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
Posted in Burnout, Poetry, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life
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!
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.
Posted in Burnout, Poetry, Searching, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life
Tagged juliet schor
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.
Posted in Burnout, Politics, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life
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.)
Posted in Burnout, Politics, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life
Tagged education, faculty salaries
Matthew 13: 1-9
“That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the lake. 2Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. 3And he told them many things in parables, saying: ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. 5Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. 6But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. 7Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 8Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9Let anyone with ears* listen!’”
“We’ve been travelin’ on the rocky ground, rocky ground,” Springsteen’s background singers croon out sweetly on his latest album. Even though I’ve been listening to that album over and over during my commute and other times (grading papers, writing, now), there are other reasons I’m thinking about rocky ground.
I’m still spending time this week thinking “what if my life never changed,” and I’m enjoying that focus–I have so many blessings. Here’s one thing that thrills me–I’ve made a life where I get to spend a lot of time reading, much of it work related, but not all. Where do I get time to do reading for fun? As I confessed on Monday, I average about 40 hours of work a week. But we also don’t have cable, so there’s not a whole lot of TV viewing in my schedule. Lots and lots and lots of book time.
But one of the reasons I was motivated to take a hard, blessing-laser-look at my life is that it seems to me the universe has been telling me no a fair bit lately. Lots of yes, sure, but NO sometimes when I was really hoping for yes. Everything from applying for a UW System position that would’ve meant a chance to work with some amazing people AND get a course release to do it, to getting published, to getting a course approved for a particular degree designation for students. No. No. No. A few others as well–no, no, no.
Yesterday it wasn’t “no,” but it was furrowed brows and pursed lips and blank looks and “go through another layer of protocol to get approval.” Also possibly some conversations through pursed lips when I wasn’t in the room. Fine–that’s the world of work, right? You can’t always get what you want. Not every idea pans out. There is no “I” in “shared governance.” I get it. I’m not taking it personally, but I’m taking it. I’m taking it and processing it.
It’s not like I lack for ideas. If the universe says no this time, I’m ready with another launch. Seeds aplenty. Enough to scatter.
My question is this: where’s my fertile soil?
I know that later in Matthew 13 the disciples ask Jesus to explain the parable, but I’m suspicious of that–it seems more likely to me that Jesus ended with “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear” (from the King James Version, the poetry of which can’t be beat, especially not by “let anyone with ears listen,” ironic, since apparently the translators of the New Revised Standard Version, which I like for other reasons, had no ears to hear music). It seems likely to me that the disciples ended up going home and saying, “Well, what do you think he meant this time?” And came up with the word of God idea and told that to others so that eventually the cartoon bubbles got mixed up and people remembered Jesus saying all those words. In any case, in my head this story is merging with Jesus saying “Don’t cast your pearls before swine,” and I’m left wondering if I’m sowing my seeds in the right place.
Where’s the line between giving it the old college try and beating your head against a dead horse?
In looking to Jesus (as I often, often do), I can’t help but remember two contradictory stories–there’s the shepherd who searches relentlessly for the one lost sheep (not practical!), which would indicate diligence and patience are called for. Then there’s the “brush the dust of that town off your feet” if people won’t listen to you. Again and again–Mary or Martha? Should I stay or should I go? (No, wait–that’s the Clash.)
And then when it comes to “don’t cast your pearls before swine,” I have to think of Rodney Jones calling pigs “the dolphins of the barnyard,” and I also remember Dorothy Parker’s response when someone moved to let her go through a doorway first, saying, “age before beauty.” Her response was “pearls before swine.”
Clearly, what I’m saying is, I’m addle-pated. I guess for the moment I’ll trust in the gospel of the Boss who sings, towards the end of “Rocky Ground,” that “there’s a new day comin’.” Maybe in that new day there will be some more yes and slightly less no. Of course the song ends with the same sweet-sounding chorus of hard times, “We’ve been travelin’ on the rocky ground, rocky ground.”
At least I’m looking down now and then and noticing, “Oh. That’s rocky ground.”
