Future shock, part 2

So the other part of that post is that I am also thinking about what I want my life to be like as the Snork Maiden ventures farther out into the world.  This summer, I’ll drop her off at her two-week program and, most likely, make my way (with one or two stops with friends) to where Stubb will be wrapping up his out-of-town gig.  We’re planning to drive home from there and have a few days on our own, reminiscent of a long drive we did twenty-something summers ago.

One thing I might like to do, eventually, is sell the house.  I like our neighborhood and our location, but I’m not crazy about home ownership.  I think Stubb feels more or less the same.  On the other hand, it is a good size for us, and won’t feel too big for just the two of us.  We are currently getting dicked around (I am starting to realize) while refinancing, and I hate owing a big bank a huge amount of money.

I think I’ll want to keep working at SA, although my chair at NLNRU has said several times that I should come back when the Snork Maiden graduates, and get the tuition break if she goes to NLNRU or to another school in its tuition-exchange consortium.  It’s certainly another reason (besides liking a lot of the people) to stay in friendly contact with the program there.

I’m going to be mentoring a couple of students in a low-residency MFA program this fall, just working with them one-on-one.  I’ll be curious to see whether I like that or not, and whether that turns out to be part of my work over the next few years.

Today I got a very nice email from an editor I sent the ms. to back in January (here).  It’s a big press, one I didn’t expect to pick up the book, and they didn’t–but it was a helpful letter nonetheless, and it also expressed a continuing interest in the work that I think is real.

The email helped me see, actually, something that is out of place about the book, something I might actually be able to fix.  I will be thinking about it this summer.

Because in the shorter term, no matter what else happens, I really do want this book out in the world!

Less than angels

The Barbara Pym Society meets this weekend at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, to celebrate the writer’s centenary.

Here, it’s schoolwork, laundry, and other life stuff.

Big Chunks of Things:

• Finish reading and comment on hellaciously long thesis draft done for now
• Comments for three two one other students on final NLNRU papers
• Grade at least 4 2 portfolios for regular junior students

Medium-Sized Things:

• 12-minute chunk of writing
• Reconcile admissions spreadsheet for summer workshop, make contact as necessary with late admits and people on waitlist, get ready to contact people who haven’t paid
• Draft a review guide for my regular junior class exam (thank goodness, Dr. Tea has already made and shared hers, so I should be able to crib off of that)
• Clear out email inbox (which I’d been keeping to 20 active items, but which has ballooned to 45)–some of these things will disappear as I deal with other list items Pared this down to 20 12 10 and still shrinking.
  
• Comment on a friend’s poem
• Laundry
• Exercise
• Revise SA deployment plan yet again (following meeting with GGE on Friday; probably more on this later)

Small but Necessary Things:

• Remaining paperwork for Snork Maiden’s summer program
• Resignation letter for NLNRU and also sign contract for summer advising
• Handful of emails (five or six?) related to summer conference and travel
• Scan/send paperwork on Monday morning
• Added: Grocery store
• Added: Pick up Snork Maiden and friend from a study session, give them dinner, drop friend off home

Here’s the awesome thing I realized this morning: although I only have a little more than two weeks (!) until I leave for what will amount to about a month away from home, I will have more unstructured time in those two weeks than usual, because we only have a few more days of classes, and although I’ll be proctoring some exams and grading final projects, I will only have one class of exams to grade!  (AP kids usually don’t have a final exam–they have a culminating paper or presentation instead.)

I have a bunch of other things I want to write about–how a student with whom I’ve worked particularly closely was selected by his peers to speak at graduation, what it’s like starting to be chair of the department, summer plans, thoughts about next year.  For now, though, the list awaits.  Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you’re having a great day.

Night thoughts

I have never been quite clear on whether I’m an owl or a lark.  In my case, I think the two extremes meet–I really like both the very late night and the very early morning; in short, the times when no one else seems to be awake, or at least isn’t sending me email or, worse, trying to call me on the phone.  Teaching high school has emphasized my larky qualities: I got up at 4:30 on Friday to comment on paper drafts and exercise before school, and had a great morning overall, even completing two small writing projects that had been on my to-do list for weeks–an abstract and a book blurb–while my students were having writing time on the drafts I’d returned.

But then I napped in the afternoon and stayed up late–it was Stubb’s last night at home before going back to his current gig–and wasn’t much use on Saturday (napped again, even, which is fine, but unusual).  And now it’s late Saturday night–Sunday morning, really–and I am awake and feeling owlish.  The question is, do I attack this giant to-do list now, making good use of the wee hours, or do I try to go to bed so that I can get up reasonably early and get a good day’s work in on Sunday?  Because we still have two weeks of the school year left, and if I try to owl it tonight, how will I go back to larking it on Sunday night and for another two weeks?

A complicating factor: I’m not the owl I used to be.  My eyes are tired, and I know I’ll look haggard in the morning if I stay up late.  It’s just so peaceful here in the middle of the night.

Future shock

So many things I want to write about, but the one uppermost in my mind at the moment is this essay by Madeline Levine in the weekend NYTimes.  It’s about reimagining yourself after the kids have “left the nest.”

When the Snork Maiden was a baby and a small child, the business of getting through the current version of life as we knew it tended to drive out most thoughts of future versions, with the possible exception of wistful thoughts of how nice it would be not to change diapers any more, or trying to imagine when it would be OK to leave her alone to run out to the store.

