Improve Your Teaching – 10 Simple Tricks

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As you might know, good teaching is important to me, so I wanted to share ten simple tricks which I think can improve your teaching. Most of them are about making sure people get the basics which, in my opinion, is one of the biggest mistakes people make in teaching. Let’s get straight at it.

1) Make sure the preliminaries are clear before starting an explanation.

If they are not, don’t even bother starting on the explanation, it will be a complete waste of time. Even if this means that you will spend the whole lesson bringing them up-to-date with the preliminaries and you won’t be able to start on the actual topic at all. Make time for this prep work or risk that all of your subsequent explanations will not get through. To find out if the preliminaries and basics are not clear, you might have to plan testing your students regularly (at the start of each block), like with the basics (see nr. 3).

2) Don’t just “get through with the material”.

Teaching is not about you doing what you had planned, but about students learning something. If you misjudged their previous knowledge, change your plan. Bring them up-to-date. That way, they will have learned something (and thus you have reached to goal of teaching), even if you end up not even being able to start on your actual topic at all. Would you rather be “done” with everything you had planned but nobody understood anything or rather do 1/3 of what you had planned to do but be sure that students really master it? I would much rather go with the latter. Or the result will be that your class will not have made any lasting impression on the students at all. Don’t let them leave the way they came!

3) Nothing is more important than absolute mastery of the basics.

Nothing. I repeat: Nothing.

I often find teachers go over the basics way too fast without ever checking if the students got it, because they think it obvious. Students also often don’t even realize their lacking understanding of the basics because they seem so simple. But really, what is the difference between an amateur and a professional musician? It’s not that the professional plays more advanced pieces, since the amateur can do that too after some time. But they are still no a professional, right? – That’s because mastery lies in perfecting the basics and total immerson, not skimming as much advanced stuff as possible without ever mastering anything. A professional musician spends more time doing drills on the basics – and you hear the difference immediately. Once you’re good, you can always learn more complicated advanced stuff and go on studying independently. But you will have a hard time improving on your own if you’ve never even mastered the basics. 

No matter how friendly you are, they are unlikely to tell you what they don’t understand, especially admit to not having understood the material you have spent the last three weeks talking about. You can, of course, scream at them for being lazy or stupid. But no matter how you react, this will not change the fact that they did not get the basics, so any further teaching of more difficult matters or, in fact, anything which forms a progression building on these basics, is going to be time lost and nothing else. Yes, the good ones will make it. But please, don’t just settle for that.

Put a crazy dedication to everyone getting the basics, so at least you can tell yourself “at least they all have the basics now” after the class. You don’t want to overhear your colleagues going on about what horrible teacher your students had last year and have to admit it was you who couldn’t even teach them the basics. Apart from that, test because it has been proven to be the most effective method for learning and also, your students might not even realize they don’t master the basics and therefore, can’t give you a truthful answer when you ask whether they already have the basics. Ultimately, only testing can tell. Hand them a worksheet for “repetition” of the basics with multiple tasks of progressing difficulty to work on on their own. Then walk around and help everyone. Most effective method to check up on your teaching success by far, in my experience.

(When doing this, act like a coach. Don’t give the impression of testing anyone and don’t grade this or they probably can’t enjoy it in the future. I don’t want that sort of pressure in my classes. Grading is for the final portfolio they hand in, not the learning process where we want them to make as many mistakes as possible! I sometimes use anonymous Google Forms so I can see whether the class overall has a good grasp on concepts but they are sure not to be graded since it’s anonymous. Also a great method of getting feedback throughout the semester, not just at the end.)

Also, I suggest you encourage students to go over the basics again every once in a while and with every stage of their progress. You see them differently each time and taking the time to repeat them is always worth it, especially if you want to really master something.

4) Test. Don’t assume learners learned anything before you’ve ascertained it through multiple tests.

This is not meant in a condescending way. Testing is proven to be the most effective learning technique (“learning types” are not scientifically valid – see the audiobook The Great Courses / The Learning Brain for details). Only once you’ve tested you really know what students already know. Often you realize that you already lost them before your first word because you stepped in too late. They might not even have reached the starting point of your explanation. These problems, however, are difficult to spot since usually in these cases, students don’t even know what they didn’t understand and cannot verbalize it when you ask.

5) Avoid confusing naming in programming.

This is not as trivial as it sounds. It might even be pretty difficult to put yourself in a learner’s position and choose a name which is not confusing or misleading. But all the more crucial to take the time to think about it.

For a student who doesn’t fully grasp the concept of how variables  work, what types and instances are, or classes and objects, this can be very detrimental and make learning so much more difficult. In failed teaching attempts in programming, bad naming is mostly the major culprit. Right after that comes the failure to reduce complexity and purge unnecessary detail. Choose names wisely. They make or break you explanation.

6)  Make sure you always only teach one new concept at once.

It happens far too easily that you explain three things at once without realizing. This also happens when you include unnessary detail which might contain concepts students are unfamilar with and end up confusing them, even though this wasn’t even what you were trying to explain.

7) When explaining something, remove the unnecessary.

Putting didactical reduction into practice means get rid of every detail which is not absolutely crucial to understanding the point or students will get confused by the multiple concepts and not see the point at all.

Also, try to eliminate all sorts of examples which might build on extra knowledge your students might not have (like in 6, be sure you really only teach one new concept). So, you might want to use an example of a historical situation which is completely familiar to you (in your crazy scientific surroundings). But are you sure your students are familiar with it? When explaining something new, not only reduce what’s new but also make sure to keep other potentially confusing artefacts out of the explanation. Maybe it wasn’t even that they didn’t understand the new concept – they already got hung up on the ingenious illustrative example you assumed would be totally logical to them. Don’t assume previous knowledge. At least reduce to a bare minimum. Just in case.

8) Always repeat what is important.

While this might be clear to you, for a student “everything” seems important. And all is new. They cannot tell what is important yet. It is your job to triage here! That’s why I really miss handout culture. There, you had the summary of the gist of a lesson. Now it’s just slides, but the slides usually don’t give you much of a clue about what is essential and what can be discarded. If students have to do the guesswork on their own here, they will waste a lot of time and maybe fail altogether. It’s definitely part of your job to help them out here. Take the time to make a summary for them for later reference. Don’t assume they can do that themselves or else they are lazy. Appreciate that you already know what’s important and therefore, have it easy to sum it all up. After all, you planned this lesson and you know what’s most important to you that they should take away from it, right? Just write it down and they can use the additional time to memorize. (Yeah, of course, they might also just not pay attention to anything else anymore. Find a way of doing this without self-sabotaging your classes.