Posted in Creativity, God Stuff, Uncategorized, Work Life
Tagged good soil, many things in parables
What if my life never changed for the better?
That’s what I thought about driving to work this morning.
I’m a worst-case-scenario kinda gal, so I won’t usually take the time to imagine what if my life never changed for the worse–I spend lots of time imagining variations on bad things & I think a great deal of my happiness in life is attributable to being pleasantly surprised that the worst thing doesn’t always happen.
So this morning’s commute was kind of a a more-upbeat variant on a worst-case-scenario–a status quo scenario. What if things stay pretty much the same instead of all the improvements I’m constantly longing for? What if, instead of healing from my shoulder and foot injuries, I’m just kind of in pain? What if I don’t get in better shape/eat better/lose weight? What if we don’t add a room to the house or build a garage? What if I never figure out how to be a tidy homemaker? What if I continue to teach four sections a semester until I retire? What if I’m not able to retire for a very long time? What if I never publish a book?
Some days, of course, that would have been a formula for depressing myself (some days most formulas accomplish that). But today, it felt so good, I decided I’m doing it for at least this week, at least when I’m driving. What if?
I actually don’t think my shoulder and foot pain are permanent, but if they were, they’re manageable. If I don’t get any healthier, I’ll be courting cardiac problems in my 60s (or sooner), or diabetes in my 50s (almost there)–those two just based on my genetic history. Whatever role good cardiac health plays in staving off mild cognitive impairment, if I don’t have good cardiac health, it might mean losing access to my best mind sooner, again, given my genetic heritage. And whatever other health problems I end up with, if I don’t start out healthy, I’ll be less likely to heal well.
This is a pretty close transcript to what I was thinking this morning in the car. You know what’s great about it? Absolutely nothing in that paragraph about being fat or losing weight. Same thing in the car–at some point I thought, “Oh, and I guess I’d weigh less if I did get healthier….” This is pretty huge for me (pun not initially intended but then what the hell). I’m lucky–my husband loves me & finds me attractive no matter what size I am. I’m pretty confident in my ability to work a crowd, no matter what size I am. Not to say I don’t care at all–I am an American woman after all. But it turns out not to be very high on the list, which felt great.
I did spend some time thinking about my son. If I’m not active, I’m not teaching him to be active. If I’m not eating right, he’s not learning to eat right. If I’m self-medicating with food, he’ll learn to do that, too. Same with keeping my house a little neater–he’s not learning to pick up after himself if I’m not showing him. So some of the things I’d like to change have to do with parenting well.
Then what about the job thang? I’ve been teaching at UW-Richland for 20 years now, and I am wondering how much longer I want to do that, but in some ways, I don’t see a path away from what I’m doing, which makes me feel trapped (which, according to Martha Beck, is why I eat when I’m not hungry). But what if this is it? That’s my task this week–what’s great about this life I’m in? What’s great about this job I have?
Obviously, part of what I’m trying to do is focus on my blessings, and I absolutely understand I have a lot to be thankful for. Sure, I wish I got paid more to do my job (or actually, I’d like to get paid more to do slightly less), but I know I’m lucky to have a job. And here are the parts I love about this job:
I really love students. All kinds. I just love taking them seriously and pushing them gently and watching them learn.
Here’s a brief conversation I had this morning with a student who’d signed up for a one-on-one conference with me later in the week, to go over her rough draft.
Me: So did you find a source yet?”
Her: No–I’m going to look tonight, but I haven’t found one yet.
Me: Why don’t you send me an email sometime this afternoon & tell me what search terms you’re using, and I can give you some feedback on that first, so when you do sit down to look, it’ll be more productive.
Her: O.k., I’ll do that.
Just a basic pretty boring conversation, but she seemed really pleased at the end, and helping students learn to figure out the right search terms is actually one of my favorite things to do. I talk to them about doing searches in online databases and “going fishing,” where we’re first just trying to figure out what the Library of Congress subject headings would be for any given subject (which I’m now able to explain to students by saying “They’re like hashtags!” This is how I figured out hashtags, btw–“They’re like Library of Congress subject headings!). I confess to students that I can often figure this out by imagining how old white guys in suits would describe something.
