Category Archives: Burnout

Day of Rest, My Ass

Posted on July 22, 2012 | 2 comments

When I say Sunday dinner I mean lunch (although on other days, “dinner” means supper—I don’t know why) and I also mean hot meat of some sort. Today it was baked chicken, real mashed potatoes (skins-on), and three-bean salad (cheated on that—it came from a can).

In an alternate universe, this meal would have been served by me, wearing an apron, after a morning spent in church.

In this particular universe, there was no apron and no morning in church.

I never remember to put on an apron, and organized religion and I are spending some time apart. I am participating in what Wendell Berry’s character Jayber Crow called “disorganized religion,” which I typically call being a Zen Baptist.

What about you? Are you resting on this day of rest?

Some of the people who take the Bible most literally, who insist that Genesis is a literal description of creation (despite the fact that there are two creation stories in Genesis and a third in Proverbs 8), are adept at ignoring Genesis 2:2-3, when God rested and created the Sabbath—something Yahweh cared enough about, apparently, to put it on his Top Ten list, (this from Exodus 20)“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work….”

Of course, there are those who take this commandment very seriously, who won’t drive on the Sabbath, who work hard the day before to make food that can be eaten without work to prepare it. But that’s not what I grew up with, not my adult experience, although one of the reasons I love living in Spring Green is that I can function really well without driving anywhere. (Walking home from the bars is only a small part of that pleasure.)

It’s one of the more striking ironies of my life–any time I’ve belonged to a faith community, been an active participant in one, Sunday was anything BUT a day of rest.

Stretches when I’m in a wilderness time (which can be nasty and involve dehydration, or wonderful, like now), Sunday stands a much better chance of actually being a day of rest.

What do I mean by wilderness time? It’s a reference to Jesus’s time in the wilderness, first of all. Three of the four gospels tell the story of Jesus going into the desert, immediately after being baptized, to fast for 40 days and 40 nights. He’s tempted by Satan there (the best depiction of which I’ve ever seen occurs in the movie Jesus of Montreal, when the actor portraying Jesus in a suddenly-popular passion play has a lawyer telling him all the ways he could parlay this into fame and fortune).

If you focus on the gospels (as opposed to the epistles of the apostle Paul), one of the things that stands out is how often Jesus heads out on his own. My friend Tammy is the first person I recall hearing preach on this–she’s also the first person I remember pointing out to me that God pronounces he is “well pleased” with Jesus before Jesus has done anything we consider part of his work on Earth. Even after he begins that work, Jesus sneaks off a number of times, which should comfort both my slacker and my introvert friends.

I’m not saying that he was resting, exactly, as he was fasting and being tempted, but it was sort of a pause, an episode of time off the clock. His ministry won’t start until he leaves the desert, but it can’t start until he’s spent enough time in the desert.

Once his ministry starts, he somehow gets a reputation as a “wine-bibber and glutton,” which I grew up understanding was slander, that people were falsely accusing him of that. Really? I don’t know. I think Jesus had a prescription for chill pills, and knew when to take one.

Matthew 11 is a really interesting chapter. John the Baptist is in prison and sends his disciples to ask Jesus if he’s the Messiah (when John baptized Jesus, he didn’t seem to have any doubts about the matter). Jesus sends them back to John with a list of what he’s accomplished, a sort of short-form resume, “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” Then he adds, bizarrely coming at the end of this list, “And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.”

He spends some time praising John the Baptist, and then does a little comparison/contrast:

“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another,
‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

(I personally prefer “winebibber” to “drunkard,” because it sounds like so much more fun.)

It’s not literal, of course, John did eat and drink (honey and locusts, at the very least), and we don’t have Biblical evidence of Jesus eating too much or getting tipsy, but we do have evidence he appreciated good wine. Otherwise why would his first miracle be turning water into, not just wine, but wine pronounced as good wine?

The chapter ends with verses I’m pleased to take literally (and poetically, which is why I quote the King James version here): “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Never, not once, has my participation in a faith community felt easy or light. It has felt terrific, and right, and sustaining, and wonderful at times (not so great at other times). But easy? Or light? Not that I’m remembering.

So was Jesus just being ironic there?

I don’t think so, although he says things other times that contradict this (“Take up your cross daily” comes to mind—I often feel that just getting out of bed is my cross).

As someone who is nearly always teetering on the edge of burnout, I want to cling to those verses, make them real.

The title of this blog, “Day of Rest, My Ass,” is a poem written by a character in an old novel draft of mine, written during my first sabbatical, in 2004. She’s a burned-out preacher trying to find her way by working at a church camp one summer.

I understand why Jesus blesses anyone who doesn’t take offense. He did and said so many things to upset the apple quo, and advocating rest, for me a lot of days, tops the list.

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Posted in Burnout, Family, God Stuff, Spring Green, Work Life

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Summer Theologica, Part I

Posted on July 15, 2012 | 1 comment

In an earlier version of the following poem, which I, ahem, can’t seem to find, there was a line that said, “Television, being neither action nor contemplation, must be sin.” I’ve been contemplating the notions of action and contemplation this week (not so much acting on either notion), so I thought of that now-homeless line.

There is a burning ban in Wisconsin now (I’m scared to use the barbecue grill even), and we haven’t had enough rain for a very long time (and not much rain in the forecast), so even if we still lived out in the country, which we don’t, we wouldn’t be burning trash. The images of cold and wet are comforting to me at the moment:

SUMMER THEOLOGICA

Burning trash is better on the other Solstice,

December, the colder the better,
And even wind is fine
With enough snow cover.
Deep dark. We pile in
Two months of cat food bags
And Pop Tart boxes, low APR deals
And wadded up rough drafts.

