all other things being equal

I have taught for my first week now as a tenure-track professor, and if I am to fulfill my reason for starting this blog, I should write about all the transitions this week entailed.

Between that last period and this sentence there was a very long pause because in a strangely comforting way, life has gone on much as it might have were I still teaching in North Carolina. Granted, I am not sharing an office with 3 other people, and I am teaching 50 students instead of 120, but these new privileges have not yet accumulated enough traction to change the rhythm of daily life.

The effect of change rears its ugly head more often during the experience of living in a new place (opening 4 cabinets doors because I still can’t remember where I put the peanut butter, the same peanut butter that it took me 10 minutes to find in the grocery store), than during the experience of working in a new place.

I am homesick when I drive down Valley Mills instead of Wendover, buy my peaches from the farmers tent on Bosque instead of from Rudd Farm, sit in the courtyard of Harrington instead of the driveway of Roundup, eat at Sams on the Square instead of Lindley Filling Station, run around the Bear Track instead of down the Greenway, see the weather report for 108 with no rain (ditto for the next 7 days) instead of 80’s and scattered showers.

Whereas, I feel a sense of home when I am teaching, or running my finger along the call numbers on a library bookshelf, or listening to the chatter of students walking to and from classes along the stairwell. These things have a comforting air of familiarity about them.

This is not to say that there are not frustrating moments of figuring out a new work place. It took me a week and half to finally ask where the file folders were kept so I could walk to my classes without dropping scattered sheets of class notes along the way. I am about to find out if I can work the semi-ancient technology system in the classrooms this Monday, and I have my doubts.

Beyond these logistical transitions, the biggest change that looms over me, still largely undefined, is the role I will play in my new department. Because that’s the biggest difference I can sense so far, that as a full time faculty member I should have a place, a role, some niche that I fill in the department. As a student, that role is defined for you by virtue of being a student and as a limited term lecturer nobody cares (to be quite frank).

I have the feeling I am in a sort of grace period, being left alone to get over the logistical transitions of living and working in a new place. I suspect the transition to follow, which might be described as a more metaphysical one, will soon follow. Then I will have to settle down to the task of thinking and acting like a tenure-track professor without having someone first wave a wand over me and (abracadabra) turning me into one.

Until then, I will be content with pretending that misplaced peanut butter and hot temperatures are the real challenge, because of course "all things being equal" can only be a hypothetical.