Tag Archives: Education

A Brief History of the Modern Post-Ac (or Reform or Alt-Ac) Movement

Posted on December 27, 2012 by | 9 Comments

Hello, hello! I hope you had wonderful holidays. I completely and utterly enjoyed my first post-academic Christmas, the first time in my life I did not have stacks of papers to either write or grade while also doing the shopping and card-sending. It was blissful and rejuvenating.

dr

I’m back in the office the day after Christmas — so this is also the first Christmas in my life where I had responsibilities that instantly resumed at the close of holidays! But I’m not complaining: there are only 6 other people in my office, and once I answered a few student emails, I have been able to do whatever I want, which has included teaching my office neighbors to crochet, watering other people’s plants and hermit crabs, and working on our post-academic project.

(Please consider contributing!)

So I’ve been reading through archives of other post-ac blogs — mostly defunct ones — mining them for the best content so we can try and include all relevant info and not have to reinvent the wheel when we set up the website. We’re curates in a number of ways, and it’s occurred to me more than once that this feels like an historical project (in that we’re assembling a bit of history and crafting a narrative, not that we’re making history). I’m reminded of a few archival projects I did as a grad student in American Studies — one on the Hoover Presidential Library, and one on the KMA Kitchen Homemaker Radio Show — in that I’m gathering, gathering, gathering info from archives with no organization beyond chronology and at some point patterns start to emerge and the story matures in a way that’s meaningful and more importantly, writeable! (Except this time, I’m doing it for fun, with friends, and no deadline, and more than 1 person will read it).

I’ve been putting together a timeline that I think traces the roots and chronology of the modern “post-academic movement.” This is a placeholder/umbrella term I’m using to indicate the counter-academic movement within and without institutions broadly: critiques of academia from within (institutional critiques, etc), including concerns about labor structure, grad student exploitation/experience/professionalization, and the contingent faculty movements that have sprung up; and the proliferation of post-academic, ex-academic, and anti-academic blogs and advice books outside the academy. Not that these are equivalent in terms of impact, but more that they’re concurrent. I’m connecting dots here. This is a draft, it’s totally incomplete, and reflects my own background in composition theory and American Studies. Please, suggest additions, ask questions, question the premise, etc.

 

1967:

  • Doctor of Arts programs established — programs briefly flourish, then precipitously fade in the early 90s (seems related because it is a reformed doctoral degree focusing on teaching and application of research).

1960s-90s

  • Process theory gains momentum in composition classrooms. This is significant, IMO, in that it generates some serious cognitive dissonance in the academy, and those effects are borne out through the practices of graduate students.
  • Foucault. Come on.

1987

  • The Wyoming Conference Resolution opposing unfair employment/pay practices for post-secondary English teachers (that is, comp instructors and TAs).

1993

  • Susan Miller writes Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, which is significant IMO because it (a) uses cultural studies to study the institution itself (b) furthers a conversation about hierarchies and exploitation within institutions and departments and (c) talks about how grad students/teachers are complicit in their own exploitation. (There are many other important publications like this. This is the one I could remember off the top of my head.)

1993-2003

1997

1999

  • Paula Chambers founds the WRK4US listserv, which served humanities and social science graduate students in career changes. (See 2010 below.)
  • RateMyProfessor.com founded

2000

  • Re-envisioning the PhD project founded with goals of improving transparency, suggesting reform, and revamping doctoral education in the US.
  • The Responsive PhD project founded to enhance transparency, improve public engagement, and promote diversity in doctoral education. Concluded 2006 with “goals achieved.”

2000s

  • Composition starts to come into its own right as a discipline by becoming everything it hates (ok, that’s an exaggeration). But still, comp starts to feel its own cognitive dissonance as it gains institutional prestige and all the markings of legitimacy (departments! offices! tenure lines! a zillion conferences and journals with parentheses and slashes in the titles!) but continues to focus on vexing issues of racism, sexism, class, oppression, and exploitation in institutionalized practices and hidden pedagogy.

