"Oslec is an annoying person, but a good TA" and Other Things People Say to Me

The past few days, I've come across some good leads on a couple things that might keep me off the street next Fall. The first is a visiting assistant professorship at Roger Williams University here in RI in comparative-historical sociology; and the second is a teaching-oriented, two-year postdoc at Grinnell College in Iowa. There's also a longshot (and I mean looooongshot): a tenure-track comp-hist position at Duke, but without pubs and not much to show on my diss, this one looks like it's very much out of my reach.

So, I've been researching a bit about those prospects, working on some cover letters and trying to piece together a teaching portfolio. I looked over my evals from my past few classes, and as usual, some people loved me, some people thought "[I was] an annoying person, but a good TA" and others just didn't like me. I was feeling pretty down yesterday, but our former department chair happened to be around when I was kvetching and calmed me down a bit. He said, "the only things that matter are faculty evaluations anyway," which was kinda helpful, but I did think about a billion ways to improve myself. I e-mailed my friend Brian at U of Florida and he talked me off the ledge, and really, a couple bad reviews do not the scholar break.

Still, I started plunking away at a sample syllabus for a summer course I proposed (probably not gonna get it), and I wanted to take a look at a course I took at Conn many moons ago that Prof. Gay had taught. So I e-mailed him, went to bed, and this morning he wrote back:

What the [expletive deleted] are you doing up at 1am? Get some sleep!

Well, he wrote more, but that was the best part.

Today, I tried to find something to keep me off the streets this Summer, and looked into adjuncting at RISD. I e-mailed a contact my friend Jen had in their History, Philosophy and Social Sciences department, but they're all full for this Summer. They said they'd keep my e-mail "on file", though, so that's sort of all right. Still, without really knowing if I'm going to get that Summer course I proposed, I need to either make money or plan to be in the Philippines or Pacifica this Summer.

After all that, I feel all right. I feel like I'm moving along, despite not having anything truly tangible, and a bit tougher after being rejected a few times -- and in a few different ways. Bob, after telling me I need to go to bed, said that it's par for the course to be a visiting prof for a couple years now before you "really" go on the market, which in a way means that I'd be disadvantaged going on the market now, since I'd be competing with a bunch of people who've incubated as visiting profs somewhere. Of course, it's also par for the course for no one to tell me that it's not always a straight path from PhD to tenure-track position. Ahhhh confidence.


* I eat bad idioms for breakfast, and write them for dinner.