Stress and academia

It's the time of year for LISTS and surveys and the like, and as so often our profession features.

A US article here ranked 'professor' as one of the top ten least stressful jobs - although they did clarify down in the comments that the 'study' considered only tenured, Full Professor, ignoring everyone else in the hierarchy and the difficulties of getting to that position... for soldier or nurse they didn't pick only the highest, most secure version of the profession for their analysis, as far as I could tell.  Anyway, it sparked off the usual spate of "I'm so stressed so we are all so stressed" and "shut up you're so lucky and it's all your own fault anyway" posts around the academic blogosphere... two of the more considered positions are here and here, where two bloggers try and take a more nuanced approach to identifying stress within the job. 

A UK report found a rather different picture; this one considered all kinds of academics and universities, and found that the self-reported experiences of stress made the sector a very difficult one.

The contrast between these two reports struck me.  The US article looked from the outside - that is, it compared things like the responsibility of the role (so that a medical role which works directly with people's lives is innately considered more stressful than an academic role) in some kind of scaled, semi-objective way.  The UK report drew on the opinions of people within the professions being compared.  It seems to me that in this difference lies the true issue. 

Stress is about individual responses to sets of circumstances - a situation which one person finds dull can be high-pressured to another.  A friend from college is a medic who likes to work in intensive care or emergency sections - she says geriatrics is depressing, orthopedics is boring etc. etc.  Boredom is stressful - she likes the buzz of being needed, thrives on emergencies, and was frankly pretty wearing to be around as an undergrad when all that thrill-seeking focus was looking for something to operate on.  Another moved from academia to accountancy, because he was sick of the vagueness of the outcomes and moving goals of academic work - he loves the tidiness of accounts which are right or wrong, the structure of commuting and working standard hours and ticking things off neatly.  People choose a profession partly because it suits them and their needs, right?  But my feeling is that there is a big flaw in academia; the selection process requires a different set of skills than the job-as-experienced-today, especially in the UK setting.  The selection process - the years of study and research and post-docing, the teaching training, developing your own teaching philosophies and research plans etc. etc. - selects for independence, for self-management, for the ability to go off alone into your own head and into the depths of a subject.  It selects for the ability to think outside the box, long term, and to work towards big goals.

Being an academic, however, you lose most of the nexus of control.  Your research is now mostly controlled by your ability to get funding, or the work of your students or post-docs - so you are now responsible for more e.g. people's work and careers (which you are probably stressed by, if you are both conscientious and used to working alone) and have much less control over how things actually get done (my fingers still ITCH to sieze some labwork off students and say "just let me do it" because I KNOW why stuff is going wrong and it's driving me NUTS waiting for them to follow through on my advice or even better/worse learn for themselves how to fix it).  When my first post-doc project went seriously off the rails due to some fieldwork problems in the first few months, yes, I was stressed, I was anxious - but I was also able to throw myself into the reading, thinking, talking, writing needed to find an alternative route, to implement it, to put in the hours needed to find the new track and push the work onto it.  And if I failed it was MY failure, not my FAULT but not in my control and affecting others.  Your teaching is controlled at the least by departmental and programmatic structures - curricula are communal things, which modules you are assigned, modes of assessment, length of and number of classes, types of location - all these things are not fully in your control.  I'm in a team-teaching-loving environment, with all sorts of extra layers of approvals and rules such as no more than three assessment items, no two assessment items can assess the same set of learning outcomes, all assessment items must total this number of hours of exam or this many words, all items must be set by the week before the semester starts for approval by a committee etc. etc., so I feel that only the time I'm in the classroom is in my control... and since my preference is to NOT be in total control of the classroom, since learning happens whilst doing rather than whilst listening, perhaps the only thing I really do control is the words on the handouts and powerpoints, and whether those get copied on time (which also depends on things like whether there is any paper or toner in the copier or a queue, and those things are not mine to control).  Then there's the bureaucracy and changing priorities and firefighting...

And my point is, these things may not be very stressful on some absolute scale of stressful life events, but for the kind of person who typically makes it into an academic job in a middling institution, they are very stressful indeed.  I mean, I was really good at science, right?  Predicted great grades at A level.  The school just assumed I'd apply for pre-med or vet school, because I had the academic skills.  But I knew myself, and I knew I'd crumble under the people-handling demands of those jobs.  Some people get good stress from life and death situations, a joyous surge of energy and sense of being alive and valuable that they thrive on.  Me?  I get the toxic kind of stress from even the smallest emergency situations like dealing with a cut finger in a laboratory.  But the thrive-on-stress people would probably get the toxic stuff from carrying out thousands of identical measurements, or meeting with ten different groups of students to explain correlation analysis ten times for the second time this year and doing that every year.

