How to Thrive on a 4/4

This is a guest post by Mary-Beth Willard, Weber State University

As I thought about Jason Brennan’s post on work-life balance, I realized that while I agreed with most of it, I was doing the automatic mental translations I always do when R1 people write advice aimed at more general academic audiences. I thought sharing some of those thoughts might be helpful for someone else who is on the tenure-track at a teaching-oriented institution. 

I’ve been teaching at Weber State University (say “Weeber”, especially if you’re applying for our job this year!) since 2011, having graduated in 2009 into what I’m told was the Great Recession but still feels like a dark abyss I can’t gaze into because it will eat me. 

I teach a 4/4, sometimes a 5/5/2 to pad the salary a bit.  I’ll have a 3/3 in the spring when I take over as Jedi Commander program coordinator. I’m eligible for full professor in two years.

I don’t like the phrase “work-life balance” but “how to have a well-rounded, full life while teaching a lot” sounds even like a TED talk that’s going to begin by telling you to make your bed and end with folding your sweaters while petting cats.

I have no idea how many hours a week I work, but I worked 55-70 hours a week in low-wage jobs once upon a time, and a typically day had me at work doing data entry starting at 7:30AM, working till four with a half hour lunch, then commuting across town to the sporting goods store, where I worked 5-11pm. 

I don’t do that as an academic. It might not be a stretch to say that the main attraction of this career for me is the autonomy over one’s time.  But with great autonomy comes great responsibility, so here are some thoughts:

1. The golden ring’s made of brass, Forking. Brass.

We are acculturated to think of an academic job as something that is supposed to be totally fulfilling, measuring our life out by coffee spoons and publications.  This feeling is intensified by a brutal academic job market that has more in common with a lottery system than any of us would like to admit, where one spends an absolutely stupid amount of time and energy trying to land a job.  We wind up thinking that the job, the job we are so grateful to get, must be the center of our lives, worth every sacrifice.

Meh. While having a tenure-track job is a very cool job that affords one a lot of autonomy and the chance to do philosophy every day, it’s also just a job.  Don’t let your job become your sole source of meaning.  The presence of other goods in your life does not make the good of philosophy valueless. 

2. Actually look at your tenure requirements.

If you’re at a teaching-focused institution like mine, chances are that your institution doesn’t expect you to be publishing like you’re at an R1, nor are they going to support you if you try.  One common trouble spot: we are all trained as if we will need to be publishing like we’re at an R1.  The job market encourages it, too, and it’s hard to get out of that habit.  So, look at what your job actually requires of you.  Of the three common categories of teaching, scholarship, and service, scholarship is likely to be discounted pretty heavily if you’re on a 3/3 or 4/4.

Observe your institution’s norms and culture in addition to the formal guidelines.  What’s the bare minimum you would need to do in each category to get tenure?  That’s what you need to do.  If you’re not up to the minimum in any of those categories, that’s where you should direct your energy.

The bare minimum just gets you to keep your job. How you spend the rest of your time at work is how you want to shape your career.   When I look around at my colleagues, I see that everyone is a very, very good teacher.  With our load that’s not surprising.  Shoddy teachers don’t last.  But I also see a great variety in how people have chosen to spend the rest of their time at work.  Figure out what your strengths and interests are and make that part of your job.  Some people are unparalleled administrators, and they like the nuts and bolts of how the university ticks and enjoy pestering the provost.   Some go above and beyond in teaching, developing new programs and creative activities for students.  Some redefine service with awesome community outreach programs like vote drives and philosophy nights at the local coffee house and physics open houses where hordes of elementary school kids use an air cannon to shoot paper rockets into the air.

Some decide to pour their extra time into writing or research. The best thing I ever did for my writing productivity was to recognize that because my job didn’t care about the prestige of what I wrote, or whether I stayed in my area, I could write whatever I wanted.

(Everyone has their own writing ticks and quirks, but if I had to give one general point of advice. I’d say don’t let a day go by without writing at least a little.  The hardest part of writing for me is getting back to it after a long break. It takes at least a week for the gears to start turning, and that’s lost time.  Write 250 words a day.  Once you do that, you’ll probably write more, but make that 250 like brushing your teeth.  Also, brush your teeth.)

If you want to try to replicate the pace of an R1 publishing job without the support, you’re welcome to it.  But if you do that, keep in mind that you’re essentially making writing philosophy your hobby, and that it’s perfectly fine to decide you’d like to have another hobby instead. 

