For much of my time in my position, it's been no real contest - I would say
the advising I do in my job is my favorite of all my responsibilities. I can
pretty much advise all day if I need to, whereas it's been a long time since
I've had to do English teaching and related responsibilities all day, and those
memories aren't very happy ones.
But I was also twenty-six and younger then. A
decade later, I've been involved in English tutoring, curriculum, and assessment
from the perspective of someone really embedded in a full-time
department, and that's a somewhat different experience. If all my semesters on
Portfolio Assessment have taught me anything, it's that I certainly
could teach competently if I decided to, and would be very much less
isolated in it than I was as a young adjunct. Over the past almost-eight years,
I've learned a lot - and have also felt, I think justifiably, that I have a
better grasp of what effective composition teaching looks like than a number of
our current part-timers. Some semesters it was hard not to feel like maybe I'd
better get involved with teaching again, simply because the teaching of
developmental and introductory composition will happen at my college,
every semester, no matter what quality it is, but that quality has real
implications for the future academic paths (and professional lives?) of
students.
There'd also be the undeniable pull of really belonging, with full-timer status instead of just warm affiliation, to the English department, colleagues to my very favorite people on campus. They have spent a lot of time being
oh-so-generous to me and really treating me as one of their own. Not without
precedent, to be sure: historically my position has often been a feeder for the
full-time faculty, which I didn't really know when I interviewed for and
accepted it, so it was in their interest to welcome and prepare me. But it's
really been more than pro forma. And one of the nice things about working
in a department where you're the youngest (or at least were until recently -
probably the newest hire is younger than I) is when people try to remember what
it was like to be twenty-seven and just starting. I remember being checked in on
early on when my academic division re-orged (the one that was just a re-org, not
the later dissolution of that division), some of the conversations that happened
when I was on a search committee, the time the department chair told me (I'd
only been at the college a couple of years) that he was glad I'd been hired.
Dozens of tiny encouragements from people kind enough to care.
But the truth remains, and I know it, that I probably wouldn't join an English faculty for
anyone else but them, anywhere else but where I work. And even then, I'd blanch
at a five-course teaching load; my dream is to get offered the Writing Center
Coordinator position (which is not a completely crazy dream, as the current
holder of the position is tired of it, but there's been no successor
forthcoming), which carries only a two-course load (which becomes essentially a
one-course load if you're able to take a corequisite course).
As far as being a full-time advisor - I could certainly do it, and for all I know I might well like it a lot. But I've been surprised by how much less excited I've been about
it than I would have been even a couple of years ago. Advising, as it turns out,
might be more fun when your caseload is smaller, but these days to be a
professional advisor is to have a minimum of 250 students (though how many of
them show up is another question). Also, not to be that person, but my
interaction with NACADA leaves me feeling like advising is just a more openly
politically-progressive field right now than I am ever going to have that much
patience with.
And I also would miss the academic side of things. Curriculum
Committee wouldn't be the same if I weren't interacting with tutees and their
assignments, because that's my best window into how things look on the ground.
In academic discussions with faculty, I'd lose the credibility that tutoring
students and teaching College Success Seminar has given me. No convention in my
own field has ever been as interesting as Four C's was back in grad school
(though some of that is probably about the quality of presentations you can get
on a national scale versus a regional one). And I do care deeply about
composition curriculum, but what, I'm going to keep reading portfolios as an
advisor? (Assuming the project even survives into this new academic year, but
that's another story.)
But again, I think of how, even teaching CSS, I often
didn't love the actual act of teaching (although sometimes I liked it - it
depended on the lesson). I still, even for a one-credit course, dreaded grading.
A wonderful department is truly wonderful...but they wouldn't be there with me
in class. They wouldn't be grading my papers.
I wonder how much I'd want to teach if it weren't for the simple fact that I have more natural sympathy with my college's faculty - often the kind of delightfully geeky people I most adore
- than with its advisors, who though nice also seem noticeably less geeky, and
the women of whom are often (it must be said) very much more stereotypically feminine
than I am. And if some of EFC's plethora of southern military moms (not all of whom
are stereotypable, I know) have unknowingly taught me one thing, it's that I do not really
know how to act around women who aren't of an implicitly or explicitly academic
turn of mind. I haven't really had to very much. (Practically all my
closest female friends, before, during, and after college, have been. And my mom
is more so than she probably thinks she is.)
Anyway, what I ought to also be
doing, besides thinking, is praying. After all, my current position has been
such a glovelike fit - and it's so unusual for its type, and only by a slightly
odd coincidence did it come open in the way it did in first place and stay open
long enough for me to apply - that I can hardly do anything other than chalk it
up to the power of the prayers of church ladies, per the Biblical book of James.
(Don't scoff, non-Christian readers, assuming I still have any. Any Christian
without a healthy respect for the praying church ladies is, as Chesterton would
say, a very shallow critic.)
And I'm mulling over an interesting exchange I
stumbled back across in Gaudy Night -
[Harriet] "...I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel."
[Miss de Vine] "I don't think that matters, provided one doesn't try to
persuade oneself into appropriate feelings."
...
"But one has to make some
sort of choice," said Harriet. "And between one desire and another, how is one
to know which things are of overmastering importance?"
"We can only know
that," said Miss de Vine, "when they have overmastered us."