Academia IS stressful, these days, for the majority of those involved in it.  Partly because of the changing culture, the poor economy, changes in society, etc. etc.  Partly because we are whiners, maybe - certainly we do like to articulate and critique everything we encounter and feel, it's what we're trained to do.  But partly because many of us aren't really in the right situation to do our best work, or even to do OK work - we're awkward hand-carved pegs of all sorts of special shapes, mostly being managed by people who are the same as us and therefore no good at it or who have no patience for the boring necessities of good management and leadership because they are expected to ALSO teach and research and so on as well as manage with minimal training or support, and it's STRESSFUL for US.

Maybe that's because many of us wouldn't do great in the 'real world'.  I've done my share of 'minimum wage' type jobs, and I wasn't great at bag packing or dealing with shop customers or receptioning - couldn't manage the 'look cheerful all the time' bit for a start.  Shelf-stacking was OK if it was overnight when there weren't customers around, but I was a bit too prone to daydream and to 'making inappropriate comments' (such as saying 'oooh it's like a build your own cow kit' after spending an hour sorting all the different cuts of beef and organs and stuff in the big freezer, apparently that traumatised the girl I was working with).  Bar work - I was good at the sums, and eventually learnt to both pull a decent pint and to mix the bizarre cocktail preferences of the darts team, but lacked the ability to build a rapport with people needed to be really good at it, and didn't enjoy the need to be 'in public' all the time.  I liked my really boring data job (I checked paper forms to make sure that all the boxes had been filled out and that some numbers added up before someone more senior entered them into a computer) - clear goals, clear outcomes, a nice quiet desk in a corner of a busy room, and permission to read a book in the lulls as long as I worked like the clappers in the busy times.  I liked working in the sorting room at the post-office, the teasing of the students was good-natured and the work was mostly repetitive and came in flurries with the odd bit of interest and the odd bit of sitting around.  I've done contract work, depended on clients, written tenders, written reports in different corporate styles - not much, but enough to have an idea what's involved, and to appreciate the challenges it presents.  I'm also a first-generation-to-university type, so no-one in my family had an academic job, so I know what different kinds of work are generally like. 

I'm not totally ivory towered.  And yes, I'm a delicate little flower with a sense of entitlement I expect.  But I continue to find my work stressful, both in the lack of control and in the conflicts between the stated purposes and aims and the actions that are required or rewarded, and at the same time struggle to find an alternative which would suit me and my talents and my weaknesses, especially now I have these various health issues... Anastasia, for example, writes a really interesting blog about her transition from academia to high school teaching which is clearly going well for her.  I am totally in awe, because no way could I handle the people-work she describes, clearly relishes and seems to excel at.  That sort of thing - I can do it, if I'm honest, I do do with some of my students, but I can do it for an hour for one or two people and then I'm wrung out and have to find somewhere to hide and recuperate.  I would not consider classroom teaching as a possible role for me in a school during the compulsory school years.  Nu-uh.  Just... no.  Horses for courses.

Midwinter Ponderings part 2

Thanks paradocs for commenting on my last little rant.  It's reassuring - albeit depressing - to realise that so much of the UK system is breaking up and creating such difficult work environments (not just from paradocs but also from friends 'outside the computer' who are also academics both in my field and outside it).  I wish I could work out how to do something about it.  I think there is so much good in our system - and so much good we could be doing for our students and 'society' and our country and our world - that it feels like I should be DOING more.

But I don't know how, and I don't know what, and I'm tired of being called naive and idealist as if those are hurtful, slanderous words which should hurt me, or of my passion being labelled overly dramatic, gender-driven rather than genuine, or a sign of instability and needing more medication.  I'm also just. plain. tired.

What am I going to do differently this year?  Well, if I really want to fight for what is good in the system and try to hold on to what matters, I need to be prepared - grounded, strong, calm, focused.  If I want to move on to another university job, where at least things will be different and I can start over - without some of the History such as VeryDifficultColleague and my, uh, issues with same*, or the Clique Problem etc. - I need to be doing better in terms of grants and almost certainly in terms of working full time again.  If I want to change careers, I need to be feeling confident and making a positive choice, not running.  If I want to gain more power in the system and fight that way, I need the grants and publications to get the promotion I'd need (and currently do not fancy), hence need for balance and focus on those things over the day-to-day needs of individuals around me.  All of which say to me that this needs to be a year of focusing on my physical and mental health - losing weight (15 years at NorthernUni, over 100lbs heavier and I wasn't light to start with.  If I carry on like that my retirement home will be the traditional two paces long one pace deep piece of clay, and the lack of reading bothers me more than the lack of embracing about that place), getting fitter, sleeping better, getting stronger and more grounded, although all these things are hard.  I WILL take more time off, in proper blocks, aiming for a full month this summer AND other blocks.  And see where that takes me.


