If you ask me what I need, I’ll tell you nothing

Posted on November 27, 2013 by rglw

Too often, I’m writing about how quickly time passes and how incredulous I am that another month has gone by, that another semester is nearly over.  There is a seasonality to being an educator that is both comforting and confounding.  The beginning of the school year is dizzying, trying to internalize the rhythm of a new schedule.  And just when I settle into a routine, it’s already the end of November and this steam train is headed straight into the end of the semester.

My students are distracted and so am I as the lure of the holiday season creeps slowly backwards from December into the end of November.  Everywhere you look it’s the season of giving and the season of thanks juxtaposed with a season of excess consumption.  We should be sharing with the “less fortunate” and buying “must-haves” to shower our family and friends.  These competing messages grind against one another.

Even though I don’t celebrate Christmas, I know the commercialization of the holiday overshadows the religious and spiritual meaning of the day.  Mass consumption has clouded the whole season, confusing Christmas and Hanukkah and throwing the retail world into a tailspin. Commercialization of the holiday has grown even in the years since I worked in retail, and we seem to have lost sight of being thankful.  We’re spurned to buy and “giving back” is secondary.

This is just the beginning of the time of year when giving is at an all time high. There are so many opportunities to give money or time or goods to charities and non-profit organizations.  And because it’s the holiday season, we can feel good about helping other people.  But after the new year, food insecurity, poverty, and people’s needs recede from view.  We hunker down for the winter, with our must-have gifts and our sky-high credit card bills, and we hardly see those still in need.

I am especially troubled by the excess and paucity of stuff and food this year having just moved into a new house and celebrating Hanukkah and Thanksgiving on the same day. My family has been asking things that we need.  “What do the girls need?” They also ask me, “What do you need for the new house?”

I want to publicly state that we need nothing. Having just packed all of our things into boxes, moved those boxes less than three miles away and staring at the resulting chaos, I can honestly say, we need nothing. [Sidenote: My husband will disagree–he’ll say that we need this or that thing to put in our house or for the girls.]

Sure, there are things that I want.  I want new boots. I want an e-reader. I want a hammock for the yard. But do I need those things?  I need nothing.

I have so many things that I know others would never take for granted. I have a safe and comfortable home. I have electricity and food when I want it. If I lose electricity, the power company will come to fix it (usually).  If I don’t feel like cooking or our cupboards seem bare, we can eat out or make a run to the grocery store.  I have options.  I have a car than gets me where I want to go and I have enough money to afford the gas. I have a husband who cares about me (and who is undoubtedly rolling his eyes at this post).  I have two incredible children who make my life better every day they’re in it. I have a family that has always supported me. I have so much.

No one can give me the things I actually need.  I need more time in the day to spend with my family and to rest.  I need job security and more time in my work week to tackle the research that sits collecting dust in the corner of my office (and my brain).  I do without these things but I don’t suffer like those folks who are hungry for food or work or housing.

In this season of excess, of unbridled consumption, I hope others will think about the things they can give to others and the things they already have.  And when the holiday season draws to a close, I hope others will continue sharing with others truly in need.

Posted in being jewish, culture, economy, everyday life, family, food, holidays, hunger, kids, lessons learned, personal, writing | Leave a comment

My life is in boxes: reflections on making a home

Posted on November 19, 2013 by rglw

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we are moving.  Life has a way of making big changes feel ill-timed.  The past few weeks have been full of planned and unexpected transitions.  Even though we’re moving less than three miles away from our current house, the moving process seems longer.  It feels like we have been packing and schlepping for weeks.  I look around my house now and all I see are boxes.

I have moved many times in my life–several as a child, three times in the years that followed college graduation.  But more recently, I’ve been rooted where I live. You would never believe that I always wanted to be sent away. As a child, I loved stories of girls who went to overnight camp or boarding school, but those scenarios were not financially possible. I always thought I would move far away, but then I met my now husband just a year out of college. He was from Massachusetts and I was from New Jersey so when we landed in Connecticut, I felt really lucky we were able to stay close.  Several years later, the girls joined our family and the idea of displacing ourselves just because we wanted to be far away seemed foolish.  Eventually, though, we felt like we were outgrowing our current house and started looking for another.

