This year, I went on my own terms. Not that the previous years weren’t (in some ways) on my own terms, but this year felt so different. This year I went to Chicago because I was giving a presentation with one of the affiliate societies. I arrived Friday night, so I missed #THATCamp and some great-looking panels on Thursday and Friday (I also missed a Friday luncheon for K12 teachers and think it’s insane that anyone would hold that on a Friday). Aside from my Sunday morning presentation, though, the only panel I went to was the TeachingHistory.org workshop on Saturday. And it was…okay.

I’ve been thrilled this year to see all the discussion in the AHA regarding the future of the job market and the need to think beyond tenure track. But so far, those conversations suggest extending to public history or other areas of academia/higher ed or perhaps even into the private sector. No one seems to talk about (or think about) the possibilities in secondary ed.

Let’s be honest: I don’t mean to suggest that there are BILLIONS of jobs in secondary ed for historians that are just laying around, and for that matter, let’s be honest in considering public history. Isn’t that similar in many ways to the library sciences, where jobs can also appear few and far between? Public history is a great idea, but it’s not the end all, be all. Rather, we need to think more broadly, and that includes thinking about opportunities to educate students below the collegiate level.

It’s entirely disappointing that the AHA has so few resources seemingly focused on secondary ed. I think there’s a lot of opportunity here to tap into. Of course, there are challenges, too: the AHA’s meeting time in the second weekend of January means that most secondary ed teachers are back in school, so aside from locals you may not get many secondary ed folks there. And many schools simply haven’t got the resources to send someone to the AHA.

But there’s potential. And there’s so much more beyond having a very basic workshop in which participants:

1. Get walked through a website
2. Hear someone argue about incorporating labor history into curriculum
3. Learn about some tech resources
4. Learn about SOME of the steps one school has used to break down the research paper process
5. Learn about some more tech resources
6. Hear a highly esteemed historian worry about whether technology can still help personal engagement with students.

None of this was bad. In fact, I suspect many people learned a lot. But I confess that none of this was what I was looking for or had hoped for. I’d hoped for an opportunity to network with other high school teachers, talk about how they approach teaching, learn from them, and maybe get involved. I complained that so many of the panelists were not in secondary ed (only to be reminded that there was one panel of secondary ed teachers), but you know, maybe leading with that one panel might have made things better.

Maybe all of this means I was simply at the wrong conference, and maybe I was. But I have a certain affinity for the AHA, maybe because I have such fond memories of the few annual meetings I’ve attended (last year’s job market stress and 2008 illness aside). I’ve maintained my AHA membership since graduating, and not solely because I was presenting in January. I greatly appreciate that there are ANY efforts to connect to K12 teachers, even if it’s as small as having a special membership category for us, or trying to get a couple of relevant panels at the Annual Meeting.

It’s just that it’s time to do more.

Not this year, however. In my journey to adapt to life-post-grad-school, making change is a constant part of life. Hardly a day goes by that doesn’t involve me considering how I could change my approach to this class or that to better help my students, or assessing how I could improve my work-life balance and remember how to have fun (and not work all the time). I like the constant tweaking thing in its own way, really: it’s my own brand of problem-solving in my life these days.

This year, I have a list of 10 resolutions. They range from the humdrum “floss daily” sort of thing to “read 100 books this year,” which is never really a challenge for me – only now I do it for fun rather than for grad school purposes. I’ve posted the resolutions in my kitchen and on a virtual sticky note on my laptop screen and I wrote them down somewhere, too. The big one is all about writing, or the goal of getting back to 500 words a day. For today, that’s meant blogging, but for tomorrow it should mean something else. I’d like to say I’ll post here more regularly, but in some ways the writing goal is for other things I’ve promised myself for awhile.

