What I'm Doing with my Summer Vacation

You know what I hate? The paired questions that come from non-academics when they hear that no, I’m not teaching this summer: so what are you going to do? is LG going to be in school fulltime?

Now I understand this question is not malicious. But it also comes from a huge misunderstanding about the nature of academic life in general and my job in particular. And since this is my first day back to work—between the travel and the illness last week was a wash—I’ve decided to spend a few moments writing about what summer means and what my job entails, as a warm up to the real writing. (Not that blogs aren’t real, but I don’t get paid for spouting off here.)

I’ll start off by saying that I hated summer until my senior year in college, when I took summer classes and worked at two libraries before going on the Great Tour of Graduate Schools on the East Coast. The reason I hated it was that traditionally summer meant having a “job” that I could walk to—I didn’t have a car—that would allow me to make minimum wage and keep me out of the house “doing something.” And let’s be clear: the purpose was not really to make/save money because I needed it but because my parents didn’t like us sitting around over the summer doing “nothing.” There’s a lot of assumptions here, assumptions about what it means to be productive and the point of adolescents having jobs and all kinds of things it’s probably not worth going into. What made that summer between junior and senior year so great was that it was summer on my terms, and it was, to my mind “productive.” I took classes directly related to what eventually would become my field; I studied for the GRE; I wrote poems in my head while I shelved books and helped people conduct basic research at the library. Summer wasn’t just some arbitrary three month break from my “real” life of going to school and reading but, finally, vitally connected to it. Fast forward to graduate school: here any summer I job I had was both financially necessary but also, more importantly, a university job. I tutored. I taught. And when I wasn’t doing those things, I was taking classes and reading and writing and doing the things that would eventually get me a “real” job.

So here I am, in my ninth (?!) summer since earning my PhD. Life interruptions—trying and succeeding in getting pregnant, having a newborn, moving cross-country—aside, summers have taken a fairly predictable pattern. I have a self-proclaimed summer reading project (which I usually abandon, in pursuit of other reading) and a major writing project. While the tenor of summer is very much one of pleasure and quiet and solitude—reading on the porch, taking walks, drinking peach tea—its purpose is getting work done. I could teach summer school--and I have in the past, because the money (here, anyway) is great—but that would actually stand in the way of my getting work done, even as it is more clearly understandable as “work” by the general public. So let me say loud and clear: I will not get tenure from teaching summer school. I will not get a merit raise from teaching summer school. The figures in my department by-laws are as follows: annual reviews are based on 45% writing/scholarship, 40% teaching, 15% service. For tenure, the balance is tipped even more toward scholarship than teaching.

So while LG and I might take a few weekend trips or maybe even a “vacation,” and while I am sure to be spending too much time driving back and forth to the fertility clinic, this summer—my last before putting together my tenure portfolio—needs to count big time. My department chair has made this clear in no uncertain terms. At minimum, the following things need to happen:

1. syllabi for fall courses (one is pretty much done, the other requires a decision about books)
2. draft and revise one new article (hopefully two)
3. revise various and sundry short pieces
4. begin the next book project
5. send out manuscripts on a regular basis (everything from short essays to full book manuscripts)

And this, my friends, is why LG is at school/camp full time at this point in her young life. Now, overwhelmed as I might be, I need to work.