What Now?

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!

Looking at JIL again after all these years

I haven't been an MLA member for at least three years now, but I'm still on the email list, and a couple of weeks ago I got an email from MLA president Rosemary G. Feal, informing me that the Job Information List was now available for free by PDF.

Years ago, of course, I would have torn through it the moment it went live online (or rather the moment I could get access to it, since it was always crashing during those frantic first 24 hours), searching for that perfect academic job that was going to give me the future I'd been dreaming about. This time, I waited until I had a moment of leisure and then spent a pleasant half-hour unwinding on the couch, sipping a glass of white wine, and browsing the JIL for the first time in five years. 

Some thoughts that arose during my idle browsing:

• First, what happened that the JIL is now free to all and sundry? There was a period there when it seemed as though it was almost impossible to get access to it unless your department had the right code to give you, which always seemed rather hard luck on those who actually needed jobs, as opposed to those who already had them or at least had department access. I haven't followed MLA business in ages, so I was surprised at the turn-around.

• Also, I loved looking at it via PDF instead of through the online search, which is the way it was available (or at least that I knew it was available) for a good decade at least, and perhaps still is. I never quite trusted the search functions, and with fairly good reason, so I used to do multiple exhaustive searches that were really so much less efficient in the long run than just going through the whole list page by page.

• Third, it was so interesting to glance through the list paying most attention to geography. Partly this was a function of the fact that the PDF is set up by state, but also partly because I have come to recognize the powerful influence that my geographic location plays in my happiness. (The entire five years that I lived in Small City, I was desperately homesick for Grad School City; since we moved to Adventure City, which is awesome, I've only felt that homesickness once, and it was when we were on a plane taxiing in to land at the Grad School City airport, which I think hardly counts at all.) And I'm interested to muse on the changes that have occurred in my life such that I now think much more about how happy or not my whole life would be with any professional change than how good the job is. I would have been much better off with that attitude back in grad school when I was first on the job market, but of course I didn't realize that at the time.

• Interestingly, the jobs I'm drawn to now (in a strictly hypothetical way, of course) are not the same jobs that I was way back when. Well, I'd definitely apply for children's lit jobs now, as I did then, but otherwise I think that the rhet/comp jobs are the ones that look interesting and that I can imagine doing. Except that I can't quite imagine doing them since I'm not entirely sure what a rhet/comp person necessarily does, not ever having been one and not having a degree in the field. I think it's just that I'm now kind of a high school rhet/comp person and have sometimes wondered what would have happened in my life if I'd gone that route in grad school. But of course I also sometimes wonder what would have happened if I'd gone the history rather than English route, so clearly there are lots of potential "what ifs," which don't in the end matter so much since I ended up well despite or because of my various decisions along the way.

• But what if I wasn't approaching all of this hypothetically but really wanted to get back into the higher ed game? It's not even clear to me how I would approach that goal as a once-tenured but out-of-the-game-for-5-years-now person. Would I stay in my current job and write a book and then apply for associate jobs? Would I apply for assistant jobs and somehow make a compelling argument that they should look at me? How on earth would I get anyone to write me a letter of rec at this point? Reading the ads, it really does seem to me that -- as I would have expected -- once one has definitively stepped off of the academic path, it must be almost impossible to step back on unless one has had a noted success in some other professional arena that a university want to capitalize on. No surprises there, of course, but I just haven't thought about it in several years and so it struck me with renewed force once I perused the JIL again.

• All religious schools now give me the heebee-jeebees.

• So apparently we now speak of "The Long Twentieth Century"? I find this incredibly charming, for some reason, and I'm thinking of adopting this phrase into my own conversations as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

• I didn't see any English Education jobs. Are those no longer listed on the JIL, or is it kind of not a category anymore? When I mused aloud a few years ago that English Ed really seemed the only route still open to me if I ever wanted to go back to higher ed -- and it became more than just idle musing when a couple of such jobs near Adventure City actually appeared on the JIL back then -- a bloggy friend pointed out that I would probably have less-prepared students and be at a less prestigious school than I currently am, which I think is true. And I will admit that I have a bias against Ed schools, although it's based on a very small sample size.

• I have no idea what Interfolio is. Some sort of national rec-letter-forwarding organization?

