Failure to Launch
I'm struggling to re-energize for the academic year. I have too much to do and am having trouble initiating much of anything. About all I have really managed to accomplish is to have more things placed on my plate.
I foresaw this over the summer. Last year was incredibly productive in many ways. Teacher's Lounge is almost one year old. I created a little over one hundred new poems and paired them with both old and new graphics. The Gender Workshop series that I posted here laid the foundation of a major project I have been planning for several years. I became what passes as the expert on this campus in critical thinking. Some work I was doing with Women's Studies culminated a week ago with my writing of the mission statement and summary of the program (which was necessary for the program to get a budget for this year), though there is a bit more that needs to be done about creating a Strategic Plan (one hopes that someone else will step forward to pick up that ball). A lot of creativity was generated, drawn upon, and applied to push foreward on a lot of projects, culminating in June with notification that I had been awarded tenure.
But in August I pretty much crashed. Finishing things has often brought that state of affairs in the past. And when I say crash, I mean crash. I am struggling even to write this as a membrane of writer's block threatens to seal off my creative side. On the agenda for this year have been the following items: - complete my file for appointment to full professor
- do a shitload of work because I was elected to the Tenure and Advancement committee
- assume more responsibility the Gay/Non-Gay Alliance (campus climate survey; get the group blog active; contact Mel White of Soulfource and perhaps some other outside groups (PFLAG?) to come to this campus for a program)
- white a substantial portion of a book about how to learn to program
- establish a campuswide effort on critical thinking (I agreed to go to another conference in November on assessment of critical thinking)
- finish a paper on the experience of learning mathematics by gender-variant people
- create a presentation on who the f*ck I am for the Board of Trustees meeting in October (this is brand new...and unwelcomed. It turns out all newly tenured faculty have to do this)
- participate in the creating of a new academic program in eCommerce (to be initiated in Fall 2007)
- re-envision our Computer Literacy offerings (creating new content, course descriptions, syllabi, etc)
- participate in the planning of a mathematics teaching institute on campus
- no doubt a load of stuff that I have either forgotten or hasn't raised its head yet
I decided finally that I will not apply for full professor this year, a position the chair of my division will no doubt try to dissuade me from (I have until Wednesday to inform the committee that reviews this (i.e. the one I am a member of)). But the prospect of working on that damn file has paralyzed me to some extent: if I want to get any of that work done, I need to work...not prepare an application file. There is also the feeling of conflict of interest I have about being a member of a committee while I'm applying.
My blogging class got officially cancelled this week. There were only three students who signed up, probably because of the disgusting time slot it was assigned (Thursdays 4-6), and only one of those actually showed up for the first two meetings. That sort of makes it hard to do the group work that I had planned. I meet with the dean on Friday to arrange my replacement work: the critical thinking stuff.
Tomorrow I shall have to weed through my emails and find out how much I have been ignoring because I just haven't had the time. That includes emails from some DKos members. My sincere apologies to anyone who was expecting a response. I hope you will get one.
But mostly, I need to rekindle the spark. I'm not possible that my creative self is capable of being reignited, but I'm hoping to do so.
--Robyn Serven --Bloomfield College, NJ |