Back to School

I'm playing on facebook the day before classes start and two days before my first classes when it hits me, the little flutter of joy somewhere in my chest. I catch my breath. It's time. BACK TO SCHOOL.

I have no idea how spastic I was for the very first first day of school, but I know that I was crazy looking forward to it. I still think that the first day of school is just about the coolest day of the year. I've been watching my friends posting First Day pictures of their kids, and eagerly awaiting my own first day - one of the most glorious perks of life in academia is that you get a first day of school every year until you retire.

Buying school supplies is so fun that those of us without kids
 buy them for other people.  This photo from Back to School
shopping with my bestie for my church's school supply mission.

There are calendar years and fiscal years, and different new years in lots of cultures. The Jewish new year is Rosh Hashanah. The Chinese new year tends to be around the beginning of February. And for lots and lots of people, a year begins in January. I can adapt. If someone says ‘that was a tough year,’ I know she’s probably talking about a year that began in January, or perhaps a year bracketed by birthdays – the year she was 22, perhaps. If a friend says ‘Next year we’re going to keep the house cleaner,’ he probably means that as a resolution beginning 01-01. But for me, the year begins in August and ends in May. A year is catalogued not as 2002, but as 02-03. Summer is an extra time, a yearly bonus, a time to catch up with family and housework that the year didn't allow time for, time to research and read, time to sleep 9 glorious hours every night. But no matter how great the summer, no matter how bad the phase of my life, ever since I started first grade at age 5, August has always promised a renewal, a new year, new chances, new ideas, new people. The 3 years after college that I was out of school were good for their own reasons, but when August rolled around and I went to yet another day of work instead of to school, it was not only disappointing, it was disorienting.

I am about to have my 34th first day of school. It will be my 6th first day of school where I teach now. My 2nd first day as a tenured professor. I have had 8 first days since I finished graduate school. My first day of school as a teacher was 13 years ago. This is an auspicious year for me - 13 has always been my lucky number. I am, I have to say, incredibly and unspeakably grateful for every single one of those first days, for the fortune to have an excellent education, to have been able to spend year after year in a classroom, to have spent the better part of my life - and I do mean the better part of my life - learning.

 But I can't find words to express my gratitude for the 13 of those years that have been as a teacher, because I've learned the most in that time. I remember a professor in my Masters degree who just seemed to know everything, and I asked him "How, HOW, do you know all this? I will never know all this!" and he said "Oh, wait until you're a teacher. You don't really know something until you teach it." He was right. He was so, so very right. I really thought I knew Hamlet after I'd, you know, written about it in my dissertation. I freaking knew that play. Backwards and forwards. And then I was assigned my first Shakespeare classes, in my first tenure-track job. Re-reading the play to teach it taught me Hamlet. Preparing my discussion notes taught me Hamlet. My students' responses taught me Hamlet. It felt miraculous, recognizing that I'd be learning for the rest of my life, just by doing my job. 

Most of us start out each fall giddy with anticipation, ready to MOLD YOUNG MINDS and INSPIRE FUTURE LEADERS, hopped up from full nights of sleep all summer and perhaps in some cases a possible marathon of Dead Poets Society and Mona Lisa Smile. The weeks will pass. The joy will not last. The grumpiness will set in. A student will miss a required conference and have to be penalized. Cell phones will be confiscated in class. Unprepared students will be sent out, and they will complain that it's so very unfair and will possibly even go gripe about me on Ratemyprofessors.com, writing comments so foul as to deserve deletion by site administrators. (Should anyone choose to visit the site, observe the blank comments section on a few of the posts. There were once comments there. I have on this site a fairly good record of the dates I passed out graded papers in years gone by - it is the day before the date of the post, in many cases). Even in Dead Poets Society, there's the red-headed kid not standing on his desk at the end, bitter and angry and untouched by Mr. Keating's magic. There's always the one, at the very least.

See all the kids not standing? They don't care about Mr. Keating
and they didn't appreciate his life lessons. Not yet.
photo from http://www.whatascript.com/dead-poets-society.html

Ideals collapse, and yet they endure.

