What Now?

Here's how it went down

So, as of 9:00 this morning ... I am in fact the interim English department chair for next year!

I had totally psyched myself up that I wasn't going to get it, and I had re-read nicoleandmaggie's comment from yesterday to put myself in the right frame of mind to hear the news. But lo and behold, what the head of school wanted to tell me was that the decision had been entirely unanimous, that everyone in the department and administration wanted me for the job. So all right then!

It turns out that I'm pleased about this -- quietly but definitely pleased. I certainly wasn't sure that this would be the case, and it may well not remain the case for the entire year, but it is at least true for today.

The Head of School is going to call my dear friend and former colleague (DFAFC) tonight and offer her the sabbatical replacement job, but of course sans the department head role. So this morning the Head and I chatted about what courses and additional roles DFAFC should be offered. And I must say that I liked being consulted about all of this. Figuring out coverage of all of the different courses and other responsibilities is a big ol' puzzle every year, I know, and I'm a little scared about whether I can figure out that puzzle well, but it turns out I'm really pleased to get the opportunity.

I don't know whether I'm so pleased just because I have a desperate need to be recognized and praised or because I have a legitimate interest in department chair-ship, but I'm not going to worry about that parsing that and am just going to go with enjoying it.

Three things that will be on the docket for me and other folks to figure out in the near future:

• To what extent is the current Department Chair included in this spring's decisions that affect next year? The Head asked me that this morning and then immediately said, "Let's both think about this and come back together and talk about it." I see some potential trouble here with the current Chair feeling left out of things, but I very much appreciate that the Head stressed, "We want you to have agency. YOU will be department chair next year, so the decisions that affect next year need to be yours." One could certainly look at a one-year interim chair position as simply a place holder, as one whose only responsibility is maintaining the status quo, and she was very clear that this is not the way she sees the position.

• One of the first decisions that will have to be worked out, either with or without the current Chair, is the big puzzle of coverage for classes for next year, which will be complicated by the fact that we'll be short by a couple of sections, as we were this year. The way that we managed it this year is to hire two people for one course each, neither of which has worked out beautifully for different reasons. So staffing will be the first challenge. I wish I were going to start with an easier task, but oh well.

• Something that the Head and I didn't talk about (and perhaps she doesn't even know about it): Department Chair wants us to redo our senior courses, which I'm all in favor of ... but I don't really agree with the proposals she's made about those changes. I've mostly kept a low profile in these discussions because I was following my "hey, I'm not the chair, and I don't teach seniors; why agitate myself to no end?" philosophy, but now I have a real stake in this. Any changes that we make will go to the Curriculum Committee next year, which means I'll be shepherding them through, but Chair wants to have the whole proposal and its attendant paperwork put together by this spring. So now I have to navigate through this spring and try to work out a proposal that we can all live with. This will be a challenge!

All in all, I'm feeling not exactly wildly celebratory -- this is not going to be a cake walk -- but I'm certainly pleased with this turn of events. (So, Mean Something, we'll have to learn together how to be department chairs next year!)

Two emails

1) I got an email this morning our learning specialist (the one who helps kids with learning difficulties, disabilities, etc.) with the subject line "The buzz around FGS." And the message was "I wanted you to know that several of your past and current students are singing your praises. It has just come up incidentally in conversation, and kids, past and present, keep saying what a wonderful teacher you are."

How lovely is that? And she cc'd my department chair and the head of the upper school as well. Super sweet of her to have passed on the compliment, and also lovely to pass it on not just privately but to my higher-ups as well.

2) Then tonight I got an email from the head of the school: "Do you have 10 minutes to meet with me at some point tomorrow (Thursday) or Friday? I would like to talk briefly about English Department business. Let me know when you are free and I will make time in my schedule." I wrote back to her with when I was free, but she hasn't yet responded.

I was expecting something along these lines because I knew that she and other administrators were talking today about the English Department chair business.

If I were a betting woman, at this point I would put down money that she is NOT going to offer me the department chair position for next year but that instead it is going to go to my dear friend and former colleague who also threw her hat in the ring for the job. It's just a hunch, really, based on the fact that a 10-minute meeting is just long enough to let someone down easy but not long enough to really make any plans for the next year.

I'm trying not to be disappointed, especially prematurely, although one of my coping strategies is to be bummed about things ahead of time so that I can handle them better in the moment. I'm reminding myself that I initially said that I didn't want the job, so it's silly for me to be disappointed if I don't get it. But of course there's a big difference between taking myself out of the running and being turned down by someone else! Anyway, there's no point fretting about it one way or the other. My one goal now is to play it cool whatever happens tomorrow. (Or possibly Friday, I realize, but I really hope that she can meet with me tomorrow so as not to drag this out.)

And I'm also reminding myself that whatever happens in that meeting, the first email above is always going to be a more important marker of success.

