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Guest Post: A Different Kind Of Trailing Spouse

This is my first guest post here at CollegeReadyWriting! This is by Heather Scarano (@HeatherScarano on Twitter), a wife, mother, professor, and wife of a college baseball coach. She blogs over at http://nobluffing.com/. I like her writing, and as a fellow trailing spouse, I wanted to share the similar and yet different kinds of challenges she faces.

Enjoy.

There is something about the fragrance of February that I love. A walk outside this time of year invigorates the body and encourages the soul. The freshness in the air and the smell of moist earth and wet grass are glad reminders that Spring is near. But there is something else about February that makes me happy: it marks the beginning of baseball season.

As a college baseball coach’s wife, I look forward to February, when at last the hours, months, even years of preparation are tested in nine-inning contests of skill, speed and strategy.

Being a coach’s wife has its benefits. I have front-row seats at the games, which I enjoy watching with my two young sons. Each new season I am introduced to a new group of guys and have the privilege of getting to know them and their families. I also travel to tournaments and tag along on Spring break trips to warmer, beachier places.

Whenever our family has moved to a new college or university, we’ve found instant friendships within the institution’s athletic department. And we have never suffered from being unknown in a new community.

But being the wife of a coach isn’t eternally pleasant. We move a lot. And to places I’d frankly rather not be. Baseball coaches and their families do not live only in sunny places like Florida, Texas or Southern California. They live in the rural Midwest, too.

And now that I am working at the same college as my husband, as a coordinator of a writing center and instructor of developmental English, I’m learning that the label “coach’s wife” isn’t always useful.

It is one thing when you’re not working in higher education to brush off a comment like, “So, have you always been a cleat chaser?” as immature and unenlightened, but it’s an entirely different thing when you are facing these stereotypes while at the same time trying to establish credibility in your first year of teaching.

For the record, I am not a cleat chaser. Joe and I met during his last semester of his fifth year of college, and we did not go to school together. The only baseball I ever saw Joe play was as an outfielder for the church softball team. While we were dating and newly married, he worked as a landscaper, limo driver, newspaper delivery boy and Starbucks barista. I never imagined he’d be a college baseball coach.

I’ve also had to deal with people who suspect or infer that I am in my current position – that I got my job — because of my husband. Maybe I ought to get around to hanging up that diploma of mine.

I’m discovering that there are other challenges as well. For example, what do I do when two baseball players in my introduction to composition course do not complete their first writing assignment? Do I tell their coach, who will undoubtedly chew them out, or do I handle it on my own?

One night last week, at the end of a long day and after the kids were in bed, Joe and I were sitting together on the couch. I was venting my frustrations about the lack of motivation I was beginning to see in some of my students. Without thinking about the possible consequences, I mentioned to Joe that his baseball players were two of several students who did not hand in the paragraph that I’d assigned.

Encouraging academic achievement and cultivating attitudes of respect are priorities for my husband. I should’ve known what would happen next.

Later the following day Joe told me, “I buried those guys. I embarrassed them in front of the entire team. I asked them if they thought they should be on scholarship if they can’t complete simple assignments.”

Oops. I wasn’t trying to get my students in trouble. Now I felt like a tattletale.

There are other issues I will need to figure out, too.

With the first home doubleheader of the season just days away, I’m wondering what to do if one of my baseball-player students hits a homerun, or makes a diving play at third base?

Do I stand up, yell and slap my little boys high-five, as I normally would? Or, would it be better for me to tone it down a bit – stay seated, clap quietly and smile? How do I transition from teacher, to coach’s wife, and back to teacher again while still maintaining boundaries and some semblance of respectability?

Or, what if one of my students sees me in my yoga pants, or chasing my wild, two-and-a-half-year old up and down the hallways of the hotel when we are in Florida next month on Spring Break? Will he still be able to take me seriously at 8 a.m. the next time we have class?

Despite these conundrums, I am enjoying my new career in academia. It is not the career I envisioned for myself (I was thinking more along the lines of award-winning international journalist, read: Christiane Amanpour) but now that I’m here, I think I’m finding my niche.

Joe is in his seventh year working with college students, and I am now beginning to share his passion for these burgeoning adults. The college years are a brief but transformative time, and as their tutor and mentor, I have a big role to play in my students’ personal development.

