What Now?

Prima donnas and other departmental woes

We had a lively department meeting this morning, one that raised any number of questions without solving any. Which I guess is okay, since we have a few other meetings scheduled to keep working on the Big Issue ... except that it's not clear to me how we're actually going to move forward here.

The Big Issue is our senior English courses, which in theory are electives and thus more college-like, except that (1) all of our courses are year-long, so students don't really get to choose different courses each term; and (2) there are actually only two real electives, both of which are good courses but sound deadly dull; plus (e) about half of our students take AP Lit, so the "electives" really wind up being the non-AP options and thus seem like the reject courses. All of the courses are actually quite good, but there's only one of them that students actually look forward to taking; in general, students seem pretty ho-hum about senior English, which is something we'd like to change as a department.

The question, of course, is how to change it.

One option is jazzing up the electives, giving them more interesting titles and themes and mixing things up a little, so that they sound like fun courses to take. One goal that the department chair and I both have is to get a little more circulation among the faculty in courses, so that we're changing things up occasionally, keeping teachers and courses fresh. So instead of the same old courses year in and year out, every year or two there could be different elective options that sound more interesting.

Another option that one teacher keeps proposing is to simply make every single senior course count as "Advanced Placement." If the theory is that AP means the equivalent of a college freshman course, than it probably is the case that 90% of our students are actually working at that level anyway. So then we could offer 6 or 7 different electives each year, and all of them would be AP courses and students would take the exam at the end of the year. I have mixed feelings about this idea: there is real value, I find, in having the students working at the highest level together in a course that gets to move faster and go more in depth. But the annual selection of who gets into AP and who doesn't is the most agonizing part of every year, and the department chair, who teaches the course, says that by this point she's been pressured to let in so many students that it's all kind of watered down and slower anyway. So do we just throw the doors wide open? Or do we narrow the gates a little more and step up the quality of the course? There are clearly good arguments to be made in either direction.

A couple of our competitor schools have actually eliminated the AP English option altogether, which would be another option, but I think the school wouldn't go for it. College pressures are simply intense enough that we're being pushed to let in as many students into AP Lit as possible ... which on the one hand I understand but on the other hand is annoying because no other department gets this pressure. The theory is that English is the easiest of the APs. Unfortunately, under our department chair, who teaches the course, that has actually been true, so it has legitimately earned that reputation. If it actually ran at a high level, and grades were correspondingly low, perhaps there wouldn't be that student pressure to be let into the course?

One of the other big questions we have is the creative writing course, which is the only one that younger students actually look forward to taking. And the teacher who has taught it for years is very good. But she runs it as a by-application course, which means that every year there are a few students who have longed to take it and who see themselves as writers who get rejected. And there isn't another creative writing course for them to take, so they wind up in the "reject" electives. And she refuses to budge on opening up the course.

Plus, she's got a death grip on the course and clearly doesn't intend to let anyone else in the department teach creative writing until she retires in ten years or so. What makes this particularly frustrating is that she is and always has been a part-time teacher; she teaches two courses, both of them senior courses, and she made quite clear in this morning's meeting that she couldn't possibly teach any of the younger courses and that it is vital that she continue teaching the creative writing course "for the good of the students," making quite clear that those of us who were interested in having more faculty movement among the courses -- and thus removing the "experts" from the courses they had crafted over the years -- were sacrificing the students' well-being for our own selfish motivations. It was very annoying, to say the least! If she were anyone else, I think the department chair could just assign her courses in the same way the rest of us get them assigned (that is, our stated desires are taken into account, but you can't always get what you want), but she's an institution at the school, having been teaching there (part-time!) for over twenty years and had both of her daughters graduate from the school.

Did I mention that this woman is my co-author on the FGS history book? I see some conflict ahead of us, given our various roles. Ah well.

Plus there's another colleague who is convinced that our entire discussion is a conspiracy forced upon us by the evil administration. But that's kind of his idée fixe. During our discussion, he got up and wrote on the board "Don't take the bait," which is the sort of thing that he does.