*VDC is a bully.  I am bulliable.  VDC is also... inconsistent.  Charming, smart, well-intentioned, hard working, apparently collegial - for months and months.  Then in the middle of an apparently innocuous and standard week or meeting, VDC'll turn and get vicious.  VDC has the same talent my teenage sister had of knowing EXACTLY the tone and the words to not just hurt but to do it in such a way that it takes all the wind out of any chance of riposte, you know?  VDC has problems - and things are a lot better than they were a few years ago, and other people have had it far worse in interacting with VDC than I have (you really wouldn't want to be the PhD student of a VDC).  

I hate the waiting for the shoe to drop, for the flip to happen - either way, it really bothers me.  Probably because I'm a pretty integrated person - I find it very hard to create or maintain personas which are anything other than different shades of the same thing - whether I'm Professional Networking or Academic In Charge of a giant first year class or running a small seminar or hanging out in the bar at a conference or messing around with old mates or playing with a six year old, I'm an insatiably curious, over-talkative, clumsy intravert cat-loving verbose fantasy-novel-reading history buff who happens to be a scientist with a wide range of intellectual enthusiasms, most of them ultimately about things which are wet, muddy, sandy, furry, juicy, rocky or otherwise outdoorsery.  And... one very strong thing about my parents and my wider family is that they are people with the sort of personal integrity which means you know what you will get.  I always was a slow social developer, and I still get thrown - scared, confused, made uneasy - by people who are inconsistent.  Oh, is VDC inconsistent.

Hmm, writing that, I realise that part of the problem with Other People being unreliable - the 'promise but won't follow through or write down' thing - is that I probably believe that my colleagues are Decent People and Decent People Are Consistent.  And yet... they aren't.  And that doesn't make them not decent, just... foreign.

midwinter ponderings

I have been at NorthernUni, and living in this house (first as tenant then as mortage-payer), for fifteen years now.  It's an odd thought.  If I stay until typical retirement (which for my generation will be age 67 I guess), I have another twenty-some years to go.

I don't know if I can do that.  And even if I can, should I?

December was... interesting.  I got sick the first weekend, I guess, carried on for a few days, lost my voice and got sicker, took two weeks off on sick but spent chunks of time doing work stuff and feeling very guilty, then was on 'holiday' (preparing for and hosting parents for a week), and since then have been, well, not doing all that much really - and certainly not working.  Things I need to do drift into my mind occasionally, and I've checked my email a few times, but I just don't have any interest or urge to do any work stuff.  Which is not like me.  I don't know if I don't actually care, or if I don't think there's any point, or if I'm just burnt out and still not well (the latter is likely, I suppose, on the balance of the evidence, but it's hard to look clearly at ones own mental processes when one has to use said processes to do the looking).  It's been a horrible semester due to various interpersonal crud, with things going bitter in some subtle, energy-draining ways, even though all the usual stuff like, oh, research students and delivering classes and even making very slow progress with research writing actually went fine until the latest bout of viral whatevers.  It isn't over yet; by our system we still have two exam weeks to go.  It was also clear from emails and a couple of calls whilst I was off sick that the underlying problem is definitely still spreading.  And there's really nothing I can do about it, except try not to make it worse and try to protect myself from the worst of it, which means a lot of deciding which of two unpleasantnesses is the least bad.  Not fun.  :-(

My department isn't a happy place to be at the moment.  What with cliques and threats and people who've basically given up and are focusing on cruising through the teaching then going home to their kiddies as often and early as possible (which you know of course is fine and probably sensible but, hell, it still feels like being abandoned when they are people I liked and respected as allies.  When someone I thought was a friend can't possibly manage to come out to lunch on ONE measly day in two months time around a particular professional anniversary we share because he has to work over lunch every day so he can get home for Bath Time, well, I want to throw things). 

