Mama PhD

I enjoyed Afshan Jafar’s piece a couple of weeks back about parallels between parenting and professing in the early years, and I imagine I’m not the only mid-career academic/parent of a teenager who was tempted to write the next chapter.

Ideally, those who have suffered unfairly develop a strong sense of compassion and justice. I like to think that happened in my case — but not right away. I arrived at my college determined never to be an underdog again, no matter what it took, and with the underlying conviction that most people would hurt you if they could. I planned to be as tough as necessary. I quickly developed a reputation as a sharp wit.

As is the case with most teachers, I have a stash of tricks that I teach my students to help...

Universities are developing more strategies for students and faculty to engage with each other and communities outside of traditional educational settings. Right now I am traveling with students from my university “down the bayou” in Dulac, Louisiana, introducing them to the environmental story of disappearing wetlands and an estuary in crisis. The trip is part of an alternative spring break option — a competitive program at my university where students choose between either national or international trips that take them to communities with critical issues such as poverty, housing or the environment.

Today is the first day of my spring break. The day began at 5:45 am with a call from the local school system to tell us that there would be a 2-hour delay in school opening due to “predicted inclement weather.” I put the phone down, told my husband what was up, and tried to overcome the adrenaline that an early-morning phone call always elicits and get back to sleep—then realized that the call had come from my son’s former school system, not the one he’s in now. I was pretty fully awake by then, so I got up to check on his school—and saw the snow falling in large, lazy flakes, blanketing the cars but not, as far as I could see, the roads.

As noted here previously, my French is what is known as "serviceable" — I can read the newspaper, order theater tickets and carry on a superficial social conversation, but generally speaking, when I address French people who understand English, they will immediately switch, and if they don't, they start speaking slowly and carefully. Even at my peak, I have never been quite fluent, with two notable exceptions.

As I rolled into work on Monday, I was greeted by a friend from the Chemistry department rushing out of the building. She frantically told me that there had been a shooting at her daughter’s school. She said that five students had been shot, that she was off to see if her daughter was ok, and to please pass the word on to her department chair. She was off before I could give her a hug, but the scene haunted me all day as more bits of information became available and the story grew more horrible.

All my life, I've been an extreme introvert. A thoughtful, quiet child, I was continually told by strangers to “Smile!” At the beginning of graduate school I scored 98% introversion on the Meyers-Briggs test. A vocational test in high school suggested that I was temperamentally suited to be a sculptor.