Rockin' Othello

Bardiac asked in the comments earlier this week how Othello was going, and the answer, I'm glad to say, is fabulously!

I'm sure that's a completely "well, duh" sort of answer for those of you who love teaching the play, but I had sent Bardiac a panicky email over winter break, saying "Help! Last year it didn't go especially well, and I have kind of a block about this play and nothing really to say about it, and ack! Whatever shall I do?" And she was absolutely lovely and talked me off the ledge and sent me her class notes, which of course is one reason that things are going better with the play this year than last.

I also finally realized that last year when I taught it was immediately after spring break ... which is to say when I'd just gotten back from South Africa and was still exhausted for the first two weeks back in school. So, gosh, maybe it's no wonder that I wasn't feeling on top of my game! This realization has helped my confidence enormously this time around.

It's also helping that I am now teaching this course for the second time in a row and was much more deliberate and thoughtful about how I ordered the texts, so we came into Othello having read Adichie's Purple Hibiscus in December and talked a lot about internalized racism, colonialism, and cultural messages. Then when we started up in January, the first thing I had the students do is start working on a personal essay that explored a cultural or familial message they'd grown up with that had shaped their identity in some way, either because they'd accepted it or rejected it or were still working out a relationship with it. I'm finishing up reading these now, and they've been much more interesting than their run-of-the-mill essays, and the students seem more insightful about why Othello might be so quick to believe that Desdemona has betrayed him, because they're more thoughtful about what it means for him to be a Moor in Venice and the racist messages that he is surrounded by ("Haply for I am black ...," etc.).

I also dropped the reading quizzes I'd done last time and instead am having students write "character diaries" for each act of the play; for each act, they have to choose a different character and write a diary entry about the action of the act from the perspective of that character. The students are having fun with these (in that they actually come into class and say, "Gosh, that was fun to write!"), as opposed to the quizzes, and they are quick for me to grade but also I can catch misunderstandings, as in the student who thought that Act 1 took place over an extended period of a few weeks -- good to figure these misunderstandings out early on. Plus this is my first foray into having students post their work on a discussion board in Moodle; I still don't really like Moodle, which I find clunky, but it's good in this case that they can read one another's work (but only after they have posted their own work), especially because they are all choosing different characters -- it's like one big collective study session. (It does occur to me only in this moment that I need to clarify for Act 5 that they can have the character write the "diary" BEFORE they all die at the end!)

The nice thing about teaching in high school is that we can take our time, so they're reading an act a week, which is a very relaxed pace and means we have a lot of classroom time to talk; also, once they finish each act, we take the 25 minutes or so to watch that act in the Fishburne/Branagh film version, which they think of as a huge treat -- VERY important in the gloomy days of January!

The one thing that did work really well last year is that the students and I did not talk about Act 5, but rather I divided them into three acting troupes and gave them the task of editing and acting out part of the act (Scene 1, and then I divided Scene 2 into two), an idea I got from the otherwise not great Teaching Twelfth Night and Othello: Shakespeare Set Free from the Folger Shakespeare Library. The students did a great job of working out a lot of things on their own, and their performances at the end were amazing. I'm definitely doing that again (and of course we won't watch the Fishburne/Branagh version of Act 5 until they've finished their own performance). Then they'll write up an analysis of their performance, including an explanation of the choices they made and a discussion of what they would want to do with the scene if they could take it to Broadway and have a real budget.

The other thing I'm emphasizing this winter is their developing a more personal and interested voice in their writing. So we started with the personal essay, and then their Othello essay is going to be a combination of a personal and academic essay; I'm giving them as a model the opening of Jane Smiley's "Say It Ain't So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain's 'Masterpiece,'" an essay whose argument I disagree with (Smiley conflates the antebellum context of Uncle Tom's Cabin with the Post-Reconstruction context of Huckleberry Finn in a way that makes me crazy and that completely misses the point of the latter novel) but that has an engaging personal voice and real ideas about the novel. So we're going to see if they can pull that off with Othello -- wish us luck! I have found in the past -- and then I forgot to act on it this year until now -- that students have far more interesting things to say about literature if they can say it in a personal voice; last year, when I told students to begin a writing assignment with "I really think that ...," they had so much smarter things to say! Now obviously they will have to learn to take out the "I really think that" for more formal essays, but my thought is that it's better to work through to that point, saying the interesting things and learning how to make them more formal, than to forbid the personal voice as some of my colleagues do. What I told them is that if I and their 9th-grade teacher Mr. L and their math teacher Mr. E were all writing a memo to the head of school, even if we didn't put our names on those memos, she would undoubtedly be able to tell who had written each because we have distinctive voices, and that this is what I want them to develop. And I think that the way to develop this is to start personal, engage with the ideas they're writing about, and then help them craft those ideas and that strong personal voice into more traditional academic prose. Or at least that's the theory I'm working on for the rest of this year with my sophomores; I just can't take any more bland, generic essays!

