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I’ve had a cold this week which has finally turned to laryngitis, oh joy. I don’t feel all that bad, but I have no voice, not even a squeak.
My cats are taking this to town. OneCat sits at my bookshelf, slowly and methodically pulling out one book after another, glancing curiously at me in between books to gauge my reaction. TwoCat has decided that the Day of No Yelling means that he is free to sharpen his claws on the side of the couch, gazing innocently me all the while. The fact that I am red-faced, waving my arms up and down at them, and silently mouthing evil, evil curses, has no effect whatsoever.
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Cool! From Celandine, of course. :)  | You scored as Gandalf. You are Gandalf! This wise, old mage is loyal and brave. He is known for his counsel and advice to his friends and allies during tough times.
"All you have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to you."
Gandalf | | 88% | Faramir | | 63% | Eowyn | | 63% | Samwise | | 56% | Pippin | | 56% | Arwen | | 56% | Aragorn | | 50% | Frodo | | 44% | Gollum | | 13% | </td>
Which LOTR character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com |
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I'm trying to finish up my syllabi for the spring, and it's pushing me just a little bit over the edge. One of my goals for this year is keeping myself sane, and I've decided that the most important way to keep myself sane is to design assignments that I enjoy grading.
Well, yeah, how obvious is that? you say. I'm probably a little slow, so it wasn't that obvious to me. Last semester I felt the first tiny hints of being burned out, not big enough to be troubling, but disturbing when you consider that I've got a good thirty years or more left in my career. So I worked very very hard to prepare my courses this semester in a way that would be more satisfying to me. It was something of a shock to run my syllabi past a few friends whose first reaction was unanimously "But that's a hell of a lot of assignments you've got there! Won’t you drive yourself nuts with the grading?" because I was particularly pleased with having created a set of assignments that I didn't think would be as much work.
But having thought this over, I think both are true - that I've given a lot of assignments, and that they won't be as much work. The key is that I simply like them better. Seriously, if I had to choose between giving two assignments that I'm not thrilled about and eight that excite me, I'll go for the eight every time. New Kid has written before about friends of hers who burn out on teaching by setting their own standards too high, and I know exactly what she's talking about. But I don't think that's me, at least not yet. This depends on what wears you out: I start to burn out when I feel like students don't get any value from what we’re doing in the classroom. If they're enthusiastic, I'm enthusiastic; if they're bored and inattentive, I develop a hearty dislike of them, and the class, pretty quickly. So the trick is not the amount of work, but designing work that makes them enthusiastic at least to some degree, work that creates a cycle of satisfaction. If they enjoy doing stuff, I enjoy grading it.
The craziness comes from the fact that I've just read a fabulous essay about undergraduate research, here. The author makes some excellent points about how lost students can feel when given a research project, and how easy it is for us to unintentionally teach them that research is all about repetition, not discovery. Well, no wonder they think it's pointless and boring. She’s given me some great ideas about creating better research assignments that can be meaningful and useful to students, not just a way to force them to jump through hoops to give them a grade. (and for me, grading hoop-jumping assignments is the fastest path to burnout.)
Why does that induce craziness? Because I’d just finished all the syllabi for my classes this semester… and now I have way better ideas for them, particularly the upper-level one that I’ve really been wrestling with. But I think I’ll get a hold of myself, decide that what I’ve come up with is good enough for this semester, and commit myself to slow improvement. That’s one thing I love about the semester cycle… even though at the end of every semester, we all bitch and howl about why we do this to ourselves, I love the chance to start fresh and do it a little better the next time around. Ever the optimist.
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Like New Kid, I’m sad to see that Bitch, Ph.D. is considering leaving academia. The discussions around this, combined with my own particular circumstances, have me thinking about professional ambition, particularly among women in academia. I suspect there’s nothing here that hasn’t already been discussed to death over recent years, but here’s my 2 cents.
Some background: I began my academic career with a position at a small liberal arts college (hereafter SLAC), which requried a great deal of energy from me in terms of teaching, but very little in terms of publishing. After a few years, I moved to a position at a regionally prestigious university (don’t have a good pseudonymous acronym for it yet… it’s a medium-sized school of medium-rank quality in a medium-sized city, so I guess I’ll call it MU), whose tenure requirements gave more weight to publication (at least a book or its equivalent).
So this year I’m up for tenure, and it’s going reasonably well; the book contract came through just in time and I seem to have performed up to standard in other areas. Recently I met with my dean (we’ll call her H) about the tenure process, and her principal concern was whether I was well positioned to make the next move to full professor in six or seven years. At first I was quite flattered by this, because the tone of the conversation indicated that they did in fact want to keep me, and that Dean H was envisioning what kinds of things I could do for the university down the road.
But the more I think over this conversation, the more it brings up these questions of ambition and accomplishment and gender. The dean’s principal concern was the lack of women at the position of full professor at MU – there are very few, and several of those who are there were hired in at the position of full professor. There are several talented women at the assistant-professor rank, but as H described the situation, they are more easily sidetracked by the obligations of teaching and service, and many of them simply didn’t see the achievement of full-professor status as their central goal. H said that I already had an excellent record of teaching and service, but she wanted to make sure that I stayed focused on research and publication. The implication of all this, of course, was that I (and other women in academia) needed to be ambitious, and that ambition was defined principally by the desire to attain the rank of full professor.
At one point, discussing my previous experience in this context, she referred to my years at SLAC as “wasted time.” I interrupted to say “You know, I really don’t consider it wasted time; it was simply time spent in the pursuit of different goals than the ones I’ve had here,” and she nodded and said “It was wasted as far as publication is concerned.” Hmm. I’m glad to be at a place that encourages me to contribute professionally to my field (staying at SLAC would have made that virtually impossible), but I certainly don’t consider my time spent teaching to be “wasted.” And that’s an interesting corollary to the full-professor issue. Why isn’t the pursuit of teaching considered ambitious? I deal with an average of 65-70 students every semester, and while I hope to inspire at least a few of them in some way, at least I manage to give most of them some basic skills and perspectives that I’d like to think contribute to their formation as educated adults. (In this sense, I think survey classes are even more important than upper-level classes. Kids in upper-level classes are already self-selected by interest; you can turn them loose on a topic and they’ll get something out of it. But if a kid is going to have only one class in his life in my field, I’m going to make damn sure it’s a good one and that it’s useful to him in some way.) If it takes me several years to publish a book that will be useful to (at best) a dozen or two people, why is that more valuable and ambitious than what I’ve done for several hundred students in the same time frame?
Yeah, I know, you’re rolling your eyes at what an idealist I am. But I’m also thinking of this in terms of the kinds of issues that have nudged BitchPhD away from academia, and in terms of what kinds of things keep me sane. I can easily imagine getting burned out on this job (not just at MU but anywhere), and I’m trying to find ways now to ensure that doesn’t happen for a while. Imagining myself as full professor doesn’t give me a rush of satisfaction; imagining myself as an effective teacher does. To be clear, I do want to carry out research and publish and contribute to my field; that’s one of the reasons I sought out this job. I enjoy research, and I think what I do is valuable to my field. But if I put all my energy into that, with the ambition of becoming full professor, I’ll have to withdraw some of that energy from teaching, and I suspect that I’ll enjoy it less – and that puts me on the road to a quick burnout. If only the things I truly valued were considered to be worthy of professional ambition, I’d have it made.
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