pedagogical challenges and a new approach to the work week

Starting week 3!

The add/drop period here is crazy. It was 2 weeks long at my last job too but there was nowhere near this level of switching around. I think the kids here are a lethal combination of very very very concerned about getting an A / wanting the getting of that A to be very easy. So they go to a class and if it looks like too much work they switch. Over and over! For 2 weeks. My rosters have been fluctuating like crazy. Of course this means that TWO WEEKS into the semester you are inundated with emails from students who have just joined the class asking “did I miss anything”.

At any rate, that is life!

Week 2 was considerably less epic than week 1, thank god, but it was still pretty jam-packed. I used my startup money to get an iPad so that I can have all my clips and audio in one easily transportable place, instead of lugging my laptop around. That is my attempt to solve the stupid, stupid tech situation here; it’s not a perfect fix but it does make a difference not to have my laptop (with all my most precious documents on it) constantly hanging like a billion pounds off my shoulder. My course admin and I rescheduled all our daily meetings for the week so that they will be during lunchtime, which will encourage me to eat lunch. I’m kind of actually digging sharing an office with my course admin, because she is in her 50s and motherly. Every day she tells me I look nice and makes sure I brought something to eat, because she’s worried I don’t eat enough, which, during the work day, is certainly true, as I have discussed here many times. The only downside to eating lunch with her is that I am forced to see someone be horrified by what I have brought for lunch. “Lets see, what do we have today….a heel of old bread….and a carrot.” The main reason I would like to have a 1950s housewife is that she’d pack me such a nice lunch, probably with a homemade piece of cake in there.

Currently my pedagogical challenge is that I have somehow never TRULY understood the difference between a liberal arts school and a research university. I planned all my classes without thinking about this, because by definition a blind spot is something you don’t know is there until something slams into you from out of it. By the end of the year I will either have learned to be a different kind of teacher or I will have failed at something I fundamentally care a lot about.

Anyway. We love our week because we have decided on a very healthy schedule. Thursday is actually Friday for both of us. We get up at 6:00 a.m., take the dog to boarding school, go to campus, teach and have meetings all day, then at 5:15 when I get out of class and go back to my office, there he is, chatting with my office mate in his man blazer, and we walk to the car in the failing light of evening and when we get in the car we put a lead curtain down and we cease talking about school, our students, etc., because now it is FRIDAY NIGHT, which means pizza and wine and watching The Simpsons and laughing. Then, the next day (actual Friday) we take completely off. We don’t do work; we try not to even open our computers, although I have to check email twice a day because my course admin has to ask me a lot of stuff as stuff comes up. But other than that, we don’t do work. We have coffee together in our sun room. We talk. We run errands for our home and life (hardware store). We ostensibly clean the house although this hasn’t really happened yet. We do the laundry. We walk the dog together. We hang out all day doing whatever the F we want. I read a novel; the old man takes three naps. At night we cook together and have more wine. The next day it’s back to work!

I got sad when we were hashing out this schedule because the way we were both talking about that one full day off suddenly made me realize how weird and oppressive this job can be. We were both like “that day off is so important! You need a buffer between the work weeks! You have to have time off from thinking about work!” I suddenly was like, wait, we are just talking about a “Weekend” which is what everyone already has. Why don’t we have that? Why do we have to sit here and make a huge schedule in order to have ONE DAY OFF a week?? And why does taking that day off seem so revolutionary to us? Truly–we told a friend (also an academic) about our new schedule and she was amazed. “The whole day, you take off?? God that sounds amazing”

On the one hand, it’s of course a good thing, because it’s due to the fact that our “work” for the most part doesn’t feel like “work” in the old sense of the word I used to feel when I was doing data entry or similar. Like, we are genuinely excited when the teaching week is over, and we can spend the whole weekend reading about Marxism or writing an article or whatever. It doesn’t feel like “work” exactly, although there IS a lot of angst surrounding it–you have to write the article, you have to do the outside work, in order to keep your job or be successful at your tenure case, e.g.

On the other hand, it is bullshit how we all (academics) just accede to this stupid 24-hour-a-day work concept. We all talk about it and complain about it, how we are always working, how we don’t have time to take yoga classes or go on a trip or read a novel. It’s true that there is an endless amount of work–you’re never “finished” with your “work,” in this job, you can only ever just decide to put it away for a few hours–but at the same time, Jesus Christ, unions fought and died for our right to have a couple days off to play with our kids every week! And we aren’t honoring that legacy, the legacy of the weekend! And we aren’t taking care of our bodies or our relationships or our outside interests. And anyway, you know what, there IS enough time to get it all done. If you have good time management you can stay on top of your work for the most part, while still taking days off sometimes. It’s stupid. I don’t want to capitulate to this cycle of being at work 100% of the time; of thinking about work constantly; of answering work emails the minute they arrive. It’s bullshit and I’m not going to do it. There I said it.

But now I do have to get back to work

good day sir