9) Help them help themselves.

Often teachers get annoyed that students are very dependant and don’t know how to find out something by themselves. But ask yourself, did you ever explain them how to do it? Ironically, students depend on you to teach them how to be independent.

10) Nothing is obvious.

Rule of thumb: It’s highly likely you lost your students about 3 steps earlier than you think where you lost them.

That’s it. Hope it helps!

Have a great Sunday!

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How do I get to do task XY for the first time at the job

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Today I want to talk about how you convince others to let you do XY for the first time as an official job responsibility, even though you might not have experience or any formal training doing so. And also, why you have probably come across a situation where one of your colleagues has been chosen to do task XY and not you. Even though you are both equally qualification-less. Now you feel left out. New tasks are opportunities for growth you probably really need if you want to stay in academia. It is all the more detrimental that bosses often don’t take the personal/CV growth of their young colleagues into account and hardly ever give out those tasks strategically. You can end up the lucky one – or you end up left out.

 

Disclaimer: Again, as always, these are my personal opinions and they might not apply to your situation. Use your brain.

 

New skills are always needed in your institution

Especially in the Digital Humanities it can happen a lot that there suddenly is a demand for a certain skill at your institution that nobody has yet acquired. Then somebody gets chosen to do it, often basically by chance and after they have done so, they are the expert on the topic. Which is good if you were the lucky one chosen (teaching yourself probably was quite the struggle so you’d deserve it). But if you aren’t – congratulations, the possibility of you ever going to be able to do this same thing (like programming in a certain language, teaching, shouldering a certain responsbility) might have just shrunk to zero. Often, DH centres are not big enough to need more than one person for a  less-mainstream specialty skill. It will from now on be incredibly hard for you to prove yourself in that area although you might be just as qualified. You have officially become invisible and somebody else has officially become the guy who does XY. I have experience on both sides. I have both had a responsibility thrust upon me, not really freewillingly or because I would have wanted to. But because there was just a demand and nobody there who was actually qualified to do the task.

 

If you were chosen

You’ll have to teach yourself and might end up with patchy skills

Meaning you will probably end up with a pretty stiched together knowledge and might have to relearn the skill in a more systematic way after the project is done if you really want to go on doing what you were asked to do in a professional way. Projects are often time-sensitive and deadline-driven, so you won’t have the time to really learn the skill in a systematic way. Unlearning bad practices acquired like this can be really hard  afterwards.

You are now officially the default person for the task

You might not exactly be more qualified than your colleagues but you are still going to be the default option to do the task. If you want it or not. So be careful accepting these jobs if it’s a task you genuinely dislike or consider out of line with your own personal development goals. For me, personally, I want to become something of a ‘real programmer’ in the Digital Humanities. I am a girl, but I don’t want to end up being the web designer. Not that web design is bad, inferior to ‘real programming’ or anything. I just prefer ‘real programming’ but since I am a girl, people tend to hand me the ‘soft bits’ and give the ‘hardcore programming’ to a man. Which the man might not even want. Sadly, unconscious gender stereotypes are still very effective in workplaces. Woman often get discriminated againt by ‘non-events’, i.e. not being asked to take up a challenge while male colleagues are etc. which ends up harming their success in the long term. If you want the challenge, you might just have to take it up in your private life or compete hard with your male colleagues. If you accept a specialty you don’t really want, you might seriously harm your ability to start something else afterwards. You will end up with that label. So be careful which label you choose. Also, your time resources for personal development will go into this task completely. If you were planning on learning something else, that’ll have to wait for a long time. Choose wisely and turn it down if you have to and can.

You probably can’t say no

In many situations when you’re asked to do this daunting task nobody else has ever done before, it is probably because you are not be most important member of your organization. You are probably young or new and are deemed to be a hard worker and able to learn. These are good things. But it might still not be something you do freewillingly. But do accept the task. If you don’t you might come across as though you’re unwilling to take up new challenges or learn new skills. Not an impression you want to leave for further job openings and ending contracts – which are never very far away in academia. Also, this new skill your institution is trying to acquire through you might be a reason they hold onto you later or or the base for a new grant proposal, etc. So this might just be a golden ticket, even though you had always imagined those would look more glamorous. Also, it might just be that you are the only idiot they dared to hand this stupid task to. You never know.

 

If you were not chosen but would have been interested

This is really stupid and happens a lot because these informal decisions are not discussed with everyone on the team (which they probably should be and bosses should be aware of this once they have read this post.) But the sad truth is that this decision will probably be made by the bosses in a back room in a discussion you are not allowed to join.

So even if you knew it was about to happen, there isn’t much you can do except maybe inform people beforehand that you would be interested. This by no means guarantees your success but since these decisions can be very spontaneous, maybe it even will get you the job. Definitely try it if you get the chance or overhear a discusssion. Butting in on other people’s discussion is rude but it is also rude of bosses making seemingly inconsequential decisions in private which actually are very consequential to their young employees and can make or break a career in the long term. In this case I would say, better sore than sorry.

But what if it’s already too late? It might even have happened to you that somebody else was chosen as a “new expert” for a job (in a backroom decision) which they are not qualified for – but for which you, in fact, are qualified for. Of course you can tell people that you think you would have been more qualified or at least wished you had been asked. But once the job is already given out, it’s unlikely they’ll take it back. Unless the other “chosen one” has expressed that they will only do it if nobody else is found but rather wouldn’t do it if they didn’t have to. Probably try and say something anyway.

Official responsibilities make you more trustworthy than actual skills

This is an especially stupid situation for you because it undermines your skill and legitimates the other person who actually didn’t have any legitimate skill up to now. If you already have some experience in these matters, you will probably know that often, experts are not made by skill. They are made by decisions of their superiors. In the end, your skill doesn’t count. What counts is solely the fact that your bosses trust you to do a job. This can lead to major unfairness, of course. And you are virtually powerless once it does. The only thing you really can do is show your experience and skill elsewhere. Join an expert society. You will need very bold action and extremely solid credentials if you ever want to make up for this misguided decision again. Also remember that bosses hardly think about this. They are probably completely unaware of the detrimental effect this will have on your career.

