Most teachers I know are reflective folks, using the end of the semester to honestly look at what worked, what didn't, what to toss, cut down, revise.
Most teachers I know also will swear that the new year starts in August and not January.
I don't disagree.
But as the days get shorter and shorter, and dark at 450p has me longing for bed, it's easy to think about the year ending, the world turning, to think about what has happened and try and peer into the future.
There are still over 400 people dying every day of Covid. Some places and cities seem to half-heartedly be asking politely and quietly if people will start wearing masks again but no one seems to be listening. Only 13% of the population is up to date on their vaccinations and boosters. Racist cops are still killing Black men and women with impunity. Queer and Asian and Jewish folks are still being attacked, live in fear and danger. Extreme white supremacists and the barely hiding it politicians and public figures that support them seem determined to get people killed with their hate speech and rhetoric.
And why did I publish chapters in edited collections rather than journal articles.
The world is awful.
It's been awful.
There does not seem to be an end in sight to any of it.
New York City is going to cut staff and locations for the New York Public Library because of budget cuts. But their police department is the biggest and most expensive in the country. Their spending will exceed $11 BILLION.
There are politicians who voted AGAINST protecting same-sex marriage.
The Voting Rights Act has been gutted, and recent runoff Georgia elections were held up as proof that democracy worked but the long lines, the delays in mostly minority neighborhoods told a different story.
There are public figures arguing we shouldn't make sure public school children are fed.
Books that serve our most vulnerable students are being banned by small minded, bigoted people who have nothing but hate in their heart.
For some more than others, it continues to be dangerous, deadly even, to leave your house.
So when those students asked me what I hoped for next semester, I mentioned some of this. That the world is an awful place. That the last couple of years have fundamentally broken my belief in the people as collective working for the greater good. But that my students always kept a small kernel of belief alive. That despite all the awful I still had hope that next semester will be better.
What does the future in THIS world look like?
Does every possible system- healthcare, education, infrastructure, just barely keep going until there is the end of the cascade of collapse? Until people are too disabled or dead to keep the economy or anything else going?
What is the end game to just letting people be disabled, to die? What is the logic? Is the capitalistic life the holiday commercials sell this time of year really worth this body count?
I honestly do not understand, have not been able to understand, the end game.
And amongst all this I've been prepping my tenure portfolio.
I had great support from Twitter academics last year in drafting and prepping my 3rd year review. Folks were so generous with their time, looking at drafts of my statements, offering advice. I am so grateful. Last year I was a nervous wreck putting together all the documents and artifacts. I was so anxious about not being renewed, losing my job. I printed and prepped back up plans. I cried, a lot, when I contemplated what I was going to do. It was a lonely, frightening, awful time.
But then I was renewed. And I really only had two pieces of feedback- why did I not present at conferences anymore/lately...
So this year I focused on applying to present to online conferences and was/am excited to present at two. But I also wrote in my narrative that in my first year I hadn't planned on presenting because I didn't want to be away from campus and the last couple of years it was a combination of the dangers of Covid in traveling, conferences that became superspreader events, the ethics of traveling with climate change, and the issues with traveling to and supporting certain places.
This semester I wanted to take the two articles that I have in progress and finish them and send them off. But once again I taught an overload and every semester seems harder than the last. The trauma is cumulative. The stress and anxiety continues. The world continues to be awful. I got more Guardian ad Litem cases and the semester just flew by. There just wasn't any time.
So while I do wish I'd gotten to those and hope maybe over break of in the spring I can make time to get them both done, I have enough of a publication record both before I got here and now to meet the tenure requirements here so I think I'm okay.
Because of the positive response to my 3rd year review, having good yearly evals every year, I was not nervous this semester putting together the tenure portfolio. We do ours in Interfolio and I have done a good job the last three and a half years of saving and keeping artifacts so the most time intensive was uploading documents and renaming so they made sense. I felt good about the documentation. THen I needed to revise my narratives to both update them and add headings so that it was easy to match the narrative to the artifacts. I also had to write a new one for service. I felt good about all of it.
This process got me thinking about what my future is here. What my post-tenure plans are.
I was explicit in my narratives with the phrase "If I am awarded tenure..." because honestly, if I don't get tenure, I will need to find another job, that job will be teaching high school English, and I won't publish anymore. So I am both excited about the chance to dedicate full time my energy to my book project and resigned that nothing about that may see the light of day.