2001

2003

2004

2005

2009

2010

2011

2012

This post also appears at HowToLeaveAcademia.com

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Posted in Grad School Quittas, The Alt-Ac Life

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From the “NO DUH” Files: Latest from NSF and CGS makes it clear that the academy will not solve its problems soon enough to help grad students

Posted on December 7, 2012 by | 32 Comments

Inside Higher Ed sums up the latest NSF report on employment of new PhDs, showing a nearly 10% drop in employment over the last 6 years, in every single fucking field, with the Humanities at the lowest at nearly 57%. Time to completion has barely budged at an average of 9 years. The Chronicle interpreted the rise in doctorates granted as a good thing but lamented that job prospects “weren’t so rosy” in what has to be the understatement of the decade. Not to be outdone, in a shocking, ambitious, “stark appraisal” that shook the academic world to its core, MLA president Michael Berube wowed a rapt crowd of clueless and overpaid grad college Deans at this year’s Council of Graduate Schools with this frank and forthright assessment of humanities in particular:

Friends, we are fucked. We are overproducing graduates at astonishing rates. We nurture and promote a narrow range of skills and expertise that will not serve our graduates in the future. Yet we are dependent on a constant stream of new grads because we must exploit them as an army of adjuncts and TAs thanks to draconian budget bullshit. Grad students are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore, but have no one to turn to for help. And we continually mistake the vigor of academic employment with the cultural relevance of art and the humanities. My radical suggestion is this…

Oh no wait. My bad. This is what actually happened: Berube made a bunch of inconclusive statements and repeated stuff that has been said for the last 10 years. His “stark appraisal” was less informed and less radical than JC’s most off-the-cuff musings about life after grad school. However, Chronicle of Higher Ed readers surprised everyone by quickly crowdsourcing a dynamic set of solutions in the comments page. Oh no, wait AGAIN, my bad! Chronicle readers responded in typical fractious, heated, ostentatiously out of touch form by repeating the same points in the same arguments that have been made for the last 10 years!

Humanities are dead!

Humanities are more important than ever!

I don’t care about a piddly job, I want to expand my miiiiiind!

If you couldn’t figure out the academic market sucks, you shouldn’t be allowed in grad school!

Finally, administrators are dicks! THE END!

FacepalmAfter drunken night at Chris' II_MMVIFacepalm

/dohHead in Hands

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Post-Ac Bloggers Everywhere Do a Massive Facepalm

I am continually staggered by the lack of conviction, the lack of recognition behind every academic discussion of the “grad school crisis.” I get annoyed real quick when the conversation gets derailed, time and time again, into the “humanities crisis.” The idea that the horrific working conditions for grad students and recent graduates is due to some broader trend of cultural denigration of the arts and literature baffles me. It seems like a denial technique, a way to deflect the painful reality that graduate programs do active damage to the lives — the livelihoods — of grad students, and turn it back to a textual analysis or critique. If kids these days just appreciated Shakespeare then everything would be ok. If administrators today would just pay us the millions of dollars we deserve for our cutting edge research then we, benevolent faculty, would handle everything perfectly.

I know a lot of faculty who stand in solidarity with grad students and adjuncts. And I know it’s no cakewalk for a lot of profs who are dramatically overworked and compensated at a rate that’s pretty pathetic. But I simply no longer have the patience to wait for the academy to solve this problem. The master’s tools (to borrow a phrase) will never dismantle the master’s house.

I don’t believe a “new” PhD “track” (anyone ever heard of the massive failure of the DA? Is there institutional memory at all??) will make PhDs more employable.

I don’t believe a new kind of “relevant” dissertation will make PhDs more employable.

I don’t believe that a bunch of academics and administrators sitting in a room will come up with the solution, and I certainly don’t expect them to ever agree on a right thing to do.

I do not believe that anyone in the academy has the first clue about what it’s like to look for work in the real world with graduate school as the only thing on your resume.

We cannot grad school our way out of the problem of grad school. We cannot dissertate through this. We cannot conference a solution. We cannot study group interest this away.

The simple fact is that faculty, departments, and schools will need to figure out ways to keep people coming into graduate school. Their solutions to this problem will be focused on maintaining the status quo, for some good reasons (we need teachers) and some shitty reasons (cheap ones!). I doubt that their interest will ever be purely on doing what’s right for grad students, because what’s right for grad students as human beings (IMO) does not match up with what’s right for the institution. Those continents don’t meet.