The summer of 1985, when I was about to start high school, I fell in love with an ideal of Back to School from which I may never fully recover, thanks to one of my teenage girl magazines, probably Young Miss or Seventeen. Whichever one it was ran an August issue photo spread that was all about Back to School, showing red-cheeked girls in sweaters and plaid skirts, in misty fall afternoon scenes of football games or chummily piled into someone's Jeep or Range Rover or something, all friends and laughing with their books tucked under their arms. I was completely in love with it. I paged through it breathlessly, soaking in that this was what school would feel like - it would feel like this felt - forgetting entirely that I was in south Georgia and it would be fully January before we had anything that could be considered sweater weather (I usually got a single sweater at Christmas, since it wasn't like you'd get much wear out of more than that). When those realities began to sink in, as the fall wore on and it was hot and I didn't have very many friends and certainly no Jeeps to hang around on, I had to come to terms with the fact that my Back to School ideal would not come true any time soon. But I had a wonderful year, nonetheless. I confess, though, that if you look at my senior portrait four years later, you'll see me in a sweater and plaid skirt, hanging on to that ideal in a faded form, insisting on carrying it with me into my academic future. 

The joy and the promise of Back to School is an ideal, and ideals fall apart when we get close to them, like meeting your favorite movie star and realizing he's not as brilliant or funny as the characters he plays, but is still a nice guy. The ideal of Back to School is a heady one for academics. And we do carry it with us, because for all that my first fall of high school did not turn out to be a teen magazine spread, I made some new friends and football games were fun, and over the years there were cars to pile into and girls to laugh with as we walked from class to class with our books tucked under our arms. Ideals are useful. They teach us what we want. They are an anchor for us when we're spinning, a home to which we can return when reality devolves into brown Christmases and grade complaints. 

With my two best friends from high school, goofing around as we got ready for
our next big Back to School - in college. Both of these friends just posted on fb
the Back to School photos of their daughters. Some realities are better than the ideal.

The first day of Back to School is so full of promise, and it won't live up to all the promises we force it to make to us. But it's a beginning, a return to an ideal. And in seeking our ideals, we grow and learn, a little more every year.

So when I see students posting pictures of the books they bought for my classes on facebook and twitter, when I see my friends post pictures of their kids in their First Day outfits posing on the front steps with their shiny new backpacks, when my dearest bestie from grad school melts my heart with her annual ode to sharpened pencils, and when my other friends are texting me that they're almost done with their syllabi and without a moment to lose, I get breathless with anticipation. The School Year is Here! 13-14, Babyyyyy!

Happy New Year, my friends.

Syllabus Agony

Syl.la.bus. Sillybus. Syllabus.

Forms:  Pl. syllabi /ˈsɪləbaɪ/ or syllabuses /ˈsɪləbəsɪz/ .
Etymology:  < modern Latin syllabus, usually referred to an alleged Greek σύλλαβος .
(Oxford English Dictionary)

The first recorded English usage, according to the OED, was in 1656, to mean a sort of summary of contents for non-printed dissemination of knowledge, sort-of like a table of contents for a series of lectures, as well as a brief statement of the contents of a treatise.

It's been in use since 1889 in its most common usage, to mean "a statement of the subjects covered by a course of instruction."

It is the bones of the course. The policies, the assignments, the reading schedule. It constitutes an agreement of responsibilities, proposed by the professor and implicitly agreed upon by students by their continuation in the course after having that agreement offered to them. It is a contract between professor and student, which even further underscores the deep and terrible shame that many students don't bother to do much more than glance at it once before it disappears, crumpled, into the vast recesses of a bookbag. Yes, there are students who on the first day, as I'm going over the syllabus and books and such, carefully get their portable hole-punch out of their backpacks and punch the holes so they can file it neatly into their already-labeled course ring-binder. They will then go back to their dorms and meticulously highlight the assignment descriptions and record the due dates in their daybooks. But those students are not the majority. Five weeks in to the semester, after something like 25 reading assignments and probably at least one writing assignment, a student will ask "Professor, when is the next writing assignment due?" Response: "It's on the syllabus." Student: "...um, syllabus," (said while absently unzipping the bookbag and idly ruffling through things) "...yeah, can I get another one of those?"

