Tis the season… inventory time.

In December of 2008, after my first semester on the job, I did a little bit of a check in to see how things looked in the shake out.  I counted up all kinds of things.  Now seems like a good time to do the same, so without further ado, for 2010:

Number of students taught: 199.

Number of papers graded: 675. (some were short ones)

Number of quizzes graded: 1265.

Number of hours just lecturing: who knows– I can’t keep track any more.

Number of hours prepping classes: see above.

Number of hours spent on research:  surprisingly, a lot.

Number of peer-reviewed articles published: 1 (and one more forthcoming in 2011)

There have been sundry other things– grant applications, independent studies (add a couple more papers to that paper tally up there).  The lesson has been as the tenure track keeps a tickin’, the work load just gets heavier.  In theory, one’s capacity to shoulder the burden also increases.  That first semester, I was just happy to survive.  This year, I survived and managed to get more work into the pipeline, tweak my teaching, head to a few conferences, and… AND…speaking of taking on more….

Professor Rottweiler is whelping.  There is a puppy on the way, so the tenure track is about to intersect with the mommy track.  In the middle of the semester, I told my students that if I ran from the room with an urgent need to vomit, it was not because of anything they had said, but because of the phenomenon associated with my steadily thickening middle.  There are already numerous excellent blogs about surviving the tenure track as a new parent, so I will try not to divert the blog to all things parental, though I am told that the center of one’s universe inevitably reorients and one talks about parenting because one spends so much time parenting.  There are also all kinds of abysmal and scary studies out there of what motherhood does to one’s tenure prospects (according to the book Mama PhD have a baby within 5 years of finishing your PhD and there is a 38% higher likelihood of not being tenured).  Look around and it becomes obvious that there are far fewer tenured women and female full professors when compared to male-female PhD ratios.  And women aren’t the only ones affected by the introduction of small new people into the family…. so we will be juggling Mr. Rottweiler’s graduate studies and tenure track aspirations in addition to my own, particularly since once my maternity leave is up, Mr. Rottweiler will be primary childcare provider extraordinaire.

For now, I am concentrating on being both productive and, I suppose, reproductive.  The plan is to *finally* complete my book manuscript and start shopping it around prior to the pup’s arrival.  I must say I am looking forward to a full-time focus on the book.  Between that and small person preparations, I should be sufficiently distracted from the irritations of working within higher education (another lesson learned in year 3 of the tenure track– one’s patience with silliness really erodes… at first I thought I was irritable because of the pregnancy, but my senior colleagues all assure me that everyone gets ticked off in year 3– more on the sources of these irritations in future blogs, I suppose).  As of Monday, it will be me and the book manuscript ALL THE TIME.   But for today and through the weekend, it’s going to be cookie baking, eggnog drinking, napping, reading, and silly movie watching.  Wishing everyone a happy holiday season, and a productive (and reproductive, if you are into that kind of thing) new year!

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