I think the only people who can really look out for grad students — past, present, and future — are other grad students, and really,  are quitters, because we’re not as invested in the whole thing. (Berube noted in his presentation that most opposition to promoting alt-ac/post-ac careers comes from current grad students near the end of their programs). I hereby declare that the only people qualified to actually talk about alternative academic or post-academic or ex-academic careers are alt-ac, post-ac, and ex-acers. (It’s kind of like declaring bankruptcy.) Clearly the MLA president knows he’s not qualified to speak to this:

“If indeed our programs are designed to produce teachers and researchers, perhaps we need to remake them from the ground up if we are going to see them as producing teachers and researchers and something else.”

“Something else” indeed.

I made up these numbers.

So I call on my fellow bloggers to step it up. More and more folks are googling about grad school quitting. They have no one to turn to, for real. We’re it. So what are we going to do about it?  I mean very literally, what more can we do? What do quitters need? What do prospective grads need? How can we help?

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What You Learn About Thanksgiving in Kindergarten

Posted on November 26, 2012 by | 2 Comments

In the car today on the way to gymnastics, D says:

“Mom, say this: Raise your hand if you know the name of the ship the Pilgrims sailed on.”

“Raise your hand if you know the name of the ship the Pilgrims sailed on.”

D raises her hand. I call on her.

“The Mayflower.” Then she says, “Wasn’t it good how I didn’t just blurt it out?”

“Yes. Nice job not blurting. What else did you learn about the Pilgrims? I noticed a picture of Pocahontas in your Friday folder last week.”

“Pocahontas went to meet the king and queen. She was an Indian. She lived in India. Her dad was in charge of their area, and he didn’t like the pilgrims, and then Pocahontas got tooken to meet the queen, and then she met her husband and they had a baby and he was their son! So was that baby a boy or a girl?” (That last question is clearly an imitation of her teacher’s voice, so I answer.)

“Um, a boy.”

“Right. He was a boy.”

I wait a minute, to see if more information is forthcoming, but this seems to be the end of the story of Pocahontas. I ask a couple follow up questions, but it seems like she genuinely has no idea why Pocahontas’ father didn’t like the Pilgrims, why the Pilgrims came to North America, or why Pocahontas went to England to meet the king and queen. Since we only have a few minutes in the car, I decide to try and intervene with the most glaring misunderstanding.

“Hey D, remember when you read about Christopher Columbus?”

“Yes. In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That’s a rhyme: two, blue. His mom and dad thought the earth was flat but he did his dream and sailed and he was right because our world is a sphere, mom! A sphere!”

“Um, right. Remember how he wanted to sail to India, but he ended up in North America, but he didn’t realize that he had made a mistake sailing, so he called the North Americans he met Indians?

“Yes! But they were NOT India Indians!”

“Right. And neither was Pocahontas. She lived in North America, near the ocean, and the Pilgrims met her when they sailed here.”

“Oh. Did they think they were sailing to India?”

“Um, no. They pretty much knew where they were going. They just weren’t very respectful about people’s names. What else did you learn about the Indians?”

“Um, some really nice people bought Squanto and set him free after the bad people taked him and sold him. There’s a special word for that.”

“Slave? They made him a slave?”

“YES. They slaved him, and it was really bad, they were bad guys!”

“Who? The Pilgrims?”

“No. Well, I don’t know. Maybe Pilgrims. Or maybe Indians. But then those other people bought him and set him free. Wasn’t that nice?”

“Yes. That was definitely nice.” Again, all my follow up questions about this gem of a revelation are met with total confusion. She does not know if Squanto was enslaved (or freed) by Pilgrims or Indians, why he was enslaved, or how this story is connected to Pocahontas, if at all, beyond her initial (mis)understanding that both Pocahontas and Squanto lived in India.

Also, at no point did she mention the Pilgrims and Indians having Thanksgiving dinner together, which I would have assumed would be the centerpiece of any kindergarten lesson about the holiday. Or maybe it was, and I have the kid who only remembers the peripheral details of interest to her: ships, slavery, conflict, marriage babies. American History at its kindergarten best.

 

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Let’s Talk About Debt, Part 4: The Golden Handcuffs of Employment (aka “Public Service”)

Posted on August 29, 2012 by | 12 Comments

Hello from post-academic-working-busy-life land! I’m so intensely sorry to have neglected the blog. I have excuses but they are boring. I think I’m finally settling in to my job and will have more time and brainspace to write here.