Moving a home is daunting when you’ve settled into your space. When we searched for our first home, we were scared to take on what we considered to be “too much house” even though everyone told us we would “fill it.”  I was never concerned with filling it–we don’t typically buy things just to buy them, and it takes us forever to make decisions about big decorating purchases. I felt lucky to own a home at all.  We bought just before the mortgage market fell apart and even then, my mother told me she lamented how expensive real estate (especially in the northeast) had become. My mom never saw our house, but she would have loved it (she would have loved it more if it had air conditioning).

Our house is modest and lovely. It’s eighty-five years old and full of charm. And in the six years we’ve lived here, so many things in our lives have changed.  We’ve painted the walls, hung our pictures, and added our own signature to the house.  And we have acquired so many things, including two little ladies. When you’ve filled a house with things that you use (and things that you simply keep), the prospect of packing them and moving them is debilitating.  Packing a life into boxes makes you face a few sobering realities.

First, I have too many things.  In the last few weeks of packing, we’ve made lovely discoveries in the attic and the basement (and sometimes in my own closet). We have “found” things we thought long gone or recovered things we thought lost or discovered things we never knew we had.  All signs that we have some serious thinking to do about the things that live with us.  I am already making false promises about having fewer things, about using my things more often, and about giving things away.  I hope I’ll keep up my end of this shaky bargain.

Then, there’s the issue of moving into what is known in suburbia as “our forever home.” I haven’t yet called our new house “our forever home” because I feel like it implies that life until this point hasn’t been real. And it also adds too much pressure. “Forever” implies that the future is guaranteed. If I know anything about life, nothing is guaranteed. Having already helped to clear out my family home (my parents’ “forever home”), I understand what it feels like to get attached to a house and to feel sadness over saying goodbye.

More than anything, more than packing the things or reframing how I see the next phase of my life, I feel sad that I can take the tangible things with me but other intangible things are left behind.  It’s not really about the physical house. I can hardly remember the two years we lived in this house before we had our kids.  We brought our daughters home to this house. I watched my preschooler take her first steps on the sidewalk in front of our house. I watched our littles run in the yard together and play together like sisters.  When I got my PhD, we came home to this house. I can’t pack those feelings, those images, those memories in a box with me. I can keep those experiences in my heart but they feel most salient in this place.

I have to keep remembering that the only thing changing with this move is our house. I feel so blessed to move to our new house. Thankfully, we are staying in the town where we’ve been for the last eight years.  I hope to stay here and see my children through school, to make this home a place for them. It might not be forever but it’s where I see us for now.

I’m so excited for the new intangible things I’ll accrue and eventually store in the attic.

Posted in family, kids, lessons learned, marriage, personal, writing | 6 Comments

My preschooler, the budding sociologist

Posted on November 8, 2013 by rglw

My preschooler is struggling with her social world. We switched her preschool about eight weeks ago, and she’s around more kids (other school was smaller) and more boys (other small class had only a few boys) than before. It’s also our first experience sending our child to spend the day with a group of kids we don’t know very well.

With Laurie Berkner’s Pandora station playing in the background, I get snippets of the day’s activities on our ride to and from school.  She’s working through gender binaries, expressions of femininity, beauty standards, and social class divisions–you know, the standard roster of concerns for the preschool set.

After a few weeks of school, she started to notice differences between kids.  One observation cropped up over lunch time:

Kiddo: Mommy, some friends have lunch at school.  I want to have lunch at school with them.  Can you sign me up for that?

We didn’t sign up for school lunch because we pack lunch, but it’s okay with me if she eats school lunch once a week.  She sees some kids have something that she doesn’t have. Still, her awareness of differences between kids and the knowledge that she could “sign up” (in essence, pay up) for something surprised me.