Another issue is that the school has really been making a big deal about wanting some faculty to pioneer "interdisciplinary" courses -- by which they actually mean inter-departmental courses -- and so one of our new teachers is working with a history teacher to put together a very cool-sounding African American studies senior course. Except that the school is insisting at the moment that team-teaching a course is like teaching only half a course -- not understanding at all that it is MORE work, not less work -- and so what the administration wants is for them to teach two sections of the course, which would take literally 1/3 of our senior class. (There are around 95 students in each year at FGS, and class size is usually around 15.) And the history department chair refuses to allow the course to "count" as a history course because he doesn't want to draw enrollment away from other history electives, but if it counts as senior English, then we're really left with only one other elective (plus AP and the creative writing course) to offer seniors. That's no good.

This sort of thing is one reason I'm not sure I'm cut out to be department chair. I don't know what the answer is, and I'm not sure how to move the department toward an answer. Not that it's my responsibility to do so -- I am, after all, not the chair until this summer -- but I will be the one to usher whatever changes we propose through all of the bureaucratic rounds next year, so I need to have step up to the plate in what happens now.

Sigh. I'm a little bit excited but a lot more flummoxed by all of this.

Napping

On Monday, we had a professional development day at school; we did iPad training from 9:30 to 3:30, with only a 45-minute break for lunch. Now, it was all very interesting and helpful ... for the first three hours or so. After that, we all became increasingly wiped out and brain dead. Some faculty just left; I'm too much of a rule-follower for that and so hung on to the bitter end, but was increasingly resentful. The facilitator was really great, but I think it's a terrible idea to make people sit still and do the same thing for that many hours! We would never have our students do something like that; it's almost like we forget what good pedagogy looks like when we're designing lessons for teachers themselves.

Then, after that exhausting day, I had to go home and finish my spring break grading and getting ready for the final nine weeks of classes. My own fault that I still had work to do the night before the students returned, but I really had been assuming we'd have some time during the day to get work done, which is our usual M.O. on these professional development days.

Perhaps it's not a surprise that I then came home early on Tuesday (I don't teach the last period), ate a snack, and lay down on the couch for a three-plus-hour nap, after which I still slept for eight hours last night. And then I did something similar today, taking a two-hour nap after school. It was not a particularly restful spring break, and I think I have a lot of built-up tiredness.

But also it occurs to me that this could be a side effect of going on the Lexapro. I've had much less shakiness than I did last time, but I have had low-level nausea the last couple of days, and maybe the tiredness is related? Anyway, I'm going with the philosophy of "If I'm tired, go to sleep," so I guess I'll keep going with the naps this week. This isn't a sustainable practice in the long run, but my hard work on Monday night means I'm actually caught up with school stuff for the week, so I can afford to sleep so much this week.

I wound up cancelling my therapy appointment yesterday because I was feeling so exhausted that I felt kind of sick. So, ironically, I haven't yet told my therapist about the Lexapro because I was at home sleeping off what may be the effects of the Lexapro. We'll talk next week.

I'm taking the pill in the morning because it sometimes causes insomnia, but some people take it at night because it makes them sleepy, and perhaps I will switch to that practice in the long run. I have a follow up appointment with my doctor in three weeks, and we'll work it out then.

Thanks for the supportive comments about going on the antidepressants, by the way. I appreciate it!

Better living through chemistry?

So it turns out that what I did on my spring break, in addition to visiting my family and doing a ton of grading (and in fact I'm not quite done with the latter), is going on antidepressants.

I finally decided that my ongoing sadness no longer qualified as "winter blues" or "overwork" if I was spending hours crying for no clear reason on more than one sunny day over spring break. Plus there was the fact that I have been dreading not only the return to classes, but also this summer and next year; I mean, when one starts dreading both work and time off from work, there's not a whole lot left to feel good about.

I was on Lexapro once before, during that ghastly last year at St. Martyr's, and it was hard to tell definitively whether it made things better or not -- since, of course, I have no control group for my life -- but I did keep my head above water as things got worse and worse that year, and in the end I walked away from academia and moved several states away to start life over, all without having a lot of panic, so I guess that's something.

