I don’t want to talk to much about life outside of the university, but Christmas was lonely and New Year’s was sort of ruined when I hurt my toe, requiring 3 stitches!

Still I got a bunch of PhD stuff done over that holiday break. That includes 150 sources for the second Scoping Literature Review (SLR) and a draft of the first SLR article. It still has a couple of gaps in it but it’s aroun 80% there. I also put quite a lot of work into the ethics application, I’d say it is 3/4 done. I sent all of that to my supervisors. One was on leave and didn’t reply or respond at all. That is of course, A-OK as they are on leave. The other one confirmed for me that the Plain Language Information Sheet (PLIS) is the next thing for ethics and helped me look at the timeline so I get it done. They had read what I had done and made a few comments. But they didn’t get time to look at the article draft, which was a little dissapointing; made moreso because they gave me a copy of some reviwer’s guidelines as a checklist for the article… not knowing themselves if I’d already addressed those things or not. It was fairly obvious and straightforward stuff like :is the purpose of the reivew made clear.

The Change Fatigue paper is almost ready for submission and the article about pre-service teachers rural placements is just about to be re-submitted. Sue and I are going to mail merge out the surveys for the TAFE project this Friday. I’ve also got a review done for Corrin (American woman I deal with from a group of journals from Common Ground). So if that’s the list of things I have been doing… my list of things I haven’t touched is longer:

Book chapter with Trixie

Rurality article

Rural Placement project

UNESCO project

TAFE project

Intersectionality article

Cross-school grant team question 4 article.

Fair to say I have not been very productive so far this year. I’ve been distracted by things in my personal life, including upcoming dance teaching. I guess you could say I’m just not feeling it. I’ve spoken to a couple of others and they are having the same issue. At least two other academics have extended their annual leave because they need a longer break. Good on them for doing what is best for themselves. Then I think maybe I push myself too much like these people? Maybe I need a break too! Maybe my list of things I haven’t worked on is A-OK! I am just trying to get back into a routine, including fitness and dancing (to look after myself).