about the lesson, and they told me it was good, refreshing, interesting, useful. Not sure if they really meant this, or were just being polite.
So there is a bit of insecurity there. Also, I'm not sure what I think about it myself. I don't have this whole idealistic idea of 'spreading knowledge'. I like to explain stuff to people, but mostly to interested people who've asked me about it, not to 30 bored 15-year-olds who would rather be playing video games or shopping and are constantly doing stuff on their phones.
Which I totally understand: I was exactly the same in secondary school. Which is why I'm not usually the one correcting them ("David, please put your phone away" "Ladies in the back, please pay attention" "Guys, stop chatting please"). I'm the one thinking: I would be chatting too, and there are a couple who are paying attention, who do need my help, so why not just talk to them?

Not really the educational spirit one is looking for, I think.

After the first 3 classes, I rode home and thought: This is not for me, I'm going to quit. But the thing is, I'm not a quitter. Also, I still don't know whether this is or isn't for me. I have a funny feeling it isn't, but I can't say after just 3 classes (co-taught, there is another intern standing next to me who is doing half of the teaching, which is fun and handy but also slightly annoying, as her teaching style and personality are quite different from mine, and I feel like we're clashing sometimes). So I'm going to try at least another day (3 more lessons) and see what comes out of it.
My coach, by the way, was raving. "Clear explanations, you got them to work, excellent, great first time..." Maybe this is my own insecurity or hunt for perfection, but I didn't believe her. My fellow intern did, by the way, but she is 100% convinced that she's going to be a teacher and she's going to love it, so it's easier for her. Me, I'm still not sure.

Life, and things

I've read quite some blogs over the past few years, and every once in a while there's a looooong pause followed by a "Not dead!" kind of post, in which the author exuces him/herself for the long silence and vents on all the things they have been doing in the meantime, and tells the reader that everything will be better from now on. This is exactly that kind of post, except that I can't tell you that everything will be better, because I'm expecting everything to get even worse for a couple of weeks.
So what have I been doing? In short: working. That's right, I've got my first fully grown-up job as a project manager for several science school books. It's 3 days a week, which means I'm expected to sit in an office 3 days a week (or attend meetings elsewhere). In practice, it's 7 days a week, since I've got people emailing me about important things almost every day (sad fact: the first thing I log into when I start my computer is my work email, not my private email). This week was my first week, and as all first weeks go it was pretty confusing and energy-consuming, but at least I now have a basic idea of what I am expected to do, how I am expected to do it, and who I am working with. Sadly, the person whose work I'm taking over has not been able to come in due to a back problem, so I've been trying to figure these things out mostly on my own. But now I know, so that's good.
In other news, on Wednesday evening I sent out my dissertation yet again, hopefully it's now good enough to go to the second reader, which means it is nearing completion.
On the house front, things are moving slowly but steadily to the desired end. We (that is to say: mostly my parents and boyfriend's father, as 'we' have been busy working) have painted and drilled and hammered and sanded (sooooo much sanding) until the top floor is entirely done, and most of the first floor (that's second floor to Americans) too. On Monday the carpet guys will come to install (is this the right word?) the carpet, so then these floors will be reeeeaaally almost done. Most of the hallway downstairs is also done, plus half of the living room walls, and with the carpet in there we still hope to move the last weekend of February (or the first week of March). This weekend we will clean the whole thing, as it is veeery dusty (did I mention the sanding?), so that the carpet can go in nice and clean.
And once it's in there we can start packing things and moving things, as the place we live now is steadily filling up with piles and piles of books and other stuff which does not fit into the closets anymore.
Oh yeah, did I mention the two classes and short internship I'm taking this semester start next week? Lots of reading to do!

Anyway, I think that pretty much sums it up. Lots to do, all fun things, all things that make me happy, but also all things that leave me very little time for other stuff, let alone for thinking about other stuff. So it might be quiet for a while longer here, until we settle into the new home and my dissertation is finally approved. Then hopefully, we will have some more breathing space!