We've suggested an English Education Concentration, and I have some things I really would love to do with this. I've talked to our program coordinator and department chair about with the renovation setting up a dedicated classroom in our building that I can set up like a high school classroom, use to teach our English Education class, and use as a learning lab, resource. I'm interested in seeing if we can offer internships for these students who want to be high school teachers as tutors in the writing center, as TAs to our GE English classes. Hands on teaching experience can be hard to get, but these are both ways I could get our students experience. I'd like to codify some of the things we sometimes do now for our majors who want to be high school teachers.
But I am not putting a lot of work into these things this year, or rather, the semester we have left.
Because I have a habit of going all in on projects, doing all this extra, outside work for something only to have whatever powers that be not move forward with a project or nothing coming of it. A lot of times I do this because my brain needs to work on something RIGHT AWAY. Often it is because teaching, lesson planning, pedagogy, all comes easy to me so it's easy for me to do. And a lot of it is due to twenty plus years, a whole career of being told by others that "of course" I have time for this because I am not married and don't have kids.
Most of the time I don't mind volunteering for stuff. Especially if it's something that is easy for me. But a lot of the time I say yes to something because I feel I have to, have to prove my worth, have to stay busy, have to in order to keep my job, and that knee jerk answer often results in hard schedules, stressful days down the road.
So I'm trying with all things to be more mindful. To only put energy towards things I believe in, where my time is of good use. Where I can see the benefit. To ASK questions before I say yes about what's involved, what the goals and mission are.
I have complicated feelings about this reflection, this stance, because there's the cliche about professors getting tenured and then checking out.
I have no intention to stop teaching, volunteering, researching, serving.
But I have been thinking long-term what my life looks like here if I am awarded tenure.
I have always had to hustle in my jobs. I have always felt precarious. I have never felt safe. Secure. I have never NOT worried about how to pay bills, how to make it to the next year. I have lived a whole life totally focused just on putting one foot in front of another.
I am 46.
And if I get tenure, it will be the first time I will feel stable long-term. I was starting to feel stable in Albuquerque in my high school teaching job and probably would have gotten there, but then I uprooted everything, I moved here. And I started all over again.
I have seen a lot of scholars on Twitter share their tenure stories. Awful stories that prove academia is not a meritocracy. Wonderful stories of support systems and collectives holding people up. Thoughtful reflections that academia is a marathon not a sprint, and yet grad school only teaches the sprint, that it is hard to fight against that and retrain for the marathon.
I love my students here. I love teaching here. I have been very clear that I have no intention of leaving. I would really love the opportunity to be here long-term and make long-term plans, set down roots for long-term programs. Build on community connections I've already made.
But I'd also love some time to breathe. To be more strategic in what I put time and energy towards. To feel safe enough to say no without worrying about being fired.
The tenure portfolios are due 20 January. But we're back 4 January and classes start back 11 January, so I did not want to be frantic or feel rushed those first couple of weeks back. I always like to clear the decks before we're back so I can focus all my attention on the students and those first impressions. I had a plan this semester, a schedule for when each section's artifacts needed to be updated, when to revise narratives, and it ensured that I got everything done but never felt rushed. All my stuff was uploaded before we wound down the end of the semester. The only thing I had left was revising and updating my narratives and I finished that today.
So I submitted my portfolio.
My hope and plan was that it meant I could actually rest the next three weeks, that I could recover from yet another busy and hard semester.
Higher ed is a weird business. It's strange that so many people never know what they're doing from one semester to the next. Or that those of us lucky enough to get steady jobs still face precarity year to year with contracts, every three years with reviews, at tenure, promotion. It is hard to build support systems and programs when so many of your folks may not be there next month, next semester. I know a lot of places have faced a lot of turnover the last few years, some by choice and some not. I know a lot of places are paring down, shutting down, whole departments or colleges that just no longer exist anymore.
Yet academics are evaluated on what they accomplish, produce, bring in. Hard to do under great conditions. Ridiculous under the last few years.
So hope and the future are odd things to contemplate.
Grad school certainly has no conversations about this, about what happens after you get the job, how you keep the job, what keeping the job takes, what comes next.
So I'm not sure what my future looks like.
I hope I get to stay here.
I love my house. I am grateful for my wetland woods. I love my Guardian work. Under ridiculous circumstances, I think I've against all odds, managed to start a life here. I'd like to continue to build on it. I'd like to not feel rushed, pressured, scared, about what all comes next.
So as everyone's year ends and begins, as people reflect on where they are and what comes next, I hope the future is better, whatever that looks like for you. That is my wish for you.
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