The past two weeks of break from school have been great and weird and crappy and too long (depending on my mood and perspective). On Tuesday morning, everyone returns to school – and I’m ready. I got my time off, I saw a lot of movies, I read a lot of books, and I improved the overall cleanliness condition of my home. But in the past few days, I’ve also gotten really excited about plans for the remainder of this academic trimester, which will include teaching such things as:

• The Middle East Since 1945
• Latin America/Sub-Saharan Africa Since 1945
• Hemingway’s short stories
• Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
• the end of Reconstruction and the advent of Jim Crow/segregation
• the Gilded Age

This week, I’ll return to school with a bunch of new ideas, some fascinating topics to get to explore with my students, and some fun swag for my classroom (a Tardis, for one, and a Doctor Who calendar for another). And I’m caught up on things, at least for the time being, which gives the illusion that it might be at least temporarily possible to get ahead of the curve ball, if only a little.

I won’t wax poetic about the end of 2011. It was a good year, after all, since any year that sees me finishing a PhD and getting a job has to have its perks, right? Even more, what’s not to look forward to for 2012?

(And if you’ll be at the AHA Conference in Chicago next weekend, feel free to say something below. I’m flying in Friday and leaving on Sunday.)

First, here’s what grad school looked like in terms of out-of-class work:

Oh wait. Grad school was ALL out-of-class work. Whether it was my own preparation for classes, writing a dissertation, or teaching, most of my work occurred outside of formal class hours. When you think of it that way, there may not actually be much difference between the out-of-class workload for teaching private secondary school or for teaching college. In other words: classes are fleeting, but prep and grading is where it really is. Seriously, though, I taught either one discussion section for ONE course or at most 3 discussion sections for the same course. This meant I only had to plan one lesson a week and adapt it for the students as needed. They were all covering the same thing at the same time. On top of that, I had either my own papers and reading to do for classes I was taking OR I had that dissertation thing to research and write.

Now, take away the research and writing. Consider this:

I teach four classes and have 3 preps. If you want to put it in academic-y terms, it’s similar to a 3-3 load, except for the fact that it may be more accurately a 3.5 and 3.5 load (I’ll explain that in a moment). On any given day, I teach 3 or 4 classes. If I teach 4 classes, two are sections of the same subject – but they’re not always on the same schedule. The other day, both of my sophomore sections were covering China: Part I of the Cold War Asia years, but they had a drop day after that when we didn’t meet due to the school day structure, so now they’re one class behind my other sophomore section. In other words, although I may technically ONLY have 3 different courses to prep, sometimes I’m teaching two separate things on the same day for the 2 sections of the one course. Also, one of those sections could be a 40-minute class and the other could be a 60-minute class, depending on where we are in the weekly cycle.

In short: my sophomore class sections require a little more in terms of logistics, as I have to figure out who’s doing what when, and where I need to be for each day. It all evens out in the wash, but there’s a little more forethought that has to go into it. (This Monday, for example, one class will finish up China and the other will start India. On Tuesday, the first class will start India, so I’ll use my original India materials – slightly adapted – for that class. But this weekend I need to make sure I prep for both China AND India – although I DID already prep and teach that China class once, so it’s pretty much good to go.)

…which gets us to the real heart of the question: how much work DO I have outside of class?

And that has a complex and perhaps not helpful answer of: it varies. When the school year began, I was working ALL THE TIME. I’d come to school, work on prep things for the hour before the school day started, teach, use free periods to plan (if I was lucky), go home, work for another hour or two, watch TV, and go to bed. I spent all weekend working (or at least it felt like it). By October, I’d gotten a little more used to it and the routine has started to improve.

In an ideal week, I’ll get all of next week’s classes prepped during the school day. This means I use my 2-3 free periods to plan lessons ahead of time so that I don’t have to do it on the weekend. If it’s a light grading week, that means that my weekend will be relatively open. If it’s a heavier grading week, I might spend a couple of hours working on Friday night or devote an entire weekend day to work. These days, I tend to be able to get at least half the weekend to myself.

Things are a little crazier right now, though. My goal is to NOT work over our two-week winter break. I need a break, the students need a break, and I have an AHA presentation to prep (and movies to see!). However, I also have a lot of assignments due across the board right now.

A week ago yesterday, my junior English students turned in 3-page essays on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Ordinarily, I would have started grading on Friday and finished it up Saturday (no matter how long it might take). Except I was visiting family Saturday and doing other planning things on Sunday, so I spent time this week grading and it took me longer than usual around other things I had to get done. I finally finished the 16 papers I had  before I went to bed last night – which is actually about a 5-business-day turnaround and not bad at all.

