Because yeah, that's something I worry about. Probably inordinately but I do worry about two things:
a. Being "good enough" to keep my job (though you need to be unsatisfactory more than two reviews in a row to actually lose it, and you have to be less-than-satisfactory in more than one thing, I think, for an overall unsatisfactory)
b. "wanting to please the grown-ups." That is, to have my colleagues write a favorable letter. What I would long most for is an "everything's fine, keep on keepin' on" even as I know this is described as a "developmental" process, meaning the game is that people are supposed to find something to criticize you on, so you can work harder at that next time. And for people with my very particular emotional makeup....well, that's kind of unpleasant. I know I have to just divorce myself from the process and from the "constructive criticism" but I'm not there yet.
(Someone else I know? Got very angry when their teaching was criticized and I had to hear all about it, about how it was an unfair assessment. When my "service" got criticized last time, I was just kind of ....
I mean, I like doing research and all, but....it's hard to fit it all in and do very much. And sometimes it's hard to come up with ideas (or good sites where you don't have to go and camp out for a week, there are not a lot of good nearby field sites).
I confess: I probably won't miss research when I retire. I will miss teaching. (Heck, I miss teaching right now - the little interactions with students, the having small daily goals to meet, instead of amorphous "by the end of the summer" goals).
But I'm gonna let the paper sit for a day. I do need to call the local Corps of Engineers office (I tried an e-mail contact but as I suspected, that's a much slower way to get information) and maybe I do that tomorrow. And maybe I even send the thing off next week, I don't know. I never know when a paper is "done" enough, though I do remember my graduate advisor once commenting that a person could endlessly revise a paper and at some point you just have to decide it's "done enough" and send it in.
But I still kinda hate post-tenure review, and it seems like every time they add in more stuff you have to document and prove. The diligent people worry a lot about it and spend a lot of time on it; it seems the people who aren't so diligent kind of laugh the process off, and that's always the way, I guess. We live in a fallen world.
***
I'm also kind of done emotionally. This has been a hard week; a couple people in my outer orbit lost close loved-ones this week. And there's just so much bad dumb contentious news out there.
I probably need to take a day and go antiquing or figure out some town near here that has something interesting to do that I've never been to before and just go....I get too stuck in the one-inch picture frame of "go to work, sit alone in my office all day, don't talk to anyone except online, then go home and don't talk to anyone" and I feel like the world I am in is very small and not very pleasant.
(Though part of that is the heat. It's sure less fun running around doing stuff when the heat indexes are in the low 100s than when they are in the 70s)
For now, though: I need to take my bundle of raw nerves that I am and go home. Finish piano practice. Throw a load of sheets in the wash. Clean up the house a little (And put up my new over-the-door bookshelf; I have one of those wire shelf things in my bedroom, over the closet door, to hold paperback mysteries. It broke over the weekend - one of the hangers broke. A new one could not be obtained locally, but I ordered one and it came, so now I can put it up and at least pick some of the books up off the floor)
I also need to get some of my craft motivation back, to work on something or more ideally, finish something. (Maybe I pull out some of the cotton dishcloth yarn I know I have somewhere and just knit a dishcloth? Because it's fast? And I feel like I need to have something I can point to and go "I made this")
Though cleaning house (especially getting all the accumulated mail and junk off my piano top) might go some distance to helping with that.
Update: got the living room picked up, and the sheets in. Tried to re-do the shelf but the shelf I bought off Amazon was TERRIBLE - flimsy and crummy and wouldn't hold books. (It was sold as a "pantry shelf." Good luck keeping canned goods on it). FORTUNATELY I had another one of the "good" kind of shelves holding some excess yarn/scrap yarn and I just transferred the yarn onto the flimsy shelf (I might eventually just get a box for the yarn, and chuck out the flimsy shelf, counting the $25 or so I paid as "learning money" - the lesson being, don't buy stuff like shelves if you can't see it and pick it up first to assess its quality)
Piano practice is almost done.
I'm trying to talk myself out of pity-ordering a Roma's pizza for dinner....I'd be better off cooking a healthy dinner with vegetables....
Updated, 10 pm:
I did break down and get a pizza. I was in the middle of housecleaning around 6:15 and just couldn't deal with the idea of stopping and cooking. But at least I did get the living room mostly cleaned up, and the kitchen and dining room cleaned, and a lot of stuff sorted and tossed that I had to. And I swapped the yarn and the books on the shelf but am still considering just getting another plastic tub for the yarn and either tossing the cheapo shelves or else maybe using them in the garage for very lightweight things (seed packs and empty plastic/peat plant pots). I don't think they'll hold up well where they are, with me always brushing against them as I put clothes in and take clothes out of the closet. But at least I got some basic cleaning done, and did complete my piano lessons.
No comments:
Post a Comment