Not only is she noticing what other kids have, she is also aware of their perceptions of her. She is already developing a looking glass self–seeing herself as others might see her. Just this week in the morning, while getting dressed:

Kiddo: I don’t want to wear those pants, Mommy.

Me: Why, honey? It’s going to be cold out and these fleecy pants will be warmer than plain leggings.

Kiddo: I don’t want to wear those because other kids don’t think they look good on me.

<Insert look of horror here>

Dressing a four-year-old with opinions is a challenge.  But the idea that she would internalize outside perceptions of what she looks like in her clothing surprised me yet again.  I may be (okay, I most likely am) reading too much into the situation, but this isn’t the first time I’ve argued with her about her clothes and if she’s harboring fear or anxiety about other’s perception of her, I worry for her teenage years.

And then, there are the endless conversations about “boy things” and “girl things.” In two separate conversations with my preschooler this past week, she has voiced her confusion about the kids in her class.

Several nights ago, to her father:

Kiddo: Daddy, boys can like pink and girls can like blue. (Her tone implied that she was not curious, but simply confirming a suspicion she had.)

Husband: Go tell mommy that–it will make her very happy.

On the way home after preschool recently:

Kiddo: Mommy, I want to play at Matthew’s house and I don’t care if he only has boy stuff.

Me: Honey, what do you mean by boy stuff?

Kiddo: You know, trucks and stuff.

Me: Did someone at school say that there was boy stuff? How do you know what’s boy stuff and what’s girl stuff?

Kiddo: Well, girls like princesses and boys like trucks. But, I like trucks too. And boys should try playing with princesses before they say they don’t like them.

Sociologist mom or not, there are some things (too many things, really) that I cannot control.  We’ve given over to our daughters’ preferences for colors and clothing–they love pink and purple and sparkles.  At the same time, we have stocked our house with “gender neutral” items like art supplies and building toys or with books that have strong female heroines.  Yet, they know things about the world and about gendered expectations. Worse, they know things about standards of femininity and beauty.

How do I explain how to conform to or diverge from these expectations?  I’ve already shattered some of her princess dreams.  She loves to dress up in fancy dresses and stomp around in my heels, but when she pines for a “long ponytail” like the princesses in her story books, I have to shut it down.  Our Semitic hair is tough to tame into those long, flowy tresses. Straight hair is not a thing for us.

Just when I start to think that I’m screwing everything up, I get a glimmer of hope. Recently one morning:

Me: Honey, was it busy when everyone was changing for swimming at school yesterday?

Kiddo: It was. The boys take karate. (I swore I’d sign her up for karate but I never did). And mommy, Alex (a girl) takes karate.

Phew. “Yes, honey,” I reply, “Girls can do karate, too.”

Posted in family, fashion, gender equality, kids, lessons learned, motherhood, parenthood, personal, writing | 6 Comments

I’m going on a time diet

Posted on October 31, 2013 by rglw

I’ve got an accounting problem on my hands.  Accounting was my worst grade in college–the only class where I earned a C.  Overburdened by responsibilities in other classes and woefully behind on and confused by the material, I capitulated mid-semester.  It’s amazing how dramatic life seems at age twenty-one.  At the time, I felt that getting a C in accounting was the end of the world.  I worried endlessly that my degree in economics and my future plans to work in business would be ever-marred by this blemish on my transcript.

Ah, how different life is 15 years later. I care less about accounting in an economic sense. I’m summoning my knowledge of debits, credits, and amortization to solve the time loss I’m experiencing in my life.  I’m losing time every day–time to spend with my incredible little girls, time to spend with my husband, with my family and friends, time to spend on my writing or reading or just sleeping.  I’ve been wandering through time since the start of the semester and chalking up poor communication, deferred tasks and loads of stress to loss of time.

Conservation of time is kind of like conservation of money or some other resource.  In other spheres of life, when you want to conserve something, you instate a diet of sorts. If I was shoring up my finances, I might log my every expense.  If I was trying to lose weight, I would note every calorie consumed.