One big blue kitchen match or two
Scraped fast against the barrel,
Which once was painted bright blue,
And the flame touches,
Tickles, dances, overwhelms
The trash. The chemical residue
In the barrels sends up thick smoke, sky blue.

Transformed! Detritus of the modern life
Consumed by fire, condensed to steam
And ash. Another chance to start again,
Another slate scorched clean.

The fire keeps you warm.
On Christmas Eve once, I sang
“Away in a Manger” while burning trash,
cows actually lowing nearby.

Bits of paper rise in the night,
Against the starry sky it’s hard
To keep saying paper, fire, ash—
Orange lace makes more sense,
Flickering warm constellations
In a coldly growing universe.
Our dwindling friend, the past, is receding.
One gust and there’s a gray hole
Where the tiny fireworks had been.

But we keep up with trash better
Spring, fall, summer, letting it pile up
Only if there’s a burning ban, and this summer,
There’s way too much rain for that.

Loading the barrel raises a cloud
Of mosquitoes from the puddle inside.
Die, demons, die, I say,
Lighting it fast. But they’re so thick.
I want to wear a smudge pot
Round my neck, dip my clothes in Deet
And citronella oil, set myself on fire.
At least immolation wouldn’t itch.
At least not at first.

There is something holy about fire,
I think to myself, dancing on the squishy
Ground to dodge all the whiny
Little proboscises aimed at me.
All that was is less.
The volume visibly reduced.
Blue incense rising slowly toward heaven.
Here it is, God, what was, what we no longer want.

_________________

This poem is about so many things, and it used to be about so many more. (In that version I can’t find. I don’t think I burned it–I’m just not sure where it is.) There used to be a line in there from a friend who burned trash with me once and said, “I’m the worst person you know.”

There is redemption in burning trash. In getting caught up.

A couple of weeks ago there were three posts that people were sharing on Facebook, all related, I think, to burning trash—at least metaphorically.

First, there was this one, on the potential benefits of procrastination, called “Procrastination Rules.” The only point at which I disagreed was in the penultimate paragraph (most of which I did agree with), in which Frank Partnoy said, “If we aren’t working at all, we are being slothful. If we are working on something unimportant, we are showing bad judgment. But if we are working on something important, then does it really make sense to judge us negatively for not working on something less important? If we put off errands because we are trying to cure cancer, are we really procrastinating? And if that is the meaning of procrastination, why is it so bad?”

Terrific questions, but two other posts were flying around the same day that made it clear it’s not true that we’re being slothful “if we aren’t working at all.”

One was this one, “Why Killing Time Isn’t a Sin,” in which Leo Babauta says “Killing time isn’t a sin — it’s a misnomer. We’ve framed the question entirely wrong. It’s not a matter of “killing” time, but of enjoying it….Now we might spend this moment working if that work brings us joy. But we might also spend it relaxing, doing nothing, feeling the breeze on the nape of our neck, losing ourselves in conversation with a cherished friend, snuggling under the covers with a lover. This is life. A life of joy, of wonderfulness.”

What’s interesting to me is that this seems like neither action nor contemplation to me (I see contemplation as somewhat synonymous to meditation—something requiring focus and effort). This just seems like fun.

And fun, as an anti-dote, can be very powerful, as Tim Kreider points out in “The ‘Busy’ Trap.” I loved how forthrightly he said, “I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.” But beyond his terrific voice (I’m really enjoying his book, We Learn Nothing), he has some really important points.

“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

This is connected to what a lot of creativity researchers talk about in the steps, or stages of creativity (which I covered in my first blog, “Creativity: A Pumpkin Saga”):

“People who describe the stages or steps of creativity use some variation of the following list (much of which comes from an early researcher named Wallas, though he is rarely cited):
• Immersion (where you consider all the possibilities)
• Incubation (where you set your work aside and let your subconscious stew)
• Inspiration (when, like Archimedes, you have your “eureka!” moment—and bathrooms rank high statistically as places where we report getting inspired*, btw. But I shouldn’t say “we” because I would never report that, even if it were true, which of course it’s not)
• Verification (where someone whose judgment matters, for whatever reason, says, “Yes! Tastes great!” or “I’ll publish that!”).”

Procrastination gets you in trouble sometimes in relation to this list, because if you’re working with a deadline, and you spend too much time on the immersion stage, you might not have much time to leave for the incubation stage, and that might cut down on the likelihood of inspiration.

There’s a balance there–as in most things, as in the story of Mary and Martha (tune in tomorrow for that one), as in burning trash–you don’t want to put it off too long, because then you’ll have bags and bags of things to burn and it’ll take forever to get it done. But you don’t want to do it every day, because then you’ll have a tiny little boring fire that will be out before you have time to appreciate how wonderful the moment is, how beautiful the flames, how delicate the ashes are as they lift up and float away.

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Posted in Burnout, Creativity, God Stuff, Poetry, Procrastination, Uncategorized, Work Life

Summer of my Relative Uselessness

Posted on July 5, 2012 | 2 comments

I’m somehow reminded of when the O.J. trial was on—I spent a lot of that summer on the couch, agreeing with whichever lawyer was speaking at the time. “It’s like they didn’t cancel LA Law after all,” I told my friends.