As an English instructor, my job is extremely meaningful. What could be more valuable than helping students become better communicators, especially in this socially-networked, hyper-communicative world in which we now live?

I could also see my role developing into a faculty advocate for student-athletes. What many academics fail to see, I fear, is that student-athletes may be some of the most disciplined, hard-working students of all. The average college student does not get up for 6 a.m. workouts or spend hours in the afternoon at the gym or on the field for practice. When the other students are at home for the semester break, at the beach for spring break, or in their beds on a snow day – the student-athletes are on campus, practicing or playing games.

I have a mission, and it is not at all different from my husband’s — to help develop young adults into responsible, respectful, capable human beings. Our goals are the same, though admittedly we use different means (and tactics) to get there.

Still, there is one thing that we can always agree on: February is an awesome month. Just like the scents of the season, the sounds are hopeful, too — the trickle of melting snow dripping from roof gutters and sloshing down streets, and the cheerful songs of returning robins and sparrows as they titter in the trees. Add to these the ping of a metal bat connecting with a leather-covered, cork ball, and the thump of an 88 MPH fastball meeting the catcher’s mitt, and the ambiance of approaching Spring is complete.

What I learned as an Undergrad

There has been a lot of virtual ink spilled over the past few weeks about how little our current generation of undergraduates are really learning (just Google it, you’ll see); students don’t read, don’t write, don’t think critically. Let the finger pointing begin. Colleges suck, professors suck, the K-12 system sucks, students are lazy and don’t care about their education, and we’re all on the short decline into post-apocalyptic chaos and destitute.

Sigh.

I’ve written in a lot of different places (like here and here) that I was not the best undergraduate student: I didn’t come to class, I was distracted while in class, and was more concerned with the social side of university life than the educational side. I selected my undergraduate degree because it offered paid semester-long internships in my area of study (professional writing); as long as my GPA was high enough so I still qualified for those internships, then I was fine.

This was not the fault of the (majority) of the wonderful professors who taught in my program; if not for them being just generally great, great teachers, I wouldn’t have stuck around to do an MA with them. Sure, there were some duds, but over-all, the quality of my classes was excellent. Could they have sat me down and said, you’re doing well, but you could be doing so much better if you just applied yourself (code for actually showing up to class and not being hung over)? Yes, but I give them credit for treating me like an adult and letting me make my own mistakes. Thankfully, because I got good grades, I could learn the life lessons without being forced to drop out, like some of my friends.

No, the fault lies with me. What I learned in college was about life, who I was, and who I wanted to be. I knew, pretty quickly, that I didn’t want to be a technical writer, that I loved literature, and I loved to write (not bad lessons, really). I learned how to budget (the hard way), I learned how to (minimally) cook for myself, and I learned that sleep was really important. I learned that I wasn’t indestructible or immune from failure. I learned how to recover from said failures; I learned resiliency. Or, perhaps I learned more ways in which I was resilient. You have to have a certain amount of resiliency to survive high school, divorced parents, and participating a competitive sport. Now I knew I could survive other situations as well.

I did develop my critical thinking skills, but mostly through my immersion in another culture and language; I went to a French university in my home province of Quebec just after a referendum. I also improved my writing and research skills, and I was “forced” read books I would not have ever read (or understood) otherwise, even if it took years to come around to them again as a professor. I’m not sure, however, if I would have self-reported any of these developments in a survey or if they would have shown up in a test. My brain, throughout a lot of university, was elsewhere. I remember almost failing a French grammar class because I was unable to answer basic questions whose answers I had known throughout high school and know once again today. But in that moment of my second semester, I didn’t know anything about French grammar. And I was trying.

What I learned as an undergraduate directly shaped who I am personally and professionally today. I just don’t think that if you had told any of my professors back then that I would now be teaching at the university level that they would have believed you. Just because an undergraduate doesn’t look like or even recognize themselves that they are learning anything as an undergraduate doesn’t mean that they aren’t. Maybe it just means they haven’t realized it yet.

Adjuncting and a Modern Literature Disaster

When I was a graduate student, I taught an intro course in comparative literature, comparative Canadian literature, to be precise. This was my exact area of expertise, so, other than the boring early discovery/settler literature, the class typically went well. This was my first experience teaching undergrads; I had previously taught English as a Second Language to bored and resentful teenagers over summers, so the literature thing seemed really easy to me.