Can the same strategy apply to time?  In order to understand time loss, first, it’s important to account for the time.  (I am only now realizing that this post may be full of unintended punning and wordplay).  In light of the recent and unexpected loss of our uncle in September, I have been wondering whether I am spending my time well.  How can I conserve the time I have to use it in a way that makes me happy?  And how do I figure out where the lost time goes?

I am the first to admit that I give in to distractions far too easily.  When I am able to carve out blocks of time to write or read or grade or whatever, I am shocked at how productive I can be.  To use my time efficiently, I have experimented in the past with work strategies–sometimes focusing on one big task and other times allowing work to consume me.  Practically speaking, I learned about an app called Toggl where you can log your time (especially your work time) to figure out where things go.  Without more efficient use of my time, my energy feels misdirected or I find myself apologizing for not accomplishing a seemingly important task.

Another way I’m clawing back my work time, finding a community of writers to keep my accountable for my work.  In the coming month, I’m committing to a productivity push with the Academic Writing Month (#acwrimo) movement.  Consider adding yourself to this spreadsheet and reporting your progress.

My average knowledge in matters of finance should serve me well in accounting for my time.  I’m still curious about how other people manage their schedules, though.

Tell me about your time diets.  I’m hungry for them.

Posted in academia, blogging, community, higher education, lessons learned, personal, work, writing | 2 Comments

A post on Conditionally Accepted that is actually published

Posted on October 28, 2013 by rglw

I remarked three weeks ago that I thought the semester was flying.  It is indeed a slippery one.  By my calendar, it is Week 9.  The great push towards the end of the semester is on.

Today, I am excited to contribute my first guest post to Conditionally Accepted, a blog sharing stories about scholars on the margins of the academy.  I met one of the Conditionally Accepted editors via Twitter this past summer at my big annual conference and hoped I could contribute my experiences working in a contingent position to his project.

I am not quiet when it comes to my opinions on my work and marriage, parenthood or tenure.  The title I have chosen for this guest blog post is forceful “I’m Not on the Tenure Track and I’m Not Sorry About It”), and thus, I’m a little uneasy about it.  Strange that I’m apologizing for my unapologetic title.

I do hope you’ll read it, and please tell me what you think.

Posted in academia, family, grad school, higher education, lessons learned, personal, sociology, teaching, tenure, women, work, writing | 1 Comment

In loco parentis: real life role conflict and role strain

Posted on October 25, 2013 by rglw

Thanks for not giving up on the blog and me.  September and October knocked me down, but I am slowly standing back up.

Everywhere I look, all I see are Rogue Cheerios.  Residuals from my work and personal life are spilling over everywhere.  The ungraded papers tucked in my suitcase on vacation with my family. The missed call from my husband while I’m counseling a student. The unreturned messages from students pinging on my phone while I play Zingo with my daughters.

In Intro to Sociology, I teach my students about role strain (the competing responsibilities of an individual role) and role conflict (when the responsibilities of different roles battle for prominence), but I haven’t articulated how role strain and role conflict happen at the same time.  The competing, similar demands of my role as an educator and my role as a parent have me gasping for air. 

In teaching role conflict and role strain, I use “the good mother” or “the good professor” as archetypes for understanding how competing roles work.  I am quite secure in knowing that I embody neither of these roles on even my best of days.  The good mother is selflessly devoted to her family and her partner, subjugating her own needs and balancing the responsibilities of parenting and home life with whatever else fills her plate.  The good professor is selflessly devoted to the life of the mind, engaged wholly in scholarly pursuits.

I am A good mother and A good professor, but I am not that good.

I never realized how much parenting I would end up doing at work when I’m away from my own small children.  Every semester, I end up spending hours with students, discussing future plans, their major, or their experiences with roommates.  Most colleagues would tell me that the parenting I’m doing for my students is not my job.  I respectfully disagree with them.  New research from folks at Hamilton College confirms that the development of relationships with trusting adults on campus is associated with greater retention. One of the reasons I knew I would make a great college educator is that I respect the chaos of their lives and I enjoy watching them discover their newfound adulthood.