I know that I seem to have given an awful lot of thought to something I say I'm not interested in (although, then again, I am the person who once in grad school wasted a good hour in planning out what all of my preparatory steps would be if Matt Damon unexpectedly called me up three days before the Oscars and asked me to be his date. I'm so not kidding). There are respects in which higher ed will always be the "one [career] that got away," but in other respects it feels more and more like a foreign world, one that I have increasingly fuzzy memories of -- not of the work I did or the writing or teaching or meetings or anything else, but of the feelings I had while doing all of those things. Mostly I think I felt stress but didn't even recognize it as such because it was just the way normal life felt at the time, but on reading the JIL job descriptions and trying to think about what those positions would feel like, it all seems so terribly stressful and exhausting! Of course, it's all just what one is used to; I'm sure many of my college-teaching friends would look at my life teaching high school and think it looks terribly exhausting as well. And they're not wrong -- I took a three-hour nap this afternoon because I was so completely wiped out from this past week -- but of course this is now the stress and exhaustion I'm used to, as opposed to the different stress and exhaustion I used to feel.

Ah, the JIL: How you always make me reflect on my life and its directions, even if I'm not on the job market!

New blood

As I mentioned three weeks ago, the FGS English department is hiring for a couple of new teachers. And the cycle of school hiring is such that we've already wrapped up that process! So I'll have two new colleagues in the fall, replacing the two who are leaving -- one much mourned, one not so much.

The whole experience was eye-opening for me about the process of hiring at independent secondary schools, which is quite different from that in higher education. And it's always good to have some insight into how one was hired oneself! We actually went through this process once before in my time at FGS, but it was the first spring I was there, and I was overwhelmed enough that clearly none of it really sank in. This time, I was paying attention.Of course, the way things happen at FGS are probably not universal, but apparently they are pretty common; at one moment in the process, I was about to get my knickers in a twist about how the hiring process was going, but I thought to ask a couple of folks who had taught at a variety of schools, and it turned out that, indeed, everything was going normally and that I just needed to readjust my expectations from higher ed hiring.

I already knew that the timing is much different, in part because schools usually don't know they'll need to hire someone until it's contract-signing time for the current faculty, which happens in March at many schools in this area. In my first year at FGS, I just about fell out of my chair when, at a January faculty meeting, the head of school announced, "If you are planning on not returning next year, please let us know now so that we can get a head start on hiring your replacement." Good heavens, such career mobility! And sometimes faculty tell their heads of school that they're going to be looking for another job, so they want to put off signing their contract until they do some exploration and possibly get an offer. It's a very different scene than I was used to -- much more open.

And then usually the head of school cheerfully (or at least usually faking cheer) writes a recommendation for the faculty member who is looking around for other jobs ... and gives that letter to the person to pass on to any potential hiring committees! This also seems extraordinary to me, that one knows exactly what one's letter-writers have said, and that everyone in the administration knows that one is looking for another job. (The closed letters of higher ed always make me think of that scene in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, in which it turns out that the sealed "recommendation letter" actually says "Keep this n----r boy running." Not that most letters are like that, of course, but the one time I was on a hiring committee, back at St. Martyr's, I did actually contact a candidate to alert him to a damaging letter in his file.) Once a school is seriously interested in a candidate, of course, they do call department chairs and heads of school at the candidate's current place of employment, and sometimes much less positive things come out at that point -- as in fact happened for both of the people we ended up hiring, but then our academic dean went on a hunt and talked with as many people at those schools as possible to get the fullest picture possible. So it's not like I'm saying that everything is a rosy Garden of Eden at the secondary school level, but I was impressed at the openness of the process and at my department chair's and the academic dean's willingness to work hard enough to find out what other institutions really thought of the candidate.

And I guess this process of checking with references is even more important because it feels to me that there simply isn't as much information to rely on in hiring. No writing sample, no discussion of research ... in fact, for the most part, no cover letter, just a two-page resume. And of course folks are being hired as teachers, not as writers, but it's very hard to get a sense of someone just from a resume. So then the process boils down to the interviews and the teaching demonstration. (At FGS, potential candidates have a phone interview with the department chair and are then invited or not invited to campus -- so the rest of the department has no say in which candidates we meet, and we never see the entire slew of applications.)

Moreover, at FGS, the standard practice is for the teaching demonstration to be observed only by the academic dean, the head of the upper school, the department chair, and whichever teacher normally teaches that class (but our department chair often has the candidate teach her class). So when we went through our first round of looking for a new teacher (the one that resulted in our favorite candidate's turning us down), we had a department meeting to discuss what we thought of the candidates, but all that most of us had to go on was having had lunch with the candidates! It was really frustrating, especially since there was a sharp difference of opinion about one candidate -- our chair really, really liked her, and the rest of us didn't, but the chair was the only one who had seen her teach. I complained about this process, and the department chair was amenable, so at the next, successful round of hiring, we as a department had as many faculty as possible sitting in on the classes, much to the academic dean's dismay. In fact, she tried to kick some of us out of the room beforehand, and I protested sharply, arguing that (1) once you've got more than one adult in the room observing, it doesn't really make much difference whether it's four or six in terms of the candidate's stress, and (2) if we're going to be asked what we think of candidates, surely we should proffer informed rather than uninformed opinion! I won the day (and later made sure to have a friendly, smoothing over chat with the dean), and it was in fact much easier as a department to reach a clear conclusion about whom to offer the position to.

