Scrappy Doo is now passing from newbornitude into proper baby-ness, and I am about a month away from having to be back in the classroom.  The search for childcare has begun in hopes of buying me some work time and Mr. Rottweiler some dissertation time come the Fall.  I have mixed feelings about going back to work full-time (let’s be honest, even at my most pregnant and then, post-partum sleep deprived, I never truly stopped working, at least a little here and there).  First, I wish I had stopped, full on.  I am all too aware that Scrappy Doo is an ephemeral and ever-changing creature who ought to be enjoyed while the getting is good.  Second, part of me thinks that I would really love to stay home and off the tenure track for a whole year.  The other part is very excited to get back to fighting form, and get the tenure ball rolling again… it’s seriously stalled for all the best reasons.  Will I love going back to work?  Won’t I?  One thing that’s for sure, some of the silliness at Midwestern U., the administrative battles, the pettiness, the self-aggrandizing puffery, all seems to be a lot less important now that there is a puppy in the Rottweiler brood.  Here’s hoping that Scrappy Doo keeps us grounded as I face the dreaded *Third Year Review* while Mr. Rottweiler tries to finish off his dissertation and enter the job market (hello, two body problem), and that we can do all of this while nurturing Scrappy Doo so that he can grow up to be a a normal not-too-nerdy kid– or at the very least, not a sociopath.

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!

I am staring at stacks and stacks of student papers that demand my grading attention.  There are stacks and stacks of them because I chose to neglect my grading in order to spend much of September working on more research-related things– mostly two articles (well, 1 1/2 since one of them is not a research article but a commentary).  I was sick of them and just wanted to finish them off and launch them into the Great Publication Pipeline (or is it a Vacuum?) so that I can have some ‘movement’ on my cv.   Get out the academic Metamucil.  Let’s get this stuff flowing like well-oiled machinery.

We are advised as newbie faculty to try to avoid the “clustering” or “clumping” effect where everything comes out within the same short time period, and there are large swathes of nothing going on between these publication bouts.  The thing is, I submitted pieces in a steady and regular-ish fashion.  I just have ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL when it comes to how quickly they will be reviewed, returned, re-reviewed, approved, and queued for publication.  All I can do is be diligent about revisions when manuscripts come back to me and send polite queries to irritable editors who may or may not be able to speed things along.  Otherwise, I have to do as the serenity prayer (and Kurt Vonnegut) advises and have the grace not to fret about that which I have no power over.  I just hope that the senior faculty will consider this when I face the dreaded Third Year Review (coming to you this Spring, in a department near you!  See the angst-ridden junior faculty!  Will they or won’t they be renewed!)

And the better the journal, the longer the cycle from submission to publication.  Case in point, I first submitted an article to a respectable journal in March 2009.  This article underwent two rounds of revision, and was accepted after the first round, some time in January 2010.  It is slated to be published round about somewhere in the middle of 2011.  So that is just about 2 years to get an article in print.  Given that I am time-bound to go up for tenure in 2015-2016, that means that everything that will count towards my tenure must be submitted within the next two years.  Scary stuff, huh?

Thus, I have stuck to my guns as I proposed last month and opted to put off the teaching related activities in favor of keeping my nose to the research grindstone.  Did I mention I started a new research project this semester and submitted a large grant in August (with Schnauzer– two tails are definitely better than one), and that I want to finish my book manuscript by February?  I am not short of projects to keep catapulting into the publication pipeline/cesspit, but knowing my luck, if I’m lucky enough to get things accepted for publication, they will all appear within 6 months of each other…. more like a steaming pile of… well, you know, than a string of measured and steady pearls of wisdom.

First, let me clarify that my lowered expectations are for myself, not my students.  I will still be holding them to the very high standards that make them narrow their eyes at me in rage.  Starting year 3 on the tenure-track, my lowered expectations for myself in the classroom stem from several realizations that have sunk in over time.  First and foremost, whether I spend 3 hours or 30 minutes preparing my class, the students seem not to be able to tell the difference.  They get as excited (or bored) by a lecture I sweated over for hours as they do over the ones I outline in 45 minutes.

Second, now at a point (temporarily) where there are no new preps (no new preps!) I am teaching courses with which I am more than passing familiar, and all of that cumulative preparation has paid off.  So no big changes, complete overhauls… the time has come to tweak, to finesse, and, though unrealistic, to perfect.  There will be some changes to my courses, but they are of the minor kind, requiring me to write two new lectures, to substitute a few readings for others, and to demand a wee bit more from my introductory students who I think are capable of producing more in my big ole lecture course.  And of course, to show an extra movie in each class (though I have recently learned from the very smart Schnauzer not to list these on the syllabus ahead of time and just surprise the students with them in class– it turns out they are more likely to come to class this way.  Who knew!)