Version of this advice for VAPs: Your current job is a means to your next job.  You shouldn’t be doing service, and so your focus should be on teaching and research.  You might think that as someone without a tenure-track job, you need to be doing everything to maximize your scholarship and teaching.  I object that: the principle of marginal returns applies here, too.  If you have eight publications, the ninth is unlikely to be the thing that gets you the job.  If you have high teaching evaluations, it’s probably not an extra 0.1 that’s keeping you off a short list.    Maybe your work time would be better spent developing an in-demand AOC, or going to conferences and networking, or reading fiction so your writing doesn’t devolve into academicese, or watching basketball so you can make small talk during job interviews.  Maybe you spend your time figuring out your alt-ac plan B. 

Maybe you need to decompress so your brain can work better.   We don’t expect star athletes to perform without rest days; we need them too.

I didn’t figure this out as a VAP.  That’s why I can’t think about 2009-2011 without losing five minutes to deep despair. 

3. An ounce of preparation is worth a pound of aggravation.

A heavy teaching load is overwhelming at first.  When I was VAPing, at a SLAC I liked very much, I was what one colleague dubbed a “utility infielder.”  Over two years, on a 3/2, I think I taught eight or nine unique preps.   That was a lot of work as a fresh PhD.

But I’ve been doing this teaching thing for a while now.  I usually have a 4/4 with three preps. When our course rotation is running optimally, I can teach a new class every other year.  That means the vast majority of what I teach I’ve taught before, and it simply doesn’t take as much time as it used to.   (Back of the envelope calculation has me having taught intro over forty times.)

I also put a lot of work into making teaching efficient, especially in lower-division classes that I’m going to teach multiple times.  Modules that can be moved around or dropped or replaced.  Banks of quizzes and exam questions and assignments.  Rubrics so I can make assignments that are more clear to the students and easier for me to grade.   Reasonably good lecture notes to myself.  (Wealth, flutes, and in general instruments.  The bar ain’t high.)   What you’re trying to do is minimize the day-to-day preparation by building yourself a giant database of teaching.

There’s also rarely a need to start from scratch.  Ask friends for syllabi (and be willing to share your own.)  Steal great teaching ideas from colleagues (and share yours.)  You owe your students a good class, but just because it’s fresh and exciting for them doesn’t mean it has to be completely new to you.

Being efficient doesn’t mean I don’t want to make my classes better.  I’m a tinkerer, and I can’t resist fiddling with my classes.  (My sister the industrial engineer recognized what I do as mapping onto the engineering principle of kaizen.  I’ll take her word for it.)   There is no need to overhaul everything every semester.  Resist the thought that you’re doing a good job only if you’re spending inordinate amounts of time on it.  Improvement might be something as simple as introducing a new exercise in class.

If you’re at a SLAC:  it’s OK to close the door.  They’ll be all right if you write for an hour. If you have no willpower, get off campus.  They’ll be there when you get back.

4. Boo to the Cult of Busy-ness. Boo! Boo!

I know that the academic work cycle comes in waves.  I’ve pulled crazy hours while editing podcasts for my online course to have ADA-compliant captions, which meant that I had to teach myself how to use editing software.  I turned around 130 logic exams in 24 hours while in the early stages of labor.  I usually work some nights and some weekends, largely because I’ve pretty aggressively scheduled my life to leave afternoons free when the kids get home from school.   I’ve been on two or three search committees, and I’ve had to pull those proverbial 25-hour days and 60-hour weeks.   

But I can’t believe such a working pace is the norm, and it shouldn’t be.  I also know that I’m in a position of relative comfort and privilege.  Pick your favorite intersection, and you’ll find many structural reasons that make it harder for someone to avoid spending too much time at work.  But that’s even more reason not to play along with a culture that inflates the amount of work necessary to be merely adequate.

I want to leave you with another thought.  One of the things that drew me to philosophy was the idea of a well-lived life.  And maybe that’s naïve, but I’m not the only one, and a well-lived life is one that can be modelled.  How can we encourage our students to live philosophically, to value philosophy, if we’re working so hard at performing misery?

Fold your sweaters.  Pet a cat.  Make your bed.  And try to enjoy your life a little, mkay?

 

 

 

Comments

[Ornaith]

This is great advice! I just got tenure at a 4-4 place and this is pretty much what I would tell anyone starting out. I'd add: join your union if you have one and get involved at least to some extent. I've witnessed firsthand how a strong union can make a real difference in one's working conditions. Being involved has been one of the more fulfilling aspects of my working life.