... except that the head of school had already offered the job to one of the candidates before we even had the last candidate on campus! This was one of those moments when my knickers were seriously twisted; the department hadn't had its meeting to decide yet; how dare the head of school act so authoritatively?!

Fortunately, I checked in with some other folks before letting myself get too wound up, and sure enough, it turns out that FGS is actually quite remarkable in the extent to which it solicits departmental feedback, that at most schools it's simply the head's choice, usually in consultation with the department chair but with no insistance that the chair be happy with the choice. I had wondered at the laissez-faire attitude of some of my colleagues, who were not rearranging their entire schedules, as I was doing, to have as much time as possible with the candidates. No, if they were free for lunch with the candidate, they went, but they didn't make any special effort to do so. Now I know what they knew all along, which is that hiring isn't their decision anyway, so there's no point in getting terribly invested in the process.

Very interesting! And I guess I should take from this the wisdom that, next time we hire, there will be no point in wearing myself out as I did this time.

That, however, is not the lesson I'm learning. No, I'm figuring out how to work the system, as I sort of did this time and will do even more of next time. After each candidate came, I started dropping in to have a friendly little chat with the academic dean (whose office is on the English hallway and with whom I have a good relationship) in hopes of having some small influence on the way the administration thought about each candidate. It also turned out that it was possible to get a cover letter or personal statement for candidates if only one asked for it early enough and with some persistence; the school gets those and uses them to decide which candidates to bring to campus, but they just don't think of this as something that the department needs. Also, this entire experience underscores for me the importance of having a good relationship with the department chair, especially during hiring season; as you know, I have more than once felt frustrated with my chair, but she is trying harder to do her job well, and I am trying harder to be a cheerful and not threatening member of her department, and I will say that she really does take seriously departmental feedback on candidates, so that part of the hiring process went very well, and I just need to keep those lessons in mind for next time.

Another thing that I think I'll try to influence next time is broadening our search for candidates. FGS relies almost entirely on Carney, Sandoe, the biggest search firm for independent schools; other than potential candidates whom someone knows and contacts personally, all candidates come through Carney, Sandoe, and our jobs are rarely posted on the school's website or on the National Association of Independent Schools website. I understand that this process cuts down dramatically on the number of unqualified applicants, but it also cuts off many fabulous candidates. I, for example, was not accepted by Carney, Sandoe when I was looking for a job, because I didn't have any secondary school teaching experience, and so I am only at FGS now because the temporary leave replacement job was posted, and I was hired for it, and so I happened to be physically on campus when the English position came open, which meant that I heard about it and was a known quantity when I applied. (When I think about that chain of events, I am sometimes tempted into the "Everything happens for a reason" line of thinking, which is actually something I don't believe at all but which helps me not panic about how easily I might not have gotten my FGS job.) So this time around I started working on my department chair about other avenues we might take for finding candidates, including sending job announcements to the English departments of local research universities, taking advantage of the fact that many folks who went to grad school in Adventure City may want to stay in the city and are thus looking for local employment. Some friends of mine back in grad school wound up with jobs at a local independent school in just such a way, and I think it's a good model. The academic dean won't like it -- she's very prejudiced against hiring people who have Ph.D.s; she thinks I'm the bee's knees but am a rare exception -- but my department chair thought it was a good idea, so we may try pushing that through next time. And if nothing else, we should definitely be posting the job on our own website!

Not that I'm hoping "next time" comes very soon, of course. I like both of the folks we hired, although I'm not over the moon about either of them. (Some of this is simply psychological; as a department, many of us are in deep mourning for one of the folks who is leaving, and no one we met struck us as an adequate replacement for her, but that's to be expected.) Both of them strike me as very young -- how could someone who graduated from college in the 21st century possibly be a professional and a colleague? -- but that is entirely about my now being middle-aged! They both have several years of teaching experience and M.A.s in English, and they are both more than ready to do well at FGS.

And on that note, maybe I should stop thinking about how to hire English teachers at FGS and should instead think about doing my own job! Oodles of grading to do this weekend, although for once I actually did what I always mean to do, which was to start on the grading right away, getting a few done last night so that the grading doesn't loom before me in a psychologically daunting untouched state.

Good news and phantom pain

What a dream I had last night! D and I had moved to Texas (which -- no offense to the state -- is not something I'm hoping ever to do), and I was looking for a job. So I was interviewing at a no-name sort of university that was a couple of hours from our home; it was going to be a ridiculous commute, obviously, but I was pleased to get the interview and thought I'd go and see how it went.