This week, I was not able to do any of next week’s prep because of those papers. Well, I did get the next AP US History outline going and the structure in place for our next unit, but I haven’t actually planned the 3 classes on Reconstruction that I’ll be teaching.

Today, my sophomores are all supposed to turn in 2-paragraph responses for a stage of a project they’re doing. I plan to grade those this weekend. Today I also have 10 AP students taking essay exams, which I also plan to grade this weekend.

On Monday, my sophomores will turn in 3-page papers (all 27 of them). On Wednesday, my junior English students will turn in photo essays on The Great Gatsby. On Friday, my junior English students will do a vocab quiz and submit their vocab paragraphs. And come hell or high water, that will ALL be graded by end of day Friday so that I can have my winter break free.

Really, this month is more intense than usual. If we didn’t have break coming up, I’d spread out things a little more, but I really have no choice. We couldn’t do the sophomore essays until we got to a certain point of the unit, for example, and I couldn’t assign the Gatsby assessment until we were near the end of the book. (Also, I ditched a timed-in-class writing assessment in English because I realized that would overload me far too much).

Is there more out-of-school work now than I might have elsewhere? Probably not. I think it’s all just timed differently and perhaps comes more frequently than at the college level (or maybe just AS frequently). On the flip side, I don’t have any research or writing requirements, so I think that means my workload may be on par at many times with those who teach a 3-3 or a 4-4 at a college somewhere. Oh, and did I mention I only have 54 students? That might help, too.

Of course, none of this takes into account the idea that in a private school, you’re also part of the community – so attending athletic events, theatre performances, etc., is definitely on the must list. I’m getting there when it comes to those. They may mean more presence AT work, but really, those are the fun parts.

Hopefully this all makes sense (if you’ve even read this far). If you have any questions about anything, feel free to ask.

I’m not sure if I’ve said it on here before or not, but I never went to high school. There are people at my school now who find that fascinating, and my extended family greatly enjoy a few giggles at the idea that it’s taken me so long to actually go to high school. That’s all another topic entirely – and I’m happy to discuss if anyone’s interested – but yes, as you might imagine, getting used to a secondary school routine has been a change. Particularly from grad school (although I have to say that I kept more-or-less “business hours” in grad school, with an average 10:30-11 pm bedtime and up around 7-7:30 most of the time).

Our school runs on a six-day rotating cycle schedule, which means that my days feel very different in a lot of ways. I find this fun and energizing, but it also can be a bit chaotic at times. We also operate on a trimester schedule (as opposed to quarters or semesters). In a six-day cycle, we have 7 blocks (A through G). A block meets every day as the first period. B through G rotate daily, and one of those classes drops every day. So, in a six-day cycle, I’ll see my students 5 times for my history classes (but since my English class meets in an A block, I see them EVERY day).

Confused yet? Don’t worry. It took me ages to figure it out.

Here’s the upshot:
Every morning, my alarm goes off at 5:15. Most days I jump out of bed to switch off the alarm and hit the shower. Some days I’ll nix the shower for another 20 minutes of sleep. Once I pull on my clothes, it’s breakfast-and-check-email-and-facebook-etc routine, followed by hair/makeup, prepping my things, and taking the dog out to the backyard. My goal is to be on the road to school by 6:30, because traffic’s better then. On the best days – like today – I can be on campus before 7 a.m.

Technically, we have to be on campus by 7:30. A fair number of students start arriving around that time, though, so I like to be there as close to 7 as possible to allow myself some breathing time: time to set up my chairs (I have rolling, padded desks that are the kooshiest in the building), go over lesson plans, respond to emails, etc. Sometimes I’ll meet with students or parents. On our Wednesdays (a day when classes don’t start until 9), we might have faculty meetings from 7:30 to 8:30.

By 8 am, most of my English students will have arrived. Or maybe not. That A period can be rough on juniors, so it’s always interesting to see how many people will make it on time. We’ve just started The Great Gatsby, which we’ll work through between now and the start of winter break on Dec. 16.