Alpha vs beta

In the Netherlands, there exists a differentiation between 'alpha' and 'beta' people. This difference starts in secondary school, when you have to choose between an 'alpha' or 'beta' profile, the first including mostly languages and/or creative subjects, the second being the science subjects. It is almost impossible to combine the two, especially since most schools now offer 4 'streams' you can choose from: nature & mechanics, nature & health, economics & society and economics & culture (the last one is a combination of things I still fail to understand). Once you're in a stream, your somewhat fixed, and it's almost impossible to take courses from any of the other streams (as classes are planned on the same time, e.g., 'chemistry is 3rd period, so we can plan arts history then as well, as nobody will want to take both'). But also further in life, people can ask you whether you are a typical alpha or beta person (or 'gamma', if you're into psychology) and then judge you as creative or logical or social or anti-social accordingly. You are put into the 'alpha' or 'beta' box and stay there.
I know this system does not exist in most other countries. I know, because I've tried to explain it to so many foreigners, who have looked at me blankly as I struggled to make it clear. It isn't clear. It's not really a 'system' either, it's just a way of labelling people, putting them into boxes to make things easier.
Of course, there are some people who do not fit in either of these boxes. I was at a talk by someone who studied Dutch, history and geography, and there was another person who studied economics and English. All of these things are not easily 'married' in the Dutch educational system, but do still belong to the 'alpha' box. It becomes even more difficult when you try to live in both boxes.
In secondary school, I took the 'nature & health' profile, but I added German and Spanish on to that, because I really enjoyed science but I also really enjoyed languages. I studied Biology, which went pretty well, but when it turned out (during my research MSc) that this was not the way I wanted to spend my life, I studied English Language & Culture after that. I enjoy science, reading about science, and discovering things, but I also love languages, reading, writing, and creating. Strangely enough, I do not enjoy the 'scientific' side of languages: linguistics. It is a weird combination.
Now it seems that weird combination has landed me a job. As there are so very few people who combine an interest in science with an interest in language, there are also very few people who can write scientific school books. And I've been doing an internship at a publisher for school books. And they mentioned they needed people who had affiliation with both 'beta' subjects and language, and whether I knew someone. I mentioned that I knew myself. Somehow, this led to me getting a temporal position at the 'beta' department for secondary education.
The interesting thing is, the third person I met in this department studied chemistry and arts. That is crossing the alpha/beta division even more than my biology and English. So now I'm starting to wonder what we're trying to achieve with this alpha/beta divide. Clearly, there are many people who do not fit in these standardised boxes. So making the world easier to grasp by trying to put secondary school pupils in one of four streams may be throwing a way a lot of good things, as people are not encouraged to stimulate other parts of their interests. They may enjoy biology and chemistry, but also history and geography, and now they have to choose. This may cause frustration, but also lead to poorer results because they have to take the 'full package' of what comes with the stream, regardless of whether they also like for example maths. If you choose a 'beta' stream, you have to take the whole thing. I was able to compliment my science profile with languages, and after 9 years of university have finally managed to find a place where I can use both. But how many people have to suppress or ignore part of what they love to do because they do not 'fit' in the system?
If we are the only (that I know of) country actually using this weird system, maybe it's time to look critically, and dispose of it. There are no 'alpha' or 'beta' people. There are just people, with loves and interests, and they should be able to study and learn everything they want.