There’s no trial on this summer that I’m watching, and since we barely have broadcast TV, we’re not watching the lead-up to the Olympics and may not watch much of the Olympics. (Which I’m sure we can add to the list of ways I’m a horrible mother.) I’m also not watching soap operas, because the ones I loved the most are gone. I’ll admit it—I did get a little sad yesterday thinking I couldn’t turn on Guiding Light and find out if Jeffrey were going to make a surprise appearance at the Bauer barbecue and thus lead to yet another Josh and Reva breakup.

Regardless of how little TV I’m watching (other than all of Season 3 of Justified on my laptop through iTunes—just giggling a little here about the juxtaposition of Timothy Olyphant and lap)—regardless:

Between when the spring semester ended on May 24 and, well, any time now, I’ve been pretty useless.

I don’t want to say I’ve earned it, but I did have my gallbladder removed on May 29. Yes, they were able to do it laproscopically, and no, there weren’t any complications, but it took me every minute of three weeks to feel anything close to normal. So many people said they just “snapped right back” after gallbladder surgery. Apparently I’m not snappy. It took a solid month before my son pronounced me 99% recovered.

“Or maybe 98%,” he said. He made this observation after I’d apprehended a runaway grocery cart that was hurtling across the grocery store parking lot toward parked cars. The cart-herd had left it unattended while he moved some other carts back inside. My brain went kind of “phbbbbbbsplat” for a second or two, as I was thinking, “oh, that’s going to hit those cars,” and then, shifting into superhero mode, I scanned the parking lot, said to Wendell “let’s go!” and we ran with our cart after the runaway cart.

I grabbed it before it hit anything, and then pulled both carts back up to the store, where the clueless cart-herd was emerging. I started to say, “I just saved your ass,” but I stopped myself (Wendell tonight at dinner told nath and me that Callie, our kitten, was “pissed off because you’re not snuggling her enough.” I told him that’s another one of those words he shouldn’t use until he’s older, like when he gets his drivers license.)

“I just saved you,” I said to the cart-herd, and it seemed to dawn on him (or, as he’ll probably write in my composition class this fall, dong on him) what I’d saved him from. As we walked to our car, Wendell said, “That’s the first time I’ve seen you run since your operation.”

“I must be recovered,” I said.

“99% anyway,” he said. “Or maybe 98%.” He and nath have been watching Star Trek episodes & Spock is a big favorite.

It was a very dramatic moment.

And that’s pretty much it, in terms of what I’ve accomplished so far this summer.

O.k., not entirely true. I’ve read a lot. I found a lot of terrific apps for the iPad. I actually wrote a fair bit.

And just tonight, I finished transferring my TO DO list from paper to “Things,” which is both a web thingy and an app. It’s designed to work smoothly with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” religion (I read that book during my recovery stretch). I’m relatively excited about the possibility that these two things will help me be more productive. I would personally be more excited if he called it “Getting Shit Done,” but probably that would not be as broadly appealing.

Other than my gallbladder surgery, I think my summer of relative uselessness can be attributed to ongoing issues with burnout. I’m hoping that taking it pretty easy for a month let some of that heal up, too.

I am very, very grateful to have a job where I can take a month to recover from what is, by all accounts, relatively minor surgery.

(You don’t need to tell me how many things I could complain about with my particular job in my particular state at this particular point in history—-trust me. I’m not one of those people who say, “Can’t complain,” because I know I always could. About anything. I’m creative AND I’m a worst-case-scenario thinker. I could complain. But I don’t, not always.)

It isn’t true that professors “get summers off.” But it is true (especially if we’re not teaching, which I’m not, this summer) we have a big chunk of time to get a big chunk of things done, with a proportionally big chunk of autonomy to figure out how, precisely, to go about Getting Shit Done.

So we’ll see—will this summer of my relative uselessness morph into an incredibly productive stretch of time? Or will I spend ever more time finding addictive word game apps and and then finding ways to get the iPad away from my husband and son?

Tune in tomorrow, soap fans. Or next week—or whenever it is I get another blog posted.

(Also—if the title of this post rang any bells, you’ll be happy to know that Kristy McNichol is alive and well.)

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Posted in Burnout, Creativity, Family, Procrastination, Teaching, Work Life

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Metaphors: A Semester

Posted on April 27, 2012 | 2 comments

1
damp pile of limp balloons

2
multiple balloons, inflated to bursting
in January
let go on schedule until March
then all at once
sputtering
zip zoom
flail
hanging suspended in April
flop

3
you know how the house in Up floated away?
like that
but no passengers

4
some old-school blown-up balloons
along with helium mylar
and one miniature hot-air contraption
elaborately connected
mostly self-propelled
landing gently
grades turned in

5
damp pile of limp balloons

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Posted in Burnout, Poetry, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

The Moan Tax

Posted on April 25, 2012 | 10 comments

I pay for every blessing—don’t think I don’t.
Sure I’ve got a good job, but I work too hard,
And I’m lucky in love, but marriage takes work.
Don’t believe me? Listen to me piss and moan
About the house I have to clean, the food
I have to cook, the garden I have to weed,
My beautiful, rural commute ruined this week
with a spread-manure-fresh-dead-skunk reek.

I might be spoiled but at least I’m not content.

God forbid I should relax or take a break
Or cut back somewhere or say no to anything
Or take the risk of being seen as slacking
Or just enjoy the son I thought I couldn’t conceive.
I fight off jinxes with my constant, low-voltage rant,
Lest all my precious miseries be stripped from me.

