How I Spent My First Break on the Tenure Track

By James M. Lang

From the moment I entered graduate school, I held part-time jobs to supplement my meager income as a teaching assistant. Those jobs -- in bookstores and banks, mostly -- did not provide four-week breaks over the holidays or for summer vacation. For three years after graduate school, I worked in an administrative unit at a research university, and our offices remained open over the academic breaks.

Hence the four weeks of freedom I had between the fall and spring semesters this year constituted my first real academic break since my days as an undergraduate. And after my first semester on the tenure track -- teaching three courses for the first time; learning my way around a new city and a new part of the country; living with an unhappily underemployed spouse, a child just starting kindergarten, and a two-year-old; and, for much of the semester, battling a chronic illness that chose the wrong time in my life to subject me to one of its bouts of activity -- I couldn't have welcomed that break more enthusiastically.

I made BIG plans for break -- I intended to accomplish quite a bit. And I did manage to accomplish some of what I had set out to do. But a week or two into the break it occurred to me that this was not the right time, or the right year in my life, to be obsessing over the amount of words I was turning out each morning on the computer.

It's my first year on the tenure track. I needed a break. So here's what I did instead:

I read the first Harry Potter novel. Like most of the rest of the world, I was impressed. I also read Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. Impressed again. I bought four more novels that I didn't get around to.
I watched a sporting event from start to finish. The fact that this particular event was a college football bowl game in which my undergraduate alma mater was cruelly humiliated by a clearly superior team detracted only slightly from my enjoyment of the event. After all, not once during the game did I feel guilty because I had a stack of papers waiting for me in my basement office.
I did every load of laundry in the house for the entire four weeks of break. It still probably wasn't enough to make up for all of the laundry I had neglected to do over the 15 weeks of the semester, but it may have helped a little. Check with my wife on this one.
I served on the search committee for a new position in our department. I read through applications, wrote summaries of the qualifications of the candidates I was assigned to review, met with the other members of the committee, and conducted four phone interviews. I remembered what it was like to be on the other end of that conversation, and empathized.
I played with my kids every afternoon. I bought each of them a canister of Tinker Toys for Christmas, and taught them how to make cats, dogs, aliens, and skyscrapers with pulleys.
I took the occasional nap.
I prepared three brand-new courses for the spring semester, and wrote a proposal for a new course to be offered in the fall of 2001. I felt excited to be charting out these new intellectual voyages, but overwhelmed to think that I had another 15-week stretch ahead of me.
I answered all of the e-mail correspondence I had been neglecting over the semester, and then wrote e-mails to all of my friends and colleagues with whom I had lost touch since my arrival here. I let most of them know that I would probably not correspond again until the summer.
I brought a bunch of empty file folders to my campus office, intending to reorganize all of my files into a more efficient system. I began working assiduously on this project during the first week of break, and went home one evening with the files scattered around the floor of my office, in mid-reorganizational mode. Those files stayed on the floor for the remainder of break, a casualty of my sudden realization that I had better things to do. On the day before classes started for the spring semester, I closed them up and set them on top of my file cabinets. They're not going anywhere.
I repeatedly opened the computer file for the academic conference paper I was supposed to write over break, and repeatedly failed to add anything to it.
I wrote a prospectus and the first two chapters of a nonfiction book -- part memoir, part stitched together from interviews with others -- about chronic illnesses and the impact they have on the philosophical and spiritual perspectives of those who suffer from them. While I was waiting in doctor's offices, laboratories, and pharmacy lines, I spent some long, hard hours thinking about my own chronic illness, and the ways it has changed my thinking about my life. For the curious, I have Crohn's disease, one of those maddening illnesses that alternates periods of disease activity with periods of perfect health, and science has yet to determine what moves the body from one state to the other. I compared mental notes with my brother, who is also an academic and who suffers from a chronic illness of his own; I wrote down our stories. This might not be the book that earns me tenure, but it's a book I've been trying to avoid writing for the past five years, and the break finally weakened my resistance.
I balanced our checkbook.
I entertained my parents, three of my siblings, their spouses, and one of their dogs over the holidays. We sat together in the evenings around the fire and talked about whatever came up. We cooked, we drank beer and wine, we ate lobster, we planned to get together more often. We missed my brother and his family who couldn't make it. My sister-in-law bought me a bean-bag toss game for Christmas and my two brothers and I played hotly contested games of Challenge 500 in the basement, neglecting our children and spouses for an hour or two, making crude jokes, and comparing our experiences of being grown-ups.
I picked up my older daughter from kindergarten every day for three weeks, watching her come skipping down the stairs and out into the snowy playground, talking and laughing with her friends, scanning the crowd for me and then smilingly pretending not to see me. I made her lunch every day, and wrote little notes to her on the napkins I put in her lunchbox.
I daydreamed about the summer.

In a wonderful collection of stories and lessons from a lifetime of teaching, titled The Vocation of a Teacher, Wayne Booth, a longtime (now retired) English professor at the University of Chicago, asks himself why, if he loves teaching so much, he's so glad when class is over.

I felt much the same way about my first semester on the job -- I loved it, but I was powerfully glad when it was over.

I hate to generalize too broadly from my experience, but I'm willing to venture one piece of advice for those of you who manage a successful run at the tenure track this year: Once you've slogged your way through most of that first semester, and you see the end in sight, don't overburden yourself with grand expectations.

It's a long semester, and there's another one coming.

James M. Lang is an assistant professor of English at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. He will be writing occasionally about his first year on the job.