What I Exactly Actually Do

 It is official. This job HAS grown on me. I work closely with faculty and look on in pity I desperately try to hide, as they battle with the simple syllabus, grading deadlines, uncooperative technology, and miniscule freedom in their classrooms, while at their backs, the State DOE's scythe busily slashes away at developmental and preparatory courses. I do not regret choosing this road.

I sit in my office, spider-like, weaving schedules, material, emails for my writing center, pulling a thread here to cancel an absent tutor's hour, adding a stand there to extend a shift. My staff often peer into the glass walls of my office, and I can see bewilderment  on their visage: WHAT exactly do I actually DO in there? I can see the same bemusement on my family and friends' faces about the same question. Upon asking what I do at the college now that I am no professor and receiving my answer, they awkwardly try to exhibit recognition, nodding "Ahh" and exclaiming, "Really? How Wonderful!"

I often mentor others who have been appointed to a parallel positions across campuses. These people are usually previous faculty, adjuncts, retired editors and the like. They are mystified at the job they are expected to do and ask me the same question. They try to understand this by demanding that I describe a typical work day. I try my best. I do. Promise!

I find it so difficult, almost impossible to describe exactly what I actually do. You see, one cannot be trained for this job. There is no degree that prepares you for it. The job description hints at its real nature with a general list of expected duties. This job did not exist when I was being educated. There is no real way to correlate this job to anything similar. The only way to know it is through side glances as something slides away just beyond one's range of vision. 

In a way, this job is full of contradictions: I can quite easily do it outside my office, yet my presence here becomes imperative. I can help students understand chapters, concepts, and ideas, yet I may not teach. I cannot actually hire anyone, yet no one can be hired without me. The center is not part of mandatory curriculum, yet the curriculum may not be conquered without it. My work demands solitude,  yet I am encouraged to collaborate. I am to help improve a paper, yet I may not make a single mark on it. When a student requests answers to problems, I am to assist them, yet I may provide no answers, and that includes grammar and sentence structure errors. In fact, one of the major skills I train my staff in is answering all questions with questions. 

My center has, I am so proud to say, got quite good at its job, attested by our increasing attendance, especially by desperate students. I genuinely wish I could take all the credit for this achievement, but truthfully, I may not take any. It is the nature of the job that hones people to do it well. Essentially, this job requires all that one has that makes one a civilized, reasonably educated, more or less socially adjusted human participant of the milieu that a writing center is part of, should that community be fortunate enough to boast one.

in my most arrogant hour, I could describe my job as a job of the future. It is an unwieldy job, but I have always loved contradictions. Nothing else defines balance to me, the Middle Way that Buddha recommends.  It is a way one often has to carve out for oneself, a frontier with sure yet nebulous boundaries. The only way to know the terrain is to walk it. 

What can I say, my patient Reader? I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it. Should you have use of me, look for my inky cloak huddled behind glass walls in a corner of the library at the edge of this city. I will look up when you knock on my door.

Of Fardles and Bon Mots

It has been a few months since I began my new job. One could say that I am settled in, though I do  remain, at heart a lit major, in spite of not having stepped into a classroom for almost a year now. I had not realized this until this past few days when a couple of events brought it to my notice. I do not yet know how I feel about it.

The first event was utter, sheer exhaustion, though one can not always call that an event. It was rather a breaking point that came on a Thursday afternoon on one of the busiest weeks my writing lab has ever seen. There were days when it would be a couple of hours before I could reach my office and check my email: I would be enveloped in student needs from the moment I'd step into my writing center. Students had the hunted, much-wept look of the lost and the displaced as they haunted the center, trying to access  their email, begging me to do some magic that would give them access to My English Lab or D2L. They hung on to their school responsibilities as though to an anchor; if their grip loosened, some sort of apocalypse would follow and they carried this desperate urgency as their most treasured cargo. If I did help them access whatever they needed, or explained a concept to them, they looked at me with gratitude of cosmic proportions, which defeated me. This is natural in a world that is left behind by a storm that closed down my State for over a week. However, we were all exhausted by the Thursday of that week. The talk was of the end of the world, how nothing was ever going to be the same. So I distributed Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" and we discussed the short story for about an hour. I had distributed the story not just to my staff but also the couple of students who remained in the writing center. Later, as I walked back to my office and the writing center began to get busy with the evening traffic, I realized that this kind of discussion was exactly what was missing from my present life. This stolen hour had adjusted my perspective and I have vowed that this would not be the last time that a story or poem is discussed in my lab. My staff, too, confessed to thinking of the story repeatedly over the next few days. Perhaps we were all lit majors at heart?