Many folks would never choose to work with college students but I feel particularly grateful to be in their lives at such a crazy juncture.  I have to feel grateful because I’m doing some of the parenting that other parents cannot or will not do for their kids while they are away at school.  I have to place the same confidence in the people who care for my children while I work.  I feel grateful for our childcare professionals–they love our children just as much as we do.  Down the road when my children leave our home, I hope my girls will find someone like me that they can trust, too.

My proverbial cups are full, overflowing, making a mess, but I should not complain.  I’m employed and I have two amazing little daughters.  I just feel the weight of the roles I fill and right now they’re heavy.  I take the responsibility of being a good mom, partner, sister, friend, educator, and citizen very seriously.  Right now, the responsibilities of the roles feel eerily similar to one another and the lines between where one role starts and one roles ends are too blurry for me to discern.  Worse yet, I know that the role strain and role conflict prevent me from being the best version of my self in any of these roles.

I’m comfortable in the gray area, though. I’ll have practice for those teenage years with my own girls and thank goodness I don’t have to face those years for at least a decade.

Posted in academia, family, higher education, kids, lessons learned, motherhood, parenthood, personal, sociology, students, teaching, work | Leave a comment

The writing is the reward

Posted on October 4, 2013 by rglw

If you’re a teacher, you are probably wondering where September went.  I know I am pretty amazed at how many things happened in the last month and how quickly this semester is flying.  In this first semester of non-graduate, non-dissertating life, I took the advice of others about organizing my schedule and preserving time for myself and for writing.  I set aside time on my schedule for writing and for self-care and made those appointments recurring so I would never have to remind myself to both write and take care of myself.

Anyone want to guess what happened?

Life. Life happened.

I wasn’t so public about what was happening in life, but as life ramped up my work life got pretty hectic, too.

So I stopped trying to get up early to fit in writing. I stopped going to the lunch time yoga class or taking walks. I stopped taking any good advice I’d given myself.

But now it’s October and life seems to be settling itself.  It’s never going to be totally quiet, but it is going to be more manageable.

And I have found that sitting down to write something is such a treat.

The writing is the reward for completing other tasks, for getting through that hectic day, for surviving the week.  What a relief to simply sit, relax, and put words together. With so many facets of life up to chance, writing is comforting and relaxing.  How can I convince my students of this?

I have things to write about teaching, about parenting, and about life. Instead, I’ll just write about writing.

Posted in blogging, lessons learned, teaching, writing | 2 Comments

On social media: [sometimes] you say it best when you say nothing at all

Posted on September 25, 2013 by rglw

With so many channels for communication, it is incredible if anything stays private. News, no matter how big or small, travels quickly.  Is it possible for the thinking brain to internalize, recall, or reflect on so much information?  What about when the information is wrong or incomplete? Our society feeds on an amplified version of the news and we have come to expect more information, to receive greater and faster transmission of this information, even when it might be better to stay silent, to reflect, to think.

That’s how I’ve felt about my own use of social media in the last four weeks.  I use Facebook, I tweet, I blog.  Yet, I haven’t been able to tell the whole story of my everyday life.  Rogue Cheerios is not an entirely personal blog–that’s what my Facebook profile is for–but I have felt speechless at the turn of events in my own life in these last few weeks. Instead of constantly updating or needlessly sharing bits of information, I have chosen strategically to say nothing and instead experience life as it is happening.

As a Facebook friend or a Twitter follower, if I’d never said anything about what’s really happening in my life.  If you caught me in a good moment, you might never perceive any stress.  I began to wonder how social media may be perverting the way we understand the social lives of others.