Pushing papers around

So this internship I'm taking is about preparing for the working life that comes after university, more particularly, the working life in a publishing company. But interestingly, most things I'm learning have nothing to do with the work itself, but more with the things happening around it, such as 'going to lunch with colleagues', 'having a meeting with people from different backgrounds' and 'interacting with people on cold, stormy Saturday mornings when everybody wants to be in bed but they have to be at some stupid conference they don't want to be at'.
Another thing I'm starting to learn about: office bureaucracy. Today was a case in point, one that drove me almost mad. Now I'm not going to give you any names or specifics, but it's handy to know that the company I intern for is a publisher of educational books, and that they have a lot of their materials online.
Now some time in September, my supervisor got an email from a teacher saying that there were mistakes in one of the answer sheets in the online database, and that she was annoyed by this. She mentioned one specific case, and then said something about 'grammar assignments in the upper levels' also containing mistakes. I removed the mistake from the mentioned exercise and my supervisor emailed back asking the teacher whether she could be a bit more specific about where the other mistakes were. The teacher replied grumpily that she was not planning on telling us.
So about a month after the first email, my supervisor asked me if I could check all (that's right, all) answers for the higher level questions, to see if there were any mistakes. I did this, and emailed her with the mistakes. Then about 2 weeks later she emailed me asking whether I could correct these mistakes. I had thought some specialised author was going to do this, but it turned out I could just do it myself. So I did.
However, there was one question where there was no answer at all, it was simply missing from the answer sheet. I marked this question and send everything back to her, saying that I could not correct this question as I did not know the original author's intentions. She got back to me this morning, saying that the author in question is no longer working for the company (the questions were made in 2007), so I should just do the best I could. So I did, and finally, this afternoon, I was able to email the completely corrected files to IT to be uploaded. A full 3 months after the initial email from the teacher.
I got an immediate reply from our regular IT editor that I should contact another editor, as this was not her area of work. Okay, I thought, just one more email and then I'm done. I resend the email to the second editor, crossed my fingers, and got an immediate reply. Success! I thought. But no, it was an out-of-office reply, stating that the editor would be on holiday until the 2nd of January...
Taking into account the multitude of email this person is going to have after an month's absence, I should be happy if the files are uploaded before my internship finishes. That will be a full 4 months after the teacher initially send her email. All the work I've done on the project could be condensed to about 6 hours. So all the rest of it, the emailing, the waiting, the misunderstandings, the miss-sending, all of that took up the rest of the 4 months.
I'm now starting to see how it is that in such huuuuge companies, stuff always takes longer than you expect. It also makes me less grumpy at our mortgage guy, who delayed our mortgage by 10 days. 10 days is peanuts, I now know, it could easily have been 4 months!

Traffic theatre

To get from my house to the company I'm doing my internship, I can take two routes. One goes through the middle of the city centre, has very few traffic lights, and is generally quicker, unless it is a market day or there are lots of drunk post-party students hanging about. The second is through a more open patch, going round the city centre, with lots of traffic lights and streams of busy commuters trying to push past me on their bikes.
Sounds like the first route is preferable, and in many ways, it is. But for the past two weeks, I've been taking the other, slower route. The main reason: broken traffic lights.
There is one main junction in Groningen that has been under construction for about 5 years now. A new underground parking lot has been built, put on hold when the digging made the homes in the neighbourhood slide and crack, continued, and finished, with a huge new office put on the top and new roads put around it. It's been chaos and mess and diversions for 5 years now, but finally, the thing is almost finished. On Monday last week, the new traffic lights were installed. These immediately malfunctioned, unable to cope with the busy morning rush, causing long delays and traffic jams. While the problem is being sorted out, traffic marshals have been put in place of the lights.
This provides me with free comedy every morning. There are two of them, standing in the middle of the junction with their whistles and there red lights and their high-visibility jackets. I admire their bravery in stepping in front of an oncoming stream of cars, forcing them to brake and wait. Sometimes cars try to slip past them, but they are always kept in check by an angry whistle and waving of arms. This leads to many smiles and knowing nods amongst the cyclist ready to move. I also love how they apparently arbitrarily decide who gets to go and who doesn't. But their system is so much better than the traffic lights, because they can actually see which line is longest or that there is a traffic jam up ahead so they should keep traffic in that lane back, etc.
But the best moment is when they pull the whistles out of their mouths and shout together: "Cyclists! Pedestrians!" (these generally don't get to cross together, but in the early morning rush hour time is of the essence, and the traffic wardens just mix them together). On a good day, they also make a cycle movement with their hands above their heads, as if we can't remember what we're supposed to do. But most people start cycling as soon as the wardens reach for the whistle in their mouths.
There are always a few car drivers brave (or stupid) enough to try and slip in between the cyclists and pedestrians, but they never make it. The waves of bikes and 'freight' bikes (used to transport small children to and from school) are just too thick. In a couple of seconds, every biker is on the other side of the road, cleverly avoiding the traffic wardens and other cyclists in the process. And then the whole thing starts over again, with cars in short lines having to wait quite a while for the busier parts to clear. But as a cyclist, you're always one of a huge pack, one that floods the junction for a couple of seconds and then separates and disappears. It's one of the perks of being an early morning bike commuter, and I will be sad when the traffic lights are fixed and I won't have my free mime break anymore.