Mama PhD

Thanks to everyone who inquired, in the comments and in email, about the outcome of last week's audition, or wrote to express support. It meant a lot. It was fine. I apparently didn't get the job, since I haven't heard back, and that is fine, too.

As Labor Economics was one of my fields in graduate school, I always look at any hiring process with special interest. I therefore was intrigued at the new job opening I learned of Monday, with the news that our current Pope is resigning.

A colleague of mine from another college came back from a work/life balance seminar where the speaker focused on four different quadrants in which to divide work. Urgent, Important; Urgent, Unimportant; Not Urgent, Not Important; Not Urgent; Important. The speaker argued that too many people focus only on the first two areas, rightfully ignore the third, but also skip out on the fourth which may be the most important area to focus on. In actuality, my colleague was mocking the talk as yet another waste of his time. For me, though, I was hungry for any new (to me, at least) outlook. As the Chair of a large academic department at a small liberal arts college, an Associate Professor, and the mother of three young children (8, 6, and 4) juggling and prioritizing are a daily part of my life.

Another morning all home together. As I begin this blog, it’s a holiday here in BC, the very first celebration of the newly created Family Day. With this holiday, plus two professional development days for teachers, the short month of February is a very short month indeed for school children. For many families the extra days off mean scrambles for childcare and fewer hours for those who depend on the time their children are in school to get work done.

This semester I find myself engaged in a television serial for the first time in a long time, and I think it’s no accident that it’s the same semester that I’m teaching Victorian literature again for the first time in a long time. The pleasures of the serial are well established, and the Victorian novel originated many of them: the multi-strand narrative with many characters, intertwining narratives of class mobility and courtship, love, death, and striving.

When I was in my twenties and early thirties, I studied acting and singing here in New York. I got work in small productions and the occasional film, but I never made enough money to quit my day jobs. This may have been partly due to a lack of talent, but I'll never know, because the fact is that I didn't try very hard. I hated auditioning; hated the feeling of selling myself; and I jumped on every possible excuse to avoid them.

When I teach Algebra, I often get a chuckle out of my students when I tell them to just “plug and chug” with an equation. What I mean is for them to substitute values of a variable into an equation and then to find the value the equation now represents. I have found myself thinking of this recently as I recall an equation that I once applied “plug and chug” to when I took a class in Quantum Physics in college.

On a recent Tuesday it was over 60 degrees before sunrise in Chicago (setting an historic record), while it is dropping to 7 degrees by Friday. I’m not going to list the reasons why we should care about global warming nor the indisputable facts that back it up. (Bill McKibben’s recent article in Rolling Stone magazine does a better job than I ever could.)