Anyway, D. -- who is a big believer in better living through chemistry -- has suggested more than once this past year that I talk with my doctor about antidepressants, and I have resisted every time, but when she suggested it again on Thursday, a day that I had spent mostly in tears, despairing about the future for no clear reason, I decided to listen. This was after I tried to improve my mood by getting some exercise ... and proceeded to cry for the duration of my half-hour jog. It was all pretty pathetic, and I finally decided that D. was right and that perhaps the time had come for some chemical intervention.

Now, what I probably should have done is to wait until my therapy appointment on Tuesday and discuss it with my therapist first. But the last time I started Lexapro, I felt terrible for the first couple of days, and I wanted to get that horrible feeling out of the way before I started back to school, especially since I'm chaperoning a weekend trip next weekend; so if I didn't start the drugs this weekend, it would really be two weeks before I could start if I wanted to do so without feeling horrible at school. So I went ahead and called my doctor Friday morning, and lo and behold they could squeeze me in that morning, which I took as a sign that I should charge ahead.

The doctor was very nice, especially when I started crying right there in her office -- kind of embarrassing, but I'm sure I'm not the first -- and we discussed the various options and decided to go with Lexapro, since I'd been on it once before and tolerated it fine with no real side effects (after those first miserable days, which apparently just go with the territory of starting an SSRI). So I started the drug on Friday afternoon and am now in my third day.

So far the only side effects are that I'm jittery and really tired, although the latter effect could also just be the result of having spent so much of Thursday crying. I'm taking just half a pill a day for the first week, which my doctor didn't have me do the last time and which seems to have really minimized the side effects this weekend. So maybe I could have waited and talked with my therapist first, but of course I didn't know that until I started taking the pills, so I'm not going to second-guess the timing. (I'm actually kind of nervous about telling my therapist, since I don't really know how she feels about medication, but that nervousness is probably all about my internalized sense of shame about taking medication -- illogical but still real.)

Speaking of second-guessing: Of course, right after I took the first pill on Friday, I actually felt more cheerful than I had in a few days and immediately worried that I had panicked too early and that if I'd just held on for a day or two longer, I'd have felt better anyway. But I've been doing that "just hold on" business for several months now, really going back to last summer, although it's gotten worse in the last few months. So I think I was just feeling better because I'd taken a definitive step to improve life.

So while I'm envious of my colleagues who took exciting trips over spring break and who will come back to school on Monday rejuvenated from their trips to Puerto Rico and Italy and elsewhere, I'm hoping that my spring break decision will ultimately wind up having just as therapeutic an effect on the rest of the year.

Snapshots of a road trip

I just spent half of my two-week spring break on a trip to visit my family in the Land of My Youth. I decided to drive, since the cost of gas is a little less than the cost of a round-trip plane ticket and obviously doesn't involve flying (which I increasingly dislike) and gives me more flexibility. I do better with my family if I think that I can throw my stuff in the car and just leave if I want to; I've never actually stormed off in the night, but it's a safety valve to know I can.

Snapshots from the long round-trip:

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You know what's not a great idea? Doing 2 1/2 hours of grading before setting out on a 9+-hour drive. I mean, it was awesome to get finished with the grading for my sophomores, and it's a big relief to have it off of my "to do on spring break" list, but dang, I was tired before I even started driving.

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Murphy's Law and Technology lesson: One should always go ahead and print out the directions even if one has GPS on one's phone. Phone apps do go down, perhaps especially when one is heading toward a big city that one is hoping to drive around rather than through. Unfortunately, I wasn't actually sure how to do either of those things, and there I was, stranded. I wound up calling D. (fortunately the phone part was still working, even if the GPS had gone kaput) and crying on the phone; she looked up the directions and read them to me, but her help was punctuated by my despairing repetitions that "this is a disaster! I'm totally screwed!" She helpfully told me that "a disaster" was an asteroid striking the earth; this was simply an unfortunate irritation. That attempt at perspective aside, she was very sweet and also gave me some tech help, which did in fact ultimately get the GPS working again, so I was able to avoid the big city altogether, thank goodness.

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I saw a bumper sticker reading "Nudity is my anti-drug."