It’s a whole new way to think about Goffman’s idea of dramaturgy or the theater of life, the presentation of self.  We think of our social media outlets as communicating real information about our friends, our tweeps, our followers.  Favoriting and liking has supplanted real communication.  However, there is a careful calculation of what or how we say something, how we share or withhold details, of how we “connect” using social media.  These channels meant to eliminate the social (and physical) distance between people are actually driving a virtual wedge between us.

If you check my presentation of self in the last few weeks, you’d see the surface looks relatively calm. Underneath, though, there has been rough current.  Besides the general rockiness of the start of the semester including the juggling of childcare during the observance of our Jewish holidays, we have the good fortune of finding a new house in our town. We have been looking for months and are thoroughly blessed.  The same weekend that we found our new home, we also visited our dear uncle in the hospital. Just a week earlier, he had received a grave cancer diagnosis. Three weeks later, the house was ours, and our uncle was gone after a brief and fierce cancer battle.  Our heads are understandably spinning.

These events are really our own to work through, our own to deal with.  I’m not sharing this personal information to brag (about our future house) or to garner sympathy (about our uncle). I’m merely challenging myself (and hopefully my readers) to think about the ways we truly connect with others.  How can I present an authentic version of my self or should I? Can social media facilitate this process or does it hamper it?

I don’t have the answer.  I also don’t enjoy asking rhetorical questions. I do think I’ll continue to carefully manage the presentation of my social media self.  I just wonder if that means I won’t be as vocal.

Posted in being jewish, blogging, community, family, holidays, lessons learned, media, personal, social media, work, writing | 4 Comments

It’s not easy being a sociologist, so just don’t talk shop with your dental hygienist

Posted on September 18, 2013 by rglw

It is tough enough having your actual profession confused daily by every person you encounter.

If I had a dollar for every time someone confused sociology and social work, I’d have quite a few dollars (but not enough to quit my day job).

But what happens with a sociologist ends up in another equally confusing department like Educational Studies?

As if fielding the question, “You’re a sociologist–so do you work in a hospital?” was annoying enough, now I have to debunk more mythology around “Ed Studies,” what it means and what I do.  Just to be clear, I am not a case worker and I also don’t exactly train future teachers.

By now, I should know better. When people ask me about my work, I know they’re not going to like what I have to say.  I study the sociology of education and care endlessly about school inequality.  Knowing that I have radical views on the state of public schooling, I should either speak up or shut up.  Even my own husband isn’t ready to hear what I have to say about the state of local schools.

So last week, when my dental hygienist and my dentist engaged me in a conversation on the state of public schooling, I should have kept it light.  But I just couldn’t.

Maybe it was because I had just come off a lecture on the broad history of American public schooling.  Maybe it was because it’s the start of the school year and I’m getting my students into Hartford schools to do research. Maybe it’s because I never stop thinking about kids and schooling.

But, when asked, “So, how do we fix this mess we’re in?” [“This mess” being the state of public schooling], I replied, “One of the ways we could fix the state of schooling is to blow up the attendance boundaries and figure out a way to do schooling across city and town lines.”

My dentist looked horrified. Maybe, not horrified. Maybe just a little dumbstruck.

[Side note: we live in a state where the city and town lines are deeply etched in the landscape, literally and figuratively. Folks here do not want to share anything–not even municipal services like trash or snow removal–unless absolutely necessary.]

And immediately, she redirected the conversation and threw in, “well, maybe we should just control who becomes parents.”

Now, it was my turn to be dumbstruck.

Parents, and in this case parents of children in urban districts, take so much heat for the success of their children.  And parents are surely part of the equation. But public schooling is complicated, and few lay critics fail to realize two things: first, schools are located in a specific place and even if they draw students from outside of local boundaries, they are still subject the local norms and mores of the community.  And secondly, the local boundaries did not happen overnight–local boundaries are also the result of social and economic processes that enabled some folks to leave cities and constrained other folks to city communities. (See any history of suburban life and discussion of red-lining)

Public schooling is complicated. But my stance on equalizing opportunities rests squarely on the intersection of schools, families, AND communities.  We can blame teachers or school administrators or politicians, but our public school system is tied directly to geography.  And the geography, the vast residential segregation by race and social class that exists is not an accident.  Residential segregation is the result of institutional racism and to some degree classism that over decades has left many communities without the economic and human resources necessary to run “successful” schools.