 My Faculty isn't terribly happy either - reorganisations both real and 'for the purposes of the REF' are causing a lot of inter-departmental gossip and resentment, not helped by a serious lack of clarity of information from above.  All that IS clear from the University Level is that academics must Get More Grants and Serve Students.  However, we also have to go through about thirty more steps to be allowed to submit said grants, because clearly we all have to have everything checked.  AND the checking DOCUMENTED - I not only have to get both internal and external people to read my applications now, I have to get written proof (detailed written proof) that they consider that the application will get 'above average' scores in the funding council assessment process before I'm even allowed to submit an application.  I'm finding it very hard to act like a 'grown up professional' about this, coupled with all the paperwork I have to do for teaching - apparently my fifteen years as faculty, four as post-doctoral, six in higher ed, mean that I am qualified to do my job ONLY IF every step is approved by someone else.  Who presumably knows better than me.  HOW??? (having the 'key person' who checks the research stuff be less than 5 years out from their PhD doesn't help; yes they have several 'sexy' grants, but they also have a star-studded stable of mentors who co-apply with them and have done since they were first picked out as 'a star' as a new grad student, and are in a particular subfield which is currently in a boom phase, and have access to a unique-in-the-UK beepy machine that is currently Very Sexy.  So not like my situation... or to be honest my ambitions).

Of course, we have to Teach More and Get Better Evaluations on the new (and I believe somewhat flawed) university wide student module evaluation system and Recruit More Freshers and Have Impact and Commercialise Our Ideas and Communicate With Policy Makers and Write at least One Four Star Paper A Year and Secure Funding For More PhD Students - and the message is that most of us are terrible disappointments who fail across the board at these things.  If I have to listen to one more lecture about how vital it is for our jobs that we all do Everything Perfectly and it's all down to us, I fear I'll start crying in public - or shouting, equally bad, although some of the men get away with it (they're Passionate, you see - I'm Hysterical or Overly-Dramatic or Needy).

Yeah, maybe I really didn't want to think about that stuff.

So.  The time of year for resolutions or themes of however else one tries to start over is upon us.  Writing my meme-ish list made it clear that I DON'T want this year to be like the last few.  I want something INTERESTING to report!  Something DIFFERENT.  So expect some tedious navel-gazing posts over the next few days as I try and work out a feasible sort of something...

OOps.

I was feeling quite optimistic and in control yesterday, but then I didn't sleep at all well, have been back in the office a few hours, feel like I've totally lost my ability to speak administrivese and am back in my rut.

Hello rut.

Whilst I was quickly creating this graphic, someone came by and asked for 'just a page or two' on a new class for the first years which I'm supposed to create by the end of the day (around several meetings and a 'training session on new personal portfolio software to help students become more employable'). Some days I hate this job.

::croak::

Yesterday I talked too much - my throat aches already today and it's not 08:00. But the first day of the course went well - we had a room/field full of students busy doing stuff and learning stuff. I love when someone says "no way!" really loudly, then tells the rest of their group a cool fact they've discovered, all excitedly.

But I must talk less today. Sigh. That is not normal for me!

Flailing around splashing

I am trying not to think about how much I have to do. It's paralysing, scary, depressing...

The parents arrived on Friday so I was able to get into my house, and got duly lectured/teased about carelessness (and about the cleaning I hadn't finished owing to being locked out, i.e. the room the parents were to sleep in and a last quick whip around the bathroom, which my Mum duly did with great thoroughness and my Dad lectured me about 'making' her do it). But it was OK, overall. The weekend was hard in patches - I sometimes feel like I have no idea what normal is, my normal or anyone's normal, so that acting normal, being around people, becomes a precarious guessing game. Then sometimes everything is just easy and flowing, then it's hard again - stupid brain.

I am still very short of sleep, which is a pain, but we went to a market (and bought wonderful sourdour olive bread and a Manchego-style goats' cheese as well as produce), went out to dinner one evening at a nice Italian place, did a few chores (my Dad likes to be useful and to Do Things, my Mum 'helped' me identify and pack up three bagfuls of books for charity shops (I still need several metres of additional book shelving)), and my Mum and I went to London yesterday for a museum visit to an exhibit of 300 years of quilts - fascinating. Wish I'd taken my camera - we also had time to wander around the wonderful new (ish) medieval and Renaissance galleries, and stumbled across a wonderful Italian-made quilt from the fourteenth century. It's amazing that these domestic textiles can survive so long. London was sultry and irritating as usual but we treated ourselves to a taxi, which is so much nicer than taking the underground in summer! The parentals left this morning, and I had to come back down to earth and at least look at all the things I have to do...