The bottom is where the syllabus goes.

Also: When are your office hours? What is your email address? Where is your office? How many absences do I get? What happens if I skip a test? Are we going to read just out of this one book or will there be other books I need to get? When is the last day of class?

It's on the syllabus. It's all on the syllabus.

Because before we can even get to the subjects covered by a course of instruction, we must include every policy of the school regarding student expectations and behavior in class, we must include the course objectives determined by our department, and we must include every detail that we ourselves want to have laid out and clear before that grade challenge at the end of the term. The syllabus is where we cover the bases, and where we cover our asses. It gets longer every semester because we have to go back in and clarify everything that students found loopholes in so as to (we hope, we hope each time) avoid any further awkward scenarios. Some things you don't put on there, because they would seem petty or you just hope they never happen again.*

Outcomes and Objectives - here is the information and here are the skills you are to have learned by the end of the term and I'm stating it clearly here so you don't imagine we're just sort of reading generally around in some literature and stuff with the purpose of making you well-rounded or whatever. Course Policies - you get 3 unexcused absences and here is what constitutes an excused absence and I really, really, really mean it when I say I'll penalize you for excessive absences so please don't push me on absences because holy crap I hate the arguments over this more than just about anything. Food and drink in the classroom - I swear to almighty God I actually have to specify which beverages are permitted ("food is not permitted but water, juice, and soda are fine") because I don't want to have to specify "non-alcoholic" on the syllabus after the time years ago that a student took "beverages are permitted but food is not" to include a Coors Lite. Cell phones - strictly prohibited because no you don't need it to know what time it is since you don't wear a watch, and I will count you absent if I see you texting, and no you don't need to answer the call from your mother while sitting in the middle of the third row of class just as we're covering the rhetorical triangle because she's your mother and we can only hope that she'll understand that you were in class and couldn't answer. Assignments - due at the beginning of class and not 25 minutes into class after you finally got the printer to work in the lab full of students that you got to six minutes before class started, and yes 4-5 pages means a minimum of 4 full pages and a maximum of 5, and you have to address the specific assignment and not just write whatever you felt like because you thought my expository essay assignment was boring and you wanted to do something you found more challenging so you wrote a short story about yourself.

Then we put in the disabilities statement, and the teacher licensure objectives, and whatever else comes down from administrative sources as things that must go on every syllabus. And then, only then, do we get to the subjects covered by the course of instruction. The policies take time, but after the first creation of a first syllabus, they are mostly tweaking to adjust and adapt. It's pretty rare to totally rewrite from scratch. If a course is one you've taught a few times and you like it pretty much the way it is, if you're just changing out a few readings, there's not a whole lot to it beyond updating due dates based on that semester's calendar and adding any new personal policies you've picked up from conversations with teacher friends, like counting students absent for texting, or requiring the Turnitin.com receipt as the cover page for an essay.

The real work on a syllabus, the one that we dread sitting down to do but can kind of enjoy while in the middle of it, is the new or totally-revamped syllabus. I can update a syllabus I like in about a day, which includes due-date-changing, updated policies, even changing some readings or an assignment or two and posting on the online course management system (Moodle, Blackboard, whatever).  But a new or revamped course can take over 200 hours of work. This is almost impossible to do while teaching, so most of us do this over summer, when there might be time to read dozens of books before choosing which ones go on the reading assignments, pairing and repairing and re-repairing readings to see what goes well together and what themes emerge or what possibilities emerge for students to find cool open doors for their own work. Then there is the agony over the workload we're assigning. Is it too much? Is it challenging enough? Am I assigning tons of reading for periods in the semester when they'll be getting burned out or frustrated? Am I covering enough territory to give them a real sense of what else is out there? Am I going to kill them with all this reading?

I always say that the real divide between students and teacher when it comes to coursework is that they see 15 long weeks that need filling with stuff, and we see the entire world of literature that somehow has to get edited down and crammed into the miniscule 15 weeks we're given to cover everything. Why do we overdo it sometimes? Because we might be painfully aware that this general education literature course will be the last time some of our students read, so that last book for the last week of class may well be the last book that student ever reads in his life. No pressure. Or we might find it depressing that there are more major works of literary theory than there are class days in the graduate theory course, so we have to choose which ones to cover and which ones to leave off, hoping to God that we're not leaving off the one that would have made more sense to the students struggling to grasp the concepts.