When I moved out to California, I taught various levels of writing and composition as an adjunct, from basic developmental writing to an advanced course to upper division students. While I didn’t have much experience, I had wonderful mentors, great colleagues, and so, once again, generally ended up doing ok. I even like teaching developmental students because of my experience there.

Then, I hit what I thought was the jackpot: I was asked, at the last minute, to teach a upper-division class in Modern Literature. I was excited because, while not exactly my area of expertise, I longed to teach literature again. I also knew how important it was to have experience teaching upper-division courses while on the job market. I was just beginning to think of new ways to use technology in my courses to enhance the students’ learning, and I thought that this would be a chance to try something new.

One problem: I had no idea what I was doing and virtually no guidance in order to do it. When I asked if the title of the course meant what we would consider Modernist literature or just simply modern, as in during more modern times, I was met with a shrug. Looking at old syllabus didn’t help because it seemed that the course was whatever the professor wanted it to be. So I decided to focus on the “greats” of the Modernist movement, mixing in some authors who may not have been considered Modernist, but wrote during that period (most notably Langston Hughes and others from the Harlem Renaissance). I found a wonderful and inexpensive anthology of short stories, all virtually from the time period, which allowed me to hit the greats without a tone of large novels intimidating the students. The novels I did pick, I thought, were accessible, interesting, and a good illustration of certain aspects of the Modernist period. Virginia Woolfe’s To The Lighthouse, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Langston Hughes Not Without Laughter (I was told not to do poetry; this was a literature class), and James Joyce’s, Mr Modernist himself, Dubliners.

The short stories I had selected were not particularly well-known (ie, you couldn’t use Google to read up about them), so I had students select one short story each to create a Wikipedia-type introduction to be shared with the class and then lead an online class discussion through Blackboard on that story. I moderated the discussions about the novels and had groups of students create annotated bibliographies for each of them, in some cases limiting them to critical works from the past 20 years. These bibliographies were shared among all of the students before they had to go off and write their major essay assignment, which was an open topic.

If all of this sounds good to you, it was. On paper. I had to teach the class and get the students to buy into what I was selling. I wasn’t terribly successful. The students almost universally resented having to participate in online discussion forums (I loved it because it game me a jumping off point for class discussions; they hated that part, too) and didn’t understand why I wasn’t just teaching them what they needed to know, rather than making them do it. On top of it, they either thought my lectures and expectations were too hard or too easy. The final exam, which I had to give, wasn’t fair (although I’ll never understand why students complain about getting the essay questions in advance; would you rather go into the exam blind?) and I didn’t do enough to prepare them for it.

Which is, in a lot of ways, fair enough. I was used to only having to be one step ahead of 100-level students, and while there were students who weren’t too challenging to stay ahead of, many of my students were at the 400-level. It became clear that I was in over my head. I was reading some of these works for the first time cover to cover. Why the Dubliners by Joyce and not the more “Modernist” Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake? Because I didn’t want to have to teach them! There were so many different ways that I could approach or access these works that I became overwhelmed. It showed in my lectures. While it was easy to focus in on one element to work on in an introductory writing class, it was really hard for me to do in a 400-level class with works that have inspired thousands of pages of criticism and analysis.

It was the first time I ever received more negative than positive feedback from my student evaluations. One read that I wasn’t qualified to teach the course and didn’t even have a clear definition of what the course was supposed to be about. Another wrote that I was too demanding and not at all helpful. Yes another resented my attempts to integrate technology, calling it a waste of time and effort. I was chastened. This was my first failure as a teacher, in an area I most wanted to succeed. I figured that because of the poor evaluation, as an adjunct, I would never be asked to teach the course again, and thus never have the opportunity to revise and refine my approach.

I think that this is a huge double-bind that adjuncts often find themselves in: wanting or needing to say yes to a course they have no business teaching. Because I got the course relatively at the last minute, I didn’t really have time to prepare, read, and reread any of the works I was teaching. And, while where I worked had an extensive network of people and support to those teaching writing courses, there wasn’t anything in place if you happened to end up teaching something else.

But I did end up learning some things about myself and my teaching. I think the majority of the students in the class learned something too, however grudgingly. I am particularly proud of the student who created a multi-media final essay that integrated jazz recordings with an analysis of Langston Hughes’ work. Another professor might not have allowed the student to experiment like that. So for those students for whom the class, they felt, was a waste of time, I am sorry. I would promise to do better next time, but unfortunately, I probably never will have the opportunity again. And for that, I am doubly sorry that your experience was, in a lot of ways, for naught.