So, Bardiac, that's a very long-winded answer to your question about how Othello is going this winter. I'm really feeling so pleased!

Mixed blessing

It's snowing here in Adventure City, with "wintry mix" called for during the evening rush hour.

The good: The student leadership workshop that I was supposed to help run tonight got postponed! Now, I actually thought it was going to be a pretty good workshop ... but not so good that I wasn't delighted to have it cancelled for the evening, buying me a few hours of time to make headway on all of that work. Plus I got to go home immediately after school and thus am already in sweatpants and a fleece in front of a roaring fire. Hurrah -- happy dance!

The bad: Oh, my aching head! In the last few years, every time there's a change in the weather, especially precipitation, I get bad headaches that don't respond to pain-killers or caffeine or any of my other usual approaches; they just go away once the weather stabilizes. And this afternoon's headache is particularly brutal (if I understood barometric pressure, I might know why), which is making me somewhat skeptical about how much extra work I'm going to get done with all of this newly freed-up time.

Let's hope that the good manages to outweigh the bad on this one.

Keeping my shoulder to the wheel

I'm keeping panic at bay today, fretting about how much work I have to do this week. There's nothing to be done for it except to keep breathing, do one task at a time, keep making progress, and remain confident that everything will get done by the deadline.

Thus, a list:

• Grade 29 one-page mini-essays on Huckleberry Finn.  [Done]
• Grade 30 13 personal essays from my sophomores
• Grade 30 short creative writings on Act 2 of Othello [Done]
• Prep Act 3 of Othello [Done]
  
• update a software thingy for one of my non-teaching responsibilities [Done]
• Grade 28 in-class essays that my juniors are writing on Tuesday [here's where I broke down; something had to give, and I'll just have to wait to grade these until this weekend]
• Help lead a student leadership workshop on Monday evening [Canceled because of weather; hallelujah!]
• Prep a Huckleberry Finn discussion [Done]
• Finish revamping this year's version of my dangerous words research assignment [Done]
• Reread Chapter 1 of Randall Kennedy's Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word and prep for class conversation [Done]
• Write formal mid-year update letters home for all eight of my advisees, by Thursday at noon [Done for the five juniors, still have the three seniors' letters left to write]
• Department meeting on Monday, faculty meeting on Tuesday, faculty compensation committee meeting on Wednesday
• Literary magazine meeting and Friday night event
• Figure out remaining due dates, etc. in  juniors' syllabus/assignment sheet through the end of the term [did some work; more to do]

None of these is a big deal in and of itself; it's just the accumulation of them. But in fact it's very helpful to see them all listed out like this, and now I have things to cross off one at a time, which will help me stay calm.

Plus there's various "real life" tasks that must be dealt with, not least the fact that the door locks on my car door have been working less and less consistently, such that as of this weekend I'm keeping the car unlocked so that I don't get locked out of it altogether. D. is going to take the car to the shop tomorrow, so I don't even really have to deal with it, but it's still adding a dollop of stress.

So what am I doing right now, when I should be working? Um, watching the first episode of the PBS American Experience program on "The Abolitionists." I was eager for a break, and D. and I finally saw Lincoln last night (and found it as amazing as we'd heard), and I've got abolition on the brain.

The good news is that if I can get all of this done this week, next week should really be easier, and I should be able to get back to working on the FGS history book, which is relegated to the back burner this week.

The other thing that has totally been on the back burner is health and well being. This morning I said to myself, "Well, I'll just exercise and eat healthily next week; I don't have time for it this week." And then I heard myself saying that, and thought "good heavens, what does it say about me and my priorities if work always gets a higher priority than taking care of myself?!" So I promptly put on my coat and went out and walked for half an hour; it was very cold, but the sunshine was good for me, and I'm determined to at least do a little self-care each day in the midst of this otherwise hectic pace. 

So here's how things are going down, for now at least

Tuesday was my big meeting with the head of school in which I was going to pitch to her the idea that I would take the department chairship for a year (while the current chair is on sabbatical) if I could keep my current non-teaching duties and drop down to three courses. And I had said I would post an update ... and then life/work/exhaustion intervened, and it's only now, on Friday night, that I'm relaxing in front of a fire with some wine and taking the time to blog.

The totally fabulous thing about my meeting with the head of school (which was supposed to be 15 minutes but went on for half an hour, making me late to my next meeting, but who cares?) is that it started with her telling me how much she absolutely LOVED chapter 1 of the FGS history book, which I had given her on Friday. She had made a list of moments that she thought were particularly great and said that we shouldn't change a thing, that it was perfect as is. That is not of course true, and things will get changed, and the whole thing needs to be shortened, but still, how lovely to hear such high praise for one's writing! And an excellent way to begin a meeting.