Then, the day varies wildly from there. Tomorrow (Friday) is Day 1, the day when the blocks go in alphabetical order, A through F (G drops). Tomorrow, my schedule will look like this:

8-8:45: Teach Chapter 2 of Gatsby
8:55-9:35 (B period) Sit in on my colleague’s Shakespeare class, a senior elective that I’m essentially auditing for fun
9:40-10:15 (Activities Period) I’ll have one of my two clubs in my room discussing/debating current issues – I love this period and this group!
10:20-11:20 (C period) I’ll proctor study hall, which means I can do some prep for next week
11:25-1:10 (D period) This is our lunch period today, and I teach sophomore history in D period (20th century world history). History classes have 1-hour classes during lunch, followed by lunch itself. So, from 11:25 to 12:25, this section of sophomores will learn about the Korean War as part of our Asia Since 1945 unit.
1:15-1:55 (E period) My free period today, so I’ll work on prep for next week (I need to finalize the AP US History Civil War lesson plans)
1:55-2:10 Technically, this is the afternoon break. Realistically, this means my F period students will start arriving and will just hang out until class starts. Probably with food from the bookstore. I feel bad for the cleaning crew in our building…
2:10-3:10 (F period) This is my other section of sophomore history. They’re one class ahead of the other section, so we’ll be doing the Vietnam War. We’ll watch most of the “Roots of War” episode of Vietnam: A Television War and discuss it and the issues of decolonization, the war’s relationship to the Cold War, etc.

From 3:10 to about 4, I’ll wrap up some things, answer emails, and figure out what I need to get done over the weekend to prep for next week. And then I’m off! Saturday this weekend will be filled with some family things, but Sunday I’ll start grading the English papers that are coming in this evening.

And that, perhaps, is something to discuss another time: the rhythm of assignments in secondary education. Because aside from the busy schedule and the constant being-on-the-go element of this high school, the grading and assignment load is absolutely another important element. But more on that soon. I’ve got 30 minutes ’til bedtime, and I have grand plans to read one of the For-Fun books that I purloined from our awesome library.

1. (And foremost) I adore it.
2. It keeps you really, really busy.

In the 2 months since I last had time to post, I’ve graded tons of papers and small assignments, led my English students through The Scarlet Letter, escorted my sophomores through the research paper process (AND India and China in the interwar years AND World War II AND Europe since 1945), taken my AP students from early US history to the Mexican-American War, experienced parent-teacher conferences, supported Open House, attended two school plays, and enjoyed my first extended holiday break (Wed-Sun Thanksgiving).

It’s been an amazing and crazy time, and I wouldn’t change any of it for the world. Teaching secondary school is something that keeps me insanely busy, but I love it because it’s something that engages me on multiple levels. It works for the insane organizer and scheduler in me, the creative parts of myself, the teacher in me (of course), and the reader in me. I’m always on the go with this job, which can spell insanity sometimes, but really just means I’m generally happily engaged in something or another.

(Also, I rediscovered my love of reading and take FULL ADVANTAGE of the fact that I now have an entire school library at my disposal.)

This past week, I’ve spent more than a few moments reflecting briefly on the change between this year and last year. This time last year, I was a BALL OF STRESS, waiting to talk to my advisor about the first full dissertation draft and hoping-praying-wanting AHA interviews so badly. I never got those AHA interviews – although I had a grand old time at AHA in Boston, what with hanging out with good friends and all that.

Now, what a difference a year makes. I’m still heading to AHA in January, but I have ZERO interest in being on the job market. And if you’re wondering about that? No, I’m not on the academic job market this year, nor do I intend to ever be again. I’ve found where I want to be and hope to be here many, many years. (Not that that will stop me at all from pursuing some fun things like speaking engagements or article writing – when I have some time – or even getting around to publishing my dissertation some day.)

This year, I’ll be at AHA as a presenter (Sunday morning, a session on the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell). I’ll also be checking out the TeachingHistory.org workshop on Saturday morning about using digital sources – something my department at Independent School is already really into, so it’s a good fit. Beyond that, I see the Chicago AHA as a great chance to reconnect with old friends while I make some new professional connections.

But one of these days, I’d like to weigh in on that whole “Plan B” discussion that the AHA started. Clearly, I have no problems with looking beyond the professoriate for job possibilities, and it’s something that worked out well for me. If anyone’s interested in putting together a panel proposal with me for AHA 2013 regarding the Plan B issues, etc., let me know.