So imagine my surprise when I get there and am flipping through some of the university's promotional materials and realize that the English department brochure has a two-page spread with little blurbs about various famous academics (none of whom worked at that school, so who knows why), only to discover that my name is included in this spread under the "Where Are They Now?" section, and my blurb says that I fell off the face of the earth in 2008 and no one has any idea where I am or what I'm doing anymore! And my blurb wasn't there because I used to be a famous academic, but rather as a warning tale to the school's graduate students!

In my dream, I was simply outraged and went storming up to the chair to defend my academic career and tell her everything I'd done since 2008, and she sort of apologized but sort of didn't. And I decided I didn't want to work at that university and thus got on the long road back to our new Texas home.

So now I'm trying to figure out what was going on in my subconscious that apparently I felt the need to defend myself against charges that I no longer exist professionally!

And it seems to me particularly odd that such a dream would happen on the very night that I sent off the "Consent to Publish" form for my Dangerous Words pedagogy article. Because, yay, it got accepted! It will appear in a special issue of a journal next spring, and I'm so happy about it! It's a journal that is geared toward English education and high school English teachers, and the editor said the article was smart and gutsy. He asked me to rewrite a couple of sections (including the conclusion, which didn't surprise me at all because I ran out of inspiration entirely on the earlier version and basically just ended it), and all of that revision had to happen in a week. Goodness! (Hence the lack of blogging in the last week.) The other section he asked me to revise was where I warned the readers that there were bad words to come in the essay; he said that the journal might well receive angry letters about printing obscenities and that he wanted me to frame that choice carefully. Good advice all the way around, and I'm even more pleased with the final version.

Once I finished the revision -- perhaps because I'm still paranoid from my St. Martyr's days, or perhaps because of the thought of angry letters to the journal -- I sent a copy of the final version to the head of the school with a carefully crafted email that was in no way asking permission to publish the essay but was giving her a heads up about it, since of course it's a controversial assignment and now an obscenity-laced publication, both of which will be associated with FGS. And here is the email she sent back to me:

I have just finished reading your essay.  My overwhelming feeling is one of pride:  in your beautifully written article, in your courageous and bold assignment, in our School which supported your assignment, and in our students who approached the assignment with seriousness of purpose and learned a valuable life lesson in the process.  Congratulations!

As I told D. when I came home last night: Gosh, FGS really is better than St. Martyr's, don't you think?

So it's odd that, after receiving that email and finishing up the final bits of business with the essay revision and getting that sent off, I should have my dream in which I have to protest that I still exist. Maybe because I was thinking about St. Martyr's in relation to all of this? Maybe because I have some secret shame that the journal isn't a prestigious academic journal but more of a professional journal? Hmm, I don't know.

But I'm sure as heck not taking that kind of guff from those folks in Texas!

We'll call it a successful day

I was awakened at 5:30 this morning by the fine garbage collectors of San Francisco and then immediately started fretting about my panel -- actually, I started fretting about the breakfast with the panelists before our roundtable panel, which for some reason is the part I had seized upon to worry about -- and never got back to sleep, so the morning got off to a rocky start.

And then my connecting flight to Adventure City got canceled because of mechanical problems, so I'm now in a hotel in the middle of the country and not flying home (by two more flights) until tomorrow night. And there's supposed to be a big snowstorm in Adventure City tomorrow, so all of us who got bumped are fairly convinced that we're actually going to end up stranded in yet another city before we finally get to Adventure City on New Year's Day. We shall see. I waited to call D. until I was checked into the hotel, because I was fairly certain I'd burst into tears as soon as I had to tell her I wasn't getting home tonight. And indeed, that prediction proved accurate.

I'm trying to adopt an attitude of calm acceptance in the face of my travel woes, and I'm also trying to reclaim the thrill of today's panel, a thrill that has been decidedly dimmed by the flight debacle. So as part of this latter goal, I'm going to relive the high points of the roundtable's fabulousness:

• First, breakfast did indeed go just fine, despite my early morning worrying. We got a table (which had been my big fear, because I couldn't find any place reasonably priced and reasonably close to the hotel that would take a reservation for breakfast), and everyone showed up, and we had well over an hour to get to know one another, which was great. I really liked these folks, whom I'd only "met" over email, and getting to know the folks in person made such a big difference to the collegiality of the roundtable. Plus it was just really fun to talk with them all. A couple of the folks on the panel are people I can see myself keeping in touch with, and if we lived in the same area they'd totally be friends to hang out with. Plus, I had delicious apple pancakes for breakfast, which also helped to settle my decidedly wonky stomach.
• Then, as we were settling ourselves into our room well before our session, an MLA staff member came up to us, introduced himself, thanked us for being there and presenting our important panel, brainstormed with us about how we could work together to further the agenda of our panel, and said he was staying for our panel and really looking forward to it. We exchanged business cards, and I imagine further correspondence in our future. I must say that it was really nice to have the MLA itself (as it were) thank us for our work!
• And then the room proceeded to fill up nicely with interested folks! I was a little worried that our numbers would be small because of the time of our panel ... and perhaps there would have been more people at a better time, but it was still an entirely respectable number of folks. And everyone who was there was so excited about the panel -- the energy in the room was just amazing!
• The roundtable worked exactly as a roundtable should -- brief opening comments from each of us, and then real conversation that engaged the audience as well as the panelists. My fellow panelists were all so relaxed and witty and charming; it really was like we were all hanging out in someone's big living room and just shooting the shit but with that little extra frisson of performance and appreciate audience thrown in. I'd had a list of questions (which I'd distributed to the panelists ahead of time) that I was going to ask for the formal discussion component of the roundtable, but after my first question, the audience members just jumped in and started raising their hands to ask questions, and they hit all the questions I was going to ask, but of course it was so much better that the questions were coming from them than from me. So we pretty much had 45 minutes of Q&A out of our 75-minute panel. I say it as shouldn't, but it was the most engaged audience I've ever seen in all of my years of going to conferences.
• I reluctantly had to wrap things up when our panel was officially over, but we could have kept going and going. After I made a couple of closing remarks, one woman raised her hand and said she just wanted to thank all of us for being there and me for the incredibly helpful handout I'd done and that she'd found the whole thing incredibly exciting. And then all the audience members burst into vigorous (rather than simply polite) applause. And then, once the session officially broke up, half of the audience swarmed to the front to continue the conversation one-on-one with various panel members. I gave out my card to several folks, and I hope the conversation will continue electronically for some time to come. One woman asked in all seriousness if we would come back to MLA next year and do a repeat of the panel.
• All of the panelists afterward agreed that it was the single best MLA experience any of us had ever had. And that in and of itself was a very healing experience; we'd all had our share of miserable MLA experiences, so it felt great to have this triumph. We all felt incredibly affirmed in our work, delighted to have met one another, and so happy to be sharing our experiences with the audience. It really did feel like the creation of a temporary community, which seems like a rare feat for a conference panel.

I know this is a braggy sort of post, which I hope is not my wont, but it really was an incredibly exciting morning. I ran into Meg afterward, and she can testify that I was flying high, almost beside myself with the fabulousness of the experience.

So, although I'm very unhappy not to be at home, and even unhappier at the possibility that I still might not be home 24 hours from now, I am really, really pleased at this fruition of my labors in putting together this panel. I think we can thus call today a success despite its other disappointments.

Librarians and teaching

My sophomores are at the beginning of a truly fabulous research project (if I do say so myself -- although I should hasten to add that it's an assignment I've adapted from another teacher's that I found online), so today we had a day in the library with the school librarian whose specialty is library instruction.

And I have to say that she was really not good at all, such that I will in the future teach the research skills myself. A disappointing class session all the way around -- bored students and inarticulate instruction and oodles of frustration. I'm particularly frustrated because I had sent her the assignment for her feedback before I gave it to the students, and I had spent half an hour with her yesterday, all to make sure that we were on the same page with how to introduce the students to the research they needed to do. And yet it all fell flat this morning. She went off on tangents about JSTOR and Project Muse (which they didn't need for this assignment at all), she would start talking about one subject and then switch to another without ever finishing up the first, she kept losing her train of thought, she would ask completely confusing open-ended questions in a misguided attempt to invite student participation, such that everyone (including me) just looked at her blankly, she went way over the 20 minutes we'd agreed on ... really, the whole thing was very annoying. She had invited me ahead of time to jump into the discussion when I thought it necessary, and I had to do that more than once to get us back on track or to explain something that had been muddled. And no doubt my doing so threw her even more off-center, but I really felt it necessary to keep sticking my oar in so that the whole thing wasn't just a boredom- and confusion-fest. I'm afraid at the end of the class session, the students felt confused and put off by the whole project rather than invited into the exciting world of research. And she is an experienced librarian who's been at the school for several years.

This is the third or fourth school in which I've had this sort of experience (and today's class was sadly much better than what the St. Martyr's librarian used to do!), which leads me to wonder about librarians and teaching. When I was considering a library career last year and was talking with academic librarians to find out about their professional lives, all of them stressed how great it was that they got so many teaching opportunities. And yet I have never yet been impressed with the teaching skills of a librarian (in what is admittedly a very small sample size), which leads me to wonder about what I perceive as a serious disconnect.