_____

This is and isn’t me speaking. Happy Hump Day, everyone!

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Posted in Burnout, Family, Poetry, Work Life

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Getting the Pay Raise You Deserve, Part III

Posted on April 12, 2012 | 17 comments

CREDO: ENOUGH

I don’t work too hard. I work hard

enough, having joined the small but growing worldwide Church of Enough, not to be confused with the service club called Just Enough, whose border blurs with the Club of Just Barely Enough, which is too similar, frankly, to the Club of Not Really Enough, aligned of course with the also growing club of Not Nearly Enough who might as well admit they’re paying members of the Piss Poor In Nearly Every Measurable Way Society. No, we’re the Church of Enough–not to be confused either, please, with those in the mildly amiable but really too puffed up Club of More Than Enough, who won’t admit this publicly but they share office space with the growing Crystal Cathedral of Too Much and a splinter group, the Cult of Much Too Much, who are Calvinistic in believing anyone without the proud banner MUCH TOO MUCH (a hand-tatted silky thing they work extra hours to buy), anyone who sleeps eight hours in a row, anyone who cares to whisper, “balance,” anyone who stares at a cobalt bottle in the afternoon light, anyone who smiles just must by definition belong to what they see as the biggest club of all, Just Not Enough.

Moderation in most things
is our creed. If we met
we’d chant it but we don’t
have meetings. To qualify
for membership you must
come to us having attended

enough meetings already.

A humble enough start
has bloomed like rust
in the machine
of the rest of our lives.
When progress grinds
to an ugly steaming stop
in our backyards
we’ll be there to sing songs
around the dying fire.
We will have progressed far
enough.

______________________________
I wrote this poem a very long time ago, maybe as many as 15 years ago, when I first read Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American. It became a signature piece for me at poetry readings for a while, although it still scares me to read it in public sometimes, since I assume someone is thinking and might say, “You could work a little harder, couldn’t you?”

But it’s an important end-piece for this particular series, and it’s important enough to me that my husband and I are going to be selling broadsides of it, with a gorgeous image he took of one of my cobalt blue bottles. (Contact me if you want one.)

As a friend of mine said, “It’s all about who’s in the lifeboat with us,” and as I added, “who’s down the hall in the nursing home.”

Are you with me? Want to come to my house when progress grinds to an ugly steaming stop? When that fire goes out, we’ll build a fire in our fire pit (which my husband and I made from the recycled drum of our front-loader washing machine) and drink some beers or possibly home-brewed hooch, which would both save us some cash and let me hark back to more of my Bullock heritage.

I’m saying it loud, saying it proud: Enough. Say it with me: Enough.

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Posted in Burnout, Poetry, Searching, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

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Getting the Pay Raise You Deserve, Part II

Posted on April 10, 2012 | 15 comments

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
Raise your hourly wage by working fewer hours.

It’s kind of a punch line. Kind a punch in the gut, since it’s the only kind of raise we’re likely to get in the UW System any time soon.

I once told a high-octane-hard-working, salary-sensitive professor that my salary was probably higher than hers if we considered hourly wage. She wasn’t amused.

Amusing myself is one of my highest priorities in life, but I’m completely serious here.

It’s very, very hard to scale back, but some of us have to, if we haven’t already. We have to be able to specify, to quantify if possible (because numbers convey meaning sometimes better than anything else) where budget cuts have already impacted quality and where they’re impacting quality now.

I’d love to see someone set up a Wiki (I had the idea, so someone else can have the fun of implementing it—-it takes a lot of time for me to come up with all my good ideas. Plus I still sort of don’t get wikis) with these categories:

Maintaining Quality Where It Counts—what are all the wonderful & amazing things we’re doing for students even when our morale is low? How does our professional development make us better teachers? How is our service making things better? We have a ton of examples, all the time. We need to share them.

Impacting Quality Out of Necessity—where have we had to cut back?

And if we haven’t cut back, well—-we have to cut back.

Why? It might well have a positive impact on our quality of life, for one thing. Begin the slow process (for some of us) of healing from burnout. But also—if we can’t show how budget cuts are impacting quality, then we don’t have any evidence that they are. If we don’t have any evidence that they’re lowering quality, maybe they’re not. I absolutely believe they are, but if lowering quality were a crime, could we get a jury of 12 to convict budget cuts? Not based on what our detectives have brought us so far. If I’m the DA, I’m saying, “Get me more evidence!”

I’d love to see people report, as honestly and accurately as they can bear to, how many hours they’re working. (More on this in another blog—it’s a weird thing, trying to track your own hours.)

I’d love to see numbers and testimonials on how many faculty & teaching staff are taking on extra sections or part-time jobs or doing summer work outside academia. I’d love to see numbers and testimonials on how many faculty and teaching staff are spending more time preparing their own meals and growing their own food—not simply because it’s healthier and aesthetically more satisfying, but because of economic necessity. I’d love to see numbers and testimonials on how many faculty and teaching staff are seeking psychological counseling either as individuals because of stress and low morale, or as part of a couple, since we know money woes are a huge source of relationship strife. And if we are taking those hours spent on all those things out of our sleep time, or our family time, or our community time, or our girls’ night out time, or our rearranging the nutcracker collection time, anything other than work time—I think we need even more counseling.

Did the recent increases in class size impact what we did in the classroom? If not right away, has it now, several semesters in? And if it didn’t, why not? It takes extra hours to teach extra students well if we don’t cut back. Where did we subtract those hours?

