With the teaching schedule I have, I’m only required to be on campus Tuesdays and Thursdays (unless we have a Wednesday faculty meeting or something extra comes up). This is why people think teachers have it easy. Summer vacations! Two-day-a-week schedules! It’s not really what it seems, though: I mean, for one thing, if I took the summer off, I would be unemployed and without money for three months. Not exactly a “vacation,” which is why I beg to teach as many classes as they can give me in the summers.

My two-day-a-week schedule comes with its difficulties as well. I get to campus by 7:00 am at the latest to get ready for my day, which officially begins at 8:00. I am in a classroom teaching from 8:00 am until 2:00 pm without a lunch break, though I do have 15 minutes between classes. This consists of public speaking and discussion leading, two things that, for me, are very exhausting. After classes end, I stay for office hours, which are filled with student meetings, student emails, prep work, grading, paperwork, updating the classes’ Blackboard websites, desperately shoving food down my calorie-hole, and colleague drop-bys. This lasts until at least 4:00 pm, but more likely 5:00 pm (I tend to get involved in what I’m doing and not notice I’ve stayed late). Those two days are completely exhausting, both mentally and physically (yes, lecturing in heels is physically tiring). The day flies by, though, because I am busy-busy-busy, and for the most part doing my favorite things: talking about reading and writing. This is why I do it.

But! Sweet, sweet freedom is to be had on the other days! If I’m not in classes or meetings, I can work from home. These are the days I can make use of my glorious home office and do prep-work, reading, research, writing, and grading. Through the magic of the Dropbox app (highly recommended), I have access to all the same files on my home laptop as I would in my campus office, and I can sit here in my pajamas with a dog or cat at my feet (unpaid interns) and work all day, if I like.

What I usually do is start the morning with my workout (run, yoga, or a weights class these days), come home, shower, have breakfast, answer emails, and then figure out what else I need to get done for the day. If I’m good, I can get everything done by mid afternoon and call it a day. These days I also often do my random errands, shopping, and household stuff. It’s nice to be able to hit the grocery store when most people are in classes.

This can be a wonderful schedule. The two classroom days are often brutally hard, but I can recover on the other days. Last weekend, for example, my man friend and I spent all day Saturday having an epic Lord of the Rings marathon, watching the extended editions of all three films on BluRay and ordering Thai delivery. It was delightful and cozy and perfect.

This weekend I spent Saturday doing some much-needed cleaning, organizing, and puttering around the house and then went to some friends’ house to watch the Oregon/LSU game. While the game was a disappointment, I did get to hold a four-week-old baby and give her a bottle and burp her, which was a lovely little distraction from the Ducks’ loss.

Sundays I like to sleep in as much as possible, and then spend the morning/early afternoon lounging and drinking coffee. I try not to schedule too much to do on Sundays, though once big assignments start rolling in at school, Sunday usually becomes a catch-up day for grading anything I didn’t get done earlier in the week. I try to limit that to afternoons/early evenings, though, so I can stop work at dinner time.

I tend to have a rule about working after dinner: I just don’t do it. I have so many collagues who work late into the night, leave social functions early to go grade more, or spend the entire weekend grading/working. I mean, hey, whatever works for you, right? But I am saying: that absolutely does not work for me. I have to draw a firm line between the workweek and the nights and weekends and I really only violate that division in extreme circumstances. Nights and weekends are mine, as much as I can possibly keep them mine. I may not have the typical M-F 8-5 job, but I like to constrain my work to those days and times regardless.

Currently, it is Sunday afternoon and I am busily uploaing photos of the aforementioned lovely baby girl to flickr (I took some portraits for her birth announcements), sipping coffee, and writing this blog post. I haven’t gotten dressed yet for the day and I’ve got a mug of hot (but slowly cooling) coffee at hand. It seems like this week has worked out exactly right. And with that, I’m off to do some more relaxing!