• Have decided not to submit a grant application for the deadline at the end of this week. It wouldn't be a great application, there is another deadline in the Autumn, and no-one's job depends on it. All very sensible. But I still feel like a wimp and a failure for not just buckling down and doing it.
• Teaching next week! Aargh! We do have: planned field sites, staffing, a risk assessment, a nice small group of students, an overall plan of the week. We do not have: confirmed transport to the field sites, any lectures or handouts, any equipment booked, approval of the risk assessment, permission to bring back samples from one of the field sites, rooms booked in the university. Some of the reason for that lies with the fact that we didn't know the course was running until last Tuesday therefore have not had much time to prepare. But that's an excuse - we were pretty sure it would run even if it didn't fill, for political reasons, and I should have done all this last week, but... last week was not nice, not nice at all, and I was slothful and grumpy, and I didn't get things done.
• Tomorrow I am supposed to be on an all-day first aid course. I don't know if I can... both because of preparation for the field trip (and other things) and because I am very anxious/still rather depressed at the moment, and am not sure I can cope with it. But I wasn't sure I could cope with the parental visit, or the trip to London, and I did both. So perhaps I should do this, it won't be as bad as I fear. But I would have a lot of work to do over the weekend. And I desperately need downtime (parents visiting is lovely but it ISN'T DOWN TIME) to get some balance back. Partly because:
• three weeks on Friday we depart for FavouriteIslands. I have several excursions to organise (many phone calls to make), need to write and mail information to the students, have to do a bit of budget juggling, need to complete two pilot studies, need to sort out the equipment bookings and set up my schedule up there (lots of chasing up of contacts making sure that they know when I'll be around and arranging some meetings), reviewing the research plan, checking everyone has their travel plans, copying sets o0f recording sheets etc. And I need to pack, and almost certainly shop (at least, despite not having LOST weight or gotten fitter as intended, I haven't deteriorated further and my battered field clothes from the last few seasons still fit). And fit in at least two more training sessions on Technical Equipment.
• eight weeks on Friday we depart for a foreign field area. No permits, no equipment bookings, etc. etc. etc. - not even any travel bookings are made yet.
• Also, we need to start collecting real data for Project F. But need the results of the methods experiment first. Which needs (at least) 4-6 weeks of data. SeniorStudent started the first little part of it THIS MORNING. And has already decided to drop one part as it's going to take too long (experiments are always slow to start, right? You get a lot quicker at tasks with practice, and everything in this is new to her, so I am optimistic that it is doable. She DID spend the morning in a local field collecting samples for the experiment, and it's raining hard, so maybe she's just pissed off?). Deep breaths.
• AND edit a couple of papers and plan the next stage of her data analysis with DrVisit, so that she can keep up some momentum whilst I'm away
• AND sit on a grad student selection panel
• and there's the project with FocusedWoman - which has to be worked on as I've just heard that I've been accepted to give an oral presentation at a conference in September, which we applied for on the grounds that otherwise we would let things slip and not make progress...
• and I promised DrPessimistic that I'd do my damndest to get the last lot of these analyses for DataCrunchingProject to him by the start of next week (only 2 weeks later than agreed)
• and that draft of the first paper from PowerHouseProject needs completing this month
• never mind the paper which will follow up from the workshop we held recently

And that's all I can think of WITHOUT even LOOKING at my diary/lists/notebook. You can see why my rational side thinks the first aid course might be something to miss. I don't need the stress! But then, I am thinking this is avoidance tactics and general skiving on my part...

I can haz chocolate and an extra six weeks in June pleez?

Right. Back to the lab to see how SeniorStudent is doing, then I'd better get on with those darn handouts...

memo to self:

Do not talk to DrN about teaching
Do not talk to DrN about teaching
Do not talk to DrN about teaching

Gah!!!

I haven't talked to DrN for a couple of weeks - we've not really coincided - and I popped next door to congratulate her on getting a study leave (for the autumn) and to make a joke about how she, me and one of the DrLabradors are playing student 'pong' because some of the second years are scrabbling around looking for project supervisors (they have had since Christmas to arrange this, but the form is due in tomorrow...) and we are sending them backwards and forwards between us because we're all 'full'. And that was stupid, because it tipped off a 'I am so overworked' whinge (which we all do, of course) in the course of which she delivered the following home truths, talking over me repeatedly to get the point across.

First, apparently I choose to get ill, or get ill on purpose or both. And I better not choose to get ill next year, because she is not going to cover for me ever again (note: her contract was changed from 80% to 100% this year, at the last minute, so her cover for me (delivering material I taught) actually filled that extra workload. And arranging cover is not my problem. Especially if I deliberately go abroad in the summer (because after all my research isn't that important) and make myself tired. See, whatever my HoD says about me being a valued colleague, getting this sort of comment (regularly) from the people I work with makes me feel absolutely worthless. She has a real knack of saying things so they get under every defence going. And a 'moral high ground' because she's a single parent (with partner) and she doesn't get sick and take time of work - no, she brings her sick kid to the office and expects other people to entertain him... (to be fair, that is getting better now he's old enough that she can shut him in her office with a book, and he'll stay there).