Let me quickly say that I have every respect for the research skills of librarians, and I'm sure the school librarian I worked with today would leave me in the dust with her knowledge of a huge variety of databases and the like; I do a better job than she with the research materials I use all the time, but I don't know anything about research other than literary and historical work in my own field, and I am impressed by librarians who know about so very many types of research. And because of this knowledge, I'm sure that all of the librarians I've met are very good with one-on-one help for students who come to them with particular research projects. And I know there are all sorts of other components to library jobs as well. So I'm not casting aspersions on the general state of librarianship but am thinking specifically about the group (rather than individual) teaching component of librarianship, which in my (very limited) experience is weak indeed.

So here are some thoughts I've had:

• Probably teaching classes of students is a small component of their jobs (rather than, as in mine, the bulk of the job) and thus understandably the weakest part.
• Maybe librarians aren't trained at all in leading classes? Do MLIS programs include student teaching and pedagogical instruction and the rest of it?
• In the descriptions of all of the librarians I talked with last year, the much-vaunted teaching component was mostly doing the same one-hour workshop over and over again to different groups of students (a very good reason that I decided I didn't want to be a librarian!). So that is actually pretty limited teaching experience. And I'm a good teacher who doesn't do all that well on the first day; I need to get to know the students and establish a rhythm with them before my teaching really hits its stride each term. So perhaps I wouldn't be a good teacher in this particular format either.
• Probably introducing databases and card catalogs is not the most inherently interesting material to teach. I think that the things one can find through such search mechanisms are fascinating, but I'll confess that the mechanisms don't thrill me in themselves (probably another good reason I decided not to become a librarian last year). So while students may eventually get excited about their research, they're probably not going to get excited about the research methods, and unexcited students are a drag on any teacher.
• The problem with teaching a basic research class is that the students don't have anything to research and thus see no immediate value in the instruction. The problem with teaching a more specific class about some other teacher's research project is that the librarian doesn't have free reign with the teaching but is constrained by someone else's assignment. So it's probably a sticky pedagogical context no matter what.
• Librarians must have their pet information and ideas just as every other teacher does, but other teachers have classes for an entire term or year in which to introduce students to all of these particular points. If a librarian only gets one shot at seeing a particular group of students, perhaps there's an overwhelming urge to stick as many of those pet ideas into the single class session, since this may well be the only opportunity. (Similarly, I remember when D. started preaching, she found it hard to present only one major theme or image because she had so many ideas about the text; once she'd gotten used to preaching regularly and knew that she'd have any number of opportunities to make these points, she relaxed considerably and the sermons, which had always been good, got much better. I've seen the same phenomenon in TAs who get to give a guest lecture in an undergraduate course; they tend to present an overwhelming number of ideas and information because this is their only chance to do so.)
• It's probably really annoying to try to teach a class and have the students' regular teacher thinking she knows better and jumping into the discussion all the time. Mea culpa on this point!

Regardless of the reasons why, it's now clear to me that in the future I need to go over the catalog system and the online databases with classes before we go to the library rather than have the librarian do it at the library. And this will involve some careful skirting around so as not to insult the librarians and step on their toes, which was a problem I definitely had at St. Martyr's. I know I'm a control freak and would often rather just do something myself, but this is an area in which I'd happily hand instruction over to someone better trained than I. And undoubtedly librarians are better trained at the research itself, but as long as their teaching skills remain as they are, I guess I'll just do it myself.

The identity crisis of the byline

There's a really interesting conversation going on over at Squadratomagico's about academic identities and how much one can be faced with giving up in taking on this identity. I particularly like this moment in the original blog post:

Most identities are accretive: they add to pre-existing aspects of the self. A new pursuit or skill or set of experiences expands upon existing ones, making the individual’s life richer. The professoriate, by contrast, strikes me as an identity that can be impoverishing in some ways, insofar as it can require us to give up many other things we cherish.

The conversation has gotten picked up over at TE's blog, which is where I found my way into the discussion. I love TE's image of the prisoner's shoveling her way out with the spoon, especially since, as I commented over on her blog, it turns out that the prison door isn't even locked if one is willing to try the latch.

All of this has particular resonance for me as someone who's now got one foot in and one foot out of the door. At MLA this year, I got a little upset (unreasonably so, I think) when a couple of friends commented that I had left academia, since I was thinking that I had just transferred my work papers over to a different branch of academia, but in the month and a half since then, I've come around to this way of thinking and have been flirting with shedding my academic identity altogether to take on a new, more expansive identity that includes my intellectual life and my scholarly interests but has room for lots of other sides of me as well.

I'm currently proofreading the galleys for my first article that will appear with a high school rather than a university under my byline. This journal includes a page of short author bios, and so a couple of weeks ago I had to write mine, a process that took forever because I couldn't figure out how to communicate that I had darn well gotten tenure before I left higher ed and taken my current job and that this was a move I was happy to make. I didn't want to mention St. Martyr's, of course, and I wanted to make it clear that I left of my own volition, and I wanted people to know that I wasn't "just" a high school teacher but rather had had an academic identity.

