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Tuesday, October 29, 2002
Redefining Myself on a Seven-Course Load
By JAMES M. LANG
As far as I can tell, all academics share a common
dissatisfaction with their job: Everyone believes they would
be happier if they had a lighter teaching load.
I have known people who taught five courses a semester at
community colleges, and I certainly empathized with their
desire for a lighter teaching load. But I have also known
people at research universities who taught two courses a
semester, and they also whiled away their Sunday afternoons
dreaming of a lighter teaching load.
I am no exception to this rule.
At the liberal-arts college where I am on the tenure track in
the English department, we teach three courses in one
semester, and four courses in the next. In my third year now,
I have learned to live happily with my three-course semester.
During the fall, when I have the lighter teaching load, I can
find time both to write and to live my life outside of the
college -- go to the dentist, get the oil changed, take the
kids swimming once a week.
I have not yet learned to live happily with teaching four
courses in a semester, and I don't expect to anytime soon. As
a committed writer, one who generally will log anywhere from 5
to 20 hours a week at my desk -- depending upon whether I have
papers to grade -- I hate and resent the fact that I can find
almost no time to write during the spring semester, when I
teach four courses. I also tend to feel like my personal life
gets put on hold in the spring semester -- no dentist, no oil
change, no swimming.
Life would be just perfect, I tell myself for those three
months out of the year, if only I had three courses in both
semesters.
Of course, I suspect that people who teach three courses a
semester imagine that they will be really happy only when they
have two courses in one semester, and three in the other.
But still, I can dream.
The longing for a lighter teaching load, though, has been
tempered for me in the last year or two by a growing
appreciation of one benefit of working at a teaching
institution like mine: the flexibility this institution offers
me in how I define myself as both a teacher and a scholar.
The job ad to which I responded three years ago sought a
specialist in (among other possible areas) contemporary
British literature, and that was the field in which I had done
my academic research and publishing. I came in and immediately
began teaching courses in contemporary British fiction and
British postcolonial literature.
But even as my reading and teaching in these areas continued,
my interest in writing academic scholarship about them began
to wane. Spurred in part by the columns I had begun to write
for The Chronicle, I became increasingly interested in writing
creative nonfiction and memoir.
During my first and second years on the tenure track I spent
most of my writing time working on just such a book, a memoir
titled Learning Sickness: A Year with Crohn's Disease, which
found its way into the hands of an agent this summer who
assures me that we will sell it to a commercial publisher.
Working on that book has been the most satisfying intellectual
experience of my life, and perhaps my greatest professional
accomplishment. The promise of a successful writing career,
something about which I have been dreaming since eighth grade,
has been the most exciting new stage in my life since the
birth of my first child nearly seven years ago.
Were I at a research university, though, and had I been hired
there as a scholar of contemporary British literature, that
book would likely prove meaningless in my case for tenure. If
anything, it would probably hurt me: The time I took to write
this piece of creative nonfiction was time away from potential
scholarship in my field.
Here the story is quite different. I have asked a variety of
faculty members and administrators about the value of my book,
and have been assured that it will most certainly count toward
the college's expectations for their faculty members to write
and publish. One faculty member, who spent the last year on
the tenure and evaluations committee, told me that, if he were
considering my tenure case, he would make no distinction
between the book I had written and a book of academic
scholarship.
This may sound irresponsible to some -- shouldn't faculty
members produce scholarship in their fields? But one other
piece of information is important to know here.
While I was working on this book, I have also been working on
developing credentials in this new field as both a teacher and
scholar. I have been writing and publishing creative
nonfiction aimed at journals and periodicals that specialize
in or feature the genre. I have supervised two independent
studies with senior undergraduates in advanced creative
nonfiction.
And, perhaps most importantly, I proposed, developed, and
taught the college's first writing seminar in creative
nonfiction last year. I'll teach it again in the spring.
So I now count creative nonfiction as one of my two major
fields, along with postwar British literature. And it is in
this new area that I will submit publications for both my
third-year review and my tenure case.
I am not the only one at this college, or even in this
department, who has redefined himself in this manner. One of
the members of my department, who wrote his dissertation on
Old English poetry, is now our specialist in modern Irish
literature. Another, who wrote her dissertation on Victorian
fiction, now teaches our courses in 20th-century
African-American literature. Our chairman did his M.F.A. work
in fiction, and wrote his dissertation about contemporary
American fiction; he recently completed his first book of
poetry.
They would certainly all agree with me that one of the joys of
teaching at a college like ours -- heavy courseload and all --
is the flexibility we have in defining ourselves as both
teachers and scholars.
Many readers of these pages are looking through the job ads
right now, and are searching for positions in the specialized
areas in which their graduate-school careers have defined
their interests. And many of those job seekers begin their
search looking for the light teaching loads and writing time
offered to them by the sort of research universities that are
awarding them their degrees.
I would encourage those readers to think hard about how they
are defining themselves through their research: Will the topic
hold your interest for a lifetime of academic scholarship?
Will it hold your interest for even the six years until
tenure?
If you're not certain about the answer, take another look at
those job ads. Don't let the slightly higher teaching loads
scare you away.
At a college like this one, the teaching load may be heavier,
but the chains that can define and constrict your writing and
publishing selves are much lighter.
James M. Lang is an assistant professor of English at
Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. He has written
occasionally this academic year about his experiences on the
tenure track in the humanities.
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