What if, just as one example, we didn’t routinely look at every rough draft from every student? What if we had a certain number of slots available for one-on-one feedback, and it was up to students to sign up for those slots? It might actually teach them to get themselves organized and seek feedback early in the process (which is closer to what they’ll find in the world of work, right? If they want help, they’re not going to be able to wait around for a supervisor to ask them if they want help).

What if we offered, say, 10 opportunities for students to assess their reading comprehension through in-class essays or out-of-class exercises, but counted the grades for only 9? Only 8? 7? 6? That cuts down on the grading time, since we know a lot of students will do only what they have to. Is it actually our job to teach them dedication? Or do they have to come up with intrinsic motivation at some point? Are my UW-Richland students from Wisconsin noticing that my UW-Richland students from China, Vietnam, and Korea typically take advantage of EVERY SINGLE OPPORTUNITY to learn and improve?

Maybe both those what-ifs are bad ideas, so what if we routinely shared examples of how to cut back without seriously impacting student learning overall?

How many fewer students have we steered toward becoming education majors recently? How many students have we said the following to lately, “You know, you should think about becoming a professor.” (I used to say it to three or four students a year. I don’t say it any more.)

Here’s the crux of it all—there are people who will always misunderstand, resent, and misrepresent us, and they will use any attempt on our part to cut back as evidence that we’re overpaid and underworked. But guess what? If we do nothing, we’re status quo-ing, and they’ll keep saying we’re overpaid and underworked. If we somehow manage to work even more, they’ll say they knew we weren’t working hard enough. If we work less, they’ll say we’re even more overpaid and underworked, but that’s not very different, at all, from being simply overpaid and underworked, so I say we should go for it.

FIGHT GASLIGHTING WITH FACTS
Any time we feel the need to point out to someone the stagnancy of our salaries, we are bombarded with accusations of whining and reminders how lucky we are to have a job in the first place. Well, yes (see Part I —I get it. I really get it.), BUT—at some point it begins to feel like gaslighting:

“You think you have legitimate dissatisfaction with working conditions?” the bad boyfriend scoffs. “You must be imagining things.”

There’s so much fun going on with Wisconsin politics that it’s hard to keep track, but here’s an example from this week. One state senator, in justifying the repeal of our equal pay law, made two points—one possibly logical point that some pay inequity comes from women focusing on family matters (my own experience tells me there’s some truth to that—I know I worked fewer hours and got lower merit ratings when my son was first born and was very young), but undermines any credibility with this howler:

“You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious.”

Um, hello? Breadwinner in my family? Um, me? (And also, guy/their is a pronoun antecedent error, only excused if someone is trying for gender-neutral language, which I don’t suspect is the case here.)

The one not-quite-so-bleak spot in the Chronicle’s data for salary is that pay equity is pretty good male/female in the UW Colleges.

This state senator (whose name I don’t want to grace the pages of my blog) is one of many in Wisconsin’s Anti-Public-Worker Brigade (with typical accusations like “They’re the haves!” “Overworked!” “Underpaid!” “Bunch of slobs!”), and I don’t think we’re ever, ever going to change his mind. But there are other state senators, and other community members, who aren’t so firmly anti- and those are the people we should be communicating with.

If we’re able to quantify what we do, we need to communicate that. My own state representative sends me email updates periodically; I’m going to begin to respond with an email update of my own—wouldn’t it be lovely if there were a whole wiki I could send him the link to?

STREAMLINING
Next to worrying about what state legislators and angry taxpayers think of my work ethics, I worry what some of my colleagues will think. (And I’m not even a probationary faculty member trying to get tenure.) I’m working on abandoning the notion that I can actually control what people think about me, but until then, I do worry about certain colleagues’ impressions of me—-some of the ones who work 50-60 hours a week during the 9-month academic contract, and a breezy 30-40 hours a week during most of the summer. Some of these folks are not doing it solely out of devotion and drive—-some of them feel obliged to work that much. And some of them are either explicitly critical of colleagues who work less, or spend a lot of time sighing, moaning, and dropping little hint-bombs at colleagues who work less. Not all my super-hard-working-colleagues are like this, but enough.

Thus another cruxy bit—-a lot of time in academia, we are our own worst enemies.

I remember once a long time ago someone brought up the issue that in the UW Colleges, the fall semester was 15 weeks plus finals, but the spring semester was often longer. The proposal came up—-should we make both semesters equal? Should we make them both 15? Should we make them longer—both 16? Someone pointed out that every other UW campus had 15-week semesters (plus finals). You know what? There were people who argued for the longer semesters. The UW Colleges has ALWAYS had lower average salaries than the other campuses, and there were people wanting to make it official that we had longer contracts for less money. I couldn’t believe it. Ultimately the 15-week semester prevailed, but that mindset is responsible for all kinds of busy-making, crazy-making policies. We like to have a lot of people on a lot of committees. I get that—-I miss the days when we talked about faculty governance instead of shared governance and made sure there was a faculty majority an every committee.

But those were also the heydays of what I like to call the occupative-compulsive model, of ADD MORE HOURS TO YOUR WORK WEEK to accomplish this or that valid thing on top of every other valid thing you’re already doing. “Let’s work 16!” seems radically different to me than “Let’s play two!” but I think as long as salaries were high enough that a two-professor family could be firmly in the upper middle class, or a professor’s one salary could keep HER family solidly in the middle class, the occupative-compulsive model was perpetuate-able, if not sustainable. (Even so, the people who were best at that model were not the people I wanted to eat lunch with, not that they ever stopped working long enough to hang out with us slackers.)

