Pomegranates and a Ph.D.

Had my life gone according to plan, I would be tenured by now.  Had my life gone according to plan, my vita would be a good page longer than it is now.

Life didn’t.  I’m not.  It isn’t.

I wish that more people talked openly about the process of picking up the pieces and putting a career back on track.   I have the feeling I am supposed to forever hide in the shadows.  I refuse to do that anymore.  I refuse to continue to be defined by my past.  This post is about shutting the door on what might have been and turning toward what may yet be.

To many academics, I am clearly a failure.  After all, I started at a research university with great promise but eight years later I am teaching a very small regional campus in a state system.  As for publications, I was far more productive during and immediately after graduate school than I have been in the last 4 years.   Many would ask “what happened? “

Not that it really matters but the spiral started with life happening combined with a toxic department chair and my own  personality which was based on being a pleaser.

I allowed the challenges to escalate by:  (1) worrying too much about how I was disappointing specific people, (2) losing my confidence and my focus, and (3) trying to overcompensate in ways that made things worse.  Ultimately this cost me my first tenure track job before I even went up for tenure.

I managed to find a new tenure track job.  However, the job was not a particularly good one but as they say “any port in a storm.”  At this point I am 5 years post Ph.D. The first year at the new position involved two more surgeries and trying to settle into a new state.  By that time I had lost both continuity and structure in my life.  By the time that I finished my first year at Univ. #2, I had taught 16 different preps (only three of which were even loosely connected to my research area). I was teaching 4/5 load and serving as graduate director.    As a result I became too much of a generalist and lost all momentum with regard to research and publishing.

My second year at Univ. #2, the advertisement for my current position at Univ. #3 was sent to me by a friend/mentor.  It had been a bad day.  I hated living in a town centered around a large military base. Univ. #3 is in an area where I wanted to live.  I figured what the heck.   To make a long story short: They liked me.  I liked them.  Here I am.

The move to this area brought to a close a wildly tumultuous period in my personal life.  To recap: between April 2003 and May 2006 there were 4 surgeries, losing a tenure track job, losing the possibility of motherhood being part of my life, a national search for a new job, and two interstate moves made alone. By this point I was defining myself as a failure and unable to focus on the future because I was focusing on the shortcomings in my past.

I would love to say that once I arrived at charming home in the cornfields, the chaos dissipated.  It didn’t.  In my first year at my current position we have been through 5 department chairs (regular/acting/interim), 3 deans (2 interim and now a regular Dean), 2 vice-chancellors for academic affairs, 5 searches within the department where I teach, and I have prepped three more new courses.  Still my time here has been a time for healing both physically and emotionally.

In the last 72 hours or so I have come to realize that I am starting a new chapter in my life.  Without realizing that I needed to, I have suddenly forgiven myself for my failures (real and imagined).   Oddly, I have no idea why this shift in consciousness.  Frankly, why it happened is not important.  That it has happened is an amazing feeling.  In addition, to feeling as if a giant weight has been lifted from my shoulders, I can look at the past 5 years and see what went wrong.  Being able to see the past more clearly means that I can learn from it and I can move forward.

I may never achieve the success I was expected to have.  I may never regain the respect some whose opinions I value.  What I can do is stop defining myself by what I haven’t accomplished in the past and focus my energy on moving forward from where I am now.  This is exactly what I intend to do.

I know the process won’t be fast.  4/4 teaching loads don’t lend themselves to churning out publications quickly — at least not the kind of publications on which I want my name.  Still I can focus on slow and steady progress toward realistic goals that are important to me.  I can be sure that the projects on which I spend my time and energy are those that can move me toward those goals.

More importantly, I can stop measuring my progress by where I thought I would be by now.  Instead I can measure my future progress from where I am starting from right now.

Most importantly, I can will stop hiding in the shadows in shame.

Books:

Sage has an interesting looking book on Gender, Race, and Class in Media.  It could have potential for the Micro-level Inequalities course. I am surprised I haven’t run across the first edition of this book before now.  Several inequality related books have caught my eye lately; I must miss teaching stratification even more than I realized.  Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty finally arrived as is on the top of the “to be read” pile.

New Computer:

Who on Earth decided that white/pale gray keys on a laptop were a good idea?   Keyboard get grimy no matter how careful you are.  Laptop keyboard are especially hard to clean.  I can only imagine how awful they will look in very short order.

