The Productive Professor on the GO Bus

I have not written a blog in more than a week and though I do not have the exams and essays awaiting grading as my friends and colleagues do, I think I am living vicariously through them in some ways. I still have all the feelings that one would have in December, a little tired, a little distracted, a little hungry.  I am not quite at the productivity level that I would want to be with my own writing for the beginning of December and my 2 hours of writing a day during the week that I set for myself in September has certainly not transpired over the past few weeks.

I am not sure why my productivity is down but I think it may have to do with the weather and a lot of other head space for writing issues that I am working through. I have an article that I need to send out by tomorrow evening and I plan on working on it this evening and all day tomorrow with coffee, snacks, and classical music. I think one of the things that got me back on track is the person I will call “the productive professor on the GO Bus.” Every Thursday (and he may be there on other days as well but I only see him on Thursday) there is a professorly-type person who gets on my GO bus and always sits in the same seat. He sits in the single seat at the front of the bus and as soon as he sits he promptly gets his laptop out and places it on his lap and opens a Word document with paragraphs already present. He proceeds to add to the paragraphs for the duration of the 30 minute bus ride.

You can write a lot in 30 minutes as I have discovered over this semester as I tried to squeeze in writing on buses and subways. But this professor has a lot of dedication and strong time commitment to his writing; I have watched him work all semester, every week, on Thursday typing out those paragraphs from the second he sits down to the second we get to campus.

 From afar it seems as though he is working on an article but it could be something else; maybe he is giving his student comments on their assignments, though since there is no Internet on the GO Bus that seems less likely.

 Watching him yesterday morning, I started thinking, “you could easily do that you know”, “you could have been doing this all semester actually”…and all the other great residual grad school guilt comments that one tells themselves in these situations.

Regardless, I am grateful to the productive professor on the GO Bus for getting me out of my textual lull. Maybe come January I can be the “Write the Paragraphs for 30 minutes on the GO Bus Curriculum and Instructional Consultant”. Or maybe I can just be happy with the 500 words I manage to squeeze out in 15 minutes on the Notes app on my phone while waiting for the bus.