Boost your CV, exaggerate your skills a little bit and be over-confident of yourself (because, sadly, everybody else is and you will be left out otherwise)

So show off your skills as much as you can. Drop your knowledge whenever appropriate. Especially if you are a girl or shy, this is not like you. But you will notice how (even misguided) self-confidence goes a long way. Men tend to be much more bold in their statements in the workplace and also in what they write in their CV. If have seen a CV where someone said they were a C1 or C2 in English when they really were so bad that they made tons of typos in basic programing commands. And programming language English is hardly the real deal. If they already can’t spell ‘length’ properly, how can they have a C2 level? It was not a one time typo and by no means the only type of error I observed in the very short time span I paid attention to this either. In their defense, they probably didn’t even know what C2 meant. It is still a bold claim. What I have learned from this is that the impression you convey is all that counts. Be a bit more self-confident than you really are. Pretend you have some more skill than you do. By this, I don’t mean overly exaggerate. But ask yourself whether you could learn a certain skill (in basics) in a week or weekend. Then you probably are good to state it in your CV. (Then go on and actually learn the requested skill since people will probably test this by asking some general questions on the topic. And, of course, this only goes for minor skills but many DH skill requirements are actually quite basic).

 

You have to have done it once

If you actively seek to try it out new things or want to be challenged in your job but were not chosen, you are out of luck. Since somebody else is the default option now, you are going to have an incredibly hard time getting yourself seen or heard from now on. Even if you do everything you can to learn the skill along with your colleague, they are always going to be the one who has the practical experience. Even if you should also manage to get some practical experience, they are going to be the one who won your institution’s trust and showed results on a concrete job-related project. Unless there is a great need for the skill, you might never be able to do this at your job. Sorry, but it’s the truth. 😦 The only thing you can do now is to get real job experience with the task outside of your instituation or going freelance (if your job allows that at the side). Or create a truly mind-blowing hobby project and share it online.

This is partly one of the reasons why I have this blog. I don’t really like the idea of sharing my life with strangers but at the same time, I still want my private technology- and teaching-related activities to be visible. People will only trust you once you’ve “done it once” because it is seen as proof that you can do it. That’s why people often say that you should teach exactly one class in your PhD time – takes up the least possible amount of time and energy possible but from now on, once you apply for a position which includes teaching, you are credible when you say that you can do it. If you haven’t – well, good luck to you. It is highly unlikely someone who doesn’t know you will take the risk. Especially since they probably have 50 other applications from people who did get that chance. So you kind of depend on getting the experience from your own institution. If they have chosen to ask somebody else, all you can do is be annoying or follow that default person along. Tag along and offer to help as much as you can. Drop knowledge you have whenever appropriate. This is by no means guaranteed to help – you might just get ignored. But then you can say you have at least tried to get people’s attention. And maybe it will turn out for the better at some point. Maybe they will remember you the day they need a lab rat for a new task nobody is qualified to do.

 

Conclusion: On the importance of learning from new responsibilities for your CV

“So grow your own CV and decorate your own skills, instead of waiting for someone to bring you opportunities for personal growth.” – based on a quote by J. L. Borges

So, as we have seen, this informal way of giving out new tasks to people can be a great opportunity if you are chosen. But it can also be a way of preventing eager people from taking up new tasks. Once somebody did it, they are the default person and probably nobody else is needed. So nobody else will be given this opportunity of personal development. This can be a real problem in academia where you are expected to constantly grow your CV and tend to your skills. Some people even say that you should add one line to your CV every month if you want to be successful in Academia. What line have you added last month? What will you add next month? Plan this strategically!

I hope that maybe some bosses read this post and become aware of the problem. Maybe people get inspired to hand out these opportunities more strategically and more consciously. It also often happens that it’s always the same people who get the opportunities (because they have already proven their potential to rise to the challenge) and others continuously get left out. This is bad for the ones left out and can lead to overwork in the others. If you are responsible for early career scholars, please make conscious choices with anything which could affect their careers. If you are affected, my consolations. Try to prove your skills in a side project or join a society.

 

Hope this helps someone,

best,

the Ninja

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Hipster CV – A Template

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Dear all,

sorry you haven’t been hearing from me so much lately. It’s been quite busy. To make it up to you, I wanted to share my hipster CV template on this occasion 😉 I will probably explain it later and also probably modify it in a way that it’s easiert to use for a beginner. If you want to use it and but don’t feel comfortable with how the template works, just check where the text you are looking to replace is in the main.tex and replace it with your content. That way, you should get away with fairly limited LaTeX skills and still be able to use the template if you want it.

hipster-cv

 

It is available on the newly created LaTeX Ninja Github! The template is not exactly the same as shown in the Teaser: LaTeX Resumé Template Preview.

hipster-cv-github

 

So you can look forward to more versions which will be kind of the same style. But I now have so many different elements that I could fill at least 10 different CV templates. Since I didn’t want to fall victim to my own perfectionism, I dedided to share the template now even though it could probably be better. It also doesn’t really comply with my own standards regarding good code, etc. 😉 Well, you can’t always have it all.

It is, however, more of a Saturday afternoon fun thing I did. I won’t give any recommendations as to whether it will be considered as appropriate in your field of work to actually use this CV 😉

Also, I hope I am allowed to have the Jack Sparrow images in the example. I am not so sure about it however. Come visit me in prison if this should go wrong 😉

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“Student journals” – The good, the bad and the ugly

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In this post, I want to share some experiences regarding “student” or “young researcher” journals. By “student journal” I mean journals which specialize in supporting young researchers, mostly only accepting publications from authors who don’t yet have their PhD. While this is a great idea in general which should absolutely be supported, I find that it can often be misleading and less-than-great in reality. In these journals, often even undergraduate students (before finishing their Bachelor’s) would be qualified to submit. But I find that they tend to be too much of a hassle, especially as they are not perceived as ‘high quality’ journals. Also, like the title suggests, my own experiences were mostly not so good.