A few months ago, I started a series of entries about student loans and how grad school culture supported my awful financial choices for a decade called “Let’s Talk About Debt.” In the third essay, I wrote that loans could — and probably should — be considered a prison sentence:

Really, let’s reframe student loans as a prison sentence. The higher your debt, the longer your sentence. And 5 years might seem like nothing at 22, but I’m telling you that ten years later, 5 years seems like a big chunk of your life, and that’s if and only if you are able to put a huge amount towards loans every year. Most people – like me and my family – can’t approximate that.

So you might say Fuck it, I’ll just make my minimum payments for 25 years or whatever and just count on having to pay it. OK, yeah, that makes sense (if you ignore things like the massive amount of interest you’ll pay); but really, think about what you could be doing with that $400 or $500 (or $1000) per month. You could… save for retirement. Get your kids the braces they need or help pay for your Mom’s nursing home costs. Go on a honeymoon in San Francisco instead of camping. Get your dog the surgery for his hip instead of putting him to sleep. Invest in the stock market, or buy a kickass car. Fix the car you already have. That kind of money, month after month? It can be a life or death, eat or go hungry difference.

I wanted to add a new wrinkle to this conversation after a chat I had with a coworker earlier this week. We were talking about being broke and going broke. This coworker is a close friend and fellow ex-academic who came to work in advising after completing an interdisciplinary PhD and trying (and failing) to find full-time teaching work in community colleges and the like. She’s brilliant and funny and employed and broke. (Sounds familiar, right??) She told me that under federal guidelines, our jobs as full-time employees of a public university qualify us for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. It’s kind of like Northern Exposure, where Joel gets med school paid for when he agrees to work in Alaska for a few years, but in this case, PSLF qualifies any full-time public employee to write off whatever remains of their student loans after 120 on-time loan payments.

Doing a little math, you can see that for anyone with a lot of student loan debt, this is a really, really good thing. For me, personally, depending on what my monthly loan payments end up being, this plan could save me anywhere from $60,000 – $90,000.

Let that sink in for a second.

And then imagine my thought process. Continue reading →

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But where did the first people come from? And what about sloths?

Posted on August 4, 2012 by | 10 Comments

Last night, about halfway around the block, walking slowly, trying to let go of the stress of unpacking and laundry and semester prep, D asks, out of the blue:

“Where do people come from?”

I think she must be thinking about babies, because we’ve just spent time with her baby cousin, and I say, “Babies grow inside a mom, in her uterus, until they’re ready to be born.”

“No mom- the first people. Where did the first people come from?”

Her question is clear and reasonable, but I’m hesitant. T and I have not talked about what, if anything, we will tell our girls about God. I decide to go with science:

“So, a long, long time ago, there was a huge explosion called the Big Bang. That explosion created a lot of light and heat and energy in the universe, and on our planet, earth, the light and heat and energy meant that tiny creatures could start to exist. And very slowly, over a really long time, those creatures grew and changed a little bit at a time until eventually they were sort of like people. Sometimes we call them cave people. And the cave people kept growing and changing a little bit at a time, and slowly they became people more like us.”

We’re still walking. D is thinking. I am thinking I really need to brush up on my knowledge of evolution. Are there youtube videos about evolution for children? Lucy asks:

“What about sloths? Are sloths real?”

We talk about sloths for a minute. One of the differences between D and Lucy is that after you answer Lucy’s questions, she rarely needs any follow up. It’s hard to tell if she’s listening or understanding because she tends to scamper away as you’re answering. But D thinks it through and then repeats the answer to make sure she didn’t miss anything.

“Okay. So first was the big bam, and that big bam made the universe and the tiny creatures exist, and the tiny creatures grow and change to cave people, not like us, and the cave people grow and change to people people like us?”

“Yes. Does that make sense?”

She nods. We’re turning into our driveway. Lucy asks:

“But what about robot pinecones?”

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A Rant About Wheel Bearings, Wifi, & Post-Academic Chaos

Posted on June 16, 2012 by | 9 Comments

Note: I wrote this yesterday morning. I’ve since recuperated, and the rest of my day wasn’t ALL bad. Sleep is important, people.

I found myself crying in an underground tunnel this morning. I also cried in a ditch and while skulking through the empty parking lot of a gravel company trying to find a shortcut to a diner. I am backed into another one of life’s little corners today, and bone-deep fatigue makes escape feel fruitless and impossible. I know I probably shouldn’t post while fatigued, but I literally have nothing else to do right now. Besides, the internet loves a good rant.