I finally looked myself hard in the figurative mirror and said, "WN, why do you need people to know this one thing about your identity? Why is the fact that you had a college job the one thing that you think gives you credibility, gives you an identity?" So I finally wrote a few sentences that said where I got my Ph.D., where I currently taught, what my scholarship was on in general, and what current book project I'm working on ... and I didn't mention at all my history of higher ed employment. And I sent the bio off to the journal editor with much fluttering of heart.

Which is to say that I clearly haven't fully embraced the idea of losing this academic identity, because it was such an all-encompassing identity for so long that I'm not always sure what else is there. And that loss of other selves is what made it so hard to walk away, and also what has made it exciting as well as scary to start playing around with other senses of self.

Yay for supportive people!

I spent the day crossing several things off of my "to do" list -- hurrah! It was a really productive day, the kind of day where I remember to drop off my winter coat at the cleaners on my way to the gym and then swing by the grocery store afterward. I'm clearly feeling motivated by the fact that I'm off to a conference this weekend (am I ready? Oh no, I'm not!) and then out of town for over a week (am I ready? Oh no, I'm not!) and am feeling slightly under the gun. But I keep telling myself to do one thing at a time and keep breathing, and so far that plan seems to be working out pretty well.

One of the items accomplished on today's list was to write chatty, friendly, don't-forget-me emails to a few professional mentors, especially the folks who wrote me letters for the job market last time. The goal was to present my new high school job as a wonderful accomplishment while also convincing them that I'm still a viable candidate for college jobs -- I'm trying to keep the possibility of all paths open for a while longer, you see, and I know I need support from other folks for that to happen. So I talked enthusiastically about my research agenda while also exclaiming over how fabulous the students are in my new high school.

All of these things are actually true, of course, which made the writing easier, but still one wants to craft such letters. Plus I then had to personalize each of them ... maintaining that intimate connection with each of these folks, doncha know. So it took quite awhile to get them all done, but what a relief to cross that off the day's list!

I got this collection of emails sent out this morning, and by the end of the day I had a couple of replies. And weren't they lovely?! I guess I've been so conditioned by my dissertation director to expect stiff and slightly condemnatory evaluations* from authority figures that I assume that's the norm, so it's such a nice surprise when people respond with hearty congratulations and with assurances of continued support.

One of my letter-writers, who was a Golden Child of my grad department and my advisor in a previous era, sent the sweetest note in which he commented that he had taught junior high and high school before he went to grad school and had thoroughly enjoyed it and had always planned to go back if his university career hadn't panned out, and he was just so excited for me. Nice! And then my former chair from St. Martyr's sent the sweetest reply in which he said that he was glad about the job but that he really hoped I'd look for a college position also since I was "a one-in-a-million college prof." Aaawww, how sweet! And they both said that of course they'd be happy to update their letters of recommendation for me if I decided to apply for college jobs next fall and that they also hoped I had a wonderful time in my new job.

Hurrah for supportive people!

* I should say that my dissertation director was really lovely in my last year at St. Martyr's and encouraged me to get the hell out of there and not be a martyr. But she wasn't so chipper about my looking into high school teaching or about my writing in other, non-lit-crit venues. She was one of the folks I wrote to this morning; it will be interesting to see how she replies.

ETA: Well, I doubted too soon! I just got a lovely email from my dissertation director, full of good cheer and congratulations.

How nice not to care

A friend from St. Martyr's called tonight. I should say right up front that I don't have all that many friends -- i.e., deserving of the word -- from my St. Martyr's days, which makes me a little sad since I was there for several years. Some people with whom I was close decided that I had betrayed the cause, or some such thing, in leaving, and I've had to bid a farewell to those relationships that apparently didn't have my best interests at heart (recognizing, of course, that there might be multiple ways of defining what is best for another person). But the friend who called tonight is a friend indeed, and she and I have maintained a relationship over the distance, which makes me happy.

She was calling tonight to tell me about a meeting held on campus this week, a report of which she thought I'd find gratifying. Apparently the St. Martyr's president is being evaluated by a team of other college presidents -- Is this sort of thing regularly done? Is it like a five-year departmental review? -- and as part of this evaluation, the visiting team met with a group of St. Martyr's faculty, including my friend and my former department chair. And my experience (although not my name specifically, since it would mean nothing to the visitors) came up and was the topic of conversation for a good 10-15 minutes; apparently my leaving is now seen as symbolic of things that the president does very poorly, and there was much rallying/bitching by the faculty about how I had been oh-so-fabulous and had been driven from my position by the president's inept handling of political pressure.