Me, building a new syllabus from scratch.
Photo from: http://librarianinreallife.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/gandalf_201.jpg

Then we run around to our colleagues showing them the new syllabus reading schedule and asking if we're overdoing it. Then we re-do it a few times. Then we find the typos we didn't find in the last six revisions. Then we read it out loud to our pets to see if we missed any incomplete sentences or other casualties of cutting-and-pasting.

And at some point it is just done. We post it online. We print it and staple it and pass it out on the first day of class. If you're me, you read portions of it out loud to them so that later they can't say they didn't know that the professor doesn't answer work email over the weekend.

And the conscientious ones punch their holes and place it in the ring-binder, and the ones we'll sigh over later absent-mindedly stuff it into their bookbags where it will go to meet last year's syllabi and some food wrappers and someone's phone number, and we go over which editions of the books to get and what the first reading assignment will be for the next class period. And then we're done.

And three of them will drop the class for a variety of reasons. And the rest will come back.

Contract signed.

* Things that I have considered adding to my syllabus:

• No sunglasses to hid the shiner you got in a fight over the weekend.
• No asking athletes for autographs while in the middle of peer review.
• No dipping (when this kid pulled his spit bottle out out of his backpack and spit into it, the Kappa Delta across from him visibly threw up in her mouth).
• No transparent clothing in class.
• No changing shoes and socks in the middle of class.
• Backpacks must be stored safely under or up against desks and not sprawled out in the aisles where I will trip over them.
• A Facebook Policies section: You may friend me on facebook but I will put you in a restricted list so you can't see anything but a handful of pictures of me with my family and a few updates about school events, so please do the same since I do not need to see tagged photos of you doing kegstands. Also, I can put 2 and 2 together so if you post about your epic roadtrip over the weekend please do not then tell me you couldn't finish the reading because you had the flu. Also, it shows up in my newsfeed if you and another student who has friended me have a conversation about how much you hate my class and what a bitch I am.
• Grade-grubbing makes me crazy, so don't even think about it. Demanding that I explain to you how the grade was reached is only going to make me cut and paste into my response email the portions of this syllabus where I explain in detail how that assignment is evaluated, and to remind you to read my comments and the long paragraph at the end of the essay where I advise you on what you could have done better along with what you did well. 
• Recovery from tattoos is not an excused absence.
• Please consult the academic calendar before planning your wedding so that you do not book the venue for your ceremony for the exact time for which the university has scheduled your final exam.
• You may not substitute your own choices for class readings, even if you think that other book by the same author is better.

Must Be Nice To Have Summers Off

Even with a view like this, it's hard to stop thinking about work.

I just went on vacation. A real vacation, for a whole week, during which I checked my school email only three times and answered only one of those messages (from a student who took an Incomplete in an early summer class for medical reasons, who was distressed and needed reassurance). I did not read for work, although I had work stuff that needed reading and had even slipped one of those books into the bag we packed with tablet and chargers and novels. Instead I read, in heavenly bliss, a modernist novel that my husband had read earlier in the summer and really enjoyed and which is way out of my area, and it was amazing. I hung out with family and ate and even made a side jaunt over to my alma mater for one day for a reunion of faculty and students from my old department.

On our way back from vacation, my husband and I stopped by to visit his brother for a few minutes. My brother-in-law likes to tease me about work, and he wryly reminded me that "summers are for fun." Summers are time off, he says. No working in the summers. I laughed.

I wish. Sort of.

I had a summer off, when I moved to where I live now. I finished my spring term at the school I was leaving and moved here at the end of May and then had no class to teach in the summer for the first time in 8 years. I had no workplace to go to for the first summer since starting college at 17. I felt strangely untethered. I was weirdly between research projects. I unpacked boxes, and walked the dog 5 times a day (old dog, short walks), and drove around town learning my way around, and painted things, and planted things. When pre-semester meetings began in mid-August I was so relieved to have an anchor again that I could hardly contain myself. I was rested and restored, but I couldn't have gone on like that much longer without losing all sense of connection to the world around me. I am an academic - it's how I enter the world. Too much time away (like, a whole summer) and I feel like gravity isn't holding me down adequately anymore.

