Crap one hopes to get done over the summer

One of the two most persistent misunderstandings of university life is that because we are not teaching over the summer, we "get the summer off."Almost every academic I know actually works harder over the summer than the rest of the time, but none of their extended families or non-academic friends seem to understand this.

In an effort to fight this, for the past few years on my own (now defunct) blog, I've hosted a beginning of summer post where people share what they hope to get done in the ensuing summer. Please contribute to this public awareness campaign by sharing (plus, I'm not the only one interested in what you are working on). My summer plans below the fold:

1. With Mark Ohm, give a paper at the Notre Dame Translating French Realism conference,
2. With Mark Ohm, make the final round of revisions to our tranlsation of Tristan Garcia's Forme et Objet,
3. With Ohm, write a proposal to the University of Edinburgh Press for a book on Garcia,
4. Finish two papers with Graham Bounds (one on the aesthetic moralism/autonomism debate and one on Schelling and Heidegger),
5. Again with Bounds, attend the Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy on Schelling,
6. Getting teaching-level competency in the first five or so years of 19th century philosophy (Fichte's Wissenshaftlehren, Schelling's System, and Hegel's Differenzchrift),
7. Write a set of lecture notes for my intro logic so that I don't have to use a textbook any more (am now very unhappy with Language, Proof, and Logic for reasons I'll go into in another post; Neil Tennant's excellent Natural Logic is the only introductory level book that actually presents a harmonious natural deduction system, but it uses Prawitz trees instead of a Fitch style system, doesn't cover modal logic, and is a little bit hard for some of my students),
8. Complete a written lecture introducing Montague Grammar to incorporate into my philosophy of language class,
9. With the translation being done, actually get serious about French Vocabulary, adding two thousand words to the program in Scratch that I wrote to help me in this regard (as a weird result of my dyslexia grammar is now pretty easy for me, but I'm a disaster at vocabulary; this semester I've found the computer program helps),
10. Working through the four Kumon first grad math workbooks with my five year old.
11. Continue to watch the kids four hours a day while my wife either strings jobs for the newspaper or works on a novel. Try not to rely too much on the television for help with this.

Not only are we interested, take it from me that making a list like this is also a fun thing to do just prior grading your fifty-fifth introduction to logic exam.

The right reason to become a university professor is because you love the subject matter so much that you never want to stop being a student. Summer research and teaching new classes are the two best ways to keep this flame alive (scoring logic exams, not so much. . .).