FIRST PERSON

Half a Sabbatical

Giving up a full year's leave to take only a semester off was a mistake, but even a limited break has its benefits

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By GEORGE TEAGUE

My first sabbatical was approaching, and people were worried. Especially my mother, who was not an academic but knew a few. Part of her puzzlement was that I was staying at home, working on a memoir about a road trip I had already taken.

"I thought people on sabbatical go somewhere exotic and do research," she said.

My mother's other problem: I was staying at my home alone. "Outgoing as you are," she said, "I'd think you'd get really depressed just working by yourself."

I explained, of course, that in my writing I would be going somewhere exotic — at least in my writerly imagination — and that it would be sweet retreat enough to lose myself in that creative world, to shed my teacher's ethos like a pedagogical reptile. Meanwhile, I would still see friends and drop by the campus occasionally.

Of course, my mother turned out to be right, for reasons she didn't even know. In truth, I had rigged the game against my artistic rebirth before the sabbatical even started, back in the fall semester when I made three decisions that seemed perfectly logical at the time.

Decision 1: I chose a semester-long sabbatical over the full-year variety. That was, in part, for economic reasons: At my college, if you take a semester-long sabbatical, you are paid your full salary for that semester; however, if you take a yearlong leave, you are paid only 80 percent of your full salary for the year.

A friend who teaches economics pointed out this math-impaired English professor that, by choosing the one-semester leave, I was doing half a year's work — four courses, committee work, and advising. But if I took the year off, I would be free of all such work and would lose a mere pittance of my income.

My counterargument: Pittance is a relative term. It wouldn't be prudent to throw away 20 percent of my income.

Of course, beneath my fiscal scrounging lurked the motivation my mother sensed: I couldn't imagine a year of being so disconnected from the campus.

Decision 2: Again for financial reasons, I applied for promotion in the fall, meaning that the evaluations committee would be deliberating my case while I was on sabbatical. Like most people in such a position, in my self-evaluation, I waxed optimistic when it came to the projects I would complete in the very near future — since, after all, I would have all this time on my hands during the sabbatical.

Since I knew the powers-that-be would discuss my case in the first two months of that semester, I naturally reversed the sequence in which I planned to do my writing, privileging the projects I thought I could finish quickly over my true passion — completing the road-trip memoir. Which leads us straight to …

Decision 3: The first of those quick-turnaround projects involved working with students and their prose — the very task that a professor who teaches writing and journalism courses needs to step away from during a sabbatical.

Initially, I was reassured by my belief in the idea: Students in my magazine-writing course had started a book about a local charity, which I would finish now that they had graduated. I rationalized the project as community service, which I kept promising I would do more of "once sabbatical rolls around."

Besides, I thought, it was just editing work. I had forgotten, of course, that editing is hard. Especially when it leads you to cave in to your own standards and, on some articles, do wholesale revision, interviewing new sources and reinterviewing old ones.

Most academics would view the three decisions above as tips on what not to do during your sabbatical. They will find vindication in the following image: Me sitting either at coffee shops and/or in the campus newspaper office, doing what I do every semester — swearing at flawed prose, alternating between frustration with certain students and self-doubt about what I must be doing wrong in the classroom.

I would read a compelling anecdote only to see bumping quotes. Where's the transition? In the next story, hardly any quotes at all. Hello, it's a personality profile!

The impact of all that on my big memoir project was hardly surprising: My one-semester sabbatical passed and I still wasn't close to completing the book revision. I would go into yet another fall under the burden of that unfinished project, the one that colleagues always ask about, only to have me sigh and shrug.

But here comes the plot twist: In both chronological and psychological terms, I may have taken only half a sabbatical — if you define sabbatical as a complete divorcing of self from teaching.

But within the pedagogical realm, I still experienced a surprising liberation by having a semester off: Suddenly being free of teaching four courses and 90 students, I could focus on the work of a dozen or so of my best students, and work side by side with them as fellow journalists. No textbooks, no memos, no tests, no police work: Just getting down to the reporting and writing with students who, for the most part, wanted to grow, to produce, and to make a difference in the community.

I found I appreciated the talent, intelligence, and diligence of some student writers all the more. But I gleaned my most important insights from those who were struggling: After the grind of six years of teaching writing, I realized now that the gap between what I considered good publishable work and passable classroom writing had widened. In my teacher's diary, I detailed what I needed to change, such as the way I designed large projects and the techniques and attitudes I needed to instill in future students. I might even let the students see my inner disgruntled newspaper editor now and then, just to underscore how much the standards matter.

And here is a second twist. Despite all the time I lost working on the student project, I rallied to publish three articles, churned out more than 200 heavily revised book pages, and grew in my craft. Sure, I was worried about what I hadn't accomplished during my leave, but I felt like a writer again. Rejuvenated, engaged, committed.

While measuring such things is hopelessly subjective, my journalism classes post-sabbatical seemed to go better than they had in years, students perhaps responding to a reinvigorated teacher.

In the end, my half-sabbatical productivity wasn't half-bad. Next time, though, I'm listening to my mother. Exotic locale, here I come.

George Teague is the pseudonym of an associate professor of English at a small liberal-arts college.