Those days are gone. Gone, daddy gone.

I think we need to take a serious look at our committee structures and just slash and burn our way through them. One example—I love serving on our English Department’s Executive Committee, but doing the reading, traveling, and meeting that committee requires in January alone adds up to about 80 hours. That would be 10 days of 8-hour days. That would be two work weeks. (I’m walking through the math slowly in case the Washington Post guy is reading.) Right now we have 11 people on that committee (down from 13). I think we ought to lower it to 7. Or maybe 9. That would give two people 80 extra hours.

If we got serious about streamlining, we could simplify a lot of our lives. A lot. Really a lot.

We could help ourselves–we could invent an organization RIGHT NOW and call it the United Front for a Different Atmosphere. If I need to say no to something, but I’m having trouble saying no, another member of the organization could send an email on my behalf: “You’re receiving this email because ___________ needs to devote time to other activities rather than ______________. Sincerely, ____________, founding member of UFF DA.”

Again–I’m amusing myself in a way but also completely serious. I’d be more than happy to send an email on behalf of colleague who needs to say no, or who already said yes but hadn’t realized what a boondoggle she was saying yes to. Again–I think it could help a lot. Really a lot.

ANCHORING THE BOTTOM MIDDLE
Instead of being occupative-compulsive, I think we need to cultivate more of a M*A*S*H* mentality. When it comes to saving lives (teaching students), we’ll do triage and perform amazingly delicate surgery under horrific conditions. Over and over. Other than that, we’ll do just enough.

To that end, I’m beginning to sketch out a kind of work-rubric, with performance levels of “Excellent,” “Acceptable,” and “Unacceptable.” The categories would be things like Teaching, Service, and Professional Development. The sub-categories for teaching might be “Assessing/Responding/Returning Student Work,” “Course Design/Course Revision,” “Managing Class Time.”


For each sub-category and category, I want to clearly delineate what’s terrific and what’s good enough. I don’t want to be at the bottom-middle (barely acceptable) for everything, but I want to know where it is, and I want to give myself permission to be there for however many things needed.

Needed for what? Needed for me to feel as though my salary comes closer to matching the work I do. Just based on my own pride, I’d like to average out to “very good,” but my burnout tendencies flare up when I’m not realistic about the relationship between my ambitions and the number of hours I’m willing/able to work. So “very good” might be a stretch, but it feels like a manageable goal.

I want to delineate these things for myself in terms of what I expect from tenure-track faculty as well, and I want them to know I’m doing it. If I’m anchoring the bottom-middle, I can warn them when they’re about to sink lower, right?

PRIVATIZING
Finally, I wonder if we need to stop bemoaning the race to the bottom, in which state governments cut and cut and cut support for higher education. It might get better eventually, but I’m pretty pessimistic. (Probably because the church I grew up in tended to preach a pre-millenial version of the Second Coming of Christ, in which the world would just keep carrying itself toward hell in a hand-woven basket until Jesus decided to step in, not wearing soft rope-sandals this second time. I don’t believe that any more, but it’s pretty firmly burned in my synapses and thus hard to be perky about the future, but I can sing “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine” with a big smile on my face.)

Barring a turnaround in state support, we can look to models that are already in place. For example, the Richland County Campus Foundation is an amazing organization. UW-Richland is always trading places with one or two other UW Colleges campuses as the smallest campus, but our foundation is one of the largest. The benefits include ample scholarship opportunities for students and money to reimburse professional development activities. Thus, as a faculty member, I was reimbursed in full for a presentation I did last fall at the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and learning—the total cost of which (travel, registration, etc.) was around $800. Same thing for my trip to Chicago this spring for the Associated Writing Programs conference.

What does that have to do with privatizing? These funds come from community members and alumni, not the state of Wisconsin pipeline. These funds come from people who believe in education, who believe in what we do, who trust that every dollar they spend on my professional development pays off in the classroom and the community.

I think we could learn from that model. I think we could do even more of it. If someone like Warren Buffet says he’s willing to pay more in taxes, I have some ideas for how he could spend his money (until such time as he’s asked to pay more in taxes).

And finally, sadly, some of us need to at least consider leaving academia. We need to work on our resumes and schedule some informational interviews. Some of us need to apply for jobs, and some of us need to accept the job offers we get. Some of the best and brightest of us need to not let the door hit us on the ass on our way out. That would be the ultimate in the privatization of public education—educators leaving for the private sector.

If we see dramatic brain drain, we’ll have even more examples of how budget cuts are impacting quality.

As for those of us who stay, everyone will be better of if we’re happy, healthy, good at what we do and getting better at it all the time. I don’t know about you, but down here in “Far Below the Median-Land,” I can’t be much of anything but burned out if I’m working more than about 40 hours a week during the school year. I can produce very good work at that rate. Anyone who wants my very best work needs to pay me more.

UPDATE: I forgot a step in that penultimate paragraph–some of us need to leave the UW System, some of us need to leave Wisconsin, some of us need to leave the country (Oh, Canada…) and THEN some of us need to at least consider leaving academia.

