LOL! As if by magic, my excellent chair has been showering paid extra gigs on me this week! Did he read the last few days’ worth of rants and schemes to deep-six the teaching noncareer? Maybe he wants me to stay around.
Tempting enough, really. He is such a nice man! How many people can say that about their bosses? However many you guess, you can be sure many, many fewer academics can say the same about the chairs of their departments. A competent academic administrator who manages to retain his humanity is rarer than feathers on a cat.
At any rate, these little honoraria will help make up, in a tiny way, for the summer’s financial drought. And that’s nice.
Meanwhile, work continues to trickle steadily in the door. One long-time client has a publisher interested in (and the hook out for editors at another, even more prestigious house) a collection of testimonios, memoir-like essays by adult children of Mexican immigrants escaped poverty and ended up as academics and business executives. So far we’ve read two of them, both very interesting and in some places quite moving. And a newer client keeps manufacturing new projects. He seems to like our work, for which I’m duly thrilled and grateful.
If the editorial work keeps coming in, there’s no reason why the teaching endeavors can’t come to an end. You know, I enjoy the students, who are by and large interesting and good people. But the sense of futility aside—why are we jumping them through a hoop that teaches nothing for those who haven’t learned, after 13 years of schooling, how to write short essays or research papers and that is utterly unnecessary for those who have?—the amount of time a comp course requires makes it a huge distraction from the effort to get a business up and running.
Tomorrow, for example, I have to leave here at 6:45 to get to campus by 7:30 a.m. I have a meeting on the campus after class, so it’ll be 10:00 before I get back to the computer. Then I’ll have to turn around and race to a Chamber luncheon in Scottsdale, which will absorb a fair amount of the afternoon. Then we have choir practice in the evening. So that makes a day that begins at 4:00 a.m. (the hour at which I commonly write these blog posts) and ends around 10:00 p.m.
Today’s class starts at noon. That carves a huge chunk out of the middle of my day—obviously, I can work around it, but it breaks one’s concentration, and it means that whatever I’m working on will have to stop and start, and also that Tuesdays and Thursdays can’t be used for lunchtime networking. Thursday I have to give a dog and pony show at my 7:30 breakfast meeting, also in Scottsdale, then fly back into town for a doctor’s appointment, then meet the noon class again, leaving only the afternoon to do any editorial work. I need to go by a client’s office while I’m in Scottsdale but can’t do that and make the doctor’s appointment, too.
It’s not that there’s no time to work on the editorial business, but that a lot more time would be available without the constant interruptions for class meetings. On Thursday, for example, I could have made the doctor’s appointment later in the morning, allowing time to meet the client. Whether I can even get to the doctor’s office by 9:30 remains to be seen. In fact, as I think about it, it looks like I probably should call today and try to change that to a less hectic day…if any such thing exists.