I literally have no idea what that means.

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You can tell you're getting closer to my mom's house because the radio station choices become country music or Christian radio. Or both, of course.

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Fortunately, I wasn't dependent on radio, because I listened to David Rakoff's Don't Get Too Comfortable, which I'd checked out on CD from my local library. It was a poignant experience, all told, not just because that tone permeates much of his work but also because I kept thinking about how he had died last fall, only two years older than I am. Plus I kept thinking about how I'll never write as well as he does, which was an additional sorrow.

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Even though I'm not a big driver -- no "thrill of the open road" for me -- here's what I love about solo road trips: I drove in absolute silence for the first two to three hours on both drives, thinking ... just thinking. About my life, career, writing, family, ideas. On the drive there, I also cried for awhile; the fact that I did not do so on the drive back seems like a positive sign, no? I'm feeling much calmer and less stressed out at this point than I was at the beginning of spring break. So that's a good road trip outcome right there.

Looks like we made it

Yeah, I've had this Barry Manilow song in my head for the last 48 hours. I was really beginning to doubt that I was going to be able to hold on until spring break, and then on Friday I woke up and knew that I could do it, that I could make it through one more day ... at which point the Barry Manilow tune started in my head and hasn't really left since then.

But who cares? The important thing is that it's now spring break! And yes, I have tons of grading to do, and I have to finish our taxes, and the house is a total disaster area, plus there's a visit to my family that will take up about half the time off ... but I decided a few days ago that my first and foremost priority was regaining energy and health so that I can enjoy the last two months of school instead of dragging along as I've been doing. Life is too short to be exhausted and miserable, which is how I've spent far too much of my time the last couple of months. No more!

I had actually meant to finish up part of this grading during the last week of classes, but then I got that bad cold with a persistent cough that, combined with the exhaustion I was already working against, completely drained me of every bit of energy. Seriously, I sat down one evening to grade, deliberately choosing a paper that I knew would be pretty good as a way to ease into the project ... and I had started shaking and crying by the halfway point of the paper. I just couldn't make my brain work. So I decided I was doing no one any good, apologized to the students and told them I'd send their papers a few days into break (which I can do since I'm grading them with Notability on my iPad and can just email them), and basically just tried to get through class every day as the limit of what I could accomplish. I think I'm finally ready to tackle some of that grading today, but I'm determined to do it in a relatively leisurely way, with plenty of breaks and no pressure.

Oh, here's one triumph from the last week: Do you remember my frustration with the director of the annual fund, who kept trying to squash my argument for employee giving? Well, I had given a brief announcement to the middle school faculty a few weeks ago, and it went okay, but I was a little off my game, having rushed over to that meeting from another meeting and arriving breathless and wound up. I mean, it was fine, but nothing to write home about. But this past Thursday, we had an upper school faculty meeting first thing in the morning, and I was scheduled to give an annual fund announcement at the very beginning. And friends, I brought the house down! The spirit was in me, and I testified -- all in about 5 minutes, mind you -- and all day long colleagues kept stopping me to say that it was an amazing speech and, in some cases, that they were donating for the very first time because of what I said. So hah! Take that, Miss Annual Fund! To be fair, she did send me an email immediately afterward to say that it was a great speech, so maybe this was a valuable lesson to her that my argument has some merit after all. I also got a lovely note from the head of school, thanking me for my stirring announcement, which she was sure was really going to boost faculty participation in the annual fund. So that was a great way to end classes right before spring break! Plus it was the first time in awhile that I felt like myself -- full of energy and enthusiasm -- which felt very good (even though I was exhausted again by that afternoon and crawled into bed when I got home).

But that is all in the past. Spring Break is the present, and I'm determined to fill it with R&R even though I have no exotic locale and still not a lot of energy.

Go ask A.L.I.C.E.

We had a faculty meeting this week to update us on the new lockdown procedure the school is adopting. And dang! I could actually feel my heart beat accelerating at one point in the meeting and had to consciously go into my "Breathe. Feel your feet on the floor. Breathe" exercise to counter all of the adrenaline I was feeling. As a colleague said, "That was simultaneously the scariest and most useful faculty meeting ever."