This computer purchase was not part of my plans for this past week but it happened anyway.  I had been planning to invest in a really good laptop in a few months.  I was faithfully tucking away money to go Mac.  Then my old Toshiba died.  I tried to make due with a cranky old desktop and my office computer which also happens to be a cranky old desktop.  It wasn’t working.  Using my office computer requires time to be be in my office.  Given that there are far too meetings in my life and the fact that I am teaching two of my four classes at a satellite campus I am lucky if I am in my office long enough to check my voice mail and sort the postal mail.  Without the hybrid courses, I might have managed to hold off.  Yesterday the extent to which I was falling behind and the frustration level reach intolerable.  As a result, I now own a “better than I had before” laptop but not my dream system.

I have spent a few hours making it mine — removing pre-installed programs  that are garbage not gifts, loading programs that I do use, adjusting settings, etc.  Since my last purchase I have become either smarter or pickier about the tools I use so this took longer than in the past.  The process was even longer this time because I have now entered the world of Vista though I am not happy about it.  The process is not complete as Vista requires updating some of the programs I use from the versions I have from a few to several years ago but I am up and running to the point that I can catch up with Blackboard  based teaching tasks and stop writing my lecture notes by hand.

For the record, my new lifeline to the world does not have a name.  Personally, I have never developed the habit of naming machines though many of my friends do so. Winter weather:

It was not a good travel week in these parts.  Winter weather is particularly problematic for the campus where I teach.  It is located at least 10 miles from a town.  We have no dorms so all students must commute.  For most this means 15-30 minutes on a normal day of driving through open areas (read corn and soybean fields).  On Wednesday, most of this area was shut down due to ice that result from rain turning to snow and ice as temperatures plunged 50 degrees over night and winds howled.  Despite the K-12 schools and other universities within 50 miles closing, we were open.  Between the roads and the fact that many of our students are parents who had to deal with children who did not have school, attendance very low.  Several of those who tried to get to campus ended up in accidents and so they never made it. On days like that it is hard to know whether to proceed as planned with the 30 percent or so who make it to class.

A discussion about disadvantaged and unprepared students over on Scatterplot helped me clarify some of my recent thoughts about my own weaknesses as an educator.  I know sociology (at least my specialty areas).  I can’t say the same for knowing how to teach.  Oh sure, I have learned from watching others (those who do it well and those who don’t).  I have gained a few tricks and improved through trial and error.  Oh, sure I know about varied learning styles and to limit the number of points I try to make and typical attention spans and all that.  However, I have never been formally trained in how to teach people the basics (e.g., how to formulate a question, how to write coherently, how think logically and critically).

Taken together, what does this mean for my ability to teach?  On one hand, the things I know and the experience I have amassed allow me to fairly easily teach well-prepared and motivated students new things.  However, my lack of training to teach means that I am ill prepared to help those who are ill prepared for learning at the university level.

This became painfully obvious during the semester that has just ended.  I taught research methods or at least I tried to but I started with a flawed assumption.  I assumed that students would know how to find articles and to write a literature review (the thing that is often called a research paper in high school).  My plan was to teach them how to start from that point to explore ways of producing new knowledge.  To say that I was stunned by what the students didn’t know would be an understatement.

Part of my winter break is going to be spent trying to learn how to teach these more basic skills.  I wish that had been a part of my graduate training not something to do on my own.  Step one is finding good resources for educating myself without spending a fortune on Amazon on information that isn’t helpful. I wonder if (A) I could find a summer workshop that would help and (B) I could get the administration to pay for said workshop.

I can try to help students acquire skills that, in an ideal world, they would have brought with them to campus. Unfortunately this creates more work for me that is unrewarded in the tenure process.

A recent post taking professors to task for complianing about their cushy jobs appeared over at Rate My Students.  Like most posts with a point to make this one is biased and an incomplete representation.

There are ways in which I view my job as very cushy.  After several years of food services and retails work during high school and my undergraduate years, I made a vow to myself that I would not spend my life working at a job where I had to ask permission to go to the restroom.   In fact, it is hard to imagine many jobs that provide more day to day autonomy.

Being a tenured/tenure track faculty member is secure in the sense that there is no need to worry on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis about having a job or how much your paycheck will be that pay period.  These are very good things.  These jobs also provide benefits and even the not great packages are better than what many people in this country have.

College professor is among the more esteemed jobs in our society.  Losing ground (I think) and not nearly as respected as in many other countries but certainly not something for which you need to apologize at your next reunion.

Does that mean my job is a little corner of paradise?  Not entirely. There are plenty of daily stresses and a plethora of incompatible institutional goals that complicate life.  For example, even at a small teaching institution the thing that will make or break my case for tenure is scholarship (i.e, publications) but the things that fill my days are teaching and service/administration related.  As a result the idea of vacation quickly becomes research time. Daily stresses include time crunches, too many meetings that are not productive, complaining students, technological glitches, etc.

