A Clean House and a Completed Paper
Thursday, Dec. 7, 2025
By: Phillip Cheng
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Why do my writing assignments loom so large? I don't think it's the thought of writing that causes me anxiety, but rather the requirements of the assignment, such as the number of pages, the deadline, and the content, especially if it's not something I'm particularly knowledgeable about or interested in. The hardest part is always starting, which can be said about many things and has already been said many times by many people. So what does my version of a beginning writing ritual look like? Well, for me, it's not about a “beginning” writing ritual; it's more of an ongoing one. Yes, what usually follows “it's so hard to start” is the “once you get going it's easier” phase, but for me, it's more like I need an ongoing ritual that keeps me going. And that's usually cleaning my house.
When I am in writing mode, an urge always overcomes me about 20 to 30 minutes into the process. In those 20 to 30 minutes, I am thinking, writing, pausing, reflecting, rewriting, and editing. You get the gist. And yet, right around that mark, the urge to clean my room overtakes me. Luckily, I’m not a messy person, so cleaning my room basically means making my bed and tidying up, which doesn’t take too long. Some would call this a form of procrastination. But is it really procrastination if I stop my process of writing just to clean my room? After I finish cleaning, I go right back to my writing. It doesn’t take me long to get back into the groove. I just pick up where I left off and keep going.
Another 30 minutes go by. I get up to grab a drink of water from the kitchen, and when I get there, I suddenly have to wash the dishes and straighten up the counters. It is the same feeling of wanting to clean my room. My drive to write the paper is still very much there, but these peripheral drives show up too. This is just how I write for some reason. I don’t study neuroscience, so maybe someone who does can tell me what is going on in my brain that makes me feel like I have to do other stuff. If I had to describe it, I would say that my mind and my body can only work in spurts when it comes to writing. Maybe that means I am anxious, or maybe I just need to decompress and scratch an itch in my mind before returning to the page.
Another theory is that because my mind is all over the place when it comes to writing, I experience a sense of chaos and loss of control, which makes me anxious. In other words, when a mess of words and thoughts is swirling around in my head and I can’t seem to grab onto anything solid, a way to cope is to engage in acts of cleaning because that is something I have control over, and I'm good at it.
Once I had a former career as a sales guy. Can you believe it? Me making random phone calls to folks trying to convince them to buy my product. I lasted six months in that role before I had to make a career move, but I am proud to say that the last quarter I was there, I met my $250K sales quota. During that period of time, I would get home from work and have the urge to cook--I mean cook massive feasts. My then-roommate at the time said to me that it was because I had no control at work. Being rejected on the phone and by email and never knowing if you were going to make the sale or not left too much uncertainty, and my way to deal with that was to cook. I was, and maybe still am, a good cook. I can follow a recipe religiously and make a very satisfying meal that brought me great pleasure and was also something I could share. So maybe that's it. Writing makes me feel like I have no control. Cleaning puts me back in control. Any behavioral science folks out there who can explain this to me? By the end of the paper, my room is not messy with papers strewn everywhere. It is neat and tidy, and so is the rest of my place (and sometimes a fresh-cut lawn too).
I would love to hear about your own quirks, what you do to get through the writing process. As we all know, writing can be a grind, especially when there is a time crunch (which I will talk about in a different post). I am curious if anyone shares this habit or has developed other ways of "coping". Some people might call it procrastination, but that makes me feel bad, so I choose to see it as a method that helps me stay productive. After all, who wouldn't want a clean house by the time you finish writing your paper?
About Reading
Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025
By: Phillip Cheng
Estimated reading time: 4–6 minutes
The topic of this blog post is class reading assignments. I’m someone who doesn’t feel good if my “eyeballs can’t touch all the text” I’m assigned to read. I don’t know if it’s just me or if other people feel this way too, but I’d be curious to talk with others. Although I try not to stress too much about reading, there have been times in a semester when I simply don’t have time to read everything—and I feel guilty about it. But generally, I’m someone who reads my assigned texts religiously, and I think I do a pretty good job because I use reading tools to help me.
I wouldn’t classify myself as having any reading disability, per se, but I’m a slow reader, and that doesn’t really cut it in graduate school. Reading slowly—absorbing and thinking carefully—comes naturally to me, but grad school forces you to speed up. I’m not a fan of that because it makes me feel like I’m turning my personal reading style from quality into quantity. But what can you do? It’s hard to fight that feeling when you have mounds of text staring at you, and you just have to get through them.
When I started my master’s program during my first semester at San Francisco State University, I was maybe a quarter or a third of the way in and doing my best to keep up. But it was hard because I truly felt like my eyes need to touch every single word. A lot of professors promote skimming, which is fine and has its merits. When I’m writing a paper and need something specific, I skim to the part I need—I’m not reading every word. But for classroom reading assignments, I like reading everything.