So, the gist of what I am going to say is: I wouldn’t recommend them. “Student journals” are “worth less” in your CV and, confusingly, I have found them to be more trouble than normal journals are. So, mostly a total waste of time and energy if you ask me. Read on for the details on good aspects and my own experiences which influenced this judgement. In short: The student journals I have tried had given me the illusion that it would be easier and more quick to get a publication out here than elsewhere. The complete opposite was the case! (If you just want the summary without my ramblings, it’s in the last paragraphs.)

What do I mean when I speak of “student journals”?

By “student journals” I mean journals accepting only authors until at maximum their dissertation / PhD thesis is finished. This is done in the goal of creating a “safe space” where young researchers can get publishing experience early on without having to worry about being in competition with full professors.

The good and the bad

On the up side: You, as a young researcher, maybe even without a degree at all, will get heard.

On the down side: The reviewers they have might not be specialized in your field – which will either make the publication less good and the review less trustworthy or it might even generate conflicts (as it happened to me, read below). Also, reviewers are usually aware that they are about to review for a “student journal”, ergo they know that you don’t have your PhD yet which might cause them to scrutinize over your work in a way they might not with a real journal (so the ‘blind’ part of ‘blind peer review’ is not actually a given anymore). This is probably the main factor that leads to publication being more difficult here than in a ‘regular journal’. Another main aspect of the hassle are, sorry to have to point this out (I won’t give any details on the journals I tried to retain anonymity), the inexperienced editors.

Inexperienced “student editors”

These “student journals” are mostly students’ initiatives and so the editorial board consists of, you guessed it, people in the same stage of their career as the early career scholars trying to get published in this journal. This might sound like a good thing at first – believe me, it’s not!

This means they don’t really have experience yet and since most “student journals” cover really broad topics (such as “Classics” in total) which would be difficult to have a full overview about even for a full professor, the editors themselves are not qualified to judge your work. In a great majority of cases. (Sorry editors, nothing personal.) Yet, since they are not yet experienced and – sorry again – mostly feel slightly pompous about themselves being first-time editors of a journal, will tend to interfere in ways which they are not qualified to do. Also, arguing with them on an objective basis will probably not be possible since they have no clue about what you’re talking about.

One of the editors in my cases even lacked knowledge of a basic technical term of our field which I found quite shocking (and wrote a comment like: “What does XY mean?”). Still, since the editor was in a position of power over me, in a way, I had to bend to their feedback even though they had displayed a frankly astonishing lack of basic knowledge of the field we were talking about. Since the editor works on a very different sub-field than me and was on the exact same career stage as me, I totally lost confidence in the editors and had a hard time taking them seriously after that.

To continue the not-so-professional processing, they subsequently assigned me a new editor (probably the editor in chief with more experience) after the situation had gotten weird. I don’t generally criticize the fact that they did but rather the fact that they did so without providing any sort of explanation. At that point, I already felt like they didn’t actually want my paper anymore and were merely looking for an elegant reason to reject it. The tone had changed drastically as well. I had built up somewhat of a personal relationship with the old editor (which probably already was the first mistake) and then it all was very cold and written in a very politically correct way like they were trying to weasel out of the situation and get rid of me without honestly saying they intended to.

Also, another interesting fact: They were really religious about anonymity. That is until they compromised my identity in the “blind” review. Which I only know because I requested to get the full written reviews after that one paper had been rejected and saw that the reviewing person noted in a comment that they should take better care when anonymizing the papers. I had initials in the footnotes indicating some of the translations were my own and of course, I cited one of my own papers on the topic in the references. Thus, my identity was disclosed to the reviewers within seconds, without them having to google me or anything. Not that I cared particularly much (it had no further consequence), but it just added to the overall impression of lacking professionality.

The reviewer’s board is not specific to your field

Also, the reviewers board, while mostly consisting of full professors who (should) know their stuff, will not be specific to your field and only be able to cover the topic in a very broad way which might cause conflict as well.

So if you’re in for bad feedback, rather go get it from a journal pertinent to your field. In case you get bad feedback (which you probably will in any case), you can at least be sure that the editors and reviewers are competent and relevant to your field of study. I have had the experience of getting feedback from reviewers as well as the editors themselves who totally distorted some of what I had said. Regarding some of their feedback, I would have been able to provide 5+ standard publications indicating I was right. After all, I hadn’t “invented” this “bold and coloured statement”, like they claimed –  I had merely repeated (and cited) it from standard sources where it is common sense. Which they obviously were not aware of. I am not sure how a mutually beneficial review can happen under those circumstances. After the reviewer had criticized this general tone of my article (which was in totality a summary of standard works on the field, the statements weren’t even intended to make a point – they were just the introduction), the editor seemed to think me incompetent and got really strict with me, asking me to change those things. I agreed to leave out one whole “problematic” paragraph, but refused to correct statements I believe to be correct in general. This whole problem emerged from an authoritative opinion of the reviewers which they hadn’t backed up with one single reference. It was my word against theirs. This is not good scientific practice, as they should very well know. I can merely assume this situation was produced through the power situation of the review situation which is not “peer review” but a teacher reviewing a student. One of the reviews even mentioned grades in the review. Like, “some changes would make the paper from a C to a B”. I am sorry, but being treated like a stupid pupil was not what I had hoped to get in a peer review publication. Had I not submitted in a student journal, there was no way for them to know I was less senior than they were (at least no official ways).

My personal advice: Steer clear of “student journals”

It’s really not worth the pain. I have done it twice and had trouble both times.

I felt, not to be mean or anything, that the young editors wanted to “use their power” on me. That they felt superior to me even though they were not at a higher level of qualification at all.

I am sure not all young editors are like this and I sure as hell am not trying to suggest that. I just have to state that, sadly, this was my experience. It seemed to me that these young researchers just lost sight of where they stand and what their competences are or where they end.

Also I somehow felt that the reviewers (which were probably important professors mostly, judging by the board) were more strict with me than they might have been had they not known that I am still “at the beginning of my career”. They did not trust me to have knowledge in my particular narrow field of expertise. Even though they didn’t seem particularly well-informed on it themselves.