Now she approaches the beginning of high school, and while daily life does still consume a lot of energy and thought, I’m finding it increasingly easy to imagine the growing independence she will have over the next few years.  Surely this is largely because I’ve watched my students follow this trajectory; it’s my sixth spring at SA, and we’re about to graduate the fourth class of students I’ve taught (and the third that I taught when they were freshmen).  But it’s also because I followed this trajectory myself, as a teenager, and I well remember how much I wanted independence, too.

Mike Riera, author of Field Guide to the American Teenager and other books (including Surviving High School, a well-thumbed copy of which I keep in my classroom), tells parents that we have to get ourselves “fired from the job of being our kids’ manager and rehired in the role of consultant.”  I guess the thing that keeps me from being too sad about the Snork Maiden growing up–beyond the fact that this is what’s supposed to happen–is the hope of being one of her consultants for many years to come.

Spring awakening, part 2

The strangest thing about the last couple of weeks is how much prepping and grading have slid down my list of preoccupations.  I’m still doing them, but they keep getting displaced from my thoughts and, to some extent, from my time–I’m doing them in bits and pieces instead of in neatly circumscribed chunks of time, as I’ve usually preferred to do.  What’s happening is that issues both important and urgent keep intervening–some to do with the literary magazine, which is on the verge of being printed, and many to do with departmental issues for next year: hiring, deployment, covering Gamma’s leave.

I am starting to understand the SA version of the problem of bodies in seats: we can’t finalize deployment until have some certainty about how many sections of each class we’ll need, and in some cases, that rests on factors we can’t entirely control.  We’re in the throes of a new system for applying for and approving honors/AP placements, and one effect we are discovering is that the counselors are supplying one set of numbers, based on students’ self-reporting what they plan to apply for, and the departments are supplying another set, based on who actually follows through and turns in the forms.  The college counselors put their numbers into the enrollment system, though, so that’s the set of numbers that Penelope has been using to build the schedule.  In a few cases, these numbers are strikingly different, enough to account for one more, or one fewer, class.

Fortunately for me, we seem to have enough staff to cover whatever contingency, but I want to minimize people’s preps (I am already seeing that Dr. Tea will have to deal with three preps, but none new, thank goodness, and only for one year, I hope).  And of course we all want to know what we are teaching next year!

You can see how there might end up being somewhat more winging of teaching things under these circumstances…

Spring awakening, part 1

This one is going to be short, because I’m just waiting around for a few minutes for the Snork Maiden to be dropped off from a short outing with my sister, and then we’re going out for the afternoon to attend a concert of my mother-in-law’s singing group. I am regretting saying I would have the time to do this, because I kinda feel like I don’t.  I am also pre-resenting the probability that everyone (Stubb’s brother’s family and my in-laws) will want to go out to dinner afterwards, and that I will have to be the bad guy who says no, we have to go home.  Although I guess they are welcome to take the Snork Maiden with them and drop her off at home later.  Then I’ll just be the bad guy who won’t go out to dinner with the family.  But seriously, the difference between getting home at 5:30 and getting home at 8 is a significant one for me today, and I’ve been up since 7 A.M. doing things.

AP exams begin tomorrow, which means that students will be disappearing from classes over the next week.  This inaugurates the end-of-year period–we have about five more weeks of classes, but it’s going to be a a long, slippery, bumpy, weird slide to the end.  Gamma’s maternity leave begins in two weeks, unless, of course, the baby comes early.  (I’ll be covering one of her classes.)  More shortly about the other unstable factors defining my world right now!

The enchanted April

We have made our hire!   He’s a Ph.D. candidate who genuinely wants to teach high school.  He gave a strong sample class, but what convinced us wasn’t just the planning and execution–it was his classroom presence: engaged, kind, patient, flexible.  If I have to have two new department members during my first year as chair, I am glad that they’re Ph.D. Guy and ABD guy.  I just have to come up with better pseudonyms for both of them.

The colleague who left last spring to have a baby has stayed in touch with us, particularly with Elinor and when we were on the verge of despair about making this hire, Elinor suggested that we go back to her and see if she had any thoughts of returning, perhaps part-time.  The GGE really liked this idea, because Colleague (who also needs a pseudonym, I guess) is an excellent teacher.  And as I’ve mentioned, Gamma is going on maternity leave for a term, so a little extra help is even more welcome.  The upshot is that we get to have this Colleague back for next year, on a part-time basis.

Now, you’d think that we were well and truly overstaffed for next year, but for various reasons this isn’t the case: Gamma will teach a little less when she returns, Ph.D. Guy is promised to history for (probably) two classes, we have Gamma’s leave to cover, and we are experiencing a bit of a surge in enrollment in the high school and will need to offer additional sections in at least two grades.  Also: the film teacher who usually teaches two English classes is probably not going to be able to teach more than one next year.  It’s all shaking down as I write this, and these and other factors are in flux, so Dr. Tea and I are having quite the merry-go-round on planning for next year.

Also: remember the Room Situation?  It still exists, damnit, and obviously adding teachers and courses is only going to make it worse–unless we can make what I am referring to (in private) as a “land grab.”  I spent upwards of an hour with Penelope today with a map of the school, trying to figure out where we could move people.  The upshot was that she is going to go speak with the GGE and we’ll take it from there.

Other things that have been going on: Summer plans are getting clearer, and I’ve made some of the necessary reservations.  The Snork Maiden was offered a partial scholarship to her summer program–hooray!–and that gave me the clarity I needed to plan  travel.

I want to write about finishing up at NLNRU, and about other SA stuff, and family and life and writing, but I have papers to grade and prepping to do, so more soon!