To sit back and blame parents for the condition of public education, especially parents living in low-resource neighborhoods, as though they don’t care about their own children seems like a really ignorant position.

I remained dumbstruck, unable to muster any response to her comment about poor parenting. And then she told me my teeth looked great.

I went home, cavity free.

Being a sociologist is tough sometimes.

Posted in education reform, kids, parenthood, personal, politics, race, schools, social class, work | 1 Comment

Persistence in the face of unrelenting mediocrity

Posted on September 12, 2013 by rglw

After many summers of failing miserably at tending to vegetable plants, I have resigned myself to the realization that I am not a great gardener.

Do you hear me, husband?  I stink at gardening. I am not even a little bit good at it. I’m just really terrible.

I am not sure where I got the idea that I should tend a garden.  The Jersey girl in me loves a good farm.  I have vivid memories of my dad stopping for corn and tomatoes at a farm stand near our home in Marlton. My parents have been schlepping me to Conte’s Farm in Medford to pick blueberries and eat cider donuts since I was little. So, I wanted my girls to have the same love of farms and fruits and veggies as I do.

Before our preschooler could walk, we brought her out to a farm to pick strawberries and blueberries. I put her on a tractor to pick apples. When she was finally mobile and we became a family of four, it was rinse repeat.  I’ve taken the girls to local farms a half-dozen times this summer alone.  The other day, our preschooler asked to go and pick blackberries–not sure how she knew it was the season but she’s already picked every other berry so she’s getting curious about what’s next.

I have tried reading about gardening and failed grandly at cultivating anything.  A few years back I built a raised bed with my dad’s help and but struggled to get anything to grow.  In my gardening fantasies (yes, I have those sometimes), I farm a huge plot with so many vegetables that we’re giving things away. And I cook and can the best of the summer bounty.

It sounds pretty romantic but in reality, I’m a klutz in the garden.  My husband takes great pleasure in my failed gardening efforts.  He knows how much I love vegetables, farms, and growing things.  But I forget to water on hot days, I picked the worst spot for the raised bed, and the squirrels enjoy more of spoils that I ever have.  But I stick at it.  I am so terribly mediocre at gardening, and mediocre may be putting it kindly.  As I watered the fig tree this afternoon, leaves wilted in the heat, I wondered if it would ever bear fruit.  I know nothing about fig season as the tree was a gift from a friend.  He pruned the tree earlier this summer and told me to keep it hydrated. I’ve tried that but it’s still a total fail.

If my day job was this hard, I would have quit by now.

Oh wait….my day job IS hard, just in a different way.

I’m not saying that being a professor is the same as being a farmer.  There is far more sitting involved in what I do (much to my chagrin).  But, I do plenty of proverbial gardening in the office.  I’ve analyzed data and had null findings. I’ve worked a paper over multiple times, sent it out for peer review and received a rejection. And I’ve experimented with seemingly great ideas in the classroom and met blank, bored student faces.

In a job that’s nearly entirely self-directed, it’s a challenge to stay upbeat, and I often wonder what keeps any of us engaged in work that could be considered a struggle.

For me, I stay engaged to see those light bulb moment with my students or the email I get semester later from someone who still remembers my class.  It’s the pride I get from landing that publication (one so far but it’s better than none).  And it’s the satisfaction I feel from seeing people read Rogue Cheerios.  Without these moments, the frustrating bits of the job would be all consuming.

When things aren’t working out, it’s important to take a step back, seek out support, and ask for help.  I do those things with my work sometimes.  I never look for help with the garden, though.  So maybe I should take a cue from my actual job and maybe I’ll get a little bit better at my non-day-job.

Posted in academia, blogging, lessons learned, personal, research, students, teaching, work, writing | 4 Comments