In fact, I would go far enough to say that what my colleagues and managers refer to as my managerial techniques owe their origin to my experience as faculty. Controlling discussions that do not get lost in the woods, demanding work, being intolerant of excuses yet understanding of lack of training, identifying what needs fixing, keeping records, creating schedules and planning meetings: all of these I learned as I stood alone behind the desk for decades, forever separated yet deeply connected to the people who faced me and tried to convince about twenty strangers to shift perspective and learn to analyse.

One could say that essentially, I am still doing the same job.

My friend asked me if I miss teaching and before I could even think about the question and consider it, my mouth said, "No!" The definite nature of that answer took my friend aback, I think; I, too was surprised by it. Upon reflection, in fact, I'd say that the best parts of my old job are still very much with me, while the worst, like grading, have disappeared. Yes, there are evaluations and hiring decisions, but they are nothing compared to endless oodles of ungraded assignments that had crowded my life in infinite sets of twenty each.

A couple of days ago, my Facebook newsfeed offered up a Keats ode read by Benedict Cumberbatch. I wept at the sheer beauty of the poem. I often indulge in YouTube Midsummer Night's Dream and cry at Macbeth (a play that continues to shock me). Teaching was never where I'd thought I'd end up when I decided that I was a confirmed lit major and could be nothing else. I had not really thought much about where I'd end up with a lit degree, of course. I had some nebulous idea of being a priestess in a sanctuary of words or just drinking in Prufrock under a spreading tree as the sun set behind some mountain. I had no clear idea about the actual work or ritual the routine of such a person would comprise of.

So no, I do not miss the classroom. I do miss the literature, but when I reach out for it, I find that it has not wandered away. It is right where I'd left it, beside curriculum to be assigned, files to be graded, departmental and all-school meetings to be attended, and LMS to be organized.

Ultimately, the aim of my having Read Literature seems served: it was to decorate the walls of my ivory tower so that the fardles that flesh must bear may be tolerated, conquered, and lived through.

Endings and Beginnings

I cannot think of a better day to begin writing on my blog than today; today is Akha Teej, the auspicious day of beginnings, one of the four holy days of the Hindu calendar.  So let me begin by wishing my readers good beginnings in all they start today!

It has been four months since I began my “new” job. Followers of this space might remember that I was heart-broken at losing my previous job of 17 years. Actually, I was so heart-broken, that I stopped looking for full-time faculty positions altogether. The one I’d lost was the perfect faculty job, I had done it well, and I was fortunate enough to lose it before it soured or got old. I had my perfect job, and I had enjoyed it for over a decade and half. I remain grateful, and yes, Reader, a part of my heart still yearns for it. I fear it always will.

Now, I coordinate the Writing Center at one of the campuses of my county’s college. It is a job that demands completely separate skill sets than the ones I had been using all my adult life. Much to my surprise and delight, I am loving it! I never expected to be happy as a manager of sorts, but I learn something new every day, and another piece of a large puzzle falls in place, giving me a whole new perspective on the landscape of an educational institution, a landscape I’d thought I knew well, too well. I have also taught at this college briefly and now that I see this side of process, I will never be the same again.

Yes, clocking in 40 hours a week feels just as strange as not having to work at home, both to me and my feline roommates. But it is growing on us. I knew that in an alternate life, I’d be running a Writing Center; now I really am doing it! Of course, my vision for a Writing Center was very different from this very real one. But as days go by, this vision becomes more focused, more possible. One day, the gods willing, I will have the Writing Center of my imagination. Of course, a lot of credit for my loving my new job goes to the people I work with, my supervisors, colleagues, and staff, who are all warm and helpful. Besides that, however, the work itself is new and challenging.

I did not mean to only sing accolades to my two jobs, though this entry seems to primarily do that. I hope that my Reader takes heart from my story; if something that seems apocalyptic happens and everything ends, there is still the grain of the coming morrow contained within; one only has to believe in the inexorability of the heartbeat and breath. They keep rhythm with the march towards future seasons.

According to Hindu myth, today, one of the seven immortals, Ved Vyas began The Mahabharata. I want to keep the messages it embodies in my mind today. I want to be courageous enough one day to be able to trust in the impermanent, malleable nature of all realities, and still recognize the grain of a beginning in all endings. I have written from the perspective of Satyavati, Ved Vyas’ mother, and I will keep her ability to adapt and her insistence on sculpting the ways in which she adapts.

And no matter how frightening it is, I will be brave enough to put one foot in front of the other and trust the Earth to hold it steady.