I did pitch her my idea, and she was receptive, although she didn't say, "Oh, sure, we can reconfigure the job, no worries!" What she said is, "How funny life is. Last Friday we had no options for internal candidates for the department chairship, and now we have two!"

Two, you say? One is me, obviously, but here's the new twist: The other is my dear friend and former colleague who had moved to another school a couple of years ago; she has really disliked the new school a lot (and it's a school that most faculty just adore, which goes to show that school culture is a powerful and idiosyncratic thing, and one can't always tell where one will be a good fit and where one won't), and so she's seriously considering coming back to FGS for one year even though the head of school was quite clear that they would love to have her back but couldn't promise anything beyond this one year replacement job. Anyway, they're treating her as an internal candidate for the job -- as indeed they should -- and one option they discussed was that she could be chair for the year. My friend and I had talked all of this over the week before over dinner the week before, but at the time she was doubtful that she was going to apply for the sabbatical position since it was temporary, and I had decided that I wasn't going to apply for chair. And a week later, here we were, both applying for the chairship!

So here's the human nature part of this whole situation: I had firmly turned down the possibility of the position the week before and had only reluctantly said that I'd be willing to take up the burden under certain circumstances, but as soon as I heard that someone else was being considered for it, I immediately wanted it much more than I had!

But good sense then reasserted itself. My friend and I talked on the phone that afternoon and made sure that we were both totally happy to have the other one be chair -- which is true -- and that a part of us actually hoped that it would be the other one. And she is being very clear that she would love to be back at FGS but that she's not desperate and that if the final package of teaching and non-teaching duties isn't what she wants, she can say "no, thank you" to the offer and stay where she is or apply elsewhere. So no one's in a crisis, which is a hopeful indication of good decision-making.

So the way things are right now is ... well, actually, I don't know. I guess they are the way they were before -- maybe I'll be chair next year, and maybe I won't, and I'm not sure when I'll find out one way or the other. As I said to a departmental colleague today, I guess none of this affects what I'm going to do tomorrow or the next day or the day after. I want to know, just to know, and other folks are also kind of impatient to know, but I guess I'll just wait to hear. And the trustees are on campus in a big meeting this weekend, deciding next year's budget, so I'm pretty sure that I won't hear anything one way or the other for several days yet or even longer.

At this point I mostly don't care. If I get the chair, then super, I have one less course to teach and more time to work on the FGS book (I mean, being chair is work, obviously, but it's much more episodic than teaching) and I have something else to put on my resume if I ever want to look for another job. And if I don't get the chair, then next year I do exactly what I'm doing this year, which is just fine. So I'm a winner either way, and after doing quite a bit of thinking about it last weekend, I think I've now moved to a place where whatever happens, happens.

So I guess this isn't much of a story yet, because I don't know what the next chapter is yet!

Some further thoughts

I appreciate your thoughtful comments on my last post. As you may imagine, I've had some food for thought these past few days. It doesn't look like the relevant administrators will be able to make tomorrow's department meeting, but I still have a brief meeting with the head of school tomorrow mid-day, and then I presume that department members will do some brainstorming at our department meeting so that we have a proposal to give to the higher-ups.

I've particularly been thinking about nicoleandmaggie's comment about what it would take to make the department chair position worthwhile. (I was actually an economics as well as an English major as an undergrad, so this is already how I tend to think about such decisions, but I very much appreciated their phrasing the relevant questions so clearly!)

And here's what I've come up with: I would take on the chair position if I could also keep my current fifth-period equivalencies (so there's no issue of getting them back the year after) and teach only three classes instead of four, all with the proviso that my being in that position would not affect D's chances of being hired for the sabbatical replacement. (Obviously if she were hired someone else would have to do her evaluation, but that shouldn't be a big deal.)

Here's why I think this scenario could work for me: My sense is that chair duties tend to be episodic, as do the tasks of my other non-teaching duties, so having one fewer course -- since teaching/grading is the sustained, day-in-and-day-out work -- means that I think I would still have mental energy to write in the quieter periods. This scenario would mean that there was an additional course to be covered in the English department next year, and I don't know how the funding for these things works exactly; I mean, the total quantity of work being done would still be the same, because if someone else in the department took on my current fifth-period work, that person's current fifth-period work would presumably be done by someone else, just perhaps in another department (if it were a case of coaching or the like).

Now, whether the head of school would go for this or not, I don't know, but I feel good about it as a proposal. I don't know exactly what her agenda is tomorrow for our 15-minute conversation (and she was very clear about the time limit on it), but I anticipate that I'll get a chance to pitch this idea even if we don't get to really talk about it. But of course I'll wait to hear what she has to say, in case she's making an even better proposal!