My Terrible Shortcoming as a Teacher

I am, according to many measurements, a really good teacher in the classroom. I didn’t receive ONE negative evaluation this past semester, which has never actually happened to me (there is always one who I don’t connect with and they let me know). My teaching evaluations have always been very strong, as have my peer evaluations. As many of my students’ wrote, I clearly care about them and their education. My heart melted when one of my students (who is studying to be a teacher) that I was now her professional role model.

But.

I have one very large shortcoming. I can’t learn students’ names. After fifteen weeks of handing assignments back, class discussions, emails, and meetings, I might know half of the students’ names. And it’s usually the ones who have either dropped or about to fail. When I hand back their assignments and I have the name in front of me, by about the middle of the semester I can usually remember the face. The same goes for emails. But without the name in front of me, when I look at the face, I can remember everything about the student (whatever details they’ve shared about themselves, their last free write response, what they’ve missed, their major, their career aspirations) except their name.

Learning the students’ names is the first thing they teach you in courses or seminars designed to improve your pedagogical skill and classroom presence; in fact my chair, in our new faculty orientation, said exactly that. If you want to make a meaningful connection with your students’, learn their names. If you want the students’ to be engaged with you, learn their names. The way other professors or facilitators talk about it, knowing you’re students’ name is the single most important thing you can do; everything else is gravy.

This has been a problem for me since, well, forever. I would forget my new teammates’ names for the first three months of the swimming season. When I started teaching swimming lessons, I couldn’t remember the names of the six kids in my class; worse, I would think that their name was something that it wasn’t, and then that’s the name that would stick in my brain. Word to the wise, don’t call a 6 year-old by the wrong name; they really, really don’t like it. I’ve tried everything: looking at pictures, having name tags for them, taking pictures with their name tags, memory games based on associations, everything. And every semester, I do no better than about 50%. Worse, by the beginning of the next semester, I’ve forgotten half of the half.

I admit this shortcoming to my students early and often in the semester, and it becomes a sort of running joke. Some days they’ll decide not to raise their hands when I call their name to pass a piece of writing back, just to see if I’ve finally learned who they are. The thing that they realize very quickly, however, is that I really do know who they are: I remember any and every other detail they’ve shared with me inside and outside of the classroom the moment I see their faces. They also know that I will remember those details for a long, long time. Names are only one small way we can know someone, really.

Knowing their name is important, no doubt, but it’s only one small way to know my students. I learn everything else instead. Doesn’t mean I don’t still try; just means that I make sure that my strengths far outweigh one of my more glaring weaknesses.

Anti-Social Media, Parenting, and Teaching about Modern Rhetoric

Last week, I had a massive argument with my almost-four-year-old daughter about (wait for it) whether or not a piece of bread had butter on it. It did, but because she hadn’t seen her father actually spreading the butter on that particular piece of bread, she refused to believe me. I call it an argument, but it devolved into a stressful version on Monty Python’s The Argument Sketch (note how the next sketch featured is “Hitting on the Head Lessons”; it was that, too). The argument devolved into foot stomping, yelling, door slamming, tears, and a lonely little piece of buttered bread waiting on a stair to be eaten. In my role as mother, I wanted my daughter to calm down, see reason, and eat some food (one of the reasons she was being irrational to begin with). In her role as head-strong toddler, she wanted to be right, even if the bread clearly was covered in butter.

I used this example in my class to show how having the best interests of your reader or listener can really change the tone and content of an argument. We have been discussing the differences between Sophists and Philosophers, then moving on to Gertrude Buck and her essay, “The Present Status of Rhetorical Theory.” (On an aside, why isn’t there a wikipedia page for Buck and her writings? Lack of female contributors, indeed. People, get on this!). She talks about how the Sophists were anti-social while the Platonists were social. The reason? Sophists only had their best interests in mind while arguing, while Platonists were arguing for the benefit of the listener. I asked my students, although we talk about “audience”, do we really write for the benefit of that sometimes real, sometimes imaginary audience, or do we really write for our own benefit?