Oh, and also, despite being on study leave*, apparently I have a moral duty to take on project students for next year, whether they want to work in my area (broadly defined) or in topic-I-teach-but-do-not-research. Because she's got loads of project students and she's on study leave next year so I should do the same.

*I am, following discussion with the relevant people to clarify the current rules, absolutely not expected or required to take any project students on because my leave extends over the summer (as does hers). I am taking some students, those working on projects close to my research area, i.e. am doing more than I am expected to do, but it suits me as I like supervising dissertation students. But not enough to suit Dr Moral Obligation.

Bugger. Wish I hadn't tried to be friendly now. And I have to spend the afternoon sitting in an exam meeting with her glaring at me and whispering to her partner [unless it's a blue moon day and she forgets about it between now and then]. At least I have 'permission to knit' from the current Chair of the Board! And some fun, fuzzy 'novelty yarn' in calico-cat colours and a pair of knitting needles in my bag, so will have something to do.

Thinking time is not always a Good Thing

Being off sick makes time for thinking - because doing anything active like housework or even going for a stroll makes me cough/wheeze/sneeze, because my brain is stuffy as well as my sinuses which creates a sort of distance conducive to pondering, because even I can't sleep ALL the time (lying down makes me cough, makes my neck/back hurt blah blah blah. You've all had colds, you know how irritatingly irritated and malfunctioning they make you feel). I suppose I might if I were a really keen and devoted academic work on papers or teaching prep whilst I'm out of the office, whenever I'm in a state to think at all. Maybe I should.

Maybe it would shut up the thoughts that keep going around.

Being constantly busy is not actually healthy, of course. My brain needs, craves, downtime, wondering time, gazing around time, daydreaming time. A mad-busy life is not a life examined, nor always a life well lived. However, illness-related downtime is maybe not prime positive thinking time, you know? Viruses are innately depressing. Laryngitis is anxiety-provoking. I've mentioned before that I have that dubious slippery am-I-might-I-be-heading-into-a-depressive-episode feeling at the moment anyway, that sense that the shallows of lowish mood I'm wading in have an inconstant base, that the next step might be into a trench. And I'm tired, I came into this tired.

But the thoughts go around anyway, so I'm going to lay out a few of them here (this is self-indulgent blogging, blogging when maybe I'd be better off journalling, but stuff it, it's my blog).

brainworm 1: What The Appraiser Said
At my last appraisal, the person who is now my Head of Department commented that he wanted me to focus on teaching*, that he was rather disappointed that since my last appraisal with him I'd apparently focused on my research. I've been a bit fixated on the mixed messages here. Does he mean 'you aren't any good at research' or 'you're putting in too much time on research for the returns you get in terms of things with brownie points' or 'you're clearly staying put here, what with being part time and all, so stop playing the c.v. building game and do more teaching to free up other better people to do more research'? Or was he trying to say something about the department needing some more 'visible' teaching star players and him thinking I could be one? Or that my teaching is rather neglected and is holding me back? In the UK system at least, whilst something like a National Teaching Award (um, SLIGHTLY competitive... NATIONAL, you know) might help your 'marketability', frankly as long as you're an OK teacher it's those research measurables that get you considered for jobs, that help you get those all important research grants.

If he meant I was ignoring my teaching, he is just plain wrong - my evaluations are pretty stable at a level I consider to be acceptable (team teaching makes it hard to really know how I'm doing, but I'm not the worst and student mentions of me by name in comments are almost always positive), my Peer Observations come back fine, I'm punctual, I get my assessment done on time, I follow the rules and do my paperwork. I carry a substantial teaching load with limited continuity from year to year - if I taught the same stuff every year, taught it solo or in a stable team, I'd hope to see all my scores settling at the "very good-excellent" end of the spectrum after two or three repeats, but as things are I think I do OK. I have had a teaching development project funded, my second in my time here, and I have to turn away project students. My office hours are usually pretty busy. I continue to be involved at a fairly low-key level with national teaching activities in my subject, the only person officially to do so in my department. every year or two I take teaching material to a conference or attend a teaching-focused regional meeting, and I attend one or two staff development events in teaching every year. I even buy and read books about teaching-at-HE, and try new ideas.