The hours for those of us who are doing more than phoning it in are very long.  Sure that is true of many other professions but the long hours of academia are magnified by two things.

First, the flawed perception that our jobs are so cushy that we only have to work a few hours a week (after all I only teach 12 hours a week for a little over 8 months of the year) leads to a lack of understanding by those outside of academics (our families, our non-academic friends, state legislators who fund our salaries, etc). This isn’t helped by the fact that much of our job is invisible because it takes place in our heads, in the middle of the night, at home in our pajamas, etc.  Now before you are tempted to say, “so work where you can be seen” more, let me say that this isn’t always possible.  Often what you need to work is not available if you are being visible (e.g., quiet time without distractions, a decent computer, privacy, time in a library/the field/the lab, etc.).

Second, as this response over at Rate Your Students discusses, the salaries for most faculty are far below those earned by others with advanced degrees that are often earned more quickly and similar time demands.  With a Ph.D. and eight years of experience, my earnings are still below $50K a year and when you factor in student loan payments and taxes it drops down to about $27K  to use for actual living and another $2 or $3K is spent on expenses directly related to my jobs (e.g., material for classes, research, professional dues, supplies, etc.)

However, few if any of us entered this profession for the money.  Most of us came entered into our work with the mind set of a vocation.  I think most of us became professors for because we valued knowledge or wanted to believed in the power of education to change lives.

So why the dissatisfaction?  Here are things that lead to my own dissatisfaction and I suspect they are part of larger patterns not just idiosyncratic personal preferences.

First, being a college professor has changed dramatically in the last several years as colleges and universities have started to treat students as customers and to focus first and foremost on the bottom line and profit.  Faculty are ask to do more and more with less and less in the way of resources.  Many departments have lost faculty lines despite increases in enrollment.  Even at teaching intensive colleges the expectation of publication has grown but labs, faculty computer resources, and library holdings have not been updated to reflect this change.  Increasingly faculty are losing the very autonomy that was a major perk of this job to oversight, assessment, dress codes, mandated Saturday classes, etc.

Second, most of the folks who become university faculty were decent or better students.  This means that we see the antics of our students through the lens of a very different world view and reference group.  Add to that generational differences and there is lots of room for misunderstanding. (this set of points deserves more elaboration at some point)

Third and the biggest issue for me, the personal cost of being a university faculty member is enormous.  I don’t just mean the dollars and cents cost of the education to become one but the sacrifices in relationship and balance in life.  In most fields, you don’t choose where to live when searching for an academic job — instead you hope to get a job and go where it takes you even if that is far from family or in the exact opposite of your preferred living situation (e.g., rural when you are a city person, cold climate when you find 80 degrees cold, etc.).

Academic life is also complicated for marriage and parenthood.  Couples where both members are academics often face years of living in different states if they both hope for full-time positions.  Marriages between academic women and non-academic men are especially fragile.  Motherhood is a risky bet especially before you have tenure as it may cause others to see you as less dedicated to your job but waiting until after tenure often means waiting until you are at least in your mid-thirties and often closer to forty which brings its own set of problems. Of all the things I gave up in order to be a college professor, being a mom is at the top of the list.

Heck even dating and having friends can be tough.  Imagine being dressed up and relaxing with a drink someplace out on the town and having one of your students as your server — sort of takes the romance away from things.  In small communities being a faculty member means living on a very public stage even when you aren’t at work.

So is my job cushy? Yes and no.  When I get to share something that fascinates  me with a student who gets it? Oh yeah.  When there is 10 inches of the snow piled up on the ground and I can choose to work from home?  Yes.  When I spend yet another Christmas Day alone because the people I love are several states away ? No  When I am wasting days that I should be writing dealing with students who submit papers consisting of text copied directly from Wikipedia? No. When I see my .75 percent raise for a year combined with increases in insurance and parking? Not really.  When I spend five years in a probationary period with unclear guidelines for what I must do during those five years to be granted tenure? Not so much.

Am I ready to leave academics? No. Can I imagine a time with the negatives will outweigh the positives? Yes.

This blog will serve as a place to capture ideas for teaching, reflections on and rants about teaching, and my experiences as a sociology faculty member at a small undergraduate regional campus.

Curious about the name of my blog?  Mostly it was available.  However, it does say something about who I am.  What you see on the outside doesn’t reveal the more interesting parts of who I am which are hidden inside.  Pomegranates are also a part of my favorite season of the year — autumn.

I plan to have a set of posts where I collect links and information for various topics I cover in my classes.  As I run across ideas, I’ll be adding them to these topic posts.

Understanding Race.org website