In school, typically, we write for our own benefit: for the benefit of grades. We’re not writing to inform or enlighten our professor or teacher, we’re writing to get an A. Imagine if your students actually wrote for your benefit, rather than their own? My students couldn’t imagine, but they saw the difference. Imagine if we assigned papers or presented an assignment in a way that had students consider a benefit other than their own? Isn’t there the potential to read papers that truly offer some insight in perhaps an engaging way? Tenured Radical makes a similar argument about how simply using the word “prompt” causes students to write in a way that truly benefits no one, other than being awarded a good grade.

When you write a paper for publication, are you writing it for the benefit of the reader or the benefit of your tenure case?

I tell my students that this line of thinking isn’t just limited to the papers they write for class; what about the discourse we see, hear, and read regarding politics and other “hot button” issues of the day? How many times to they hear arguments that aren’t about them, the listener, but have everything to do with benefiting the speaker? How much of the vitriol that goes on in the comments sections of newspapers and popular blogs have nothing to do with “enlightening” the author or other readers, and everything to do with either establishing the superiority of the writer or ensuring their privileged position? Is the openness of the Internet really an “anti-social” form of rhetoric?

I think my students are really thinking more carefully about their education, their ways of communicating, and the rhetoric, be it visual, aural, or written, that they consume every day. As for me, I wonder if I genuinely had my daughter’s best interests at heart as I continued to argue with her over that stupid piece of butter bread; her logic (I didn’t see Daddy put butter on it, thus there must not be butter on the bread) was sound, if simplistic. Was it so important that I win this argument? Was it for her benefit that I tried to show her that she was, in fact, wrong, or my own, in order to maintain my dominant position in our dynamic? I’m not sure anymore. But I do know that I want to engage in more meaningful, beneficial, and productive forms of rhetoric with my kids and my students.

Here’s to really being social.

Wasting Time? Try being a little more active

One of the first things I talk to my students about at any level is active reading. They’ve all had the experience where they’ve gotten to the bottom of a page of reading and realized that they have no idea what they’ve just read. And then they keep trying to re-read without any change in the situation. So they go through the motions of looking at the words on the page, feeling good about having technically done their homework, but showing up to class with little to no ability to participate in the class discussion.

Why not read more actively, I suggest. Take notes, do some research, even just write questions in the margins, anything to make the readings more meaningful. But, they protest, active reading takes so much time. Really? How much time do you spend simply going through the motions over and over again? And how much time do you spend at the end of the semester not sleeping, cramming for your final exam or paper, trying to complete all of the reading you didn’t have “time” to do properly during the semester? How much learning do you end up doing when you spend a week living off of energy drinks and little sleep in order to do everything you didn’t do during the previous 15 week semester?

My students can be a little more active in all of their course-related work. One of the biggest complaints about homework is that it is a waste of their time. And while I don’t claim that all homework ever assigned during a student’s academic career is meaningful, the student should at least try view homework as a positive learning activity that, if taken seriously and done well, can help you learn. Same thing with in-class activities.

I tell my students that every exercise in class or at home is an opportunity for them. If they choose to see it as a waste of time, then it will be. And thus it is the student, not me, who is wasting their time. I can only set up the conditions for the students to learn and be successful. It is up to them to take advantage of those conditions. I can entice them with promises of a more meaningful education experience, and I can threaten them with a failing grade. But I try to get my students to come to understand that the choice is ultimately theirs if they are going to actively engage in their education.

I care about my students and I care about their success inside and outside of my class. I know my students care about their grades, but I wonder about their commitment to their education. If they don’t get more active in their learning, then we will all have been just wasting our time.

My Awesome Week

My week has been awesome (see title). Both the professional and the personal have gone better than I could have hoped this week. Here’s a brief run-down:

Monday: Latest post for the University of Venus appeared. Snarky/mean comment on said post lead to a show of communal support and solidarity, which was most gratifying. Also lead to my next uvenus post finally coming together. And an invite to guest post for another site. Received an email offering me some advice and moral support on my Laferrière research idea/project.

Tuesday: Worked out with a colleague/neighbor/fellow mommy. We’d been meaning to get together more during the fall semester, but both of us were felled in our efforts by the demands of the job and taking care of kids. Now both our sons are going to preschool together, leaving us time to workout and talk about our kids and our jobs. Also had a lunch date with my husband. Was accepted to THATcamp Southeast. Found a book where the main character shares the same name as my son.

