Here We Go

Oh, hey, Milo is sick and Jake is sick, in the never-ending run-on sickness that has lasted longer than this sentence, but on the bright side my parents were here saving our lives so that we could cope and I could get some stuff done. On the not-so-bright side, now they're gone and we have to start coping on our own like grown ups. Boo.

Nora has developed some sort of epic pout behavior. I didn't even know a mouth could stretch in that way. Meanwhile poor Milo says, pathetically, "I don't feel well" and "I have a headache" and "I have a sore throat" but then, in a teeny little sad voice, "But I'm getting better."

Mentor has given me a list of tasks to begin the process of putting my tenure case together. This list has a lot of things on it, but we're starting off with the easy things, the busywork type things like gathering together syllabi, relevant teaching examples and exercises, lists of current and former graduate students, lists of committees I've served on, etc. There is a big list of stuff to compile while we also begin the intellectually substantive work of crafting the case itself, a lengthy supported explanation of what my research is and why it rocks (oh and why my teaching and service rock too). There is a page limit for the total tenure case, but I've heard that people don't always adhere to it. That page limit is 150 pages.

Meanwhile I have a list of things to do this semester besides writing the tenure case:

• Finish co-authored book #1 (we're sending the first draft off for review on Jan 1, hooray!)
• Finish co-authored book #2
• Complete and send off manuscript for a major paper I've been writing for, oh, ever
• Write and submit manuscript for small invited paper for a teacher magazine (Due Jan 7)
• Complete the syllabus and planning for brand new graduate course I'm co-teaching
• Teach said course, grade stuff, read stuff for the course, etc.
• Complete final draft and submit NSF co-authored grant (due in Jan)
• Prepare and give a talk at Michigan state (late Jan)
• Prepare and give a talk at conference in New Orleans (mid April)
• Prepare and give a talk in the math dept (early April)
• Prepare and give a talk at Virginia Tech (late April)
• Finish IRB and school district IRB applications (sooner rather than later)
• Collect data in a 3-week teaching experiment with 8th-grade students (was hoping for Feb, but probably March due to IRB delays)
• Continue advising my 10 grad students (8 who are in the process of writing)
  

This is a lot for one semester, so it's going to be another busy semester. But last semester was busy too and I was able to accomplish a lot, like co-authoring one book, half-finishing another book, revising an article, revising a book chapter, traveling to conferences, planning a new course, teaching my grad course, working on my new article, and submitting a co-authored article.

It's the busiest and definitely most stressful year of my career so far. Waking up at 3 a.m. with an anxiety attack is basically normal right now. But I am heartened by the fact that if I can actually get through this semester, a fair amount of my tenure case will be done, and this summer and next semester the to-do list will be much smaller. As the emotional stress of dealing with the tenure case will ramp up in that final semester this fall, at least the practical stress of having too many things on my plate will diminish somewhat, which will be good.

I feel like we're in the last stretch now, the final 6 miles of the marathon.

Also, Jake and I have decided that after this whole tenure thing is behind us, we're going to take a real, honest-to-goodness vacation. One in which I do not bring my laptop.