So my friend thought that I might be pleased to hear that I am still in some ways a cause célèbre on campus and that people continue to speak fondly of me. And she thought it would be nice to know that my chair spoke of me with great sympathy -- apparently he said that the president had "made her life hell" -- rather than with resentment at my leaving. And certainly I'd rather hear this than the reverse, but honestly ... I just didn't care all that much. How nice not to care!

How lovely to be free of the place! As she talked, I could picture the whole scene so clearly; I knew who the major players would be, who would speak loudest and most ineptly, who wouldn't contribute a thing at the meeting but would be full of bitchy commentary the next day. And I didn't get drawn in to the picture at all, because I just. didn't. care. I listened to my friend's report, and I thanked her for her contribution to the discussion about how "he done her [i.e., me] wrong," and I sympathized with her experiences of this year. But none of it felt like it was about me. It was a distant universe, in which people got all wound up about the most ridiculous things and then failed to treat one another decently -- but that's not my world now. Freedom!

Of course it helps to have another wonderful job waiting for me in fall, but I think even without that fact, I would be so glad to be out of that environment. And I know that my new school will have its own set of problems and  that there will be times in which we argue about stupid things. But really, life is so much better outside of St. Martyry's, and I'm so glad to be gone, and it's so nice not to care that they're still talking about me!

Hello, anxiety, my old friend

This week Merlin at 43 Folders quoted Jason Goldman on his 170-day weekend (i.e., taking a few months off in between jobs), in a description that I'm finding most applicable to my life at the moment:

When you have fewer responsibilities, those you do have take on a disproportionately larger weight. I found that no matter how little I actually had to worry about, I'd find some task or obligation that would become the "one big thing" nagging at me from void. Sometimes this one big thing would be laundry. The point is that you can always identify one obstacle in your life that, if removed, would make everything better (an annoying co-worker, a bad debt, a rash). Turns out this probably isn't true at all.

Which is to say: Having officially sold our house 9 hours ago and thus eliminated a major responsibility and source of stress, I now have a raging case of insomnia brought about my professional concerns such as: How am I going to wrangle getting another academic job when I've made such a muck of my career? What on earth was I thinking of, starting a new book project in a subject area in which I have absolutely no prestige such that I probably can't even do the stupid book and if I do, no one will ever read it or take it seriously? What am I going to be doing professionally next year? How can I not know what I'll be doing next year?

Stress level: Ratcheting steadily higher. It's 2:00 in the morning; I wouldn't mind winding down any time soon.

Despite the unpleasantness of this late-night interlude, I am still mostly rational and calm (this is not an emotional storm, just one of those nights when my mind is going a mile a minute) and am thus still aware of several things:

• This is the biggest career-related anxiety attack that I've had since I left St. Martyr's, which is in and of itself a remarkable thing, given what a big decision that was. I've mostly been really confident and excited, and that emotional state will no doubt return.
  
• And, even in the midst of this career panic, I don't regret the decision to walk away from a bad job. So that's something.
• The prompt for this evening's whipping myself up into an anxious frenzy was pretty clearly yesterday's conversation with the St. Martyr's colleague, a conversation that was largely about my talking her down off the ceiling because she's so stressed out and unhappy in ways that I remember all too well; and yet, in the way of these things, that very familiarity made me suddenly long to be back inside that world even as I simultaneously wanted to hold it at arm's length.
• I think I need to limit conversations with this friend. D. actually left the room yesterday while I was on the phone because she couldn't stand to hear even half of the conversation about profession-related anxieties.
• So tonight's fretting has probably been building for the last 36 hours and was just submerged under the more immediate concern and then relief about the house settlement.
• Perhaps having the house sold and thus losing that last tie to Small City is a kind of like leaving all over again, and maybe that's why I'm suddenly feeling rootless and wanting to be settled somewhere, anywhere.
• As I was lying in bed in the dark, I was frantically thinking about the academic job market and how I could position myself in the fall not to seem like a big loser. This is not a fruitful line of thinking. I think I should try to avoid it in the future.
• If this part of my life really is an adventure, I should not be so surprised when there is no clear path with obvious road signs. I'm charting a new path for myself, and it's okay not to know exactly where that path is going to lead.
• To quote Julian of Norwich as redacted by a Texan: "All will be well, all will be well, and every damn thing is gonna be all right."

Okay, making a list is having its usual calming effect on me.  Plus, I've had a snack, which usually helps my insomnia. I think I'm going to crawl back into bed, snuggle up next to the sleeping D., turn the reading light on low so as not to disturb her, and read our new book: The Nancy Drew Cookbook, which our Tuesday night dinner guest brought as her hostess gift. Perhaps that will be a soothing combination.