Wednesday: Essay on reading to my kids and how it teaches me as well appeared on the New York Times Motherload blog. My son actually took a two hour nap at school, making our time together at home in the evening much, much, much more enjoyable for all. Finished reading a book. Had a student in my class raise a thoughtful question that showed she was really thinking about what she had read, and she made a promise to reread it again to more fully explain what she was trying to figure out. Had most successful #FYCchat to date.

Thursday: Worked out and fostered actual face-to-face friendships. Was told by a student that he really enjoyed my class and my teaching style. Had one of my posts appear on the NPR On Campus blog. Another lunch date with my husband. Finally found a computer chair for my office that does not cause back pain when I type. This may be the thing I am most excited about. Figured out how to integrate a piece of writing into my over-all argument for an essay I have to finish writing this weekend.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday: Who know? It might be a disaster. I hope not. I have to finish writing two essays, due Monday (one more informal, one academic). My daughter is also doing a dance clinic and will be performing during halftime of the basketball game. I’m excited for that. I’m also excited to write. I’ve been reading, thinking, and more informally writing in preparation and I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes together (or not).

I am grateful for this week, even if it didn’t necessarily start off fantastically. I want to record these moments, these events, so I can come back to them when things aren’t going well. Life doesn’t always cooperate, but these highs make it so much easier to deal with the lows. I’ll stop now before I descend into the realm of even more tired cliches. I just wanted to share the good news.

January Blahs

There is something really different about the energy of students in January versus their energy in August/September when Fall semester starts. It’s not the same enthusiasm, optimism, and excitement. No, January starts in opposition to how December ended: full of relief and the holiday spirit. All of that get left behind when they head back to school and start their classes.

It’s not the same for professors, I think, because we see each beginning of semester as a chance to start again. A class didn’t quite work as your thought it would? We can try again with some modifications! Didn’t like the classes you taught last semester? Here is a new one to keep your interest! Didn’t like your students? A fresh batch is waiting! Not to mention that Decembers ends with hours of grading, grade grubbing, and last-minute administrative work.The first few lectures are usually well-worn territory as well, so prep time might not be as stressful. And we don’t know the students yet. There is something invigorating about the potential that each new class brings to the table. At least for me, the excitement of the beginning of the semester is rarely diminished. Especially when a class works well, I can’t wait to get back in there with a new group to do it again.

But the students, well, they don’t see it that way. Maybe they went home at Christmas and realized just how homesick they really are. Or they got sick from the cold/lack of proper sleep and care and start off the semester feeling terrible physically. Maybe they hate their roommate and so are coming back to a lot of drama that they just didn’t know existed in the fall. Or their semester didn’t go as planned and they are bringing a defeatist attitude to the new semester.

Or all of these freaking snow days are making it hard to get into a good routine. No wait, that’s me.

In August and September, the weather is nice, the days are long(er) and the mood is full of optimism. In January, the days are colder, shorter and gloomier (even in California – I taught there). Two weeks sometimes is just enough time to remind you why you love your family but not enough time to remind you why you left for college to begin with. It’s really not enough time to put any disaster, both personal and academic, behind you to be able to really start fresh.

I’m not arguing for a longer winter break; we started really late this January, and while I welcomed the time off, I am not looking forward to teaching until mid-May. But I have to continually reminded myself of the reasons behind the January Blahs when my students keep looking at me like I’m crazy with my enthusiasm and energy. I didn’t get those looks (or at least not as many) in the fall. It’s a bigger challenge in January to get my students to buy in to what I am selling them. It just means I have to work a little harder and remember where they are coming from.

How Not to Prepare for your On-Campus Interview

Or, how to lose the job before you even get to campus.

Postacademic.org just did a post on making sure you are prepared for the inevitable A/V snafus during your on-campus interview. It got me to thinking about one of my on-campus interviews and why I might not have been offered the job. Of course, there are lots of reasons and none of them may have had anything to do with my on-campus performance specifically, but for some reason a light finally went off in my head about what I did wrong not while I was on campus, but while I was preparing for my teaching demonstration.