Here's a confession: One reason that I am reluctant to take on the chair position is that I'm not at all convinced I'm a good leader. I mean, I did a great job a few years ago running a committee as part of our school's self-study, but that was a strictly focused, time-limited project in which committee folks were just as happy to have me running a tight ship because we all realized that it would make for less work for us all in the end. But department chair is another beast altogether; the English teachers at FGS tend not to be a dispassionate lot (as I think is the case for English teachers everywhere!), and I get queasy in the face of open conflict, and I tend to worry a lot about other people's feelings and to get my own feelings hurt. A gazillion years ago, I was president for a year of the English grad student union at my grad school, and quite frankly I didn't get much done and didn't enjoy the experience much at all because I was so paralyzed about making decisions that people wouldn't like. Now, I'm much older and wiser now, but I still get uneasy about any decision I make that doesn't immediately result in crowds rising to their feet in cheers and huzzahs. I know that some of my departmental colleagues (maybe just a couple of them) think I have an outsized ego, but in some ways it's disturbingly fragile, such that my sense of equilibrium gets up-ended when other folks disagree with me too sharply (and of course I'm probably in no way unusual in this!), which makes me doubt my own leadership abilities. My picture of leadership is someone who can dispassionately weigh all sides, think creatively beyond the very notion of "sides," and make a reasoned argument about the best course, all while navigating the sometimes difficult waters of conflicting personalities and personal agendas ... and I'm just not sure I can handle that task. But I don't know that anyone else in the department can either! And why am I so convinced that a leader must be dispassionate, when I myself am so moved by other people's passionate leadership (when it's balanced by a good dose of calm reason)?

I was thinking about all of this this morning as I was avoiding grading by browsing the internet. Last night I had commented on Sisyphus's post about rethinking writing, and I went back this morning to read the other interesting comments, and from there followed the conversation to another commenter's blog ... at which point, I'll confess, I got my feelings hurt a little by one of the comments made over there. Or, rather, I started to get my feelings hurt, and then I thought, "Wait a minute, does this even matter? Do I actually care what someone on the internet who is not a close friend thinks about a comment that I made on another blog? Is this actually worth any energy on my part? Um, no." And then I thought, "Hey, maybe this is personal progress! Maybe I'm finally becoming someone with a healthier ego who doesn't need to be loved and admired all the time by everyone!" Now, I have a long way to go on this road, but it did give me some hope that perhaps I would be able to get through a year of being chair without living with hurt feelings and emotional distress all the time. I'm sure I would have them some of the time, but I do anyway; the percentage would undoubtedly go up, not least because the department chair meetings are really contentious and seem very unpleasant, which is so strange in a school that is otherwise fairly pleasant and tranquil, but I don't think I would feel as distressed at those as I would about problems within the department, which of course will inevitably occur.

(A digression: One thing that really distresses me about being officially middle-aged is that I thought I would be an emotionally mature person by now, and the fact that I'm not at 45 makes me question very much whether I'm actually ever going to get there. And I'm sure that this realization strikes every single person at some point in middle age, but that doesn't make it any less distressing to me to be having that realization.)

I'm going right from the meeting with the head of school into another meeting with another administrator about one of my areas of responsibility, and so I have a proposal in my back pocket for that meeting as well; it's supposed to be a "brainstorming" meeting, but I have a hunch that I'm going to be presented in the moment with a minor crisis (the subect of which I can anticipate), so it seems best to be fore-armed.

Between those two meetings, teaching three classes, spending a period in our writing center, meeting with the literary staff of the magazine, having this department meeting where we brainstorm creative leadership options for next year, and then going to a last-minute brief all-faculty meeting where an "exciting announcement" is going to be made (I have a hunch what this is as well), I anticipate being pretty damned beat by the time Tuesday is over! I'm also getting a stack of papers to grade that day, but I herewith give myself permission not to do any grading tomorrow night if I feel like I need the time off.

Creative thinking around department leadership

One of the many things that made this a very busy week at school is that members of the FGS English department who were interested in being interim department chair next year while our current chair is on sabbatical were supposed to email the head of school about our interest by Friday.

And no one at all did.

Well, I actually did send her an email ... but it was about why I was NOT throwing my hat into the ring. No one else sent an email at all.

So now we find ourselves in a pretty pickle.

As some of my colleagues told me at lunch yesterday, they were all just assuming that I would take on the role, which they were fine with since none of them wanted it. And earlier in the process I had kind of assumed that I would take on the role as well, or at least that this was a distinct possibility. But here are the reasons I gave the head of school on Thursday about why I wasn't going to apply for it:

• It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to turn my professional life topsy-turvy for a one-year appointment. Under normal circumstances, I said, I'd be happy to try something out for a year and see if I might want to do it for real down the line, but right now I'm working on this FGS history book; next year will be another one of intensive writing, and while I might be willing to throw a whole new learning curve into the mix (how's that for a mixed metaphor?) for a long-term job -- such as one of the academic class dean positions that she talked with me about last summer -- it didn't seem like the best use of my energy for a one-year position. Plus, there's the issue of my current extra responsibility of advising the student magazine (most of us teach four courses and then have a "fifth-period equivalence," and advising the student magazine is half of my "equivalence"); I assume someone else would get that advisor role for the year, and then they might well want to keep it, and then what would I do the following year, with neither magazine nor the interim chair position (which would be over); I'd have to do something like be an assistant coach for field hockey or the like, and that would be a grim state of affairs indeed. (Coaching is a valuable role in the school, of course, but it is definitely not my thing.)

