Finding Balance in Higher Ed: A Series About Time, Part 1 of 3

Finding Balance in Higher Ed: A Series About Calendars, Part 1

This teacher education blog series about time and calendars is for any graduate students and higher ed faculty who balance hyphenated expectations of teaching-research-service with wellness-family-adventure. I offer my particular efforts to find a sustainable way to navigate decisions that are, in my view, deeply connected to my conception of time. I acknowledge that time management and self-care are not solutions to institutional practices that see teacher labor as an expandable resource. This series is more about my coming to understand my way of life.

I am about to begin my 4th year as a tenure-track teacher educator. For me, this means I have been reappointed to my current position (or welcome to stay). It means I have met the expectations in my weighted workload of three components: teaching and advising (50%), research (40%), and service (10%). (When I was hired, I took the percentages to be a guide as to how I spent my time and energy.) Being in my fourth year also means that in the next three years, I must continue to be productive/engaged across all three for tenure (or an invitation to stay longer).

Part of the reason I am in higher ed now and resetting my tenure clock is because I abandoned tenure as a junior high English language arts teacher. At the start of my 4th year as a junior high teacher, I was granted tenure, and I thought this meant that I had a degree of job security and that this is where I’d be a teacher for the next 20 or 30 years. But in my 6th year, I didn’t think I’d make it past October. I was on the verge of an emotional and physical breakdown, which is not hyperbole.

Doctoral life was (not) temporary

I began teaching adult English language learners in 2000 while a full time social worker. In 2002, I began grad school for my teaching certification. In 2009, in my 6th year as a junior high teacher with tenure, I was ready to quit education. Feeling overwhelmed by unethical practices like high-stakes tests tracking students out of art and music and all those data-meetings devoid of real classroom stories, I wanted out. But like most teachers, I had invested so much time and money into my career, that I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to find a path back to joy.

There were likely other paths at the time, but the one I followed brought me back to graduate school, a doctoral program. I began in August 2010 and graduated December 2014. I taught junior high by day, taught an undergrad class at night for a tuition waiver, and took classes the other nights. I spent every minute in between studying. This was agency for me. I was doing something to understand and maybe change how things were.

About midway through the second semester of grad school, it became clear that I needed to do better with time management. My partner was very supportive, but he was neglected. I didn’t plan time for us, for me — dimensions of Sarah that were a little less “educator” and more woman, partner, friend.

I had no plans of ever leaving my job as a junior high teacher, so I didn’t see the doctoral program as a stepping stone into a new career. I just wanted to learn what I needed to love my job again. And I did. I found the confidence and knowledge to launch a school-wide art initiative embedding art in every classroom with a culminating trip to The Art Institute of Chicago for 2000 students. I started a blog. I wrote a book. I attended conferences. Grad school afforded me access to the sort of professional spaces I needed to understand how to engage in and shape my experiences and our profession.

However, because I saw it as temporary, I white-knuckled (i.e., survived not thrived) my way through the program. Here was a typical daily schedule (below). Note: There was a semester that I took leave without pay and another that I taught part-time:

• 4:00am check emails, pack for the day if not the night prior, breakfast
• 5:00am go to the gym, shower
• 6:30am commute to school, pick up coffee
• 7:00am-3:00pm teach junior high, plan
• 3:00pm-4:30pm commute to grad school; this was only 30 miles away, but traffic made it a 30-90 minute commute
• 4:30pm-10:00pm take or teach class; I taught a class for a tuition waiver at one university and taught a class at another university to pay for books-fees-conference travel
• 10:00pm-11:00pm commute home
• Weekends: Saturday was usually an day of rest; Sunday was a day to read, write, study, prep for classes.

In short, I didn’t learn how to live and thrive in a higher ed career because I wasn’t ever planning on one. I didn’t think I had to learn how to sustain a teaching life with research and service because it was temporary.

Only it wasn’t. Temporary. That pace of things was more status quo for me. I think school, in general, is set up for teachers and students to just barely survive each semester because we know a break is ahead. We do more and more because more needs to be done. I always worked just beyond my capacity. And sometimes past (e.g., once I had to go to the emergency room after a night class because of exhaustion).

Having finished my third year in higher ed, I was still saying I will catch up during the break or Things will get better when this semester is over.

I really like this faculty role in education for me, but I don’t know how to understand it in a way that will allow me to sustain it for the next decade (or two, that is, if higher education still exists). I think the “answer” may be in my relationship with time.

Understanding my relationship with time

I lose time all the time. Or rather, “time flies away.” I am not sure how long this has been going on, but once I found teaching, I began to lose time. With almost anything I do related to teaching, I am in the state of “flow.” Finding “flow” can be defined as a state of focus in which a person is completely absorbed and engrossed in their work.

“The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost,” Csíkszentmihályi said in an interview with Wired magazine.

This is the goal after all, isn’t it: whole being, using our particular skills to the utmost. I am grateful to have so many moments in a state of flow. However, I need a mechanism to help me be conscious of entering and leaving flow, so that I can attend to other ways of being that will keep my body, mind, and relationships healthy. Again, this is just me.

A calendar. I know this is nothing new. We all use calendars, but I think my calendar work that I will share in the next two posts has really helped me understand and enjoy my particular flow of navigating the hyphenated expectations a whole lot more.

Spoiler alert: The calendar work I will share in this series of posts did not solve/is not solving my tendency to overcommit my time to education work because I cannot extract my teacher being from my Sarah- being as a reader, writer, thinker, lover, friend, athlete. My identities are intertwined, each nurturing the other.

Some thoughts on pandemic shifts in time

If you have done the math, you know that I began this higher education path the semester before the pandemic hit. I had moved my family from Chicago to Oklahoma only to live and teach in a home office for the subsequent two years. But from that office space, I spent time writing poetry and doing research about teaching and reading young adult literature with dozens of teachers who know me in way that makes calling my experiences in teaching-research-service “work” minimizes.

I offer this as reflective work, a way of being conscious of and navigating decisions that shape the way I live my life — a life I share with my partner and family but also, now, the many educators who have become colleague-friends.

In the following two posts, I will share ways I surfaced my relationship with time in the service of understanding what I can really do in this new education role. If you’d like to receive the next part in your email box, please subscribe.

I would love to open up a conversation about time in the comments. Does time fly way for you? Do you feel every second? What aspects of your life offer you a state of flow? Which experiences involve your whole being? How can you welcome more of that?