For now, though, I’m off to enjoy my last half-day before school resumes. Not that I’m not looking forward to this week, mind you. Here’s what I’m looking forward to when we get back to the classroom tomorrow:

1. Wrapping up Kate Chopin’s The Awakening with my junior English class
2. Introducing the same class to Fitzgerald and modernism and The Great Gatsby
3. Telling my AP students all about Bleeding Kansas and John Brown and all that – all in the context of football rivalries, since I’m a Mizzou grad, of course
4. Helping my sophomores learn some good note-taking skills as we begin our unit on Asia since 1945.
5. Giving a presentation in assembly tomorrow about the SUPER-AWESOME summer course we’re trying to offer. The one in which I will get to live my dream of being a pirate. Kind of. Only I don’t think they called them “pirates” but more likely “sailors”. (More on that soon.)

We’ve had four weeks of school now, and I’ve been loving it all. That’s the first thing I want to say in this long-overdue reflection about the new job. My students are incredible – they’re engaged, they’re curious, they’re hardworking, and they are genuinely appreciative of teachers’ efforts. My colleagues are wonderful, and I feel like I’ve found a great environment for me.

I’m thrilled to be where I am, but I won’t lie and say it’s been the easiest transition. I think that transitioning out of graduate school into a new job – whatever it might be – is a difficult venture. For me, switching gears after six years of something entirely different has definitely been an adjustment. It’s a welcome adjustment, but it’s a change nonetheless.

In grad school, I spent my first year learning to adjust to the reading and writing load and the pace. In my second year, it was about balancing two courses as a student with one course as a teaching assistant (plus preparing for exams and figuring out my dissertation topic). In year three, it was a lot like the year before – but with even more pressure on exams and dissertation prep. In years 4, 5, and 6, it was a combo of switching to the dissertation mode, continuing to teach, and then alternating responsibilities that involved applying for grants, conducting research, and job searching. None of that is easy, but it also has – in many ways – a more singular focus than I think most people would find in their first job after completing a PhD (whether you’re talking a career like I’ve chosen or a more typical tenure-track approach, or even a transition to a corporate-style position, whatever that may be).

The past month has been about learning to juggle preps for 3 different courses, figuring out students’ names (and strengths and weaknesses and personalities), planning on a weekly basis and revising those plans daily, trying to look ahead to the “big picture” for the trimester to keep things on track, adapting to a new community and participating in that community, keeping up with the reading, keeping up with the grading, and wading through many, many more emails than I’ve been used to in awhile. And that just scratches the surface, as I haven’t even mentioned the element of interacting with co-workers and parents and administrators to meet various other obligations.

It’s a lot. And I imagine my cohort member from grad school who just started a tenure-track job this fall is probably finding himself in similar shoes, but who knows.

So that’s my big take-away: that graduate school was the easy part, and if you think it’s going to get easier or simpler after you have the PhD in hand, you’re very wrong. It gets more complex. This isn’t a bad thing – it just is. I find this new complexity very rewarding: I feel like I’m “firing on all cylinders,” by which I mean that the diversity of things I’m doing seem to satisfy me on various levels professionally. This is a very, very good thing.

At least, I feel like it’s a good thing when the idea of grading 20 papers didn’t even phase me this weekend. Earlier in the week, I’d been hoping to have everything done before the weekend, but then I realized that some assignment deadlines and some upcoming personal commitments made the idea of having a work-free weekend impossible. And I was pleased to discover that I really didn’t mind: I spent a good eight hours this weekend reading papers and prepping for sophomore history classes this week, and Ioved (almost) every minute of it. This weekend, I graded their first major written assessment, and part of the reason it was so rewarding was that I was able to see how well they acquired information in this unit on World War I. It was also a fun challenge to think about their writing strengths and weaknesses and to identify strategies to help them improve as we move forward.

In other words, I felt like I wasn’t just assessing their work, but also identifying ways to help them improve as writers. And that was an awesome feeling.