So here's what FGS is up to: We're adopting the A.L.I.C.E. approach to dealing with an armed gunman (an approach described in this NPR piece from last October). The acronym stands for Alert - Lockdown - Inform - Counter - Evacuate." Alert and Lockdown are what we have already been doing during drills; the alarm goes off, we gather all students in our rooms out of sightline of the door(s), lock the doors, pull down the window shades, turn out the lights, and sit there quietly in the dark until we get the all clear. And that used to be the end of it ... but apparently one reason that fatality rates are so disproportionately high in school shootings is that everyone's just sitting around waiting instead of getting the hell out of there. (This is one of the tragedies of Columbine, that most of the students could have gotten away but followed "correct" procedure and hid under desks, where they were then shot.)

So we will no longer stay with Alert and Lockdown but will continue through the rest of the acronym, beginning with Inform, i.e., having better information during an event; so we're getting a new phone system in which the classroom phones can all become loudspeakers and in which anyone can announce information to the whole school -- "the shooter is in the science wing" or the like. Then, if the shooter is in another part of the school, everyone not in that part of the school gets out of the building and runs. If the shooter is in your part of the building, you've already followed the basic lockdown procedure but now proceed to barricade doors and, if possible, get the kids out of the building via the windows (which in my case would involve breaking the glass, but at least we're on the first floor). That's the E, Evacuate.

It's the C, Counter, that has made this a controversial approach, one that an official organization of school safety officers has denounced. The approach here is that if the worst thing happens, if the gunman breaks through the barred door and you're trapped in there with the students and can't get out, you damn well go after the guy and get the kids to do the same. Throwing things is a big part of this -- everyone in the room starts throwing everything they can at his head to distract him and make it harder for him to shoot accurately. And you all start "swarming" -- basically, race around the room, tackling him if possible, but definitely remaining a moving target. And if you actually get him down, you get the gun away and put it in the trashcan (NOT holding it yourself, because police will shoot anyone who has a gun in that circumstance) and kneel on the guy's head and extremities. (Our security guy said, "People want to know if they can shoot the guy if they get his gun. I can't officially tell you to do that. But if you're struggling and the gun happens to go off and hits him, then that's all right by me." Okay then.)

Probably the biggest change in the whole approach, honestly, is that we're no longer pretending that there are clear rules that we'll all abide by and then everything will be fine. No, this relies on keeping a cool head ... aided by our instinct for survival; our security officer said, "Look, the natural thing to do in the face of danger is to run away. All of this training to sit quietly in the dark and wait for danger to come to you is fighting against instinct, and we need to stop doing it."

Apparently one of the real advantages of this approach, in addition to the most important one of reducing casualties, is diminishment of survivors' guilt, which totally makes sense to me. Part of what makes this a brand-new way of talking for FGS folks is that it admits right away that some people are going to be in more danger than others, depending on where the shooter is, and that the people who are in less danger need to get away instead of staying in their rooms out of some sort of FGS solidarity for the people in more danger. I mean, it seems ridiculous when I put it like that, but it actually is a real change in rhetoric.

So of course the whole discussion was seriously fucking scary. But it also was such a relief because we were finally talking honestly! No more of the bland lockdown procedures in which we were all reassured that naturally everything would be just fine if we just sat quietly in the dark. No, this was no-holds-barred conversation: "People are going to die. Students as well as teachers. There will be deaths. What we're trying to do is maximize the number of people who survive." Frightening to contemplate, but clearly more honest than we've been in the past. When teachers protested that students might get hurt jumping out a second-story window or doing something else dangerous, he just kept repeating, "This is the worst-case situation. It's better to break a leg than to get shot. We're trying to reduce deaths." Grim but real.

It's also given me a whole new appreciation for my classroom, which is on the first floor right next to a side door. I guess that means that my room and my across-the-hall neighbors could be a gunman's first targets, but it also means that we probably have a greater probability of escape if we're not the first targets.

