Dogwood afternoons

Another week sped by in a nearly stupefying blur of work, including search committee meetings and phone interviews. Then there were the honors weekend obligations, including going over two 100+-page theses, sitting in on three senior theses defenses (40 minutes each) and then spending nearly three hours with colleagues and outside examiners, discussing the merits of seven honors projects. This latter part all happened yesterday, on a Sunday.

Of course, this all meant that, aside from planning classes for the past two weeks, there has been no time to do the grading that still awaits for me in prodigious piles, mostly because I assign too much writing. And that's basically because I see the pay off in most students and my evaluations consistently mention this as part of why they feel challenged and why they learn a lot in my classes.

I hope that now that the search is basically over (except for campus visits that will happen in the next few weeks), and honors is finally done, the waters will all come back to splashing, rather than near-drowning, levels and I will get a semblance of my life back. One of my Latina advisees saw my husband yesterday at my small college on the hill's marathon and asked him, with little irony, if he had to pen himself in my appointment book (as she has to do) to see me. "She knows a little too much," my husband quipped after telling me the story.

Meanwhile, the dogwoods are preciously in bloom and, although there has been rain for the past two days and temperatures aren't budging beyond the 50s, the promise of 70-degree temperatures returning later this week and weekend makes it bearable. I am also happy that this is the penultimate week of classes so that by May 7 my time, finally, becomes my own again.

I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to spring 2011 when I'll be on my third-year leave, after what promises to be another busy semester this fall because I will also have to teach three classes (though I won't have as many students as this semester) and I will be under scrutiny for the process of pre-tenure review, which means that every member of my department will come visit my classes!

However, after preparing a short vitae for inclusion with an application for a very competitive summer stipend, so that I can revise an article that I submitted to a journal in July and have now a "revise and resubmit" request from, I've decided that after MLA in January, I won't be doing any more conferences for a long, long time.

Participating in the search committee has made me much more aware of what a strong resume should contain to be highly competitive in our discipline and, based on that criteria, I finally feel like I can lay down my sword and shield and rest, for a while. Yep, it's definitely time to stop and gaze at these glorious dogwoods.