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Posted in Burnout, Politics, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

Getting the Pay Raise You Deserve, Part I

Posted on April 10, 2012 | 4 comments

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks to be a professor. March 23 there was the guy from the Washington Post, who proceeds from the basic assumption that professors are overpaid and underworked. A lot of people responded (call for the Day of Higher Ed, Aeron Haynie’s good response), and their responses are valid and important, but if you pair his editorial with news from the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, reporting on faculty salaries, the bleak picture suddenly gets sunny for the UW Colleges:

The Washington Post guy isn’t talking about us. He can’t be.

He mentions salaries that are almost $30,000 more than ours, for faculty at a two-year school where scholarship and research aren’t listed as part of their responsibilities. (Their teaching load seems higher, but one class might just about equal the time we’re asked to spend on professional development, at least as we work toward tenure or try to stay competitive in the merit pay pool—oh, wait. There hasn’t been money attached to merit ratings for something like eight years.)

He imagines faculty are capable of spending 20 hours in the classroom (approximately six classes) as opposed to the UW Colleges typical 12 (typically 4 classes) and then getting all the class prep and grading done in another 20 hours a week. I know he’s not talking about us at this point-—that only works if faculty are delivering lectures they’ve delivered before, for classes they’ve taught multiple times before, assessing assignments that are not writing-intensive (maybe he’s imagining multiple-choice tests graded by scan-tron or given online), spending no time on course evaluation or innovation. That’s not us.

He seems to think we take a month off between semesters (I do usually manage to take a week off then), don’t work on spring break (most of us do), and he imagines us lying on the beach on “summer vacation from mid-May until September.” I don’t work full-time during the summer, but I work a lot.

He says that “faculty salaries now mirror those of most upper-middle-class Americans working 40 hours for 50 weeks,” but ours don’t, not in the UW Colleges. And most executives I know get more than 2 weeks of vacation.

THE LUXURY OF IMPROVING OUR LOT

Along with the Washington Post guy’s bad math comes the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s survey of faculty salaries.

Relative to faculty at other two-year institutions, we’re simply not overpaid. For example, I’m a full professor, and I’ve been teaching at UW-Richland for 20 years. My salary is about $5,000 below the $62,000 average for full professors, and that average is in the bottom 25th percentile for salaries at 2-year institutions. “Far below the median,” the Chronicle says. I’m relatively comfortable sharing my salary because it’s available online if you’re on a UW System computer, and available through the mail otherwise. (I think it ought to be online for everyone—I think it used to be. Besides, I’m a public employee. Taxpayers and tuition payers do pay my salary, and many of them, if you look at numbers people throw around when they talk about faculty salaries, think I make a lot more than I do.)

Relative is the key word—-if someone’s out of work, having a job at all seems immeasurably bountiful. If someone has work but not benefits, having a job with decent benefits (even if we’re paying more for them now), sounds terrific. If someone works for a company (or state) who raided pensions already, our nervousness about future raiding might seem almost quaint since, at the moment, the Wisconsin retirement system is sound. Even inside academia, being a tenured faculty member, or even tenure-track, is a position of relative privilege, given how many highly qualified professionals are scrambling to line up as many sections a semester as they can. Those of us with tenure do have something precious—-a measure of security in an insecure economy (although tenure is being starved by neglect, with fewer and fewer new tenure track positions all the time, and tenure is ultimately as vulnerable to changes in legislation as collective bargaining rights–and I don’t think people would show up in the tens of thousands to protest on our behalf if tenure went away). It is all too easy to come across as whining, and something like “I had to spend an hour on the phone getting my insurance coverage worked out today” can come across as ingratitude, a classic First World Problem.

In that context, it is a luxury to consider what changes we could make to improve our lot. But you know what? A lot of us in academia do have that luxury, especially those of us with tenure.

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
Pay raises are possible, even in these budget-cutting times. You can engineer your own, without talking to administrators or legislators or resorting to crime. “Well, it’s happened,” you’re saying to yourself. “Marnie’s gone all the way around the bend.” No, not this time. You can raise your earnings very simply—

Raise your hourly wage by working fewer hours.

(Coming tomorrow in Part II, I’ll tell you how.)

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Posted in Burnout, Politics, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

Tagged ,

Clitter Clatter Clutter Time

Posted on March 24, 2012 | 4 comments

Here’s the thing–I just don’t deal very well with reality. The whole 24 hours in a day concept? Sure, I’ll tell you with a straight face that I get it, but then you should ask me what I anticipate getting done in the next 24 hours. Or, I might have that covered, but if you multiply it at all, say, times two (as in a weekend), and ask me what I think is going to happen, if I’m honest at all about the list in my head (or the one on paper, or in my laptop), we’ll stand there realizing I’m in cloud cuckoo land.

In some ways, my husband helps me notice reality (in other ways not so much). He did me the hugest favor when we were first living together. I have what is officially diagnosed as “mild to moderate hearing loss,” and although I’ve known about it since I was five, I was never told I needed hearing aids. I missed a lot, and in conversation, people would often say, “Did you hear what I just said?” and I would always, ALWAYS say yes, because it’s embarrassing to miss what people are saying, and it’s exhausting to attend carefully to what people are saying when you have even mild to moderate hearing loss, and I wasn’t raised to show my weaknesses. (In general, I think I was raised to be honest, but nevermind about that.) Nath was the first person in my life, ever, who added a second question to “Did you hear what I just said?” If you know nath, this won’t surprise you. He said, “All right, so what did I just say?” At that point, I might be honest and say “no, I didn’t hear you,” but I was just as likely to take one last stab at it and say, “You said, ‘the broccoli is on the air conditioner?'” It was hilarious in one way, because he wouldn’t have said anything about broccoli or an air conditioner, but embarrassing and frustrating (for both of us) in every other way. So I got hearing aids.