The ugly: Lengthy rambling with examples of my personal experiences

Here follows a lengthy rant about how it went for me (without calling names, of course). Skip it if you’re not interested. However, I think my experience might be relevant to you when choosing where to submit your paper (which probably represents the distilled sum of months of your time). Please note, however, that all of this is my personal opinion and might not be representative of your experience or the phenomenon of “student journals” in general. Just some innocent, highly subjective observations of mine.

“Student journal” fail story number one

The first time, everything went well until basically the day before publication. Then, all of a sudden and for no discernible reason at all (I suppose it was just stress-induced), the editor started yelling at me via email that I was not being grateful enough because it is an honour for me to publish in their journal. Which, I have to add, I don’t really see to begin with. It’s a student journal without reputation and I am very well able to publish with “real journals” and have done so. Publishing with a “real journal” would be better for me and they don’t ask me to be grateful. I mean, honestly, what the fuck?! An unsolicited aggression like this from a person I have never met, had never happened to me in academia before. And it’s not like weird things didn’t happen to me in the wondrous land of Academia on a regular basis (ass-grabbing during a panel and the like).

If the editor doesn’t think my paper is good enough for their journal, they should not have accepted it in the first place. Also, both the student journals I have published with (I will not name names and don’t want to blame anyone here), had like a maximum of 2-3 papers per issue. So it’s more the other way round: They needed my contribution (or any contribution whatsoever for that matter) or else they wouldn’t have anything to publish. Which isn’t much of a quality indicator for the journal I handed the precious fruits of my labour to. I was frankly pretty angry at this out-of-nowhere yelling via email (I honestly don’t think I did anything wrong up to that point and felt I had put in tons of effort in being polite). Then – seeing as I have quite a temper myself 😉 – she got the full blow back. Like, does she honestly think she’s the only one working crazy hours for free in the Humanities? That had been one of the points, that she works for free and I’m not grateful etc. And, hell, I really get how this can be frustrating seeing as that had been my exact situation at the time as well. Working 60 hours to get this grant proposal done and getting paid for 10 hours which was totally not enough to live off. But hey, that’s the Humanities. You signed up for this and you knew it was going to be like this. Don’t take it out on fellow PhD students who suffer from the same system…

Student journal fail story number two

So that was story number one. Story number two was after that. First I had this really (a bit too) good relationship with the editor who was overly friendly and helpful. At some point – once the review had come in and I had worked in the suggestions – the editor kept accusing me of not having integrated the suggestions etc. The paper was sent into review again to see if it had improved and the reviewers said no. I was a bit confused about the fact that I didn’t hear back from the editor in months and was only told afterwards that they had sent it to the reviewers once again. Which would have been fine by me but I kind of felt attacked having not been informed about this and then criticized after the review had come back. Apparently, the reviewers could not see how I had worked in their remarks. But seeing as I work on a very narrow field, I pretty much know mostly everyone in that field. The reviewer had made some comments on a historical person which led me to frankly doubt their ability to judge my paper since they were ridiculous, not at all backed up by any literature I know of and seems to me totally contrary to current opinions.  Of course, the esteemed reviewing professor is not asked to back up their claims by literature, while I am. Maybe I misjudged this, but I still found that highly dubious… Also, before, having worked in the suggestions from the first review, I gave the paper to multiple professors from “my circle” to criticize and worked in their feedback as well. I had done a private round of, not even peer- but “boss-review”. So I really felt a bit hurt at the accusation of not having worked in the suggestions. I don’t think most people add in private review rounds in between peer-reviews (nor have professors around who are willing to take the time to do this, which I am grateful that I do)… The longer this went on and the longer the emails between me and the editor became, I had the suspicion (which I had secretly been doubting since the very first feedback) that they didn’t want me to make some changes. They were not happy with how my paper was done in the first place.

Since I don’t think this is what peer-review is for, I only corrected the smaller issues. If the editors don’t like the overall making and idea behind the paper, they should just reject it straightaway, shouldn’t they? That would have been fair to me since at that time, it would still have been easy to make minor changes and send it in to another journal. After a million very specific corrections which had ever only made sense to the editors, not to me, I didn’t have that choice anymore. The paper had been altered so fundamentally according to their requests and wishes that already, I felt it was not really “my initial paper” anymore.

Also, I had to furnish lots of justifications of my choice of words which I deemed unnecessary and a bit weird, to be honest. One of the main issues had been my language (which nobody else has ever had a problem with in the past). Apparently, I am not “reflected” enough, whatever-the-hell that means… It went to a point where you were not even allowed to normally use any word anymore. You had to justify every choice of words, put any term which could possibly be misunderstood in quotation marks. Ambiguity is an inherent characteristic of language, folks. Sorry to have to break it to you. I wasn’t even really allowed to talk about my topic anymore (it was about superstition) because that is such a judgemental word. Science needs to be objective and free of judgement, blah blah. But I had stated about five times already that I don’t intend to judge any historical practices and just wanted to discuss religious deviance which was regarded as potentially superstitious. Honestly, I have hardly ever lived anything more annoying and frustrating than this.

To end this story, I have just received a rejection of my paper (after the draft for this post had already been done). They had sent out the paper for a third review, this time by a neutral other person. (And they, of course, hadn’t bothered telling me because why should they… It’s only a question of being polite and professional.) Since that person had criticized similar points than the other one and the atmosphere between me and the editors had gotten rather cold, they rejected me. Annoyingly, however, all of the reviews had stated they thought my paper was really good and interesting, except for the continuously problematic parts.

Reviewer 1 had criticized me using subjectively derogatory words to describe certain religious practices and “had used vocabulary worthy of conspiracy theories” (which I rather find to be a quite derogatory and subjective statement in itself). Reviewer 2 had criticized the presence of some ‘problematic terms’ which weren’t reflected upon enough, so I assume they must have concluded, I hadn’t made the changes they had asked for. Interestingly however, the words which had been criticized in the first review weren’t even present in that third version of the paper anymore since I had fully deleted the paragraph in question. So the criticism could not have possibly pertained to the same problem, even though the problem description / issue was a similar one. My view is that the new reviewer just had other preferences – which will probably always happen once you invite a new person into a discussion.