I tried to be really clear in my email (a) that I was still interested in the possibility of administrative roles and should definitely be kept in mind if any arise, even though I was sidestepping this particular one, and (b) that if the department chairship is perhaps not going to be for simply the one year that it's advertised but might become a long-term role, she should follow up with me. I tried to be clear but subtle on this point. More than one person has voiced aloud the question of whether the school is going to try to ease our current chair out of her position and so perhaps the interim chair will become the "real" chair. I am avoiding this line of thinking, both because I'm feeling so very grateful to Chair right now for her above-and-beyond generosity towards D. and because I thought I had to respond to the job as it was advertised, not as some people thought it might become. Chair made a point of telling me at the beginning of the month that she is definitely coming back to FGS after her sabbatical; I'm sure that she wanted me not to be thinking of this interim position as a step toward becoming the permanent chair. And I honestly think I would prefer the potential position of academic class dean anyway.

• And then I added one more reason that I wasn't going to apply for the interim chairship, and that is that D. is going to apply for the one-year sabbatical replacement teaching position that we'll be advertising. Now, it is by no means my fantasy to have D. and me working in the same department, but we know that it is going to be difficult for her to find a position with her varied professional background (which we have taken to calling a "rich professional background" instead, since it sounds more positive and is just as descriptive). But it's possible that FGS might, because of her connection with me, be more willing to consider her as a viable candidate, and then after a year at FGS she would definitely be in a much stronger position to apply for permanent jobs. And after this week of having her around every day subbing in the English and social studies departments, we both think that we could handle the temporary dual roles of colleagues and spouses; and there are other spouses who both work at FGS, so this isn't outside of the norm, although having both spouses be in the same department would be very unusual. (One couple both are in the math department, but one is in the upper school and one in the middle school.) But if D. were fortunate enough to get the sabbatical replacement gig, I think it would be better for the smooth working of the department if I were not in the chair position.

As you can imagine, this was a tricky paragraph to write to the head of school, but I think my final result was actually pretty darned good.

Here is the email I got back from the head of school later that day: "Thanks for your explanation.  In fact, I was wondering why I hadn't heard from you--and I assumed it had to do with your commitment to the history book.  I absolutely understand your decision; it makes total sense to me." And then she made an appointment for Tuesday for "a quick chat about the history book and your schedule for next year." Hmm -- wonder what's up with that? It occurred to me that she might want to either (a) drop a hint that it's going to start out as an interim chairship but probably won't stay that way, or (b) offer me an alternative schedule in which I do the interim chairship but also keep my current fifth-period equivalent and just teach one fewer class. Quite frankly, if I were head of school, (b) is what I would do, but who knows? And what does that have to do with the history book? I guess I'll find out on Tuesday, and there's not much point wondering in the meantime because the last time she requested a conversation with me about "scheduling," a couple of years ago, I thought she was going to offer me the department chairship as a permanent position, and in fact she was trying to reconfigure another one of my duties so that I would do literally twice as much work for no more pay. (Fortunately, I put the kibosh on that move; never underestimate the power of a good argument well made!)

But in the meantime, there was this lunch conversation on Friday with my colleagues in which we discovered that NO ONE had put their name in to be an internal candidate for the interim chair position. And the thing that made us all nervous about this was that the head's original email to us said that she was going to "start with an internal search and then expand it externally." None of us liked the idea that an "outsider" was going to come in for a year to be our chair; I mean, of course there will be a sabbatical replacement for the teaching position (that's the job that D. is planning on applying for, along with undoubtedly a bunch of other folks who are more obviously qualified for it), but to have that person be chair? Definitely strange. Schools do sometimes hire someone to come in as department chair, but that's a permanent position, not a one-year one. So this possibility is rubbing us all the wrong way (unless, again, the one-year business is all a ruse and it's actually the first step toward a long-term position, but then she needs to be clearer about that with the department).

So over lunch I got nominated by my colleagues to send an email on our collective behalf to the head of school, saying that we found the idea of an external one-year chair a worrisome possibility and that we hoped the school would do some creative thinking about leadership for the department for next year and that we would like to be part of that creative thinking. The head wrote back within a couple of hours and said that we were right, that no internal candidates had come forward, and that she thought "it makes great sense for the English Department to brainstorm creatively" with her and a couple of other administrators "about possibilities." We may have this conversation as soon as Tuesday, our next scheduled department meeting, if the administrators can make it work in their schedules.