So what I need, and nath can’t be this person for me, is someone who can help me with the math and ask me the second question when it comes to scheduling my time–not just, “What’s on your to do list?” but also “is your to do list in any way realistic given that you have neither clones nor droids nor parallel universes that might help you in the next 24 hours?” Obviously, it would be best if I could ask myself that question, and I try, but as I mentioned earlier, I don’t always deal with reality well.

I like to say that my life goal is “sustainable chaos,” which I imagine as just enough stuff going on and lying around that life feels vibrant and alive but not overwhelming. It’s a skinny-minny line between “sustainable” and “horrific,” however. At least in my experience. I want my house to look like a professorial version of Mary Engelbreit-land, but it’s really easy to go from that over into my own private episode of Hoarders.

As I mentioned in a previous “inner weasel” post, I tend to try to do too much. It’s sort of a 21st century virus, I think, though it certainly was catching in the late 20th century. It’s what we say to each other all the time, right? “I’m behind at work,” “I’m too busy,” or “I don’t know how some people manage to get enough sleep.”

And as I’ve mentioned so far in several posts (sensing a theme here, or a chronic, nagging complaint I really should see someone about), I tend to suffer from burnout.

So this post from Nadia Bolz-Weber, one of my spiritual heroes, came at the perfect time. “The Spiritual Practice of Saying No” is pretty mind-boggling to me. She has a terrific list of good reasons to say no, and concludes with the following:

“Women especially get the message that they are not allowed to say no and if they do say no they should feel really bad about it. This is a lie.

My friend Sara told me that when I write an email or letter telling someone no, to write it, walk away for 20 minutes, then come back and take out all the apologies because they make me “sound like a girl”.

Now I try and say no graciously and with some humility but without apology.

Certainly we should all say yes to some things that are inconvenient or not on the top of our list of how we’d like to spend our time. I’m not talking about trying to pawn off narcissism as a virtue. I’m just suggesting that sometimes we say yes for really stupid reasons and then spend our time or energy on things that rob us from being able to say yes to things that are actually ours to do and care about.

Lastly, if you need to say no, you do NOT need to try and borrow the authority to do so from the person you are saying no to. Would it be ok if I need to say no? Oh I’m so sorry. I hope that’s ok. Are you ok with that?

Yikes. Stop it. (note to self)”

This really resonated with me. The following phrase occurred to me at work a few weeks ago, which I haven’t used yet in seriousness, but am holding in my head as a kind of talisman for when someone asks me to do something and doesn’t take no for an answer: “Please use this as an example of how budget cuts are beginning to affect quality.” It’s not a bad point, really, and in some cases it’s true, but why do I feel the need to have a sentence like that in my head? (I mean, other than amusing myself and a few others.) Because somewhere deep inside me I believe that no matter how hard I work, no matter how much I do, I’m not doing enough to justify my existence on the planet.

That’s pretty wacked out.

I actually read “The Spiritual Practice of Saying No” after I’d read “The Spiritual Practice of Saying Yes.”

Here’s what resonated with me in that post:

“Any Pastor or leader of an organization that requires a great deal of volunteerism to function can attest to how frustrating our culture of selfishness can be. The people who are inclined to say yes to everything do all the work and then burn out and become resentful about the people who are inclined to say no to everything. It’s as though the world is divided into martyrs and slackers.”

I can see my life as plotted out on a roller-coaster graph careening between martyr and slacker. I don’t seem to get moderation, though I have long pointed out that “moderation in all things” is not a very moderate statement, and that “moderation in most things” makes more sense as a moderate motto.

Honestly, this is a big part of why organized religion and I are spending some time apart at the moment. I don’t seem to know how to be a part of a faith community without volunteering too much, too soon, and burning out. The last faith community I was part of got some good stuff from me, and I got some good stuff too, but at the end, I was so burned out that I ended up responding to some social missteps by pretty much cutting all ties. I felt as though I were Jonah, vomited out by the whale. Headed in the right direction, sure, but YUCK.

Bolz-Weber concludes, “Some of us need to know how to say no to what is not really ours to do. And some of us need to know how to say yes to what might be ours to do, we just don’t feel like doing it. And most of us are both of these people.”

I am both those people, all the time pretty much. So. How do I figure out what is mine to do? And what is not? Until such time as I can answer those questions, I think I will continue to have problems over-packing to the point of not being able to zip the second-hand kid’s backpack on rollers I bought to use for my classes since my shoulder is so messed up I can’t carry bags any more. I would worry even more about looking utterly uncool and middle aged if I hadn’t recently seen this video of George Clooney in which he uses the roller to pull his backpack. Just one more reason to love the man.

(And yes, I do realize that by adding George Clooney to this post, I’ve cluttered it up, but THAT’S what I mean by sustainable chaos–I did, in fact, say no to including every single thing I thought of while writing this, but I said yes to George Clooney. In that sense, I know one thing that is mine to do. When it comes to Clooney, I will always, always say yes.)

UPDATE: It has occurred to me that I injured my shoulder by trying to do too much in the pool, exacerbated the injuring by doing a weight-lifting routine I wasn’t really ready for, and made everything worse by carrying really, really heavy bags on the same side as the injured shoulder. Lovely as a metaphor, really a drag as reality. So I’m just going to meditate on that pain for a few years.

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Posted in Burnout, Procrastination, Searching, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life