Tuesday, August 4, 2015

20150805.0656

Work continues.

I was not able to get to work on the freelance piece in any serious way yesterday, as grading took longer than expected. In this last week of the summer bridge program, several assignments fall in sequence, constraining me a bit more than I would prefer. I believe I am clear today, however, and so I should be able to make some headway on the side-job. I can only do so at the cost of taking from other projects I likely ought to do, however, and there is still a stack of job announcements on my desk that needs my attention. There is also still a stack of journals on my desk that needs reading, which shames me to say even more than the jobs note. I am not doing as good a job of being a scholar as I should be, particularly if I hope to transition into a more stable scholarly career than I currently have.

So much for being happy at having work to do.

As the summer bridge program winds down, I am beginning to gear up for the fall term at my "regular" teaching job. I'll be teaching four sections of first-semester composition, and though I have taught the class before at my current institution, there is a new program director overseeing it. From what I have seen so far, more paperwork appears as if it will be involved, and I do not know how I feel about that. I suppose it reflects a prevailing tendency towards more oversight and regulation concomitant with the still-growing assessment culture. Perhaps, though, it is part of a research program, one being used to study composition instructors in the hopes of promulgating best practices in the profession rather than in the interests of the administration, in which case I would feel better about things. I believe in being collegial, after all.

I will likely never find out.

As I read over what I wrote at this time last year, the thought occurs to me that I have not benefited in all ways from my freelance work. Because I sell it, or sell my rights to it (I am not entirely certain of the legal distinctions involved), my freelance work goes out under names other than mine if under names at all. I cannot claim specific instances of it, therefore, and that makes more difficult my provision of writing samples for some of the job applications I submit. (Those asking for scholarly work go easily enough, although I need to do far more in that line than I have of late.) I wonder if I could link to how some of my materials are used as a way to point out some of what I have done in the hopes of making me a more attractive candidate for employment...Advice on that score would be welcome.

So would many other things.

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