The same things were criticized in the paper, though the paper had been changed quite substantially between the three reviews. I felt I had responded to everything I had been asked to do. I am still at a loss of what the problem was in the end since both reviewers stated that the article was generally really interesting and they recommend its publication, if some minor changes are made. The changes I have made in this process were far from minor. I am now left feeling like this would have spun into an endless story hadn’t they put an end to it by rejecting me. I am not sure they knew what they wanted from me.

I am not the only one to feel like this about student journals either

You might think now that my rant on “student journals” is only due to my personal “fail stories”. Fair enough point. I respect that opinion. I probably wouldn’t believe it either without further proof to sugest the point is valid. I would love to say that my case is the only one. Since I really believe in the idea behind those “student journals”.

But I have heard equally disastrous, disappointing and unnerving stories from others as well. Papers ending up not being published after all, even though there had been no problem before and the author really needed this publication before a job application, etc.

Also, a professor I work with told me she was really disappointed because she wanted to look into these journals and support them and was treated in a most impolite way. Sentences in her paper had been changed without telling her by somebody who obviously didn’t understand her field of specialization very well, so they ended up not making any sense anymore.

Other friends of mine have similar stories to their portfolio.

Not an opportunity of a ‘quick paper’ but a lot of trouble

So, sadly, as much as I would like to encourage you to try those “student journals”, I really have to advise you to stay away from them. I can’t see one single advantage to you. The process is not easier than in any other journal. The editors who don’t get lots of contributions have “too much time” to spend on your paper and since they are not in the habit yet, you will probably end up as their lab rat (which clearly happened to me one time). They will take your paper apart more than senior editors probably would do but they don’t even really have the competence to back them up in this endevour.

Also, my hope of just getting a “quick paper” out using this approach did so not work. While the first paper was published in time, with the second one I wasn’t sure anymore whether the journal still wanted it after a whole year of back-and-forth. It ended up being rejected. After this year now, however, I have moved on to a new focus and don’t  currently have the time to rework it to submit it elsewhere. This is sad and stupid. A publication lying around for another year might not matter to a more senior researcher, but for my growing publication list, this is still a blow.  I had already been thinking about withdrawing the paper (which my professors had urged me to do due to lack of professionality from the editors) but I since had made so many changes already which the editors had specifically requested that I would have had to undo to hand it in anywhere else. So I kept hanging in even though professors from my circle of friends and colleagues strongly urged me to withdraw the paper straightaway at this unprofessional behaviour.

This is, honestly, a most ridiculous situation. These ‘young journals’ are supposed to be a source of empowerment and a safe space for new researchers. Yet in reality, they use their power to put pressure on you or let out their bad temper and frustration out at you.  They should be an opportunity for you to get taken just as seriously as a “grown-up” researcher and yet a reviewer talked about ‘grading my paper’. This didn’t feel exactly empowering to me, in any case. At least that was my experience and not only in one single case. In a third journal where I submitted, it seems they forgot about my paper and it’s been lying around for over a year now. Here as well I had already made tons of changes which will probably have been a waste of time in hindsight.

This opinion of mine is not pure conjecture either. I honestly received this pages-long angry email by one editor at one point shortly before publication was due. The person obviously was suffering from very high stress levels. I hadn’t done anything to provoke the aggression and the editor basically accused me of being ungrateful and said things like I didn’t appreciate how she worked for free, etc. (as though she was the only young researcher in the Humanities who ever worked for free… At that time, I worked 60h per week while being paid for 10. So thanks, but I really didn’t need a reminder to what it’s like…)

You really don’t need that. Try to find some professor or senior researcher who is willing to take care and really help you in your endeavour of getting you first publishing experience if you can. Submit to a journal they trust. Include them in all parts of the experience so they can help you should things go sideways. Steer clear from student journals.

To sum it up

If you do not yet have a Bachelor’s degree and think that you actually have something publication-worthy in the pipeline, “student journals” might be for you. Maybe even if you don’t have your Master’s degree yet, although you could probably already submit to most ‘normal journals’ by then. Once you have the possibility of submitting your work to a ‘real journal’, always choose the ‘real journal’. With blind peer review you should have the same chance of being accepted as everyone else.

Since you are not so far along in your studies yet, you also don’t have millions of papers to hand out. So I suggest you don’t “waste” your one good paper on a bad journal bad (in the way that it doesn’t have a good reputation and might not be perceived as a ‘real journal’). Your first publications are about building your CV’s publications list (see the post on how to build your publication list for young academics on this), so the choices you make matter way more than they will later on. Also, don’t submit your paper to a “student journal” if you need a ‘quick publication’. While no journal will guarantee a ‘quick publication’ (whatever that means), a journal which appears quarterly and is well established is far more likely to be able to “deliver” in this respect.

So, like I said, take what I have written with a grain of salt. The post is definitely coloured by my own bad experiences but since I myself have found it difficult to find information on how to get started publishing / building a publication list, I thought my experiences might be helpful and welcome to somebody. And while my experiences are definitely coloured by what happened to me, I submitted to three different such journals and none of the results were exactly pleasing, so I do have to conclude my experience must at least be kind of valid. I am very sad to have to say so, but I really regret submitting to student journals and will never do so again in the future. Mind you, I tried three different ones in three completely different fields (none of them DH). They basically all were similar. So please, if it’s your one good idea, have some self-respect and dare to submit it to the best journal in your field (especially if it’s the summary of your MA thesis, so the result from multiple months of work). If they don’t accept it, you can still scale down.

Best,

the Ninja

Floating minipages and other wizardry

LaTeX Ninja2 Comments

Inspired by a current issue from my friend the LaTeX Noob, I wanted to give a short explanation on how you can combine floats (i.e. figures) and minipages. Why should you care? Well, if you need tikzpicture or images placed besides eachother or beside text. So most people will probably need this at some point 😉 A great resource is the WikiBook, as always. If you want the lengthy account – that’s the way to go. For everybody else, an explanation of my own.

Floats and non-floating boxes

What are floats?

Some fundamental explanations first: A figure is a float. A minipage is not a float but a box which sits at its fixed place. These are two fundamentally different things. When you combine them in a bad way, LaTeX might get fed up at this. So when planning your minipaging or floating situation, ask yourself which effects are really important to you and which aren’t.

Do I even need a float?