If he wants me to move towards being a 'leader' in the teaching area, then parts of the solution are in his hands. I'd need funding and encouragement to attend teaching conferences, perhaps support to get a further teaching qualification (I only have a NorthernUni PGCert.), I'd need to be more formally involved in activities such as mentoring newer colleagues or graduate student teaching assistants (I offered, was turned down), I'd need to be offered the chance to take on roles in teaching administration at department and university level (again, I have no such admin roles at the moment because, according to this same person, I lack leadership qualities). I'd need to be really, really assured that working on getting some teaching publications, more funding, doing more development work, would NOT mess up my promotion chances, would not have any effect on my inclusion in future research assessment submissions, or my chances of study leave, and that he actually does mean to do something about the culture in parts of the sciencey end of the department which sees teaching as very much the lesser part of the job... and something women are naturally better suited for, being more nuturing and less competitive, y'know [which really makes me NOT want to do more of it, since I'll be seen to be conforming - 'of course she's doing it, it comes naturally to women, it's not actually hard for them'].

Do I even want to go in that direction? Part of me is eager to please, wants to be useful, can see that it would be useful for the department to have a few teaching-focused, university-recognised individuals to point to. I do enjoy the teaching part of my job - I aim to be an all-round academic, to fully embrace the three (or four) main roles of the academic and work within, develop within, them all over every 1-2 year cycle. And yes, I'd like to be a better teacher.

To be a better teacher, I need more consistency in what I teach, more forewarning of changes, less team-teaching, decent teaching spaces, less paperwork (especially last minute pointless paperwork), a clear framework of policies to guide practice which is both available BEFORE the start of the academic year and remains the same THROUGHOUT the academic year... and for the system to make the accomodations I'm supposedly promised, such as scheduling teaching on only 3 of the 4 days I work, not scheduling me for more than 3 hours back to back, and providing rooms with appropriate audio equipment to support my voice (especially important when I have back to back classes) and enough seats/facilities for the size of the class I am asked to teach. Only once I've had that for a few years will I start feeling any urge to do courses, carry out research projects, etc. etc. Any serious urge, anyway.

And... this laryngitis problem. It isn't going away. It's affected my work every year since Autumn 2003. I've had tests and speech therapy and seen specialists. I have a tendency to laryngitis, it's probably psychosomatic and stress-related. Interestingly, I always used to have IBS-type gastric problems, for at least two weeks in every four, but these have been so much better and less frequent (maybe a few days a month now, and usually linked to either not having been in control of my food choices or to certain kinds of stressful events) since I began on anti-depressants (which was in 2001) and began to get laryngitis. It's possible that the bit of the brain that does this psychosomatic stuff has realised that the laryngitis is a really, really effective way of making me stop exposing myself to certain kinds of ongoing, grinding, exhausting activities (such as long teaching runs, travelling, meetings, not getting enough sleep and being 'in public' too much), much better than just making me run to the toilet a lot. But the laryngitis is a major handicap when it comes to being a 'teaching figure' type person. Every year, I lose some time, I have to move some classes. I am reliably unreliable at the most pressured times of year, in that most vital of roles, being face to face with students. I am off on my first (and hopefully only) directly voice-loss-caused sick leave from teaching of the seventh academic year since this problem began; in every year of the last six I've had no voice for at least 2 weeks of semester time, which has forced me to cancel classes etc. For the last five of those six years I've had no singing voice at all, almost certainly as a consequence of using my voice at work before it's fully recovered, which has wrecked one of my main recreations. The empirical evidence is overwhelming - this is not going to magically stop happening.

Now, you could argue that if I was more teaching-oriented I wouldn't have gone to the various conferences and on the fieldwork that has been tiring me out and making me more vulnerable to viruses and more stressed over the last few weeks. And yeah, OK, maybe I overscheduled. But I gave teaching-related presentations at three of the four conferences, the fieldtrip included several meetings about future opportunities for undergraduate students, working with graduate students is a form of teaching, and I'd need to attend occasional conferences to keep up to date on scholarship in my field and to stay connected, even if I did NO research (which isn't what's being suggested). So it wouldn't all go away. Since the most likely source of the triggering virus (and indeed of the gastric bugs that have caused four one-day absences from teaching over the last six years) is the students themselves, I'd still be vulnerable - and doing less 'other stuff' would only lead to me being given more teaching, assuming it could be crammed into my poor little timetable, hence the stress would shift rather than just go away.