I’m not in crisis: it’s just some stupid wheel bearings on my car that need fixing, and just a dumb mistake of making the appointment to fix them in the wrong branch of the tire place in the wrong small town, on top of yet another lousy, sleepless night in a long line of lousy nights. It’s one of those little things that stands in for bigger things and makes life feel shot to hell. Continue reading →

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American History HK: Hello, Kitty tours the US

Posted on June 16, 2012 by | 3 Comments

UPDATE:

In case you were wondering, yes, we did buy more Hello, Kitty cards.

Hello, Kitty Michigan looks like Rosie the Riveter. And yes, Hello, Kitty Nevada is a showgirl. Or possibly a peacock, as Dorothy guessed.

UAW take note: here is a new way to popularize unions with the youth of America.

MOM! Are peacocks from Nevada?

 

Original post: Continue reading →

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Posted in Mothering, Pop Culture

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Square One: Lessons from a Monumental Techfail

Posted on June 5, 2012 by | 8 Comments

Here’s what you don’t do.

You don’t google instructions for turning a PDF into something editable. You don’t think, My first freelance editing client will think I’m such a badass!! and do this while eating post-coital Doritos and watching Classic Albums: Cream’s Disraeli Gears on Netflix (not the best ep, fwiw).

You don’t follow those instructions so closely that you ask a program you’ve never used before – the ominously named Automator – to perform a “workflow” that will convert a PDF to an editable RTF and dump it on your desktop. You especially don’t follow these vague missives so closely that you neglect to use your noodle and narrow the scope of drives and folders that this program will mine for PDFs from THE ENTIRE COMPUTER to a reasonable, single folder, perhaps titled “My first paying editing gig that I do not want to fuck up.”

You do not click “run workflow” and then do a slow-mo Nnnnnnnoooooooooo as you realize your mistake but by then, it will not be too late. This program will not attempt to birth 60,000 RTFs with titles like _CompressionSys14% and _writedata-l-5$ onto your desktop. Your computer won’t seize.

What you do is, you back everything up. And I did do that: I use Sugarsync for automatic, instant backup/syncing and really like it, except I didn’t notice that I hit my uploading limit and some of the subfolders of my main folders didn’t make it, and that means I lost some writing and work that was very precious to me. Work that was going to send Mama Nervosa readers into spasms of ecstatic hilarity this summer as I unveiled a humorous memoir project based on failed relationships past and present. Oh, it was going to be so good, you guys. My writing workshop – the one where Jen and I met – loved this work.

There’s a slim chance a hard copy is floating around somewhere in my office files. I have a tiny ray of hope. If I can find that one hard copy, then I will gird my loins to recreate the remaining funny stuff I wrote post-workshop, and I will sit for five hours with the wayback machine again to find and C&P my public Diaryland diary (this is before they were called blogs, y’all) from 1999-2000, and then I will share it all with you.

But I don’t know if it will be as fresh and funny. I’m scared. I’m scared that work is gone forever. (I didn’t even mention the brilliant first few pages of my novel, a novel I had sorta set aside, but those pages! They were so good.)

I picked a terrible weekend to do something incredibly stupid to my beloved laptop. Not only do I have my first paid editing gig and an overdue book review to write (sorry, Lula Belle), but we chose to take the plunge and move Mama Nervosa to a self-hosted wordpress thingydoodle. People keep swearing It’s so great to have the freedom! The freedom! But I’m sitting here going, OK, how do I get those neat share buttons back? How do we find all our followers and herd them towards the new site, new feed, etc? We had such awesome momentum when we hit the transfer button, but those stats and followers – 15k views, 50 followers – have vanished into thin air and between that and being minus some seriously important and high quality work, I feel like we are back to square one.

Anyone else remember this AWESOME PBS show?? I loved it!

I guess my whole life is square one in these first weeks post-grad school. And while things are moving and happening – I feel cautiously optimistic at my chances of getting an interview for a job I applied to two weeks ago (the listing closed yesterday, cross fingers), and I’m getting leads on writing/editing jobs – I also feel adrift. I’m still receiving updates from a University I no longer attend and thinking, Gee, my parking sticker expired and I will never renew it. Gee, I won’t be around for this new ID card transition thing. Most of my days are spent at home with two intense and bored children: we’re all hurting as we feel our universe shrink down around us. We can’t freewheel all over Eastern Iowa because we are trying to adjust to a much smaller budget. I’m grumpy; they’re grumpy.