Moving into my house in VA in 2008.

That summer, I heard maybe 4 times more often than usual the hated accusation hurled at academics nationwide: Must Be Nice.

Must Be Nice To Have Summers Off. Even when said with something resembling humor, it drips with scorn and resentment. Must Be Nice.

This is only one version. There are variations. Must Be Nice To Be Out In Your Garden On A Tuesday Morning When The Rest Of Us Are Working. Must Be Nice To Have Breaks All The Time. Must Be Nice To Have Tenure (1).

I've heard my other garden variety academic friends stumble through awkward, shamed answers, trying to explain how hard we work, how these mythical "breaks" are just chances to live the lives other people live when they clock out at the end of the day, saved up for whole semesters so we can enjoy all those evenings and weekends all at once over Christmas or over the part of summer that we're not teaching a summer class. (I will not discuss Spring Break or fall break, for those of us who get a fall break, as these are merely days to work at the office on a relatively quiet campus, almost always frantically spent catching up on grading. If you've ever graded papers for 7 hour stretches several days in a row, you'll know how absurd it is to think of that as a break). And I will concede that it's not like I'm working my usual grinding hours during a break. I figure I work more like a 30-hour week during breaks. But since during the semester I'm usually working as long as I'm awake -- not kidding, I have stopped at the office on my way home from church and not finished until dinnertime, at which point I came home and read for Monday's class until bedtime -- I feel really okay with working a lighter schedule some of the time. I do enjoy planting my garden and fixing up the house a bit over the summer.

Growing tomatoes is soothing.

I usually just say Yes. It Is Nice. It's very nice to have summers off. Thank You. I don't have a problem with this being sufficient because it is so often followed, necessarily, with: Oh, why no, I'm afraid I can't help you with your volunteer project in June, as I will be working. Oh, no, well not July, either, as I will be working. Oh, no, I'm taking a short vacation the first week of August so I won't be available. Oh, darnit, after vacation I'll be in pre-semester planning, meetings and course prep, so I won't be able to help you with your project then, either.

As for the Must Be Nice To Have Thursdays Off, or whatever variation it takes in that particular instance, I can honestly reply that I'm working from home, in my pyjamas, and you only see me because on days I work at home I often take the dog out for a nice little walk  (and because my car is out front and you care so much about who gets what that you keep track of these things, but of course I don't say that part). I say: Yes, It Is Nice To Work From Home One Day A Week Because I Can Wear My Pyjamas All Day While I Grade And Catch Up On Emails And Collect Sources For My Next Project. I say this with no snark whatsoever. It really is awesome to wear pyjamas all day. In the semester of grad school that I was reading for my doctoral qualifying exams I would spend my non-teaching days entirely in pyjamas, reading theory from 7 am until 10 pm, book open even while I prepared and ate my meals, and when I was done I would take a shower and put on fresh pyjamas (2). This was one of my favorite periods in my life and I remember it with almost weepy nostalgia.

Sometimes, though, it really does get to me and I wish I could reply to these people what I'm thinking: Yeah? Go back to school for 7 more years and work 80 hour weeks and you, too, can walk your dog on a Thursday at 2 in the afternoon. 

But while I find the acid tone behind the Must Be Nice unsettling - and it is, after all, intended to be unsettling, designed to shake me out of my decadent lifestyle as an elitist mooch on society and bring me to the realization that everyone else is out there working very, very hard whilst I traipse around the ivory tower in my silk smoking jacket calling for the butler to pour me another martini (3) - the truth is that even if I did have summers off, I wouldn't want them. I had that one once, and it was confusing to me. Oh, for the first week or so it was lovely to wake up whenever I liked and not have anywhere to be at all. But that was partly because I didn't know anyone here, which isn't a really lovely reason to have nowhere to go. And I had plenty to do around the house, so I'd have a cup of coffee and walk my little, old doggy, Felix, around the block once and then pour myself some more coffee and open up a few boxes to unpack. So it wasn't like I was totally unoccupied. But it wore on me. Before long the lack of a schedule was disorienting. I had tasks, but they had no real deadlines (who cares when the bathroom gets painted?) and they weren't exactly intellectually challenging. I even inadvertently made a few of them more challenging than they needed to be, turning the arrangement of furniture into a major problem-solving exercise. But it wasn't enough.