*Note: Teaching is not the best word for what we academics do as educators in the university sector, and I am adamantly NOT a teacher in the same way that a school teacher or a piano teacher is. However, in this waffle I will use it as shorthand for the complexity of the role of the academic in this area.

brainworm 2: he's right, I'm not good enough at research
Note, not not good, just not good enough. Look at all the time I spend applying for grants, without significant success. I'm not a new member of faculty, I've been at this nearly 12 years - maybe I'm just not doing very good science? Or researching the wrong thing? In which case... it's bloody hard at my stage to retool, you know? To try and build a skillset and a rep in a totally new area... at least, it is if you're Old School. And I am, to my bones. Related areas of my field are similarly challenging - a few Big Names and their Young Stars get money fairly consistently, and a lot of good scientists live on scraps. Maybe my university feels that what I do with the bits I get isn't enough? I mean, I usually feel it isn't. But then I go places like the last workshop and spend the few days on an emotional rollercoaster - not just from all the 'ingratitude' and personal stuff, but from the mixture of excitement at new ideas, frustration at seeing all the things that need to be done to consolidate and indeed to confirm that the latest sexy method really, actually works before we rush off and try to fix stuff with it, that no-one's doing, impotence because my lack of money/people means that I'm just not able to really enter into debates - because I can't say 'well, I'll do this if...' I just don't have the capacity. Frustration at seeing other people present results of experiments I proposed at previous meetings, but which they had the capacity to do... excited and loving my field and desperate at the thought of having to apply for more funding and longing to do stuff. I think, I still think, I have a contribution to make to this field, that I'm seeing something noone else is and might just be able to crack a few tricky hold-out problems. But... am I deluding myself? Grrrr... how to tell... remembering that this is a contextual question, it's about what I as an employee of my university should be doing, not just I-the-scientist.

And why do I spend time blogging, reading junk fiction, getting sick when I should be writing papers, analysing data, writing MORE grants? Do I just not care enough? Because I can't do 24-7, I need a life, longer hours don't lead to more work with me - but does that mean I'm not really cut out for this job?

brainworm 3: it's all my fault
It's my fault because I react badly to stress - if I could control my reactions better, if I was less self-indulgent and silly, I'd not GET psychosomatic problems. If I was healthier, thinner, fitter, I'd resist viruses better. If I wasn't such an awkward person, if I didn't find being in company so stressful after a full day of people at work, I'd have more of a local support network, maybe a partner for domestic support (one more domestic and handy than a cat, I mean). I picked the wrong career. I over-scheduled. I am fat and useless and a failure, and should Get Out of the Kitchen etc. etc. And I'm letting down all other women academics by being such a visible failure. Oh yeah, and while I'm at it, what kind of role model AM I for aspiring female scientists, I'm a stereotypically unsexy, unglamorous, long-term-single, childless, cat-owning, rather naive person with poor work-life balance. I shouldn't be taking a place in the academy, a desired, sought after job, if I'm not really enjoying it a lot of the time, if I'm 'not up to it'.

But what else would I do? Why am I so unimaginative, so unable to dream up alternative jobs? If this one is stressful and grim sometimes, why can't I come up with all sorts of options for myself?


brainworm 4: I will die alone and my cat will have to munch on my corpse whilst waiting for someone to notice and rescue her

traditional single person at home sick thoughts. ignore them. Time for bed, methinks!

Anti-climax

DrN was actually OK with Talky. The meeting was... bland. Quite chummy, on the whole.

Apparently, DrN believed that Talky was not going to do any lab work during the week from now on, and therefore would not work hard/finish on time because DrN would not be there to see her work etc. This is despite Talky sending her a long email of dates at the start of the year when she would be in and of her intermediate lab work targets (which are excessively detailed to my mind), AND both Talky and me repeatedly saying that this was not so. Apparently, that was the whole reason that she was being nasty. Suddenly, she now knows that Talky WILL be in the lab on some weekdays, and everything - from threats to cut stipend, to rants about poor writing and not thinking, to plagiarism charges - is no longer a problem. In fact, I may be exagerrating for effect. However, I am a problem and must not mislead, misinform or distract Talky from her VeryImportantWork (e.g. by helping her with the techniques I am specialised in).

Talky says 'oh great all is sorted out'.

We've been here before right? We all know... this is just part of the treatment. I hate this, but I think it's time to start up my own 'incident log' again. I did not make up all the things that happened earlier this week - I've got the empty anxiety tablet packet as evidence, for a start! I encouraged Talky to keep her records straight and still keep her appointment with the Graduate Student Officer, but... she seems really 'tra-la-la what a relief just a silly little misunderstanding', so she may not.

Right. Grant. Home. DO LAUNDRY - have to pack for trip to Scandinavia tomorrow and have no clothes that are both work respectable and clean and suitable for winter. Sigh