Summer is Here. Time for Recharging and Rethinking

Lehigh's campus has a few days left of finals. It's been a long and hard semester. Many projects, additional outreach initiatives, and more than a full plate of regular day-to-day tasks required some highly skilled juggling.

One of the tasks is to scan social media for what's happening in the arts on campus and in South Bethlehem. Of course, scanning requires a fair amount of self discipline. I set a timer to redirect the rabbit holes I inevitably go down. But every rabbit hole offers insight and knowledge that comes in handy when I work with incredibly focused people. I'm often bringing community relationships into conversation with campus programs. Those relationships are institutional as well as personal. I love to learn about faculty research. The social and cultural organizations in the Lehigh Valley are also full of intelligent, curious, and passionate thinkers who love sharing what they do with others. Helping to make connections between folks on campus and folks in the community is what I was born to do. But it takes an extraordinary amount of time to learn about the community through making and sustaining relationships. Sometimes, I'll even do a deep dive into an experience or institution to really get to the know the people inside it. I research and experience as many programs off campus as possible; especially in the summer.

You see, you can't connect the dots in community engagement if you don't know what's happening in the community.

But that is also where I get into trouble. I see some pretty awesome things happening, and get to meet some pretty awesome people. I want to be a part of all the awesome stuff. The reality is, just because I could do anything, doesn't mean I can actually do everything. Try as I might to ignore the limitations of physical endurance and the finite resources of time, there comes a point when I must limit the monkeys.

The what?

Throughout the semester, I've been referring to a well known Polish proverb:

I took on some pretty substantial monkeys this semester. One included a deep dive into high school musical theater programs, another was to co-chair a local festival. These two projects were piled on top of teaching a course that had a higher enrollment than it should have had (that will require lots of rethinking this summer), and taking a course on program evaluation that makes me want to rethink nearly everything I do..... And then there's is the local history research project I started in 2010 - and continue to peck at it as national issues bring me back to finding lessons from our past.

And what about the Mountaintop Research project this summer? This is the project I've been wanting to do since before I got to Lehigh.

I hope to write about each one of these topics and more through the next couple of months. All of this stuff made the semester a pretty fantastic circus.

In the next couple of days, I will be plotting out the reading/writing schedule and figuring out a routine that should keep me on track to finishing a few items while also taking required recharge and respite time.  That usually means staring at a large body of water (lake or ocean) until I'm ready to come back to the drawing board for another go at the circus.