Petting a six-toed Hemingway cat on vacation in Key West in 2011. 

Every summer since, I have taught at least an independent study, to have something to ground me. I know without teaching of some kind during those months, which seem long in May and excruciatingly brief by August, I will lose my mind a bit. and I have massively overlapping research projects now, always more work to do than time to do it. There is a list out there in internetland, called You Might Be An Academic If... (variants include You Might Be A Graduate Student, You Might Be A College Professor, etc.) which I've posted elsewhere on this blog. My favorite is the one about accepting guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation. It's true. Even finally relaxing on a deck chair at a cabin in the mountains, with a novel in my hand and a drink in front of me, it takes effort to fight back the rising feeling of "But the article I promised to work on. I have to get back to that article."

Must Be Nice. Ah, well. To each his own, I suppose. I do wish there were less resentment towards the collegiate folk. We're really working our butts off, and for not nearly as much money or job security as you think. But maybe we're just really lucky to be doing what we love so we seem less angry about our jobs, so that makes it look as though we're not working as hard? I don't know. Many aspects of my job can be a real drag, a REAL drag, but I didn't work that hard for that many years to qualify for a job I didn't want, so maybe it isn't that it that the job is easy, just that I make it look easy.

And seriously, if you do want to be free to work in your garden on a Thursday morning, or have summers "off," consider going back to school for 7 more years and working 80 hour weeks. Works for me.

At Kew Gardens, on a study abroad, in summer 2013.

(1) I am working on a separate entry for this one, for Tenure, that most contentious issue, and won't address it further here.

(2) Each week I took a 2 hour break on Tuesdays to have dinner with my best friend and a 1 hour break on Wednesdays to watch The West Wing. I did not then, nor do I now, consider the intense restrictions of that life at terribly limiting. I couldn't do it forever, but I have enough of the ascetic in me to treasure the time I spent totally immersed like that in my discipline.

(3) I really do like a good martini, though. A good, dirty martini is just about as good as it gets, but I have to go easy on those things because they'll knock me right out when I'm not looking.

You Might Be An Academic If...

You can analyze the significance of appliances you cannot operate.
Your office is better decorated than your apartment.
You have ever taken a scholarly article to a bar.
Everything reminds you of something in your discipline.
You have ever discussed academic matters at a sporting event.
You have ever spent $50 or more on photocopying while researching a single paper.
There is a microfilm reader in the library that you consider to be "yours."
You can tell the time of day by the flow of traffic in the library.
You regard ibuprofin as a health supplement.
You consider all papers to be works in progress.
You find the bibliographies of books to be as interesting as the actual text.
You can't watch a movie without analyzing its hidden cultural significance.
You have given up trying to keep your books organized and are now just trying to keep them all in one general area.
You have accepted guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation.
You find yourself explaining to children that you went to "20th grade."
You wonder how long you can live on pasta without getting scurvy.
You have ever explained to someone, at length, the philosophical approach you used to organize your movie/music collection.
You look forward to time off so you can do laundry.
You wonder if MLA style allows you to cite talking to yourself as "personal communication."

I Profess.

This is my love letter to Academia.

It won't be like the love letters of great poets to their muses, grand and epic and reaching for a sense of the infinite. It's more like the notes passed between ordinary teenagers in history class. Because academia, the industry I work in and love, is not epic.

