After six years of graduate school for a Ph.D. in English literature, and three years in an administrative job learning about academia and keeping one eye on the tenure track, I have finally arrived.
I first felt like an assistant professor of English literature shortly after I started at Assumption College, with the opening of the semester still a few weeks off. My exploration of our small campus in Worcester, Mass., had led me to the recreation center, where the student-athletes were training and where I spent a half-hour on an exercise bike.
I went in search of a drink, and passed a group of students and coaches for some athletic team sitting on lounge chairs in the lobby. As I circled around them, I couldn't help but overhear their conversation. They were trying to remember the name of a famous novel they had read, all of them throwing out what little bits and details of it they could remember.
"It was at a boarding school," said one.
"Yeah, the guy's name was Gene," said another.
"And Phineas -- that was his friend. And one of them fell off a tree."
"What was that book?"
"I think it was a Charles Dickens novel."
"Is it David Copperfield?"
They were nearly a century off -- I couldn't help myself. As I walked away, I tossed the answer over my shoulder. "A Separate Peace," I said. "John Knowles."
They erupted into exclamations of recognition, and one of them flashed me a thumbs-up sign. "Nice drive-by reference," he said.
So I've arrived. I'm one of the literature experts around here. I know something, and I have the office and the students and the title and the departmental meetings and my faculty colleagues to remind me of it.
A month later, now two weeks into my first semester, I am still fixating on the little things, noticing those aspects of this new life of mine - - full-time teaching at a small liberal-arts college -- which differ from my years in graduate school at a research university, or from my time in an administrative position at that same institution.
Like parking. I used to pay a couple hundred dollars a year for a parking sticker that would find me a space on a main campus lot if I arrived before 8 a.m. or after 3 p.m. When I arrived here I walked into the public-safety office with a checkbook, and was astonished to fill out a simple form, pay nothing, and receive two stickers on the spot, one for each of our cars.
And even if I don't arrive on campus until 10 a.m., a spot is always awaiting me in the lot just about a 100 yards from my office.
At my former institution, I could sometimes walk the entire length of campus without seeing a single student I recognized -- in part because of the size of the school, in part because of the relatively few classes I taught. Here I see familiar faces everywhere. Walking from one building to another will often test my capacity for remembering student names.
Undoubtedly, though, the most prominent change in my working life has been the one that relates to my move from an administrative to a full-time faculty position: the management of my time.
During my three years as an administrator, the university essentially budgeted my work-time for me, since I was expected -- de facto if not de jure -- to spend my days in the office, working a regular 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule, five days a week.
The task of budgeting my time has now fallen entirely to me.
I am writing this on a Friday, a day on which I am spending the morning catching up on several writing projects. After lunch I will spend a couple of hours playing with my youngest daughter, and we'll walk together to pick up her sister from kindergarten. This afternoon we're heading over to a colleague's house for a departmental party. A blissful day in the life of an academic.
On Tuesday and Wednesday I was either in class, in my office, or at my home computer in the basement from 8 a.m. to midnight, most of that time spent writing lengthy responses to the first essays my composition students had written.
When I staggered home at around dinnertime on Thursday afternoon, after a full day of frantically finishing preparations for - - and teaching -- my three classes, I owed my wife time with the children and time working around the house. So once I had managed to get both kids in bed I spent a couple of hours doing laundry and scrubbing toilets.
As my wife reminded me later that evening, this is the life I wanted. And she's exactly right. This is the life I wanted.
I will put up with long days and nights, end over end, if it means I get to spend my time reading, talking, and writing about the books and ideas that matter to me. I will put up with a string of evenings chained to my computer in the basement if it means I can spend a Friday at the oceanside with my family. I will put up with piles of student essays to mark if it means I can actually see my students master some skill or idea that they are encountering for the first time. I will gladly dredge up A Separate Peace in the gym if it means helping people reconnect to works of literature that might have once made a difference in their lives -- and that might still make a difference again someday.
I have had a taste of all of these experiences in just my first few weeks, and I can see very clearly that this is the life I want.
There has been one major part of the transition that I had not fully prepared for, however, and which has proved the worst part of all this: the complications of a cross-country move, the purchase of a home, selecting schools and daycare for our daughters without knowing anything about the city where we were going to live but what we could learn from the Internet and from a few helpful colleagues.
Especially frustrating has been the stress that our move has put on my spouse, a talented elementary school teacher with a master's degree in education and seven years' full-time teaching experience. Given her credentials, and the shortage of teachers we kept hearing about in this state, we expected that she would find a teaching position easily.
Upon our arrival in this city, however, we learned from several teachers in our neighborhood that many local school districts hire directly from the local colleges or from within, awarding full-time teaching positions to those who have spent at least a year working as a substitute, an assistant, or in some other part-time capacity.
So now she's putting in her year as a tutor, working just three hours a day, welcoming the fact that she can spend more time with our children but missing having a classroom of her own. Her boxes and boxes of books, classroom supplies, and rolled-up posters sit idly in our garage.
In the columns I wrote for this space last year, which chronicled my search for that elusive tenure-track position, I laid pretty bare the fact that I had high -- unrealistically high, I was admonished by some -- expectations about the tenure-track life I was so desperately in search of. Although I am barely through three full weeks of classes, each of those three weeks has left me increasingly optimistic that I will see those expectations fulfilled.
As for life outside of academics?
I'll keep you posted.