So now we have to figure out what some of those possibilities might be! Any ideas? I figure that the "creative brainstorming" will go better if we've done some pre-brainstorming.

(And I will just note here that the fact that I started this lunchtime conversation and that my colleagues assumed I would be our spokesperson and that I cheerfully took on that role because I was sure that I would do a fine job of it does perhaps indicate that maybe I should be department chair if other details can fall into place. Except that I'm not sure that would be a "creative" resolution, which is what it now seems we should be going for.)

So that's our current pretty pickle. I really would welcome any suggestions you all have about what "creative possibilities for department leadership" might look like. One colleague suggested that two people could share the job; another option is dividing the job up into its variant roles -- going to department chair meetings, finding subs, doing evaluations for the newer teachers, etc. -- and parcelling those roles out to members of the department. Another possibility is that the administration could recognize that right now no one thinks the job is worth it to take on and could somehow make the role more attractive, although I understand that there has to be parity among departments. Any other ideas?

The disgruntlement of being a student again

I actually think it's a very good thing for teachers to be students on a regular basis, mostly so that we can remember how totally annoying it can be to be a student and thus stop doing stupid things that are irritating or condescending to students and also have some empathy for the frustration of not being in charge in the classroom.

That was my experience today, and within the first hour I had remembered one of the cardinal rules for being a good teacher, which is, Sometimes you should just shut the hell up!

Which is to say that the woman teaching this class has a wee little problem of talking really fast all the time and claiming that she's running a seminar but actually cutting off everyone else who tries to get a word in edgewise.

The program in which the annoying talking woman teaches is itself pretty cool. Adventure City has this cool program (maybe other cities do as well) in which local college professors, museum curators, independent scholars, and other learned folks offer seminars of one to three days long on all kinds of cool topics. The name of the program annoys me a little bit, because it implies that teachers get to play at academics, but I acknowledge that I am probably way over-sensitive on that point because of my own career path.

The seminar I chose was on modern Muslim women's memoirs -- very cool, eh? So for today we read Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, about growing up in Morocco in the 1940s -- very interesting and well-written! When we meet again in a couple of weeks, we'll talk about Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, the graphic memoir about growing up in Iran, which I read last summer and am thinking about including in our sophomore curriculum, and then in the third session in March we'll discuss Joumana Haddad's I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman, which is some sort of poetic manifesto.

So I was very excited about the seminar, both because of the reading and because it's good to have a change of pace and get off campus occasionally and meet teachers from other schools. And all three of those things were in fact very good today ... but the teacher is darned annoying. She has a lot of verbal tics (misusing "literally," adding "as it were" to things for which it made no sense, saying "let's be honest here" all the damned time) which are the kinds of things that I think it would be uncharitable to dwell on, except that she talked so much that it was hard not to notice them, and besides I was feeling uncharitable when she wouldn't really let anyone else talk. She would ask a question, someone would start to say something, and she would literally (and that's the proper use!) interrupt the person in mid-sentence after just a few seconds, assume that she knew exactly what he or she was going to say, "answer" it, and talk for several minutes. The effect of this was that all conversation went through her, which made it initially almost impossible for us to have a real conversation; I for one didn't even bother responding (and I love to talk in seminars!), because what was the point; then -- especially when we got into the Mernissi memoir which we had all read and wanted to talk about -- people started fighting back and interrupting her in turn and talking to each other without being called on and in general trying to claim the space a little more as ours. I mean, honestly, she's got 15 teachers in the classroom, all of whom are used to running our own classes; does she really think we're just going to sit there passively? I should say that my language of "fighting back" is perhaps my own idiosyncratic interpretation; some of the other participants seemed as annoyed as I felt, but most were smiling and seemed happy the whole time. Oh well -- maybe we're mostly just good actors, and perhaps I seemed smiling and happy also.

Also, the teacher referred to herself as "someone who thinks for a living" in such a way as to seem to distinguish herself from the rest of us, and that seriously got my goat. But again, I may be oversensitive on these points.

But let's accentuate the positive here: the reading was interesting; the other teacher-participants mostly seemed cool; one of them is going to send me her syllabus for Arab literature in translation, which I can't wait to get; another told me that her mother went to FGS and talked about it all the time, and when I asked if she thought her mother might be willing to be interviewed for the FGS history I'm co-writing, she said undoubtedly and gave me her contact info; another went to a cool summer program a few years ago that I've been thinking about going to one of these summers, and he's going to tell me all about it next time; it was indeed fun to be off-campus for the day; and I got to wear blue jeans and have a yummy burrito for lunch even though it was a Thursday and a school day. So what's not to love?

But I am going to totally tell myself to "shut up already!" in class tomorrow. Aargh -- teachers who talk too much are seriously annoying, and I mustn't be one!