A float will self-regulate positioning pretty much. If you need this feature, you need a float. But maybe this is a behaviour you explicitly don’t want anyway. Then maybe you don’t even need a float at all. Beginners often get confused and think they need to use figures everywhere but, strictly speaking, you don’t. You can, for example, just \includegraphics without a figure. Then the thing will just not have floating behaviour and you also might want captions and stuff, so an environment might be in order. But this need not be a figure. But if you don’t want all this, be aware that you might not need a figure at all and save yourself some trouble debugging.

I would suggest you probably go for figures anyway if it’s a long document where positioning might change dramatically after you first insert the picture, minipage or whatever. If, however, your result is pretty static and not a pages long document, you might just be better off leaving out the floats completely. Like, for example, in a poster, positioning isn’t really up for LaTeX to decide. You need it placed in a stable, reliable way and the way you want it and you exert lots of ‘control’ over the whole process.

Floats are better if you are dealing with a thing whose behaviour LaTeX is supposed to regulate acccording to its own best judgement. And as we all know, LaTeX’s judgement is pretty awesome. So this is a feature you might very well want to profit from in most cases. Also, you might want a \listoffigures. Or not. So think about that.

A little rant on “LaTeX is not doing what I want”

Beginners often get fed up with this behaviour because “LaTeX is not doing what I want”. This is probably due to the fact that you are using structures you think are supposed to do XYZ while they actually are programmed to do ABC. This is just a ‘misunderstanding’ between LaTeX and the user and can be remedied by additional knowledge about how some things work internally. So a general good bit of advice would be to look up how a structure you are trying to use is programmed to work internally. Most of the time, looking up the official documentation will already suffice. Probably it is supposed to do something completely different than what you thought it was or wanted it to. This is not LaTeX’s fault. It’s the fault of the user who doesn’t bother to look up those basic functionalities, so don’t blame LaTeX. But of course, if you’re still a beginner, this is a normal thing to do or expect. A common false assumption among programming novices. So don’t worry either. Next time you will know what to do.

A computer will do what you wrote down. Not what you meant. Even and especially, if the two are not the same thing 😉

The objective: placing things side by side

We will follow up with some examples of figures and minipages. By now, you are already informed what the differences are and can make an intelligent choice 😉

Case 1: The figure placed right here

The following is just a figure, but it will be forced to be placed right here (as indicated per the H). Using a small h really only means ‘here if it fits’. Only h! or H actually mean HERE!!!Also, read this great (lenghty) information on floats if you want to know more. Don’t forget to \usepackage{float} if you want to use the H. Edit: Thanks to Karl from LaTeX ref who informed me that h! basically only sometimes accidentally results in “place it HERE”. Use H for reliability.

So depending on your other needs (\listoffigures, etc.), you might as well have not used a floating environment since obviously, you did not intend for the thing to float.

\begin{figure}[H]
    \centering
     \begin{tikzpicture}
    \basesketch\bfseries
    \angles
    \end{tikzpicture}
    \caption{Sketch}
    \label{fig:Sketch}
\end{figure}

Case 2: Figure beside text with wrapfigure

The same thing like with minipage, basically, can be achieved with a wrapfigure, which you might need at some point too. This will make an image float beside text. On this, read the Overleaf tutorial.


\begin{wrapfigure}{R}{0.3\textwidth}
    \centering
    \begin{tikzpicture}[opacity=0.8, scale=0.5]
    \basesketch \angles
    \filldraw[draw=black, fill=lila, fill opacity=0.3] (A) -- (B) -- (C) -- cycle;
    \filldraw[draw=black, fill=myblue, fill opacity=0.3] (A) -- (C) -- (K2) -- (K1) -- cycle;
    \end{tikzpicture}
    \caption{T\textsubscript{1} und T\textsubscript{2}}
    \label{fig:Triangles}
\end{wrapfigure}

Case 3: lifesaving minipages

First, I’ll explain the basic functionality of minipages and then issue some personal tips on how to use them 😉

Options

As you might have noticed, you have options when configuring your minipage: \begin{minipage}[adjusting]{width of the minipage} are the available ones. Meaning minipage has a specified alignment and a predetermined width. Although, you can use relative widths, of course. So it can be {3cm} or {0.3\textwidth} according to your needs. Notice however, that you cannot use 100% textwidth in total while still having everything aligned. Take off 0.03 in total to be sure. So all your minipages which are placed side by side cannot take up a total of 100% of the textwidth.

c = center, t = top and b = bottom are the alignment choices. c is default, I mostly use t. It can be a bit difficult to grasp what they actually do. They specify at which line the content gets aligned. So t means, the alignment will be oriented on the topmost, so the highest line.

Also, we can add more options [t][3cm][b] which additionally says that we have a fixed height of 3cm and the content will be aligned at the bottom. The (multiple) minipages themselves will be aligned at their tops.

Alignment of multiple minipages

Also, if you want multiple minipages aligned at their sides and not below eachother, you can’t have blank lines between them. Inside the minipage environments is no problem, but not following the first one before the second one, for example. See also Sasha Frank’s page and this.

When you check StackOverflow “How to use a figure inside a minipage” – the short answer is: You don’t!


\begin{figure}[ht]
  \begin{minipage}[b]{0.45\textwidth}
  \centering
    \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{img1}
    \caption{blabla}
    \label{fig:fig1}
  \end{minipage}
  \hspace{0.5cm}
  \begin{minipage}[b]{0.4\textwidth}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{img2}
    \caption{mycaption}
    \label{fig:fig2}
  \end{minipage}
\end{figure}

If you want to make two floats happily float, but in a row beside eachother, you can use the floatrow package, as detailed in this StackOverflow post.

Do I need a float now or what? Combining figure and minipage

If you don’t insist on having a float, people would probably go for minipage to make things sit aligned besides eachother and connected.

It is also not necessary to place your \includegraphics inside a figure, though a lot of beginners think so. Just put your images directly in a minipage if you don’t need floating behaviour. If you do – add a float. But not inside the minipage, this will cause an error. If you are confused about this, imagine a rubber duck floating in your bathtub. You cannot place it into a box because then it will sink. You can, however, make it carry a box on its back. So, this is basically the same thing with floats an minipages 😉

You cannot have a figure (=float) inside a minipage (non-floating box) since it will make the rubber duck sink. Don’t sink your rubber duck! Read up on it here (just to warn you, they don’t use rubber ducks for explanation, so don’t be disappointed).