I should also note that I thought I had already largely figured out why I hadn’t been offered the job: when I got the phone call inviting me to the on-campus interview, I asked if I could bring my infant daughter. I have to say, the people at the university went beyond the call of duty, trying to find a way for me to bring my daughter and have her cared for while I was interviewing. But I had always thought that when push came to shove, they decided that they didn’t want someone as “family oriented” as I had proved to be (I ended up leaving my daughter at home with her father with no problems; chalk it up to first-time mommy panic). Looking back, I think I have been unfair (not that I thought badly of the institution; I didn’t blame them, I blamed myself) because while I was so concerned with my daughter, I neglected to focus on what I was going to be teaching.

I wasn’t as proactive, as they say, about getting all of my ducks in a row about what I was teaching in the Intro to Literature class: I am ashamed to say that I expected them to present me with the information I would need. Instead, I ignorantly asked questions (like, how do I get in touch with the professor?) that I should have just gone ahead and done myself. And when I found out what I would be teaching, I didn’t ask if it was in an anthology or what edition they were using, I just went out and got a copy myself. Turned out, they were using an anthology, so when I referred to a certain scene or passage, I couldn’t tell them which page to turn to in order for them to be able to note it and follow along. I also didn’t think to ask for a copy of the class’ complete syllabus so that I might have been able to provide links and contrasts to what they had already read and studied. In short, I made my class into a mini-presentation on the play they had read, completely neglecting to make an effort to integrate the lecture into the larger frame of their class.

It didn’t help that it was the Friday before Spring Break. But I digress.

The lecture itself went well and I was complimented on it; I chose one or two quasi-thematic and related arches to focus on to get the students to think and reflect critically on what the playwright had set out to do. A few members of the search committee noted that I was a fine teacher and felt I deserved to get a job, if not there then somewhere. But, alas, I did not get that job. Again, with all of the rhetoric surrounding how I should have been hiding the fact that I had a baby/family, I just assumed that that was my undoing. Looking back, though, I would have done things very differently when it came to preparing for my teaching.

I hope this helps some of you preparing for your own teaching demonstrations for on-campus interviews.

Snow Days and On-Campus Childcare

We had another snow day today, after three last week. The kids got to stay home from preschool, which is the worst news in the world for my 3.5 year old daughter who adores going to school. Add to that that today was supposed to be Fun Friday, well, you can imagine how devastated she was. How much snow was on the ground, you ask? About an inch, maybe two.

Ugh.

I grew up in Canada, aka The Great White North. Snow days were unheard of when I was growing up. It didn’t matter how much snow was on the ground or how cold it was outside, we went to school, often walking there. And we went outside at recess and after lunch (at least in elementary school). The buses may have been late arriving, but you got on and you showed up at high school. I can remember driving home for the weekend from university in one of the worst snow storms; there’s nothing like an hour and a half trip that takes four hours in a beater car where we have to pull over every couple of miles to scrape the windshield to prove how brain-damaged young adults really are. And I was back at school on Monday.

Our local schools serve a large and largely rural population, so while I live in town where there is little problems with the roads, I understand that people living out in the hills and off of essentially dirt roads would have a little more trouble and why we wouldn’t want the buses to try making their way up there and back. But the problem isn’t with the local schools, it’s with the university.

As pointed out by Dr. Crazy, many universities don’t have a very good plan in place for the inevitable and eventual arrival of snow. Ours is no exception. While every single campus, school, and daycare around us was shut down, our university was only on two hour delay (in other words, any class before 10 AM was canceled, but any class/meeting/activity scheduled for after ten was on). This is no big deal for us, as my husband doesn’t teach on Fridays, but on other days, this would present a problem when we have to go to work and our kids aren’t going to school. You can tell a snow day on campus because it’s either crawling with kids or devoid of professors and students, many of whom have children of their own to care for.

One of the first questions, for better or worse, that I would ask a search committee when I was doing interviews was if they had on-campus childcare available. It’s one thing to leave your eight-year-old in your office watching DVDs or playing computer games or (even better) reading, but it’s something all together different when you have to figure out what to do with your toddler while you teach or attend an important (or required) meeting. On-campus childcare ensures that faculty and students have a place that is safe and close by for their kids. It also means that on days were everything else is shut down, parents can still get the work done that is expected of them, be it teaching or being a student.

Every year, there are snow days for most but not for us at the university. Where I live, we’ll never get more snow plows. But maybe we can hope for childcare that is more responsive to the hours the university demands we keep.

Never mind. I’d have better luck getting more snow plows.