Anyway, today marks my return to work for the fall semester. Although classes don’t start (for me) until Thursday, I have various meetings and duties to take care of starting today. I took the advantage of having this morning to myself, however, and got a 2.5 mile tempo run in at the gym, had a lingering breakfast (oatmeal with banana and blackberries, two huge mugs of coffee), and am now sitting around watching a couple of episodes of Friends before I go into campus. I know. How do I do it all?! Working life is hard. I kid; I kid.

Anyway, I have certainly enjoyed having the last week off in between summer and fall teaching. I have managed to get in plenty of rest, a little reading, a little socializing, and so on. One night, W. and I headed out to find his favorite (and most elusive) cocktail, the Sazerac. Have you had one before? I believe it’s a New Orleans specialty, and involves rye whiskey, bitters, lemon peel, and an absinthe rinse. High maintenance but delicious.

I’ve also had several great meals lately, some out at restaurants and others cooked just for me. That always makes a little staycation feel more special, too. On the whole, I feel rested and ready to hit the books!

One of the highlights, I cannot lie, has been getting my new washer and dryer installed. I dorked out over this to an extreme degree, but like I menioned before, I have been longing to have my own laundry machines for years. I don’t have to collect and save quarters anymore, or endure the put-out glares of the grocery store cashiers when I beg to buy a roll of quarters from their cash tills. I don’t have to go gingerly brushing a strange person’s pubic hair off the top of the washer before adding my clothes. It’s the little things, you know?

Another highlight was a trip to the local farmers’ market. Can you believe that in four years I had never been before? I KNOW. In my defense, it only operates in the summer, only for a few hours once a week, and a lot of the time I’ve been getting produce from my CSA. So anyway, I finally managed to make it to the market on Thursday and it was fabulous! It turns out it’s quite the place to see and be seen – I ran into my friends S. and H. there and saw quite a few other familiar faces from around campus.

My big purchases were some peaches (amazing), tomatoes (bring on the sandwiches!), and some local goat cheese. Yes, that’s right, goat cheese. I have been interested in finding some quality local dairy from a trustworthy farm for a while now, and the goat cheese at the farmers market is sort of famous around the area, so I decided to try some.

Here is one of my concoctions:

Peaches, goat cheese, and a balsamic vinegar reduction. Simple and delicious.

It’s easy to see that the summer is ending, though: this morning I slept in until the late hour of 8:00 and walked to the gym and it wasn’t even 80 degrees out yet. It felt amazing! Soon enough the weather will start to cool down for real and it will be sweater, blazer, boots, and scarf season — and then it will really feel like fall semester! Fashion-wise, I can’t wait. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn’t complain if I had a few more restful summer weeks like this one before I had to go back to work. I don’t, though, so I’d better get moving. The office and my syllabi await me!

Anyway, as you all know, I teach English at a university. What may not have been clear is that I am an instructor, not a professor. The main difference in those job titles (for those of you not enmeshed in academics) is that I don’t have the option to get tenure at any time and my job is 100% teaching-based with no research or service responsibilities. I like the fact that I have no pressure to “publish or perish” (although I do publish, I don’t really HAVE to), but the lack of job security can be a little anxiety-producing. The most worrisome factor with this job is the fact that instructors are only allowed to work a maximum of five years full time and then are forced to cut back to part time, taking a major pay cut to do so.

This year was my fourth year, meaning that next year would be year five (see, I am good at MATH, too, not just English), meaning that the year after that I would be, in the parlance of the university, “put down” to part time. Yes, they really say “put down.” What this ALSO means is that this coming fall I would have to go back on the academic job market to look for a new job for the following fall. If you know about the academic job market and how it plays out and what it is like, I am sorry that I just gave you hives/vomiting/a panic attack by mentioning it. If you don’t know about the academic job market, please refer to the previous sentence and then thank your lucky stars and/or the deity of your choice that you apparently have a “real” job.

So. I was not looking forward to this for a few reasons. I didn’t want to have to look for a new job just because looking for a new job plain sucks. I also didn’t really want to leave Auburn. I have grown into Auburn and I have my community of friends here and I like the department where I work and I like the school and the campus and damn, you know, we did just win a national championship. Why would I want to leave?

