First Day Fragments 2021: A Fresh Start

Each of the past three years I have written a post celebrating the start of the fall semester with quick hits on various topics that I’m mulling over going into the new academic year. You can find the earlier posts in the archive: 2020, 2019, 2018.

One recent addition to my podcast lineup is Self-Compassionate Professor hosted by Dr. Danielle De La Mare. The podcast as a whole is aimed a little bit over my head (I’m neither a mid-career nor a recovering academic yet) and I am somewhat ambivalent about the emphasis on entrepreneurialism, which often leans toward career coaching. But I like listening to people talk about how they navigated their academic careers, if only because that is something I’m just starting to do.

The recent episode with Brandy Simula was particularly good.

Dr. Simula talked at length about pandemic burnout and suggested that professors identify what tasks need to be done at 100%, which ones can be done at 70%, and which ones can be let go. I was already feeling exhaustion tug at the corners of my awareness when I listened to this episode, but I also know that my students are living through the same world events at an even more tumultuous time in their lives.

A useful reminder going into this semester.

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I have spent a lot of time going back and forth about what I want to do for pandemic contingencies this semester and how much I need to front-load that information in my syllabuses. I am working at a university that made it through last year without interruption, is requiring masks when indoors, and has a good rate of vaccination, but the Delta variant is all-but guaranteed to take some students out of class this semester. Right now I am encouraging students who are experiencing symptoms or who have tested positive to remain out of class and will offer alternate assessments for them to make up what they have missed.

Zoom is a wonderful tool for some purposes and I am looking to offer virtual options for office hours, but trying to teach students in the classroom and on Zoom simultaneously was so exhausting last year that I would like to avoid a repeat of that experience if at all possible.

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On a recent road trip I found myself working through the archive of the Fake Doctors, Real Friends podcast. In one episode, Zach Braff dropped a line attributed to the eminent screenwriter Lawrence Kazdan:

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.

This is a catchy aphorism, though I couldn’t find a source in a few minutes of poking around online. I think its spirit is correct — writing often gets done on top of other employment because writing alone won’t pay the bills, for one thing, but writing also involves hours spent thinking about writing and deadlines that superficially resemble school. But I also think that comparing writing to homework trivializes writing in some ways. Writing is work, full stop. The fact that it takes place at home and sometimes off-hours doesn’t change that.

I am a little bit behind on my work right now, but I’m hoping that the structure of a semester will help motivate me to sit down at the computer and plug away at my projects. This is work that I want to do, I just don’t like the implication of calling it homework. Then again, what I really need to be more disciplined about is reading.

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I am officially one week into my new position at Truman State University — a full-time non-tenure-track position teaching world and ancient history. The result is that today has a little bit more than the usual first-day jitters.

So far, the students are enthusiastic and I like my colleagues, but, selfishly, I am most looking forward to having all of my classes at one institution that is invested in me as a teacher. This is a welcome change after several years of hustling for classes at a bunch of different institutions all of which made their decisions on different timelines.

These are all good changes and I am thrilled to be here. I am just also still in a little bit of disbelief and for this year at least feeling a measure of survivor’s guilt.

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I’m not as prepared for this semester as I would like to be, but I am looking forward to it quite a lot. For now, that will have to be enough.