Even when they frustrate me, I tend to enjoy students. I love watching them really get into a lecture. I love watching them try to stay awake when the lecture’s not quite doing it for them (if there are more than one or two of those any given lecture, I figure it’s the lecture’s fault).
I love trying to analyze what’s working and what’s not and trying to improve.
I love having a flexible schedule. For example, in honor of Day of Higher Ed, (which responded to an op-ed in The Washington Post that essentially said professors are overpaid and underworked–read Aeron Haynie’s response & others & you’ll know my response) here’s what today looks like:
5:00 out of bed
5:15 reading Walter Isaacson’s bio of Steve Jobs (tons of connections to my creativity research), having coffee, then getting ready for work
7:15 hit the road (a little later than I’m comfortable with!)
7:50 at UW-Richland, heading for class.
10:00 a.m. Approx. 10-15 min. Facebook break (I didn’t keep exact track this morning, although I usually do–I’ll count it as a 20 min break, just to be sure).
10:20 Heading back to class
11:30 Lunch at the Roadrunner Cafe!
12:00 Multi-tasking–a little bit of Facebook, but mostly “Inside Higher Ed” blogs and then writing this blog.
3:20 Back to class
I’ll be working until 5:30 or so, with maybe another 10-20 minute Facebook break in there. (I’ll subtract 30 minutes total as “Facebook Break,” just to make sure, even though some of my time on f.b. is work-related). I don’t count those breaks as work hours, so I’ll end up clocking in at 8:20 (I keep track although no one else does). If I’d worked through lunch and not taken any Facebook breaks, I’d have worked 9 hours and 20 minutes, or thereabouts.
Today’s a very heavy class-time day–225 minutes in class–all four sections–but outside of class, here’s what I’m doing: writing, developing a rubric to use online, on our “course delivery platform,” planning my schedule for the week, answering emails, sending an agenda for a meeting on Wednesday, setting up a blog for the committee that’s meeting on Wednesday, class prep for this afternoon’s class and Wednesday’s classes, posting an online grade update for students in my composition classes and sending an email reminding them the drop deadline is Friday (I’ll do that for my other classes later today or tomorrow), checking email and responding (including emailing my dean and chair about using letters of recommendation they wrote for a sabbatical proposal in my fundraising letter to support my own sabbatical), grading an essay that got turned in two weeks late, meeting with a student to go over his rough draft, and…I’m not sure what else. I’ll post an update.
I don’t teach at all on Tuesdays or Thursdays, so I use those days for checking email and responding, grading, class prep, writing, reading, committee work, etc. I also volunteer at my son’s school on Tuesday mornings–I figure since I’m not commuting, I have an extra hour and ten minutes, but volunteering counts as discipline-related community service, in any case. I don’t always get 8 hours of work in on Tuesdays, but I still average at least 40 hours a week during my 9-month pay period (though I might need to count the hours of the week right before and the week right after to hit the numbers exactly–I don’t necessarily work 40 hour weeks every week of the nine months–I’m keeping track of these hours on Excel this semester for the first time, so I’ll have LOADS of great stats soon). A lot of Mondays and Wednesdays I clock 9 or 10 hour days, and I regularly work at least four hours Saturdays or Sundays (sometimes both).
Back to the question of what if nothing ever changed–I’m feeling o.k. about where I am in my career right now, not just because I get a good enough salary (these things are all relative) for working hard on average 40-45 hours a week for 9 months of the year (I’ll post about summers some other time, but let me just say that I don’t get paid in the summer, so as far as I’m concerned, all my hours then are pro bono.)
If nothing ever changes with my job and I’m teaching four sections a semester until I retire or die–it’s a pretty good gig. Everything I spent time on today is fulfilling to me in one way or another. And then during lunch, a former student told me that she was answering security questions online for some thing or other and the question came up: Favorite teacher? And she said my name is what came to mind. I told her how cool it was to hear that, given my status-quo-scenario musing.