So last spring (yes, over a YEAR ago) there started to be talk of changing instructor positions here to lecturer positions, something our school has never had before — the significant differences being as follows:

• one additional class per school year (up from seven to eight, not counting summers)
• requirement of service (aka committee work and department meetings)
• slight salary bump
• unlimited years of full-time employment

This may not sound super exciting to you, but did you see the last part? Unlimited full-time employment? Okay, that’s not the same as tenure at all — someone in this job still has a contract renewable each year, which means the contract could, you know, NOT be renewed, but as long as the school wants to keep you around and you want to stay around, you can keep working full time with no threat of being “put down” to the status of a “part-time person” (yes, they really say that, too, as if in the remainder of your time your personhood is revoked).

What I think everyone wanted and hoped for was that each and every instructor who wanted it could be converted to a lecturer, securing their ability to work full-time as long as they wanted to. There was a general sense that folks in these jobs, who do a HUGE amount of teaching and who really keep a lot of the core courses running, should have the respect and job security commensurate with the work they do. I wanted that for myself as did all of my colleagues in my department.

The way it played out was a little different, though: it took about a year from when this issue first came up for discussion until there was a plan in place to implement it in my department. Budget-wise (of course budget-wise, dangit) it didn’t work out for everyone to just be magically converted to the new status. Only some people would get moved up. Most of the forty of us? No, half of us? No, a half-dozen of us? No, just three.

We could only work it out to put three lecturers in place out of about forty instructors. Yeah, think about that. Major anxiety. For one thing, a lot of us really wanted this, and only a few were going to get it. For another thing, we all wanted it to happen not just to us individually but to everyone in our position, and that wasn’t going to happen. Over time, yes, more people will get moved up, I think. But not this year.

So it became a huge THING and a PROCESS we had to apply for it like applying for a job on the regular old academic market. Well, cross a regular academic job application with a tenure file and you get this:

Yes, that is my job application. Glasses and water bottle for scale. This was even for a job I kinda-sorta already had. A promotion application, I guess.

Yeah. There was a bit of a line at the photocopier that day, let me tell you.

So I turned in this huge dossier and waited to hear my fate. I got an interview, along with four other colleagues. Five people going for three spots: I had a decent chance.

Have you ever had to interview with your colleagues at a job where you already work, though? It seemed weird to me and I can’t imagine it’s very common. I mean, think: what happens if you completely bomb the interview? These are your colleagues. Whom you see every day. At your job. Where you already work. And where you would like to keep working, unless, of course, you bomb the interview so badly that you cannot stand to be seen there ever again and you pray every day for the floor to open up and swallow you. You know.

Yeah, I was a little stressed. But I suited up, put my game face on, went in, and talked to my colleagues about my work that I do. As it turns out, I m good at talking about the work I do because I am good at my work and I love it and I have a lot of ideas about it and thoughts and excitement, and it is not that scary after all, to talk about it. That was what I realized during my dissertation defense, too, actually. It is not hard or scary at all to talk about something you know inside and out and that you love. It is the easiest thing in the world, to talk about it.

So that went well. But then the committee had to make their recommendation about which three of us to hire (yes, “hire”) for this promotion and they had to deliver this recommendation to the voting faculty (of which instructors are not a part) and the faculty had to vote on it. So the faculty meeting was going on and several of my friends were there for it and I was like “PEOPLE YOU HAVE TO TEXT ME DURING THE MEETING OR I WILL DIE TEXT MEEEE.” I am not an annoying friend to have at all.

And we all had plans to meet up for happy hour after the meeting, come what may, good or bad, because either way I would need a cocktail — a celebratory cocktail, hopefully, but a moping/wallowing cocktail would also possibly be on the menu.

But it was good news, of course, as you have guessed already! (Later that night I even had an occasion to finally uncork the bottle of special bourbon I bought at Four Roses back in February.) Throughout the meeting, my friends kept me in the loop via text, (Uh, unless any of my superiors are reading this in which case I’m sure no one would ever consider violating any sort of meeting confidentiality that may or may not exist, I don’t even know, please don’t be mad! I made them do it!) so I knew unofficially that I was recommended for hire and the faculty voted yes. I didn’t have to wait too long to find out officially, though, as I received a super-nice phone call from my department head right afterward letting me know the outcome.