At one point I realized, “Wow, this is why grad school is hard.” I remember a moment where I had over 100 pages to read by the next day and knew I wouldn’t finish. It made me feel really bad—there was an assignment to read the book, and I simply couldn’t complete it because I had other valid responsibilities: another book to read, a paper to write, work, etc. At first, I blamed myself, but then I thought: no, that’s not productive. There must be other ways to approach this.
That’s when I realized my MacBook had a text-to-speech option. It was the Siri voice—very computerized—but I didn’t care. It was incredibly useful. I also realized that if I bought the e-book version of a text, I could have Siri read it aloud. It made a world of difference.
Side story: This was in 2016, and there were programs available at the time that could do this. I went to what I think was the disability office at my school and said I was a slow reader and wondered if the school could help me get access to the software. They said they couldn’t because I wasn’t clinically diagnosed with a reading issue. That really sucked. Reading slowly isn’t a clinical issue, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t benefit from those tools. Still, I didn’t let that stop me. I checked out the physical book from the library, bought the e-book, and used my computer to read it aloud. Sometimes e-books were cheaper, sometimes not, and I also learned that you don’t actually “own” an e-book the same way you own a physical book. But I made it work.
Using text-to-speech allowed me to finish texts that I otherwise wouldn’t. Yes, even if you read a lot of text quickly, you won’t capture everything. But the important part for me was that I felt good—I’d read the text, captured what I thought were the key points, and came to class feeling prepared, confident, and ready to ask questions and participate. I don’t know if my classmates read everything, and if they didn’t, more power to them—they’re amazing for being able to participate fully in the class conversations. But for me, this made a huge difference.
A cool feature of the Kindle e-books was that it told you how many hours or minutes it would take to read the book. It wasn’t completely accurate because it included the index and notes, but still, it helped me plan. If it said the book would take four and a half hours, I’d block out six or seven hours to account for breaks. It made the reading process more manageable.
Fast-forward to today, and there are even better apps. I use Speechify now—not a promotion, just sharing something that has revolutionized my reading, learning, participation in discussions, and ultimately my writing and analysis. It all stems from that personal habit (or obsession) of wanting my eyeballs to touch every word of the text. I’m grateful the technology exists, because otherwise I think this is exactly the type of thing that makes people feel bad about themselves. I know I’m not “not smart”—I’m just a slow reader. I want people to know that whatever difficulties they face in grad school, it’s not because they’re not smart. Grad school is just challenging, period. Technology helps, but so does having the mindset of working through obstacles.
One quirky thing to share before I end: when you start immersion reading—holding the physical book while listening to the audio—you can eventually increase the reading speed little by little. My starting speed was around 1.5 or 1.6x normal speed. After about 15 minutes, I’d bump it up to 1.7, then 1.8, and eventually even 2.2 or 2.3. It just flowed right into my brain. The consequence, though, is that I could only do about 30 minutes at a time. After burning through text at that speed, my brain felt overloaded. So I would take quick naps—about 26 minutes, which people say is the “magic number” for a restful but not deep sleep. It helped a lot.
Once you develop a consistent reading rhythm, everything becomes more manageable, digestible, and honestly conquerable. I use the word conquerable to emphasize that you don’t have to feel defeated—you can conquer that week’s assignments.
I hope this is helpful to anyone struggling on the reading or tech side, or anyone who just needs the affirmation that you’re not the only one and that it’s not because you’re not smart. Reach out if you find this relatable—I’d love to hear from you!
Welcome!
Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025
By: Phillip Cheng
Estimated reading time: 1–2 minutes
Welcome to our blog! I’m Philip, and I’m a second-year student in the School of Teaching and Learning, getting a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Teachers, Schools, and Society. Wow, that’s a mouthful! To sum it up, I’m basically an aspiring scholar of the history of education. I’m from Lakeland, Florida, and I did my undergrad at UF. I completed my master’s degrees at Chaminade University of Honolulu and San Francisco State University.
My hope for this blog is that we can be more connected. And what I mean by we is the greater graduate student community, particularly within the School of Teaching and Learning but also more broadly in the College of Education. As graduate students, our lives are completely different from our undergraduate lives, meaning we have so much more to focus on in terms of our research, our jobs, our teaching assignments, our families—you name it.
So whether you have five minutes or fifty minutes, we hope you can utilize our blog and wesbite in whatever way helps you feel more connected to the community. Here on our blog, Kelly and I aim to give regular updates about the happenings around us that you may find interesting and that we also find interesting. We also hope to use this space to be frank about some of the difficulties of being a graduate student. Welcome to the struggle bus. Good news—we ride together.
So enjoy what we post. Please reach out to us with suggestions, and I hope that through this digital platform we can build community together in ways we normally wouldn’t. Take the time to follow us on Instagram and leave us comments and questions as well!