Jenn: I’ve Fallen… and I can’t get up…
After going gangbusters on this textbook and meeting and exceeding many of my self-imposed schedule deadlines, I’m in limbo. Kind of. The conference call with my editors ended up going really well. They are incredibly happy with the book. Their main stylistic comment was that it sounds a little too conversational for a textbook, and that the students may like this, but it’s the faculty who will ultimately adopt or not adopt the book, so they want me to clean that up. It makes sense, since my process was to have a student sit in and type as I lectured in class, so I ended up with twenty pages or so of transcribed “conversation.”
They also want me to do all those things I dread. Boldface words and create a glossary. Key terms. End of chapter material. I dislike this stuff intensely, but that’s what people put into textbooks, and that’s what I have to do. I find it restrictive and stifling to have this material at the end of the chapter. I teach what I teach, and it’s misleading to kids to be memorizing a whole bunch of terms and main points that I may or may not cover. This stuff is not low skill enough so that I can farm it out to a student, so it’s on me. My editors also made some formatting changes and the plan now is to send me three chapters at a time, I’ll make the required changes, then they send the book out to 100 reviewers, 3 chapters at a time. Eek.
The thing is, it’s summer. Ask anyone when faculty should be taking a long break, and they’ll of course mention this season. Not us! At my school, we have two intense summer semesters, 100 minutes a day, four days a week, and I made the moronic mistake of teaching THREE classes. That’s nearly six hours straight of lecturing non-stop, EVERY day. The money is incredible, but the effort is deadly. My daughter is now in daycare five days a week, which kills me, but ironically she is thriving and seems very very happy. She no longer cries when I drop her off, she gets dressed happily and without complaint in the AM and when it’s time to go, there is no longer a fight, she gladly walks right over. It’s a shame that others can raise my kid better than I can. Read more
Studio Mothers: Life & Art 