The final realization that drives me to leave my courses as they are (more-or-less) is that in the third year I will face the dreaded gauntlet of the Third Year Review.  This is a common phenomenon at many institutions of higher learning in which junior faculty’s three years are evaluated in terms of their progress towards tenure.  In theory, my senior colleagues could decide that I am a miserable bet on the tenure track and choose not to renew my contract and send me packing.  In our case, the third year review also sets us up to be competitive candidates for sabbatical funds (pre-tenure sabbaticals are not guaranteed at Midwestern U.)  The take-home message of the impending review is that while teaching counts, research is what really matters.  I’d love to be tenured because of my teaching, but this is not the take home message of the institution for which I work.  So this year, I really have to put my nose to the ground, polish off promised manuscripts, and shove a couple of more things into the dreaded pipeline.  It will be dazzling.  It will be stupendous.  It will be utterly terrifying and exhausting, but hey, it’s what I signed up for… isn’t it?

So, for the first time since starting the tenure track, I find myself able to WRITE during the academic year.  Amazing.  And I don’t mean revisions, I mean new stuff.  I am one of those folks for whom the writing of new stuff is difficult, so this is a big fat deal for me.  With two big deadlines in May, this is a good thing.  I suspect that finals week, with the 99 exams, and 109 papers to grade, will throw a wrench in my writing works, but I’ll cross that miserable bridge when I get there.

Junior faculty consensus is that Schnauzer should respond to the administrative assistant that due to the economic cutbacks in our department, there is a shortage of tape.  Thus, all faculty are forced to make do with a finite supply of tape and are seeking to optimize their taping strategies to achieve maximum adhesion with a minimum of material investment.  The administrator, however, is obviously in an office that is not experiencing said tape dearth, and should feel free to invest in taping the two non-taped sides as she sees fit.

Lastly, the last question of the study guide referring to the narrative interludes was in my notes for today which accidentally got thrown out so I don’t have the answers to the questions posed in the slides and can’t remember them.

What, exactly, am I supposed to do about that?  Hmph.  And here is one more that came in today:

Dr. Rottweiler,

I have a few questions about the study guide.

1. NAGPRA
2. The Kennewick Man Contoversy
3. The theroies that Wilke uses

I can’t seem to make a connection on those topics.

Thanks

I am still waiting to hear what the question was, and whether the student cares that I now know that he neither saw the documentary on NAGPRA and archaeological ethics we watched in class, or read the book assigned for our last three lectures.

Floppy Dawg operates quite differently than Top Dawg.  Where Top Dawg blurted out insensitive comments at the drop of a hat, Floppy Dawg ingratiates.  None can be cross with him, all should get along, and there should never be any conflict.  Unpleasantness is worth avoiding at all costs.  In short, Floppy Dawg seems to have a gelatinous back bone and we are in for a period in which the department will have no one to speak up for them.  I suspect that the floppiness is symptomatic of a midwestern cultural phenomena in which one must be uber-pleasant at all costs.  This phenomena has many local variants  all across the midwest.

Floppy Dawg’s first obvious show of gelatinous backbone, unfortunately, reared its head when a new (as yet to be named) faculty member showed up this August.  A year ago, when Schnauzer, Labrador and I were hired, we came to work to find a box of business cards and our computers in our new offices with working phones.  Top Dawg had ordered everything in advance and had made sure the Dean’s office got involved when IT (ah, Midwestern U.’s blessed IT department) told him that the new computers would not be installed for two weeks into the semester.  In his best Top Dawg voice, he had barked and howled until IT was forced to succumb to his will.  We three arrived with at least a minimum infrastructure in place so we could get to work.

Need I point out that the new faculty member had neither computer nor business cards nor working phone in her office when she arrived?  And did Floppy Dawg get on it?  No– she deferred to our administrative staffer (who deserves at least a couple of blogs dedicated to her own sweet self, bless her heart, competence is not her forte) who announced newbie’s computer had never been ordered and would take several weeks to arrive.  When newbie told me that she had to wait for a computer to arrive, I informed her that Top Dawg had intervened on our behalf last year and she should make sure the Dean gets involved.  Floppy Dawg, of course, could not find it in his interest to take issue with either the administrative assistant OR to get on the horn with the Dean.  When the administrative staffer told newbie she could not have the computer she wanted, Floppy Dawg smiled and nodded.  Poor newbie had to take it up with the Dean herself.  Result?  A loaner computer installed right away, and the computer newbie wanted on its way, though it is still not arrived and the semester starts on Monday– oh, and the phone is still not working.

This, and other incidents, were the topic of conversation last night, and triggered a bout of acid reflux so painful, I was up for 2 1/2 hours puttering as all slept.  I suspect that the next 6 months (or longer) will be filled with nostalgia for the days of Top Dawg.  Otherwise, all I can do is hope that Floppy Dawg grows a pair.  May be there is a steep learning curve associated with being department chair?  We all know that no one really wants to do it as it is a very hard and thankless job to have, especially with little to no administrative support.  I tremble to think that we may be so unfortunate as to have a chair who is, err, permanently ‘fixed’ per se– this thought is enough to bring on Faustian nightmares of devilish bureaucratic incompetence that could quite possibly herald some sleepless nights ahead.