So in addition to having students I enjoy, I get to eat lunch with a former student who still appreciates what I was able to do a very long time ago, when I wasn’t nearly as good at what I do as I am now. Pretty cool.
UPDATE: Talked to an advisee about whether or not she should drop a class and what she needed to bring on Thursday for her advising appointment to talk about fall classes. Will also be grading a second essay that was turned in two weeks late (they lose 5% per business day it’s late, and two weeks is the absolute cut-off, but some points are better than none).
Found & forwarded an old power point lecture & list of sources for a colleague who’s working on a workshop related to civility in the classroom.
LATER UPDATE: The student didn’t email me her search terms. I was actually disappointed.
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.
Posted in Burnout, Procrastination, Searching, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life
As failures go, this one’s not catastrophic. Not so much crash and burn as bump and simmer. No cause for flailing and wailing–but maybe a little hand flutter and throat clearing would be in order.
I just posted an Excel spreadsheet for all my students to see, showing how promptly I’m returning student work this semester. After three semesters of being right around or below an average of a week, I’m currently returning student written work, on average, 9.7 days after they’ve turned it in. For my ENG 102 (Advanced Composition) classes, the longer essays are taking me 10.25 days.
There are seven full weeks of the semester to go, and then finals, so if I’m on top of things, the numbers should be below 7 by the end of the semester.
But I’m disappointed.
And not giving up! This failure to meet my goals (I wanted to be under 7) comes along with some other failures (subject for future blog posts, thank you very much, but I don’t want to depress myself by listing all my failures here).
There are some basic reasons the numbers are worse this semester. I have a lot more students, for one thing, and I decided to start using D2L rubrics (D2L is our “course delivery platform” for the UW Colleges–online resources for me & my students) for ENG 102 papers. I also decided to start doing reading quizzes regularly for the first time in ENG 102, and I’m doing those as D2L Quizzes. I’m also doing D2L quizzes for my literature class (did I mention I’ve used D2L quizzes only a little previously, and never where students were required to use them?) and I’m asking my creative writing students to turn in portfolios online so I can grade them digitally, which in turn motivated me to turn my regular rubric into an Excel spreadsheet so the math gets done automatically and I can post it on D2L with the commented-on digital copy of their portfolio….
As always, there was some procrastination involved. But not as much as there would have been in the past. For example, being able to post feedback for each student online means that I was motivated to finish grading assignments in all three classes at the beginning of spring break, rather than waiting until the end. If I’d been grading paper copies, and couldn’t return them until March 26, I would probably be grading this weekend instead of last weekend. (Not that students were checking their campus email during spring break, but they might have–they could have, in any case.)
But I’m realizing that one of my biggest problems is not so much procrastination as trying to do too many things. Here’s what I’d like to do each and every semester:
What’s crazy is how much of that I try to do. What’s amazing is how much I end up getting done. But here’s the thing–I’m pretty tired of feeling like no matter how much I work, I’m always behind and there’s always more to do.
So. The math is pretty easy in this case. Doesn’t even need a spreadsheet. There are 24 hours in every day. There are nine months in my work contract. The work contract thing has been true for me for 20+ years. The 24 hour thing has been true a very long time.
So, the answer is simple, right? I need to set my priorities and be firm about them and not apologize. Unfortunately, there’s not a spreadsheet that can show me how to do that.
Posted in Procrastination, Searching, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life
GOD OF MONDAY MORNING
God of running just a little late,
Of the scraping of windshields, another month at least—
Of I cannot wear the shoes that are perfect for this outfit
(the shoe repair I paid good money for didn’t last)—
God of where the hell did the weekend go?
Those hours that stretched so wide and open Friday night—
They dried up and blew away, went down the drain—
I must not have planned each hour exactly right—
I had some fun, I got a few things done
And yet I start the work week just as behind
As ever, always, apparently eternally I am—
Compared to everyone else’s current shitstorm
I know I’m lucky. I know I’m whining and
I do praise God that some days, this is as bad as it gets.
And yet, dear God, what if this is as good as it gets?
Posted in God Stuff, Uncategorized, Work Life
marniere 