an old tradition

For a number of years (I've forgot one here and there, though), I've posted a recording of Brahms' "Academic Festival Overture" on the first day of school for me:



I like this piece a lot, not just for the "bombastic" quality, and for the fact that Brahms wove in old student drinking songs (and the Gaudeamus). But I also love it because he wrote it partly as a joke, or perhaps even as a bit of a "forget you" - the University of Breslau gave him an honorary doctorate, and Brahms, who was apparently someone who disliked public speaking (I've read he was somewhat shy*) wrote a thank-you note, but the person who promoted him for the degree begged him to write them a symphony, and (I suspect) kind of hinted, "Well, really, old man, you should do this for us, look at what we did for you."

And so Brahms gathered up all the student drinking songs he knew (or at least this is how my headcanon of the thing goes) and sort of pasted them together, saying to himself (in German, of course) "This'll show them" and sent it off.

But yeah.

This year, back-to-school for me is, what, number 45? (I started school when I was 5 - kindergarten - and the "gap year" phenomenon, when I was in college, was more a thing for kids from rich families or people who were truly and agonizingly undecided**)

(* Completely to the contrary of this: )




(** In retrospect, if there had been the money for it, a gap year might have made sense for me; I changed rather abruptly from "I think I want to do genetics counseling" to "I would rather be a field ecologist" in my senior year of college, and the grad-school path I had picked was less than ideal for what I ultimately wanted to do. Then again, maybe that year of grad school at The First Place was a gap year of sorts, just one where I got paid to teach labs and did do a bit more coursework before moving on)

But I admit, staring down my 45th fall of classes, I feel more....conflicted....than many times in the past. (Would that we could go back to that seemingly pre-lapsarian world of pre-2015. That year was when all the budget nightmares started here, and 2016 was a year of other nightmares in my life). As I said on Twitter last night, I feel intellectually ready (though I still need to refresh myself on the phenomenon known as The Birthday Problem, because I'm going to mention it in biostats today) but emotionally, I'm not quite there.

The events of last week are a part of that, but also, the fact that I didn't have quite as much fun this summer or do quite as many big useful things as I had hoped. And also, the myriad ways in which higher ed is changing - or in which people say it should change, though usually those people have never been, as they say "boots on the ground" on a campus like mine. Ever since 2016 I've had two nagging worries in my head about things:

a. Will my job go away through no fault of my own? (Here, to lose tenure, you either have to do something exceptionally boneheaded like have an affair with a student, or you have to have two "nonproductive" cycles - the first one, you are given directions on how to shape up, and trust me, I'm good at shaping myself up, and I seriously doubt I'd ever hit the point of being deemed "nonproductive" in the eyes of anyone but myself). But with budget cuts/program reductions/the talk of "maybe we just consolidate the regional schools and have one regional plus OU and OSU...." I worry.

b. Will teaching change to the point where I no longer want to do it? Every year there are more administrative tasks handed to us, on the grounds that it "helps" the students more (We report grades to them monthly, in a "push e-mail" even though I also have my grades up on the CMS so students should be able to monitor how they are doing. Nevermind that when I was a student we were expected to figure out our grades ourselves from the papers that were handed back. I wouldn't be surprised to see a call to report grades WEEKLY). Or the push to make more and more stuff online, and it causes cognitive dissonance: some of the upper administrators, including the uni president, speak glowingly of the individual attention in our small face-to-face classes and how good that is, whereas other people essentially say "the future is all online." I still don't know if my response to "You will be teaching online now" would be to cry in private but do it until my retirement clock runs out, or to tell them, "take this job and shove it" and hope that my past frugality will carry me through until I find other gainful employment.

I dunno. I listen to "Academic Festival Overture" now and feel slightly sad, as I remember the days when I felt excited and happy for the fall to start and didn't have those worries, because I felt as if my continued employment was entirely dependent upon my actions, and I could control my actions well enough to keep my job. But these past few years....I guess I now feel like there's randomness in the universe, and if there's some grand plan, I can't see it, and possibly my own happiness isn't meant to be part of it....and so I do feel some conflict, despite the new pencils and new books and everything.