May 10

I've been thinking a lot about Jen Fulwiler's new book, Your Blue Flame. One strand of the thoughts has been focused on work. Work has not been very blue-flame-y lately, not at all. In fact I have been feeling burned out for a while now. In 2016 I wrote a post about why I do the research I do, and there's a sentence in it that I kept thinking of while I was reading. Four years ago I said about my research, "I do it because it lights me on fire." These days it mostly feels like guilt and drudgery, which strikes me as a real shame. I've been trying to identify the reasons for the change.

1. My teaching load is higher now than it used to be.
2. ...which means the nonsense that flows from 1% of my students is a bigger slice of the job. One percent is not a large percentage, but the quantity of annoying situations that must be dealt with calmly and professionally has increased.
3. I have more service obligations and they involve more contentious topics AND the mix of people involved in my least favorite service responsibility can sometimes be frustrating.
4. It's harder to write excellent papers in a smaller slice of time
5. ...which means more frustrating peer review experiences
6. ...which means it's harder to create strong external grant applications, since my research output is slower than it would be at an R1 institution
7. ...which means my teaching load is likely to remain high
8. ...which creates a spiral of discouragement
9. Also Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America and that fact continues to sap my will to-- to anything, really.

But I can do some things to make this better.

1. I am really, really lucky to have a sabbatical scheduled for the fall -- a sabbatical that does not seem to have been jeopardized by the pandemic, either because my administration can't afford to pay me to do research or because I can't do the work I had planned to do. I am hopeful that a semester free of teaching responsibilities will allow me to rekindle my enthusiasm for research, and allow me to submit some of the papers about which I have been thinking, "I should write that up and send it off" for a long time.
2. It would be smart to ask the folks in the provost's office if they could put me in touch with other faculty who will also be on sabbatical in the fall. A small dose of human connection and accountability would go a long way toward helping me use the time wisely.
3. I can also take some time in the fall to think about amplifying the parts of teaching that I love and streamlining the parts I don't love. Even if I never manage to get a grant that would lighten my teaching load, I can find a way to teach 3 classes per semester and protect some time for meaningful research. It will take planning and vigilance, though.
4. I asked Alex if he would write some code for my birthday, and he agreed. I want a plagiarism detector that will work with the kind of assignment I most often ask my students to complete. I would still have to deal with the fallout, but the identification would be less time-consuming. 
5. I can embrace the geeky love of language analysis that propelled me to complete my dissertation research while working around the needs of 5 children aged  0, 3, 6, 9, and 12. That was a lot of geeky love, is what I'm saying, but it's not a suuuper student-friendly task. For that reason I have mostly back-burnered it in favor of projects more likely to appeal to independent study students. But here's the thing: I can do good work in this area using publicly available language data, and it will be easier to get it published in fancypants venues. I don't have the resources to do the recruitment and transcription, but I don't have to do that work. I just have to write the code to address interesting problems in data that somebody else already collected. I can do that. I'd like to do that.

This is a topic I want to keep thinking about. More soon!