Yes, these will be going on forever! (Okay, not really.)
I have become a lot less formal on the blog recently. I’m not sure how that fits with my academic persona (as mentioned in the last post), but it fits who I am.
Conference buddies
Being totally on my own at a conference is NOT great. I need to find out if Mikee is going to K’zoo. (Just FB’ed her.)
I think she mentioned going and taking grad students with her. …Hmm. I’m jealous. I don’t have any grad students. Oh well. I can’t have everything.
Scholarship
I was asked twice what I had done that the person might have read. I felt very… under-academic? bad?
I said I hadn’t done anything they would have read, which was true.
But I have done stuff. So what do I call that?
One of my friends said to say that I primarily work in “the scholarship of teaching.”
When I got that note, I was like, What? I do not. I mean, I don’t do a lot of research… And then I realized that, yes, I do. What I do IS scholarship of teaching. So, wow. I do something scholarly. They still wouldn’t have read it, but at least I have an area of expertise now.
Comfortable
I feel more comfortable with the community college teachers. (Probably, a little, because of the section above.)
CC teachers do what I do, they put the focus on their teaching.
Then I wondered if I am more comfortable with CC teachers because I feel better than them? Am I MORE worthy because I publish, or whatever? No. It isn’t like that. I am doing less than my co-presenter. So it’s not that I feel better.
I think it really is that we feel the same way about teaching. Teaching is our focus.
I wish, though, that the CCs in my area had what my other co-presenter has… Her load is 3/4. Ours is 5/5. And, as you know, as an adjunct, I’ve been doing 6/6.
Anyway, I wonder, once again, if this means I should track myself entirely in CCs.
But I don’t think I should. I think that my work also is valid at SLACs. Certainly it is not at an R-1, but I don’t want to teach at an R-1, so that’s okay. (My mother, of course, thinks I should. But she doesn’t get the difference.)
So, CCs and SLACs are my preference. … I would like to do rhetoric and composition at the higher levels, so I guess my preference is still SLACs.
But for MLA, the choices are “big schools” and CCs. Of those two, I’m definitely a CC kind of gal.