Surfacing Time to Understand the Tenure-Track Trio, Part 2
This teacher education blog series about time and calendars is for any graduate students and higher ed faculty who balances expectations of teaching-research-service with expectations of wellness-family-adventure. I offer my efforts to find a sustainable way to navigate decisions that are, in my view, deeply connected to my use of time. I acknowledge that time management and self-care are not solutions to institutional practices that see teacher labor as an expandable resource. former trio. I offer my efforts to find a sustainable way to navigate decisions that are, in my view, really helping me thrive (or at least imagine the possibilities). Read Part 1 here.
Understanding expectations of time
When I began this higher education position, I thought it was way easier than teaching junior high mostly because of the physical work of being in the classroom, but also because I eliminated the commute to different institutions during my doctoral program.
As I mentioned in Part 1, I didn’t consider my doctoral program as preparation for a tenure-track position because I never thought I’d leave junior high, so I didn’t really pay attention to the varied responsibilities (or the time invested) in teaching, research, and service. I never interviewed or shadowed a professor, never saw a professor’s calendar, which would have helped to a certain extent. Again, this is not to fault my program. I made it clear that I was not interested in academia.
I spent my first year learning what teaching-research-service meant for various colleagues within and beyond my institution. (Note: Many tenure-track positions are a quartet: teaching-research-service-outreach, which I will not get into here.) I knew where I needed to be for teaching, but the research and service were up to me to choose and align. A few generous colleagues invited me to join their research or nudged me toward a committee. It was all very nice but uncomfortable to be working below my capacity. Used to the structure of a junior high school day controlled by bells and informed by the need to do more, I felt compelled, well, to do more, to account for my time. (This is a mentality or disposition I will circle back to.)
During my first year, I was full of ideas and desperate to learn everything. By the end of the first semester, I was working all the time, and when the pandemic hit, that actually increased because of all the Zoom meetings to make sense of what was happening.
It wasn’t until I began my second year in higher ed (August 2020) that I had a working understanding of what it meant to be tenure-track faculty. In short, I learned that there is no one way. I was afforded time and space to choose the way the tenure-track trio of teaching-research-service would live in me, could serve me, could serve teachers. (Indeed, I know it was also serving the institution that employed me.)
However, I had spent nearly 20 years in education becoming very good at making every second count as a fulltime teacher and doc student and adjunct all the while feeling like there was more do to, so I found myself asking of this higher ed position (a lot) How do I be an educator in this new context without external control over my time? How do I leverage my particular experience in this particular position to serve teachers, including me, in a sustainable way?
Tracking time
My second year was an opportunity to reflect on what I had done in year one and reflect on what I was coming to understand about my new role. I began by gathering some baseline data. How was I spending my time?
For four weeks on Sunday morning, I brought my whiteboard and colored dry erase markers to the kitchen table to talk through my week with my partner. He has witnessed the evolution of my life and has always been invested in (concerned for) my wellbeing, so he was my “critical friend” in this mini self-study. The images that follow are a month of data collections: August 31 to September 27, 2020.
I plotted in places I needed to be first: class. student hours, and meetings. The time I spent teaching (including prep and student hours) was fairly stable across the weeks. This is was a physical responsibility.
Service was another category that was driven by meetings or tasks to do. These varied week-to-week; however, I had to break engagements here into smaller categories such as school, state, and national service. I added “Belize” to national service because I ran out of space on the board to add “international.” I loved all of these experiences and didn’t like categorizing them as “service” because it implied one way; in fact, much of this work served me, my heart, my understanding.
Research was the category most difficult to quantify in time because I was developing my methods and discovering my writing process in this genre. Some projects I was on my own, and others I was collaborating. If I could have added hours before 8am and after 10pm, I would have, but that was where my partner came in– to remind me about sleep, to remind me that we came here to improve our quality of life, to remind me that I would be better at everything if I was rested.
By week three, I admitted that I never stopped working during the day to exercise. As I mentioned in Part 1, once I find the flow in a project, I struggle to come out of it, so I moved my exercise to the 6am spin class. I had to sign up for these, and the facility tracked when I didn’t show up, so I was compelled to honor exercise time by week three (out of shame/guilt, I guess).
Also by week three, I realized that any interactions I wanted to have with classroom teachers had to be on weekends, so I began to schedule interviews, book groups, and workshops on weekends– without clearing space during the week.
Also, by week three, I was confused about what was service, what was teaching, and what was research.
By week four, I calculated that I was spending close to 60 hours a week on “work” related activities.
What the data surfaced for me
I have to note here that the color coding was a disaster because I wasn’t sure how to categorize what I was doing within teaching-research-service. So much of what I was doing integrated all three.
This calendar work was an important step for me in surfacing my time and responsibilities in visible ways for me and my partner. We were in this together, and it was important for him to see and understand this meaning-making process. I was trying to figure out what my job was, how to do it, if I liked it, if I was good at it.
I tried not to work on weekends, and that helped me get close to a 40 hour work week comparable to my partner’s, but that didn’t last long. I recognize here that 40 hours is rather arbitrary, maybe antiquated, even mechanistic. I use this as a reference point mostly because this is the world of my partner’s work and also a reference point for balance. I think that across my career as a teacher I averaged 60 hours a week, so downshifting from this and choosing to spend those 20 hours doing something else (or not) was something I need to understand for myself. If I “work” 60 hours a week, it is because I am choosing to do so, and why is that? This is something I have to figure out. Am I avoiding something or am I really loving what I am doing? Or doing I simply not know how it feels to be another way?
I needed to gather this calendar data so that I could uncover what was happening so that I could be more deliberate in enacting ways to sustain and thrive in our life. Still, much of this never felt like “work,” and I felt like reducing what I was doing to categories of work undermined what it all meant to me.
In the next part, I will share how this calendar work evolved for me, but I invite you to do some data collection and see what surfaces for you.
Note: I don’t think any mentor before or during my first two years could have facilitated this process for me. I had to live in the position for a bit as myself with my own ways of being to figure out what being in higher ed meant/means for me.
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