Finish line

Another week vanished down the maelstrom that has been this semester. But now that classes are finally over and all that is left are the piles and piles of grading, all is much quieter and calmer and the stress has subsided markedly.

The semester, as hard as it was to finish, did not end on a high note. While I heard of colleagues whose students clapped at the end of class, on the last day I had a first-year student complaining about my lack of speed in returning graded material -- and I had to bite my tongue not to bark back about the painstaking and substantial amounts of feedback about their writing that I gave them throughout the semester. Thus, I opted not to attend the department's ice cream social, or the college's social gathering or a dinner given to the students in the summer program to which I have contributed, because I needed some distance and solitude.

I do have wonderful friends and colleagues who, like Dr. S, brought me ice cream to my office so I at least would be able to enjoy a little of the feast. And the former chair of the department, who's on sabbatical this semester, who took time to come into my office to give me invaluable advice, as always. Those friendships and collegial relationships are part of what makes this place often magical in its nature.

There also were students who e-mailed me to say they'd missed me at the social and students who've e-mailed to thank me for all the work I did with them, and seniors who insisted on hugging me on that last day, saying that my class was the best they'd taken at my small college on the hill. It's sad how a few bad apples tend to ruin the taste of an entire bushel, though.

By semester's end, it was hard to figure out where my commitment to my students and my job ended and where I began, especially after I estimated that this semester I spent basically 90 percent of my time on the job -- teaching, grading, reading and lesson prepping for class, commenting on student drafts, meeting with students in and out of office hours, meeting with colleagues and college officials for varied and various reasons, trying to produce scholarship, answering the seemingly endless barrage of e-mails, preparing and submitting proposals for grants (some that I got and some that I didn't get), preparing for and traveling to professional development conferences, meeting departmental demands on senior exercises and honors projects, helping to evaluate senior exercises in other departments, participating in Admissions events and in a search committee, and the sundry other time-consuming activities that sprout unexpectedly on a day-to-day basis.

This means that about 10 percent of my time was devoted to my husband, my furry children, my family, never mind myself. That will most definitely change next year because it's simply not sustainable, physically or psychically, and also because it will lead me to dislike my job, which would be quite ironic, considering how hard I've worked to get and stay here.

I do love my small college on the hill and the teaching and mentoring I do here, but the culture of the place can be almost religious about upholding its mystique of close relationships between students and professors, and about involvement in the community. I don't believe in befriending students since the power differential between professors and students doesn't disappear until, perhaps, when they've graduated (if then). But I do believe in engaged pedagogy and in mentoring students through that committed engagement. That commitment, however, definitely goes way beyond what professors can and are expected to do in larger universities (as my husband and friends like to remind me).

The challenge is to find a balance between what I want to do to in relation to my work, and what I want to do to be a happier human being. The two cannot always be the same thing. I definitely don't want to be so invested in my work that it is all I think, talk or care about. I've come too far and through too much in this life, and have too valuable a marriage and family relations and interests outside my job, to let myself be consumed by it. I've been there, done that, in other lifetimes, and I will not do that again.

Once I'm done with all the grading and submit the final grades, I will neatly fold this semester, both the good and the bad, and place it in the drawer of my memory as a reminder of what I can do better first for myself and then for others. The process of learning how to live my life better and more productively, I have reminded myself, doesn't end because I am almost 50 years old. And I guess that's something to be humbled by and thankful for, especially for a perfectionist control freak like myself.