You hear it all the time in this business. "You are so lucky," people say. "You have your summers off." Or, perhaps they say, "You are so lucky. You only teach two (or three, or four) classes a term." As we never tire of explaining to people, the time in front of students is just the part of the iceberg above the surface of the water. Summers are filled with research and course design; I have never taken a vacation anywhere that did not have a large research library. (I am waiting for some Caribbean university to open a modernist studies institute. And waiting. And waiting.) Once you factor in preparation, grading, and consultation, you can spend three or four hours working outside the classroom for every hour in it.
But our one genuine luxury is reading week.
While the teen and twentysomething sets have mythologized "spring break," the middle-aged professor longs only for a week to reorganize after the flurry of semester's start. Some of my colleagues will have assigned something due before we broke so that they have time to grade; some of my colleagues will have something due when they return so that their students have a little extra time to attend to it. Students generally prefer the former approach.
Last year, I was able to get out of town for the weekend, but this year I was grateful only to have some more time to devote to the more than one hundred grant applications that must be reviewed before tomorrow. I was also able to catch up on some appeal letters and references that I had not gotten around to writing. I did not make much progress with the book review that is now months late, but it can be ambitious to assume that you will get to actual reading during reading week.
As long as tuitions make up a major part of our budgets, the sound of empty corridors is the death knell for a place of learning. But, for one blessed week in the winter or spring, silence is the sound of catching up.
How do we live without a break in the autumn?
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