And, by the way, it also doesn’t make sense to have float inside a fixed box. Float means, LaTeX decides where exactly to place elements. But if you put a fixed box, you have already made that decision. Nothing left for LaTeX to decide. Meaning LaTeX will go and sulk at you. If you need LaTeX to calculate where to put things and it is possible your document will change a lot, it’s better to use floats. If you want everything exactly where you want it, float will make you go crazy. You can put tikzpicture inside minipages. It’s confusing, I know.

And remember: If you don’t want the minipages to become “disconnected”, which is usually the case, make sure you don’t put an empty line after one of them. They should be “connected” in the code if you want them connected in the output.

Another example (snippet) from my personal CV template to visualize language skills. As you can see, you might be able to achieve what you want using a tabular as well.

cv-languages

This is how the code looks like:


\newcommand{\icon}[3]{\phantom{x}{#3\color{#2}#1}\phantom{x}}
%------------------- pictogram Fraction: pictoFraction
\newcommand{\pictofraction}[6]{%
\pgfmathparse{#3 - 1}\foreach \n in {0,...,\pgfma<span 				data-mce-type="bookmark" 				id="mce_SELREST_start" 				data-mce-style="overflow:hidden;line-height:0" 				style="overflow:hidden;line-height:0" 			></span>thresult}{\icon{#1}{#2}{#6}}%
\pgfmathparse{#5 - 1}\foreach \n in {0,...,\pgfmathresult}{\icon{#1}{#4}{#6}}%
}

\begin{minipage}[t]{\leftcolwidth}
\begin{tabular}{l | ll}
\textbf{German} & C2 & {\phantom{x}\footnotesize mother tongue} \\
\textbf{English} & C2 & \pictofraction{\faCircle}{blue}{3}{blue}{1}{\tiny}\\
   \textbf{Latin}  & C2 & \pictofraction{\faCircle}{blue}{3}{blue}{1}{\tiny}\\
   \textbf{French} & C2 & \pictofraction{\faCircle}{blue}{3}{blue}{1}{\tiny}\\
   \textbf{Ancient Greek} & B2 & \pictofraction{\faCircle}{blue}{3}{grey!30}{1}{\tiny}\\

\end{tabular}
\end{minipage}

There also is the subcaption package (subfigure or subfig are deprecated). Here, you can use sub-floats inside a single float. Here is an example of how to use it.

You can also put minipages inside a float, to make the whole thing float again. And that’s about it 😉

And just for your reference, I included the actual TikZ at the bottom of the post. Just in case you wanted it or whatever 😉

I really love minipages. They are my go-to thing for anything and everything. Sometimes even when there probably would be another (better) option available. Minipages rock! And so do you!

Best,

the LaTeX Ninja

The TikZ

\newcommand{\basesketch}{%
\scriptsize
\node[](Kreismittelpunkt) at (0,0) {};
\node[](K1) at (0,6) {};
\node[](K2) at (4,5) {};

\draw[] (Kreismittelpunkt) -- ++(0:5cm) node[](C){} -- ++(0:5cm) node[](K2){};
\draw[] (Kreismittelpunkt) -- ++(30:4cm)  node[](A){}  --  ++(30:2cm)  node[](B){}  -- ++(30:4cm) node[](K1){};
\draw[] (K2) -- (K1);
\draw[fill=myblue] (K2) circle (2.5pt) node[below=0.5em]{K\textsubscript{2}};
\draw[fill=myblue] (K1) circle (2.5pt) node[above=0.5em]{K\textsubscript{1}};

\draw[fill=myblue] (A) circle (2.5pt) node[above=0.5em]{A};
\draw[fill=myblue] (B) circle (2.5pt) node[above=0.5em]{B};
\draw[fill=myblue] (C) circle (2.5pt) node[below=0.5em]{C};
\draw[] (A) -- (C);
\draw[] (C) -- (B);
\draw[] (B) -- (K2);

% coordinates
\coordinate (K2) at (K2);
\coordinate (K1) at (K1);
\coordinate (A) at (A);
\coordinate (B) at (B);
\coordinate (C) at (C);

\draw[fill=myblue] (Kreismittelpunkt) circle (2.5pt) node[below=0.5em]{K};

% Alternative zu Arc zwischen zwei Punkten
\draw[-,draw=black!70] (K2) to[bend right=12] (K1);
\pgfresetboundingbox}

\newcommand{\angles}{%
\pic[draw=black!70,text=black!70, -,"$\alpha$"] {angle =A--C--Kreismittelpunkt};
\pic[draw=black!70,text=black!70, -,"$\delta$", angle eccentricity=1.3] {angle= B--C--A};
\pic[draw=black!70,text=black!70, -,"$\alpha$"] {angle = K2--C--B};
\pic[draw=black!70,text=black!70, -,"$\alpha$"] {angle = C--B--K2};

\pic[draw=black!70,text=black!70, -,"$\beta$"] {angle = A--B--C};
\pic[draw=black!70,text=black!70, -,"$\beta$"] {angle = K2--B--K1};

\pic[draw=black!70,text=black!70, -,"$\gamma$"] {angle = K1--K2--C};
\pic[draw=black!70,text=black!70, -,"$\gamma$"] {angle = B--K1--K2};

\pic ["\Huge $\cdot$", draw, -] {angle=C--A--B};
\pic ["\Huge $\cdot$", draw, -] {angle=Kreismittelpunkt--A--C};}

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Regarding comments and contact info

LaTeX NinjaLeave a comment

Dear all,

apparently the LaTeX Noob is not alone to be a noob 😉

I just realized I had to approve your comments before they are published. Oops 😉 Will see to that more quickly in the future.

Also, I heard that some of you were not able to find contact information which maybe I might have messed up too 😉 I guess I just hadn’t really thought about having actual readers who want to contact me so far. And I am very happy that you exist and do wish to contact me! I will therefore add my contact info in the about section. Sorry, I am such a complete idiot not to have thought about this before 😉

Best and thanks again for all your positive feedback!