There is no Ivory Tower. That is a myth perpetuated by media and art, invested in the idea of a legendary place where intellectuals float around on clouds of ideas to escape the annoying and difficult parts of The Real World. It is as real as unicorns. I grew up in academia and I've worked in academia for over a dozen years and I can tell you wholeheartedly that there is no such thing as a place without the annoying and difficult parts of the real world. (I have also worked outside of academia. The frustrations are the same. Same shit, different co-workers). If I could encapsulate my life as an intellectual, it would be desperately trying to concentrate on either the paper I am grading or the paper I am writing while ants we can't seem to get rid of crawl around in the kitchen sink and the roof leak over my head grows from the rain that won't stop while my husband is on the phone trying to get the cable company to stop screwing us out of the few channels we can afford and the dog can't decide if he wants us to let him out onto the deck or down to the basement or if he wants to vomit on the carpet again.

Perhaps people believe in the Ivory Tower because they think the happy bubble of protection they had in college is the same for everyone who works at the school where they enjoyed the innocent existence we work very hard to provide them with for the 4+ years they spend studying the ideas that will help them join the world as educated people. We had those years too, and we think everyone should get to have them. Those years are awesome. They are amazing. They end at graduation, for everyone. (For some students, let's remember, they never existed, because too many of our students work 3 jobs and raise 3 kids while reading 500 pages a week and writing multiple 15-page papers, all while hoping to Holy Jesus that the car doesn't break down again. I call that Real).

Perhaps I should say that The Ivory Tower is as real as Camelot. Because Camelot never existed but we'd all prefer it did (sorry if I'm bursting any bubbles for you - one of the very real aspects of academia is being constantly faced with the sad realities that many of our dreams are not real. There is a definite downside to deconstructing everything. Kind of like finding out there is no Santa Claus every single day). Another very real aspect of academia is the constant judgement we face from our neighbors, our family (not in my case, but in many), from the media, from Congress. Listen to television long enough and you'll think we're all tweed-shrouded, fancy-pants, elitist assholes who work 3 hours a week for 8 months a year and have no bills, massive bank accounts, and armies of grad students to do all our work for us. I don't know if anyone like that actually exists. I've never met one.

Like most academics, I work roughly 75 hours a week. I work from the time I wake up until dinner, and then after dinner I usually work until about 10. I routinely work on Friday nights. I work Saturdays and Sundays. "Breaks" are spent catching up. I long for weekends, too, because that's my chance to do a load of laundry and I can usually spend all day in pyjamas. Summers are spent trying to do the research I didn't have time to do all year while trying to work in a little extra teaching so I can have enough money to pay down some debt. If I seem to have my head in the clouds it's because I'm still trying to figure out a solution to a problem in my teaching or my research, even while walking down the cereal aisle of the grocery store. Or maybe I'm just trying to figure out how to get our food bill down a bit more. Whatever the idealized professor is in culture, it is nothing like the real lives of all the academics I know. It's not like the R1 (major research university) professors, nothing like people researching their asses off at "teaching" colleges like small private schools or regional state schools, nothing like those teaching full- or part-time at community colleges, nothing like adjuncts teaching 6 classes a semester at 4 different campuses just to make ends meet (not counting the online work they pick up so they can afford the books they need for their other jobs). I didn't get tenure by hanging around. I got tenure by working myself into total burnout for years on end. Did I do it for the tenure? I'm still doing it, so I guess not. I guess I love it.

This is not unusual. I am a garden-variety academic. These are our lives. It's pretty real.

And I want to talk about that. I want to look at it from multiple perspectives and hear from multiple voices. I am incredibly fortunate in that I have tenure at a terrific school that I love, in a town that I love, with colleagues I respect, doing what lights me up every single day. I also have an amazing husband who occasionally pulls me away from the computer or takes away the stack of papers and reminds me to breathe and maybe even get outside for a little while.

I cannot pretend our industry is just like any other - it's more like a calling, like the ministry or the military. But it is an industry, with huge challenges and with lovely positives. It can be a difficult and frustrating life, but it is the only life for me. I love what I do, and I will defend it down to the ground. But I will also tell it to its face what it needs to do better. True love is honest. So here is my blazon to academia, in which I will do what we do best: deconstruct to the finest detail, pick apart and put back together, examine and illuminate. With understanding and a desire for more understanding.

(This blog is for everyone, including academics - topic requests are welcome and should be posted as comments to this entry).