Of Time and Academe

July 14^th. July 14^th was the last time I posted here. Since then I went to England and presented at a lovely conference at Birkbeck. After I had acclimatized myself back to Eastern Standard Time when I returned I busied myself with the end of semester duties for the 2 summer courses I was teaching.

In mid-August I found out that I landed an opportunity to teach at a new college this semester. This has been an exciting time but it has also meant a lot of prep because they did not give me one section to teach but rather three. This means that I am presently teaching a 5 load this term; approximately 125 students.

When you are teaching, prepping, grading, and managing that many sections, especially when it is your first term at a new school, time has a way of evaporating without you even realizing it. Add a conference paper two weeks ago at the Midwest MLA in Ohio and it suddenly becomes the end of November and you haven’t written a blog post on your blog in over 4 months.

I am actually quite shocked at how long it has been since I have written here. I have been also writing posts for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online as well as pedagogy and edtech related posts for another blog– you know in my spare time, lol. All these small things mean finding time, and taking time to edit, to craft, to research, to share and foster the strong community that is so very important to both professors and students.

Going through my agenda is a good way to help assess time-to look at where my time has gone this semester and to reflect on what I prioritize and to make sure I am balancing my responsibilities. A large part of my week goes to making sure my lesson plans are structured, that the students are engaging with the texts, and that I have encouraged diverse ways to express ideas and connect concepts. Reviewing rubrics, grading, and keeping up with the paperwork of teaching is also where a lot of my time goes. But there is much more to this than what is on the surface or what gets recorded in your agenda or on your CV at the end of term.

Jana Smith Elford (@janasmithelford) wrote a lovely post this week about how academics need to write boast posts every once in a while to remind ourselves of all the work we put in every term. I strongly believe in the reflective practice that this sort of boast post requires, though in true academic whose graduate student years have strongly shaped them style, boasting is not something I have ease in doing.  Reflecting on the passage of time this term has allowed me to assess things I feel I have done well and others I know I need to work on more.

Communication, especially in terms of email, is a huge factor when you are teaching 5 sections and I feel this is something I do well. I have a 24hr email rule that I stick to religiously and I am sure to let students know if I believe I will not be able to get back to them within that time frame. Flagging emails for later is the strategy that seems to work quite well for me. Commutes and late night before bed are my catching up on correspondence time where I address those flagged emails. When students come up to me and say things like “honestly you are one of the only professors where I know that when I send an email I will get a response in a reasonable amount of time” I feel I am doing something right but I also am painfully aware of how time can slip away quickly for other faculty and students.

Regardless professors need to be cognizant of time for communication is time sensitive especially if you need to contact test centres for students with accommodations or last minute emails from students when major papers, a midterm, or an exam is on the horizon. There is nothing worse than waiting for your professor to get back to you when you have a concern about an upcoming assignment. Granted students need to work on their own time-management and get those questions in earlier than the night before a due date, yet it is our responsibility as professors to make sure students know we are there to help them when they need it.

My last few weeks have also been filled with grad school reference letter writing for former students. Time marches on and we are in the thick of application season which means filling out forms and tailoring letters for each student and each school to make sure that the universities know that I truly believe in these students-that they would be a credit to these graduate programs if admitted. All academics know that reference letters can be time consuming but I do them gladly because I know these students would do the exact same thing if they were in my position. This is time well spent.

Once a month I also go to William Morris Society of Canada board meetings- which is another new responsibility I took on this term. It is nice to have a variety of responsibilities and also a responsibility that can couple academic interest with less formal social interaction. The board is a good group of passionate people and I am honoured to be a part of the great talks, outings, and activities planned for the members of the society.

…….

There are three weeks left to the term. All my classes are in exam review mode and their final papers and projects are due next week (which means I get to look forward to a weekend of grading next week).  Next term I will probably have the same course load, and knowing me I will surely take on other administrative or editing projects. This week a tweet from Shit Academics Say emphasized a lot of my self-reflective thoughts at the busiest times of the year.

Mornings 1. Coffee 2. Review to-do list 3. Self-directed anger at profound inability to say no 4. Remind that I love what I do 5. Feel worse

— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay) November 24, 2015

Time and academe are intimately linked. You need to keep up with time, with new monographs, new articles, to be the most effective as a pedagogue and researcher. If you want to be accessible as a teacher and academic you need to manage time; you need to make sure your social media accounts are up to date and update your CV with new papers and presentations. Often months go by without updating my Evernote folders with what I have saved and found through my Twitter feed. All of this slows down the process when you come to edit your work as articles or when you are working on a monograph. It takes time to save time. Organization becomes an indispensable skill (have an hour before class in the faculty lounge-write a 1000 word blog post, have a 45 minute commute on the subway-grade some editing exercises).

Of course you need to have balance as well. You need to balance your time between academe and personal relationships. Families, partners, friends, and pets all deserve and require your time as well. My good friend Sarah mentioned this in a tweet this week: “the sum of my worth is not work” and this is so true. What we do as teachers, as academics is important but it is not everything. Our own self-care needs to happen just as much as we care and foster safe creative spaces of critical inquiry in our educational spaces. All of our tasks add up; we strive to fit all our responsibilities in a 24hr day- but at the end of the day we need to be happy with what we have accomplished without guilt, without regret. It all comes down to how we choose to use our time because sometimes 4 month gaps just happen.