That all happened back in April. The reason I couldn’t tell you all about it was this: it was only our department’s choice, at that point. The department gets to choose the people who would get placed at the new lecturer rank, but the university itself has to actually hire us. So that giant file of paperwork had to go to the dean and provost for approval, along with letters of support from the department, before they could actually give me an official letter of offer to sign, indicating that I accepted the position. Which they did, and I did, yesterday morning. I was in the office giving back the signed copy at ten after eight yesterday, in fact, and my department head was all, “You signed that already?!” and I was all, “I have been waiting to sign this for months. I’ve been squeezing a tennis ball to keep my signing hand limber. I walked in with my pen uncapped this morning and everything.”

Suffice it to say I was glad to put the ink on the paper. So what this means for me is that I can stay here without being “put down” to part time next year. I won’t have to look for a new job in a new city or take on part-time adjuncting positions at other nearby schools to make up the gap in pay I’d experience at a part-time salary. I will work on committees and vote at faculty meetings and earn a little bit more money and even have a new university-owned computer in my office, a little perk I’ve never had before. Life is grand. I get to keep doing what I’m doing, which is what I love to do.

I also get to tell people to sit down, be quiet, and start taking notes whenever I walk in a room — because I am a lecturer and I am about to be doing some lecturing. Now please just don’t let the fact that I have blogged about work jinx all of this.

Next week begins the busiest three weeks of my summer, when all of my classes overlap. After that, I’ll go down to two classes and then just one. My schedule is weird, y’all, but I am most of all incredibly grateful for the work this summer. I wasn’t sure everything was going to work out, but it did! And now I barely have time to feel stressed out about it because I am quite simply too busy.

I kind of love that actually: when my day is so packed with training, work, errands, and the occasional social event that I don’t have time to sit around thinking about my schedule; I just do it. Maybe those Nike ad writers had a valid point after all.

This philosophy also applies to my weekends right now, too: long runs and rides, big blocks of grading time, domestic business, and perhaps a date. At any rate, in the interest of brevity, may I offer you a few of my favorite photos from the past week?

As you can see, life is good. What’s going on with you?

Whew. I had better enjoy it. My plans for the summer are busy indeed. I will be teaching in the special program for incoming freshmen again — a four week course that preps them for college writing — plus I’ll be teaching one five-week intensive literature course and one ten-week literature course. The three courses overlap in potentially confusing ways, so I have set up my google calendar to sync to both of my computers and to my phone and I have entered everything in and color coded it and all. Just hoping I can hold it together and not walk into my little freshmen’s class and try to teach them world lit 2 or something. Yikes. The best defense is good preparation, I think.

And that’s just teaching! I will also be moving into a new apartment at the end of July. It’s narrowed down to two choices: the preferred one that may not have a spot for me and the less preferred but still nice one that definitely has a spot. I’ll be happy in either place, and mostly very happy to be leaving my current place behind. I don’t want to gripe about it too much, so I’ll just say: ongoing plumbing issues, generally poor quality, and a population of neighbors that has been steadily trending downward in recent years. Anyway! New horizons (and washers/dryers) await.

On the sporting front, I have decided to train for at least one triathlon this summer, and I’ve just registered for a women’s sprint tri on August 7th. Bring on the swimming, biking, and running! There are a couple of other ones taking place in September that I might also add to the schedule — at least one, anyway — but we’ll see. I’m also aiming for a half marathon in the fall. Maybe Montgomery in October or Savannah in November. Maybe both!

So things are looking to get really good and busy up in here any moment now. But for today, I am taking my time, walking everywhere I need to go (just to enjoy the gorgeous weather), and I am currently sitting in the coffee/book shop, drinking a latte, and writing this post. Tomorrow the chaos begins, but for today, there is this:

So what’s on your plate this summer?