This past year, my wife and I agree without reservation, has been the most exhausting year of our adult lives, and that has far less to do with the pressures of the tenure process than you might imagine.
I am smack in the middle of that process, in my sixth year on the tenure track at a small, liberal-arts college. I'm teaching four classes this semester and juggling the usual extracurricular activities of committee work and writing.
But nothing that happens to me on the campus can compare to the nightmare I have at home right now: twin 1-year olds.
First, I should dispel some myths by noting that our fraternal twins, boy and girl, have no magical bond or secret language. They only interact when, for reasons we have not been able to fathom, the girl drops the bottle she is drinking, crawls over to her sibling, pounds him on the head, and takes away his bottle. A few minutes later, he pulls the same routine on her.
Instead of interacting or communicating with twin telepathy, they crawl or toddle around the house like roving sentinels, searching for any weakness in our line of babyproofing defenses. With one baby, you can get away with the occasional slip-up. With two of them, you pay for the tiniest mistake.
Leave the bathroom door open? Within 30 seconds one baby will be splashing in the toilet water, and the other unspooling the toilet paper roll. Forget to put the gate up? You only realize they're on the stairs when you hear them come tumbling down. Leave the dog's breakfast out? One will be eating puppy chow, the other dumping the water bowl on her head.
I get tired just writing about it. Three days a week I drop off the twins -- with their 3-year old sister -- at day care at 9:00 a.m.; two days a week I have all three of them until 1:00 pm. On all five of those days, I get to school and am ready for a nap.
The exhausting part is that you can never let down your guard. You must remain always vigilant, always prepared, always checking to make sure that no detail has been overlooked.
It is a state of existence that strikes me as remarkably similar to the part of the tenure process I am now undergoing: the observation of my teaching by my departmental colleagues, by the members of the evaluation committee, and by the senior members of the administration.
If you count all of those folks together, you get around 16 bodies who need to pay visits to my classroom, observe my teaching, and factor it into their evaluation of my tenure case.
The members of my department mostly seemed satisfied with a single visit. Because eight of us at my institution are up for tenure this year, a huge number, most members of the evaluation committee will likely make only one visit as well. The two senior academic administrators are in the same boat.
But some of the more vigilant members of the evaluation committee will come to two or three classes, and each tenure applicant is assigned a "shepherd," a tenured faculty member who oversees a particular tenure case and presents it to the full faculty when it's time to vote on tenure applications in the spring. My shepherd has visited me three times already, and may drop in again.
Tally all of those visits together, and you have between 20 and 25 that I will be enduring, out of a total of 150 class sessions I will teach this semester. So, at worst, I am seeing visitors in less than 20 percent of my class sessions, which doesn't seem all that horrible.
The problem, and the exhausting part, is that I feel as if every class I teach this semester has to be a masterwork of pedagogical achievement. Even when I am not expecting visitors, and walk into my classroom to find only students, I feel compelled to put extra energy into the course, so that the students will return enthused and prepared for the next day -- when I might find a special visitor loitering in the back row, notebook in hand, pen poised at the ready.
Experienced colleagues assured me last year that no one would visit one of my classes without asking my permission in advance. That has mostly been true. But in one case, asking my permission in advance meant standing outside my doorway before a class, "asking" if she could observe the session that was beginning in five minutes. Several other times, I have received late night e-mail messages requesting a visit to a class early the next morning.
Of course I've turned no one down. I want it to seem as if I am always at my best, always prepared for visiting dignitaries to spend an hour in my classroom marveling at the wonders of literature and the writing process.
And I do write up a lesson plan for every course session I teach, with detailed calculations of how the time in class will be spent.
But let's be honest -- not all lesson plans are equal. Sometimes I can calculate things pretty close to the allotted time, or be sure that I have more than enough material to fill the time. Ideally, I'm leading an impassioned discussion right up until that final minute of class, or storming rhetorically to the insight that will change students' lives as the final seconds of the period tick away.
But sometimes I suspect I may be a little light on material, or I might have reason to suspect that the students haven't done the reading (like those morning classes after Red Sox playoff games) and I work some fudging into my plans: five minutes of handing back quizzes and chatting with students as I move around the room; throwing up an overhead or two I've recycled from another class on some common grammatical mistake; or letting students out five minutes early on a sunny Friday.
This semester I've been wary of allowing fudge time into my plans, figuring that observers will see right through that tactic and assume I'm a slacker. So that fear has tacked on extra planning time to every lesson I've drawn up this semester, since I try to ensure that I have backup strategies in case the ones I have planned don't work.
Hopefully those extra plans, which I have resorted to in a couple of cases, will ensure that I appear to my colleagues as a prepared and committed teacher. But I wouldn't know thus far, and that's perhaps the most annoying feature of this observation process: No one gives me any immediate feedback after their observations.
At my first- and third-year reviews, people observed me teaching, and then sat down with me afterward to discuss what I had planned and how I had performed. I found those conversations helpful and interesting, and used them to modify my teaching practices.
This time around, my observers are remaining pointedly silent. Even my shepherd, whose title seems so friendly and caring, says nothing about the classes he observes. Once or twice I have cornered him, handed him the lesson plan and explained the strategies I was employing in class that day. He has smiled, nodded, and thanked me.
So I head back to my office after each observed class and sit there wondering: Was that class really representative of what I do? Did it present a distorted picture of my teaching? Would I stake my tenure case on the past 50 minutes? Do shepherds emotionally distance themselves from the sheep right before they send it off to the slaughterhouse?
Such relentless self-examination, coupled with the emotional burdens which are tied to the process -- the prospect of job security, a substantial raise, and a permanent academic home -- wears you down bit by bit. The other day I came back from an observed class on a Friday afternoon and sat in the reclining chair in my office for a few minutes to try and let the week's pressures and anxiety slide away. I fell sound asleep almost immediately. I woke up an hour later, feeling refreshed, and for just a moment smiled at the prospect of heading home for the weekend.
Then I remembered that, just before I had left for school that morning, the boy twin had pulled a half-full bottle of red wine from a cabinet that should have been locked, yanked out the cork, and gleefully covered himself, his sister, and the carpet in cabernet sauvignon. That stain would be waiting for me when I got home.
The best part of the observation process, I realized at that moment, is that it will eventually come to an end. The twins, on the other hand, for better or worse, will go on ... and on ... and on ...
I closed my eyes again. Five more minutes.