Robin, incensed at the injustice of ponytail asymmetry.

My husband and I have had some glittering and wonderful conversations about grad school quitting (more on that to come), but our chat is increasingly dominated by domestic concerns (we oughta get on fixing that bathtub drain, we oughta make plans to paint the garage) because that’s my world right now. Is this it? I ask as if I’m an interviewee in Feminine Mystique.

Other shifts are occurring on the home front. My 2.5 year old decided to spontaneously potty train, and has been doing great (except for poops. sigh.). I love life without diapers but we have been using them at night and I just realized that we are completely out and I guess we’ll just wing it and see how it goes? Oh, to be free of Pull-Ups!

The girls finally met local friends – two sets of siblings just around the corner. They live just far enough away that the kids can’t hop over there on their own, so they keep begging us to go over there after dinner, and it’s kind of awkward inviting ourselves over all the time. We neither want to impose, nor do we want to assume that their parents want to keep an eye on our kids. More on this later.

Robin started preschool yesterday. She loved it so purely and instantly that I am terrified there won’t be an opening in the fall (it’s a small, in-home program). So in about a month I will have to decide if we pursue other options or forget about it (I don’t know if Robin will stand for a year without school – she really, really loves the challenge and change in routine). These are the things I can do without.

Just standing here in my new crocs writing at my old, back-from-the-dead laptop counting down the minutes until my husband gets home (another grownup!) makes me feel so tired. But. The girls are playing together, independently, upstairs. I read a few fantastic books (see below) this weekend. And it’s JUST the beginning: the sky’s the limit, right? I’m just in yet another holding pattern, yet another liminal and vague space that’s opened up because I quit school and changed everything. But so far those spaces have yielded almost nothing but positives, so I have to trust that things are going to play out just fine. Even if it does mean rewriting a few essays.

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Let’s Talk about Debt, Part 3: Debt & Regret

Posted on May 31, 2012 by | 11 Comments

(Read Part 1 and Part 2)

The long and short of it is that the culture of debt in grad school supported my dumb decisions. The problem is both individual and systemic. Because the system gave active and vigorous windmill high-fives to my desire to avoid adulthood or cope with poverty and bad choices, there was no pushback on my decision to subsidize my very long and mostly pointless degree(s) over and over again with government money. I had to force myself to lift that rock and peer at the gross stuff, on my own, and because human beings like to avoid pain and embarrassment, it took me a long time to have the guts to do that. As in, years. And when I finally decided to leave, some still encouraged me to stick with it, just for a few more years.

But, now we’re there: we’re looking hard at our budget, we’re coming up with a plan to reduce our debt and be able to afford things like, ya know, FOOD, and it’s very painful. Ask yourself the last time you looked up your outstanding balance on student loans, or did the math on how much interest you pay on your credit card every month. It hurts. Continue reading →

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What Lauren Learned About Identity & Work via a Craft Disaster (aka “Do it, start it, FUCK THIS IT’S NOT WORKING!”)

Posted on May 25, 2012 by | 5 Comments

It’s time for me to ‘fess up: I did not do the Pinterest challenge assigned to me by Renee, the winner of the Pin Us To It prize at our 4K giveaway.

Now, I bet some of our newer readers, brought here by our connections to other post-academic blogs, are thinking “WTF is this Pinning shit?” So before I launch into a discussion of my crafting experience, let me say this about Mama Nervosa: it’s a non-niche blog. We don’t just write about being ex-grad students, or just write about being feminists, or just write about being Moms, or just write about secretly reading super goofy quasi-pornographic YA lit in sixth grade. We write about all of our experiences, and some of those experiences include stuff that’s very typically feminine or maternal. We simply aren’t interested in fracturing our identities into separate blogs or saying that how we feel about ourselves as brainy feminist women has nothing to do with being mothers or crafting disaster-ers. I’ll try to make some connections between this craft experience and some of the stuff I’ve been thinking as I quit grad school towards the end of the post, so stay with me!

From our inception as a blog, we’ve been preoccupied with Pinterest and lifestyle blogs because they’re such an integral part of the online mommying world (read this recent article from Jezebel for a taste of it). Jen is pretty ok with Pinterest: she recognizes its flaws, but overall, her experience with Pinterest is positive. I… let’s just say I feel differently. Continue reading →

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