Scary to be thinking that way, but it's actually been good this week to have lunchtime conversations with colleagues about this new procedure as we all look at different buildings on campus with a new eye, thinking about escape routes, which windows open and which would need to be broken, how high we are from the ground on various floors, which rooms connect to other rooms and which only to the hallway, etc. We're going to be doing a drill once the new phone system is in place, but in the meantime talking about it with colleagues is helping us all come to grips with this new reality.

So, as my colleague said, both the scariest and the most useful faculty meeting ever.

I'll end on one sort of amusing note: A colleague who can be a little bit of a space cadet sometimes suddenly piped up to ask, in all seriousness, if we could all be issued guns that would shoot out a big, weighted net, like she'd seen in movies, that could be used to capture the bad guy. Um, no.

Her comment aside, I was seriously glad that I coincidentally happened to have a therapy appointment immediately afterward!

Well, that's a little better

After a weekend of not sleeping very well over the whole business with my colleague (plus probably the cold that walloped me on Thursday), I had a good conversation this afternoon with the academic dean. Turns out that (1) she still thinks that my idea of having this colleague teach this particular course is a good idea and that it's definitely still a possibility; (2) she is working hard to get this colleague back up to full time for next year (something that no one actually bothered to tell my colleague, for heaven's sake!); (3) the pissy email from the head of school was mostly in response to something else the colleague had done and not exactly about this situation; and (4) I handled the whole situation just fine last week, so no worries there.

So that's the good news, which I was able to report back to my department chair and to my colleague. Yay!

The less good news is that, I'm afraid, I started crying when I talked with the academic dean. Yeah, super polished there. I had just been so stressed about it for almost four days that as soon as I started talking about it, I kind of lost it and teared up. Fortunately, if one is going to cry in front of the dean, FGS is not a bad place to do that ... unlike the time I burst into tears in front of the dean at St. Martyr's, which didn't go nearly as well. Sigh. This is just something I know about myself -- I'm a weeper, and there's only so much I can do to control it. I have cried in front of this dean more than once, and she is always very nice about it, even though I'm always very embarrassed afterward. Ah well.

I wish that I could learn not to ruminate about these things, but that seems to be a lesson that remains permanently outside my abilities. But at least I've learned to try to address things as soon as I can, which cuts down on time for rumination. If it hadn't been for the snow day combined with the weekend, I would have been able to talk with the dean much sooner. I guess if one can't change one's personality, one can at least learn to work around it.

Since I'm still sick and hacking up a lung and have almost no voice left after a day of teaching, and since I haven't slept well for several nights in a row, and since I'm emotionally worn out, I'm completely ignoring the Othello essays I should be grading for my sophomores and instead lying on the couch eating Kettle Corn and watching a kitten episode of Too Cute from Animal Planet. (I have an older friend who, distressingly, broke her hip a few days ago; Too Cute has become standard fare for her in these first couple of days back home.) My plan is to be in bed before 9:00 and to start fresh tomorrow.

Not a good start to this whole chair business

On Monday, a friend from another department asked me to be a shoulder she could cry on about a distressing turn of events: For a variety of reasons (one legit; the other two phony reasons cooked up by her department chair, in my opinion), she's losing a class for next year, which will drop her to 80% time. A 20% drop in salary is not to be sneezed at, and she's upset both about the financial hit (especially because she's within a few years of retirement) and about "getting thrown under the bus" by her department chair and the head of school (her phrase, not mine, but I think it's accurate).

Naturally I was a sympathetic ear ... but then I went beyond sympathy by having a brilliant idea that could perhaps solve her problem as well as one we're having in the English department. We're understaffed much of the time in English and really need another full-time department member, but that's not in the budget, so for several years we've been making due by hiring part-time folks to teach individual classes; much of the time, these folks have other positions on campus, and we pull them in to teach one class for us on top of their other work. This is clearly not ideal -- it means that the teachers aren't around for their students at other times of the day, and it means that the non-teaching work of the department falls entirely on the few full-time members, plus it's hard to do long-term planning and professional development with folks who aren't really part of the department -- and the head of school has admitted to us that she recognizes that this is a problem but that it's simply one that we can't solve right now. Okay, fair enough -- I mean, budgets are budgets -- but frustrating in the meantime, especially since we're now going to be even further short-staffed next year because one woman who was hired two years ago to be a full-time English teacher was given an administrative position in her first year and taught one less course this year and next year will only be teaching two courses. And yet we're being given no extra budget to hire additional folks!

