a good thing

I'm glad I made the mitts for my departing colleague. She opened them up and exclaimed, "It's my color!" (so I was right about purple).

She also mentioned that the previous pair I had made her - yes, I had made her a pair before - had "mysteriously disappeared" and today she let on what I suspected - that she thinks one of her grown daughters took them, or that she loaned them to her and forgot to get them back.

So I'm glad I did it. It was a small thing but I think it was meaningful to her.

And yes, she landed on her feet. She's now THE science person at a school district much closer to her home than we are....she has a big lab all her own, she's going to be teaching chem and biology and I guess physics (it's a high school). One of my colleagues joked she may be making more then than she does now (which could be true: the non-tenure full time people don't make a lot here). She still gets the same retirement benefits but her other benefits won't be quite as good as ours. So she'll be okay, and I bet her students at the school will love her; I know a lot of ours did.

Still, I'm sad to see her go. She was here longer than I have been! She's kind of a link to the old guard, because she knew a lot of people who have since retired, some who retired before I arrived.

At AAUW last night I wound up next to one of the retiring people who had been in admin and she expressed some outrage that people who were all good teachers - as my now-former colleague is - were let go simply because they lacked the protection of tenure. (Which is why I think we filled out that survey of how to prioritize who gets to 'stay' IF there are future cuts made - apparently this decision was made very unilaterally and a lot of people are somewhat unhappy). It's a lot harder to let a tenured person go "not for cause*" - a real financial emergency must be declared.

(*Despite what some critics of tenure say, there are clear guidelines about letting someone with tenure go - someone who fails to live up to their contract, who is insubordinate to higher-ups, who is abusive to students, who gets "involved" with a student (I mean in a sexual way), and so forth...they can be let go. Also, here, if you have two or three years in succession of "unsatisfactory" reviews (for teaching, scholarship, and service) you can be let go. Granted, in practice there may be cases of someone with pull or who "knows where the bodies are buried" who can get away with more stuff, but tenure is not the sinecure some think it is, which is why I keep pushing and striving. And anyway, I have exactly zero pull and I know where zero bodies are buried, so I have to rely on my own merits and my own hard work to keep my gig.)

I dunno. These are strange times we live in now. If you had told me fifteen or even ten years ago that some of the stuff going on locally (or nationally, or globally) would happen, I would not have believed you. (I just hope things get better budgetwise soon. Or at least that we get told straight up what's going to happen, instead of being kept in the dark. Another thing I talked about with the retiring person was how awful the not-knowing was and she agreed; the insecurity was the worst part because you can't plan - as I said, if they told me today, "Come fall, your paycheck will be 10% less than it was last year" my reaction would be, "Okay, I can budget for that now that I know." But it's the WONDERING that gets you - rumors are flying, everything from that several departments are going to be fused (I really hope it's not mine; within my department we all get along well but I suspect there would be some friction with any of the departments we MIGHT fuse with) to that full time faculty will be expected to teach half again as many hours as they do now (v. unfair to those of us with labs - we get 1 contact hour for every 2-5 hours in lab) to that there might be tenured people let go. And that is a morale killer, though I suppose on some levels, for some mindsets, the idea is that it keeps people "on their toes" or perhaps more properly "toeing the line." (I know I have pushed harder to do more service and research this spring than I might have in better times)

I have to trust that if God closes this particular door, He'll open another one for me and that maybe whatever future option happens - if it's not here - it will be better. But like so many things, it's the going-through-the-tunnel* that's the awful part - the waiting to come out on the other side and see what's there.

(* depending on the route the train takes through St. Louis, there are several tunnels it can go through *right next to the river.* It always makes me nervous when it does that; my brain blips to, "What if the New Madrid fault was to go at precisely this minute?" and also, it's just unsettling to be running through a dark tunnel where you can't see anything outside.)

As I said earlier, the sad thing about all this unsettledness is that I had some really great students this semester, people that I will miss. Across the entire spectrum: one of my students who burned through their "probation" (for poor grades) still told me, even though they couldn't return next fall, that they learned a lot in my class and enjoyed it. And another student - who was handily earning an A so I knew it was in no way a bribe - handed me a very nice thank-you card on their way out the door after the exam, a card that made me tear up a little bit because they said they came into the class knowing nothing about the topic (they were a pre-med) but that they appreciated how willing I was to answer all the questions they had and that they could tell I was passionate about my subject and about teaching. (Yeah, that one's going in the "You don't suck, after all" drawer - I keep a few of these things around to remind myself when I've had a really rotten day that I can have a good impact on SOMEONE'S life.)