I'm going to teach US History next year! I'm super excited about this new challenge. It's a required year-long course for juniors (which is my favorite age to teach, along with freshmen).
My degrees are all in English, so in one way, I guess I don't have the appropriate degree for this course gig. But if we make the decision based on what folks actually know as opposed to their degree, then I'm as qualified as any of my colleagues who are currently teaching the course! And I guess that's how the higher-ups did make the decision. My grad school Americanist professors were all cultural studies types, and my dissertation often sounded to folks more like a history dissertation than an English one. In fact, I used to wonder if I'd have been better off in the history department in grad school, although things worked out just fine as they did. Also, little known fact: I actually got my foot in the door at FGS through the history department, covering a short-term leave. So I've already taught one month of this course that now I'll be teaching for real. And -- not to sell myself short -- I did also direct the American interdisciplinary program at St. Martyr's and teach the required core courses in that program, so I have actually taught American history for five years! I just did it in a very different context.
Last fall, I'd talked with both my chair and the history chair about my interest in teaching a section of US History if that ever were an option, and everyone was amenable. I like to shake things up in my teaching to keep my brain engaged and challenge myself. Plus, a temporary teacher in the department had assumed that I was a Victorianist, which rattled my strong sense of myself as so obviously an Americanist! But it's true that I haven't taught American lit in years, even though that was my bread and butter in my first years at FGS. This is in no way due to lack of interest but because I've been teaching AP English Language, which is the alternate course to American lit.
Then, this spring, the senior member of the history department decided to go part-time, as a way of sliding into retirement. So the history department will be short two classes for next year, and due to a variety of circumstances, so will the English department. So a hire is clearly in order. The decision was whether to hire a humanities person to teach English and history or to fill that inter-departmental role internally and then hire someone in a single department. I made the pitch that I'd be the perfect person to go between departments, and I appreciate how the administrator figuring all of this out absolutely respected my comment that the thought of someone else getting hired to be the humanities person made my breath catch in my throat -- that should be MY position!
My only concern -- and it's a real one, which I've shared with the history chair and the administrator -- is that the cultures of the two departments are VERY different, with the history department much more regimented than the English department. Now, I actually think the English department could do with a little more regimentation, but definitely not as much as the history department has. In both departments, the folks who are teaching sections of the same course coordinate, but that coordination looks very different. In the English department, the teachers select some (but not all) of the same books for the year, occasionally kick around ideas, and look at each other's exams to make sure we're all roughly on the same page; in the last few years, we've also worked together to create a final project (to replace a final exam) ... although we almost immediately started individually tweaking those projects to better fit our own courses. The history faculty, on the other hand, give the exact same exam, which means that one can only go so far astray from the other sections in terms of content covered, pacing, etc. The tradition has also been that the essay assignments are all the same. And when I said that I wanted to teach US History, I meant that I want to learn from my colleagues but ultimately to teach it the way I want to! So there will be some negotiating that needs to happen. It would be good for me to learn to be more flexible ... and it would also be good for a couple of folks in the history department to learn the same. We'll see how much that all happens.
I also realize that I've been spoiled in the English department. My department chair trusts me absolutely, and I kind of get to do whatever I want. I deserve that trust, of course, and she mostly steps in to urge me to work less and give myself a break. It took us several years to work out this relationship, however, and we regularly butted heads in the first couple of years. I will now have to forge a relationship with a new chair, and I can already tell that it's going to be less easy-going. It will also be weird because I'll be in two departments at once, which happens a lot in the middle school but almost never in the upper school. So, for example, when department meetings are scheduled, I'll have to decide which to go to, or do half of one and half of the other. I foresee some awkwardness.
But mostly I foresee lots of learning on my part and lots of fun challenges as I teach a new course! Sure, administrative stuff has its challenges, but most of my job is hanging out with teenagers, and I'm really looking forward to doing that in a new context.