A turn in direction

So, you know how life has been difficult for a long time chez WN because of D's career up-and-downs? Right at the end of the year she had that experience where a board she was interviewing with imploded a few days before her final interview, and then a friend of hers in a dream job, the sort of job she's dreamed about for years, got fired in what looks like a case of politics, and somehow this one-two punch drove home for D. just how unstable the church biz is so much of the time. And this was one thing when she was in her 30s, and she kind of thrived on the possibilities of the "roll your own career" path that she was on. But now she's in her 40s, and it turns out she's craving stability and a workplace where she is accorded respect (and you would be amazed -- or perhaps you wouldn't -- at how often that respect doesn't happen in church-related jobs).

So she started musing about something she's mused on more than once before: What if she returned to an earlier career path -- teaching? I mean, she was in grad school and teaching when we met, and she had already decided at that point that she didn't want to be an academic because she wanted to be more involved in the fulness of other people's lives than seemed possible in higher ed (although this impression was in many ways about what teaching at a big research university was like, and things could have been different in other school settings, as has been clear by the experiences of friends since then). But she's always loved teaching, and she's done a lot of it and of working with adolescents in various contexts since then. So all of this led her to wonder: What if I went into the world of independent schools, a career path that has made WN so happy?

We were having this conversation in mid-December -- perhaps idly, I'm not sure -- and the next morning on a whim I looked at the job listings for our regional independent school organization ... and lo and behold, there was a two-month history upper school opening at a nearby school, starting almost immediately! It was clearly some sort of emergency medical or family leave, because the job listing had just gone up in mid-December and they wanted someone to start when classes resumed on Jan. 7. So D. worked hard all day in writing a cover letter and crafting (with my help) a resume that highlighted her teaching/academic/work with youth experiences, and she sent it off that afternoon.

... and she didn't get that job. But that's fine -- she now has her resume (which she has continued to fine-tune) and a narrative that imposes pattern on her quite varied professional life and makes it look like everything has always been moving toward this moment of teaching in an independent school. (I remember crafting my own such narrative, one that was the truth, nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth!) And there are other temporary positions that she can apply for, and I'm sure still others will appear on the employment listing.

I have never forgotten the academic dean's saying to me at one point, "You know, WN, if I hadn't been on sabbatical when you applied, you never would have gotten an interview." These are the accidents of fate that determine so much! She won't even interview people who don't already have independent school experience; apparently candidates are supposed to get that experience at lesser schools and then come to FGS. (Or at least that's the case for English and history teachers, who are apparently a dime a dozen; there's a lot more leeway granted to candidates for math and science positions, since they're harder to fill.) The dean is perfectly happy that I'm here -- in fact, she thinks I'm fabulous -- so I don't take her comment personally but rather as a warning about how hard it can be to break into this particular world. I asked her afterward if she would consider adding a "WN clause" to her hard-and-fast rule in recognition that sometimes people who don't already have independent school experience can be fabulous candidates ... and she said "No"!

So clearly D. has to get some independent school experience on her resume to help her career prospects.

And then what should happen right around New Year's but that a colleague and I got an email from our department chair saying that she had been unable to find a substitute teacher for the two of us (we're both gone a day in the first two weeks for professional development workshops) and so we were going to have to scramble around a bit to get other teachers within the school to cover individual classes for us. At which point I wrote to Chair and said, "Um, how about D. as a sub?" And, hurrah, that is what has happened! Our HR person started the CORI process over break, bless her, and D. subbed on Tuesday and will be doing so again next Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday ... because it turns out that there are a lot of upcoming absences in English and social studies in the first two weeks of the year. D. was flying high earlier this week, and she had such a good time being at school on Tuesday, although she was completely wiped out while simultaneously wired afterward. Yep, I know that feeling well.

Chair and I have had our difficulties in the past, to say the least, but things have been much easier between us in the last couple of years, and she is being absolutely LOVELY in this instance and has pledged to D. any support she can offer. To wit: D. is going to come in to school next Wednesday (not one of her subbing days) and teach a sample class (one of my Othello classes) so that Chair can observe it, and then Chair is going to write her a letter of reference. I mean, how fabulous is that? She's going way beyond the call of duty here (indeed, I don't think she actually HAS a call of duty in this case!) -- so generous. And now D. can put FGS down on her resume and has a reference from there. Sure, it's just for being a substitute, but it's substituting in two different departments, and FGS is a well-respected school, so simply having that line on her resume might actually mean that some schools look at her that wouldn't otherwise.

So who knows what will happen in the long run? Maybe independent school teaching will work out, and maybe something else will instead. But in the meantime it is doing D. a world of good to be professionally engaged, to be using her brain in a different way, to be rearranging her schedule because she's pleasantly busy ... already 2013 is off to a good start!