The Load

I’m feeling the teaching load. I’m 4/4 (for the non-academic readers: four courses in the fall and four in the spring), but with a small student population per class, so one would think that my time-suck here might be comparable to a 3/3 at other institutions. Well, yes, maybe, but not so much: in addition to the familiar committee and service stuff, there’s also the added bureaucracy that comes with this unique institution. Mandatory Web-based anti-terrorism training and suchlike. Being a sponsor or a resource for individual cadets and for clubs and teams. So I’m finding that my time fills up very, very fast, and I’m struggling to find places and times where I can actually do the scholarship that I want to do.

And the scholarship itself isn’t the reward. It isn’t the payoff. My classroom time is the payoff. I love the scholarship, sure, and I think I’ve got some good ideas, and I’m pretty sure I know more about one very skinny and narrowly-focused aspect of my field than anybody else in the field. But the scholarship is what lets me do the teaching. The teaching is the payoff.

I got my job here, at this highly unique and competitive institution, largely because of my scholarship. I enjoy my job here, as I’m sure my recent posts have indicated, largely because of the teaching. I’d made assumptions, myself, about the types of student I’d encounter, and the language many academics might use to describe them (e.g., “thug,” “fascist,” et cetera), but I’ve been pleasantly surprised: in some ways, they’re rather more open-minded than their more “liberal” peers at UMass or Pitt.

Case in point: I’ve recently asked them to write an essay about bias in higher education, and the widespread perception of a problematic liberal bias among college professors, their own included. (Most of their instructors are career Army officers with advanced degrees, but there are some civilians like me, as well.) To start the essay, I thought it would be a good idea to see how they might compare their own ideological perspectives to one another, so I sent them to the politicalcompass.org site. (Yes, it’s got all sorts of well-documented problems, but as a socially comparative instrument, it served my needs quite well: for the purposes of this writing assignment about bias, one’s politics mean nothing except in relation to other peoples’ politics.) Check out the range of (wholly anonymous) responses:

And we’re generating some good discussion about those responses in class, which is exciting to me. Some cadets, as one might imagine, have expressed dismay that their answers have ideologically aligned them with Ghandi; others, delight. But beyond that, there’s the social aspect to the teaching, and that’s the deeper and darker concern for me. I’m meeting these students as freshmen, as plebes, and I’m feeling swamped by four sections of their opinions, ideas, impressions, and worries — swamped, even, by their diversity of opinion. But the thing that remains unsaid, always, for me, and the thing that they wholly accept, is nothing like the job market worries that the conventional undergraduate bears.

The thing unsaid is that they all know they’re going to Iraq or Afghanistan as soon as they graduate. And to me, that thought is an immense load, but they bear it with that complete equanimity. In part, it’s why they’re here.