So you see where this is going, right? My friend is in a different department, but there is actually one English course that she could teach, and it happens to be a course that we don't have coverage for next year because our department chair teaches it but will be on sabbatical and no one else wants to teach it and did I mention we're understaffed? So, think I, what a brilliant solution! We give this course to my friend, thus solving our departmental problem and her under-employment problem in one fell swoop! Sure, it's a solution only for one year for her, but that's better than nothing. I told my friend that I would suggest it to my department chair, and that of course there are no guarantees at all. 

I emailed my department chair about it that very night, and she agreed that it was a brilliant solution. Hurrah -- we're all on board! The next step, she thought, was to go to the academic dean about it, and would I mind doing that on Tuesday since she was going to be out sick the next day?

So the next morning I did just that. The Dean was startled at first that word had gotten out about my friend's loss of a class, but when I said that it wasn't lunchtable gossip or common knowledge or anything, but that my friend had told me about it, she relaxed and said that it sounded like a good solution and that she would go to the head of school with the idea. Hurrah!

I actually talked about this incident in therapy that evening as an example of how there might actually be good things about being a department chair. I mean, it's pretty clear that it's mostly going to be a pain in the ass and that I'm going to have extra work with no extra time or money, and there's a part of me that's been regretting saying I'll do it (although I remind myself that it's only for a year), but this incident was making me feel better about the whole thing, because clearly one of the things one gets to do as department chair is to solve problems, which is indeed rewarding.

Except.

Except that my friend got a very snippy email from the head of school yesterday to the effect that she understood that my friend was talking with other faculty about how to fill out her schedule for next year and that she needed to stop doing so immediately and leave all staffing decisions to her department chair, the academic dean, and to her, the head of school. It was not a nice note.

So the long and the short of it is that my friend turned to me for comfort, I went into my "fixer" mode and tried to make everything better, and instead I made everything worse. This really sucks. I don't think it's exactly my fault, because I think the head of school is being quite unreasonable and that this whole situation is really her fault, but I was the inadvertent catalyst, and I feel terrible.

I actually was so distressed about this yesterday that I cried over it, although being completely exhausted and having a terrible cold may have contributed to my emotion. But I did share the whole business with my department chair, who is now also distressed but who says that this sort of thing has happened to her more than once, that she thinks of an idea that seems to her a simple and elegant solution to a problem and is then squashed like a bug for what seems to her no good reason. There's a real mixed message at FGS: sometimes we're praised for showing initiative and coming to administrators with worked-out solutions that they can simply smile and agree to, and sometimes when we do that it's seen as overstepping and we get smacked down. And it's not clear, at least to my department chair, when we're supposed to show initiative and when we're not.

But in the meantime, I feel like I need to clarify with the head of school that this whole business came about became of me, not because of my friend. I mean, the whole idea of having her teach a course for the English department was my idea, and her full employment is in jeapardy, whereas mine is not. But I don't want to make the situation even worse than it is now. I asked my department chair what she thought I should do, and her idea is that one or both of us should say something to the academic dean. We were going to do so today, but we're having a snow day, so it will need to wait until Monday -- perhaps a good thing, since it's probably wise to let emotions cool all around, but again I feel real distress for my friend, who tends to be an anxious type anyway and who now has this pissy email from the head of school hanging over her.

