20140819.0650

This is my first day off in the new term; I am scheduled to teach Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays only. It is the kind of thing that contributes to ideas of those who teach as lazy and shiftless; primary and secondary school teachers "only work nine months out of the year," and those teaching at the college level "only work half the week"--and then "only a few hours each day." Setting aside the entirely typical and representative experience of those who work at multiple colleges in an attempt to scrape together enough money to get to eat and which makes the "only" inaccurate in more instances than not, the "only" is a dangerous thing. It bespeaks a lack of understanding of what it is that those who teach do--and it refuses to understand that the scholar's job is not only to teach, but also to uncover new knowledge to be able to teach.

I can offer myself as an example, since I have managed to embody both the "summers off" and "half-days for half the week" this year. (While in The City, I got neither, as I often taught five days a week and all year long.) While I may not have had classes to teach during the summer, I conducted a number of private tutorials, including some with a man completing a doctorate in mechanical and aerospace engineering, so I was still working. I also wrote well over a hundred pages for freelance clients, so I was still working (and repudiating Shaw's adage about those who teach yet again). I further continued my academic work, curating Travels in Genre and Medievalism (to which I mean to return in short order) and drafting a chapter for a scholarly book as well as papers for presentation and perhaps publication, so I was still working. And that was while taking care of Ms. 8 while her mother, my most wonderful wife, worked. But I was lazy since I did not work at my "regular" job.

I am still lazy, of course, because I am not scheduled to work today. It matters not that I will knock out more freelance work, or that I might draft another essay for the Tales after Tolkien Society, or that I will review course textbooks and outside materials so that I can return to the classroom on Wednesday ready to offer the students a path to understanding that they would never have known to seek before. It matters not that I may well put together other outside writing so that others have things to read and bases from which to generate their own greater understandings, or that I am likely to work more on papers that will go out into the world and increase the sum total of available human knowledge. It matters not that I will stay home so that Ms. 8 can stay safe and well fed as her mother works. Oh, no, I am not in the classroom today, and so none of what I do matters, because it is not seen.

And it does not matter that my example is not exactly unusual. It does not matter that I am but one of many who act in such a way, week after week and year after year. It does not matter that those of us who teach spend much of our time outside the classroom working to teach better, and that those of us who work for colleges spend much of our time away from the classroom working to help humanity know more. We are not where we can be seen, so we must not be doing any work that actually matters...