I'd say "let this be a lesson to me," but I'm not actually sure what the lesson is. I've certainly run into problems in the past in not following proper chains of command, but I think I've learned that lesson now, and I think I was right to go first to my department chair; it probably would have been better to just wait until my chair was back in school and have her go talk to the academic dean, but I don't actually think it would have made a difference, and I was clear with the dean that I had been deputized to talk with her because my chair was out sick. D's suggestion is that we should have presented the whole thing to the dean and/or head of school as a problem needing solving ("gosh, what ever shall we do about that course next year?") and let them come up with the solution on their own, with subtle promptings from us ("gee, I wonder if there's anyone without a full teaching load next year who might be able to step in?"), which would solve the whole "don't get above your station" problem, if that is in fact the root of the problem. That might well have worked in this circumstance, although I'm probably too ingenuous to convincingly pull off such play-acting, and it seems silly to have to try to. My department chair's explanation for "what's the lesson in all of this?" is that the administrators are completely unpredictable people and there's no pleasing them, so it's not really worth trying, and you just have to be prepared for them to be unreasonably mad sometimes. But that doesn't give me a lot of confidence about next year. I think the corollary to this is that I need to recognize that, its rhetoric notwithstanding, FGS is a very hierarchical, top-down school and that I need to pay more attention to this fact and less attention to its counterfactual rhetoric. That's not an encouraging lesson, but it is at least one that I can do something with next year.

But now I'm back to thinking that being acting department chair next year is going to suck, and that what I had thought would be the one bright light is actually just expanded opportunity to make things worse.

Sigh.

Thank the lord, February is over!

Life has actually been better for about a week now, but I got weirdly superstitious and didn't want to post that life was better now that February was almost over; even last night, I thought, "No, I'd better wait until it's officially March 1 before I celebrate February's demise; otherwise, who knows what might happen between now and midnight?" Fortunately, I can now definitively claim that we made it through the worst month and are looking forward to brighter days.

Apparently I should try taking Vitamin D next winter for a less gloomy February; a couple of colleagues swear by it.

The nice thing is that the end of winter term's work coincided exactly with the end of February. So the last few days were tons of work -- finishing grading, writing end-of-term comments for all 58 of my students -- but then I got to wake up on March 1 feeling free as a bird!

And by "free as a bird," I mean that all of my students are submitting drafts between yesterday and Monday, which need to be responded to carefully and quickly.

But who cares? It's March! And in two weeks, we get a two-week spring break! So life is much better.

(Edited to add: In catching up on my blog-reading, I'm laughing at how many other folks have written almost identical posts. It does feel better to know that one is not alone in hating February!)

Weathering the February blues

Okay, I took my last post down because I decided that it was too whiny and needy even for a semi-pseudonymous blog! But I did save your supportive comments, which I very much appreciate.

The good news is that life is looking better today than it was this weekend or even yesterday. Hitting rock bottom will do that to a person ... or, rather, hitting bottom and then starting to rebound.

Here's how things turned around: This morning, getting teary on the way to school, I remembered that it was still February. And February always sucks. I know this, but I somehow forget it every year. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago I congratulated myself on getting through January because I do always remember that January is a hard month. So why do I forget about February? On the one hand, there's something not right about being blue for a good two months every winter (plus a couple of weeks every fall when I really start noticing the shorter days). On the other hand, there's something to be said for recognizing that the cause of one's misery is the calendar and not anything more existential.

So a couple of times today when colleagues asked, "Hi, how are you?," I said, "Oh, I've got a touch of the February blues." And both times the other person said, "Oh my god, me too. Why is this always such a hard month?" So that made me feel better. I still teared up a little on my drive home ... but I took that drive home kind of early, ducking out of school before the end of the day (I don't teach the last period on Wednesday). I came home, put on sweats, and immediately lay down on the couch and drank a diet Coke and ate a ton of Kettle Corn and watched a British murder mystery. And then when it was over I slept really hard for an hour and a half on the couch. And when I woke up, I amazingly felt much better about life than I have in a week.

So I decided to cement my improved attitude by not doing any work tonight (even though I have grading I should have done) and instead watch four episodes of Modern Family while drinking a wine spritzer and doing laundry. Much better.

Plus D. was feeling much more cheerful and optimistic today ... and then this evening she got invited to interview for a summer teaching position! So fingers crossed!

But I'm glad that we were both already feeling more optimistic and remembering that life is good even before she got that positive news.

I need to embroider "February sucks" on a throw pillow or something so that I don't forget and get surprised by its suckiness every damn year. But fortunately, it's a short month -- only 8 more days. We'll make it.