In case you’re curious, my current courseload includes 2 sections of sophomore history (20th century world history), 1 section of AP US History, and 1 section of junior English (American Literature). In sophomore history, we’re about to move to the interwar years, which means lots of great stuff to talk about starting with the Russian Revolution. In AP, we’re working on the American Revolution and reading Gordon Wood and Edmund Morgan. And in lit, we just wrapped up Walt Whitman and will spend this week with Emily Dickinson before we switch to The Scarlet Letter (where I’m thinking we’ll spend some time thinking about how stories get rewritten for popular consumption, perhaps comparing various film adaptations of that story).

This? This is the life.

I discovered The Help in the summer of 2009 when I downloaded the audiobook to keep me company on a drive to Ohio. I’d seen the Entertainment Weekly review for the book and thought vaguely that it might be worth trying (I’m terribly picky about my reading). All I can say is that I fell in love with it. If you’ve never heard the audiobook, it’s pretty amazing because it’s performed by 3 voice actresses (including Octavia Spencer, who also performed the same role in the film). While I remember falling in love with all three of the main characters for different reasons, I connected most with Skeeter. It might be easy to think that I connected with her because heck, we’re both white – but I rather connected with her because I saw similarities in our path to empowering ourselves. In particular, she came to some of the same realizations about gender injustice that I had been having in recent years. I thrilled over the idea that this was a portrait of a young woman defying convention for her time and pursuing a career. I loved that she noticed that ‘Help Wanted’ ads in the paper were separated by sex – one of the facts that really caught me when I was first becoming a feminist.

So yes, I loved the part of the story about the young white woman coming of age in Mississippi and coming to terms with the world around her, realizing for the first time that it’s not quite to her liking. But I also loved Abilene and Minnie and their insights into African American women’s lives in the period. I’m a women’s historian who focuses on 20th century history, and I’m well aware of the history of black women domestic workers in the south. Did The Help (book or movie) present all the nuances of the lives of black domestics? Certainly not. In The Help we get close(r) tellings of two African American women’s stories, and snitches of other women’s experiences. To flip it the other way, we get a close telling of one (upper-class/upper-middle-class) white woman’s story and snitches of other white women’s experiences. If you want to say that the domestic workers in The Help are stereotypes, you need to also acknowledge that the same stereotyping is at play for all the characters in the story, regardless of race or sex.

I particularly disagree with the ABWH’s assertion that “ The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.” While I respect and understand the general critique that The Help glosses over many things that perhaps it should not, I think that writing off the film as much as the ABWH has done overlooks the good and the dialogue that this film and book have opened up. For many people, this book and film have been an eye opener to a type of injustice they never knew firsthand and never even hear about.

I also seem to have a different take than most on the relationship between the women in the book and the story being told. While one of the criticisms I’ve seen is that The Help presents a story of a white woman helping black women realize their capabilities, I rather think it’s the other way around. Yes, this is a story about two black women and a white woman – but this isn’t about Skeeter “saving” the black women. It’s about Skeeter coming to terms with her childhood and the history of white-black relations she grew up with as a southerner, not to mention figuring out what her place will be in the world. It’s about Abilene mourning her son and moving forward – Skeeter is NOT the catalyst for change in her life, but rather the death of her son is. While Skeeter may pose the idea of the book, it’s Abilene’s other experiences that make her decide she wants to talk about her life. And for Minnie, well, she’s Minnie. At heart, the core friendship in this book is Abilene and Minnie.

When Americans think about civil rights, they think specifically of people like Rosa Parks and Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. If Americans think about it long enough, they might be able to make the connection that Rosa Parks’s action was a very simple activity: maintaining a seat on a bus. Nonviolence and civil rights activism – that’s a clear connection to most. But following Medgar Evers’ death, Abilene tells Minnie that what they’re doing isn’t civil rights – it’s just telling their stories “like they really happened.”

This is part of what I find so wonderful about The Help: it is a story that focuses on one of the myriad forms of women’s activism and protest – the kind that doesn’t involve signs or marching and may not be immediately visible. Certainly, as you look closer, it’s quite apparent that Abilene and Minnie and the other African American women ARE doing civil rights: it’s profoundly political to tell their personal experiences with prejudice and racism and harassment and abuse. It’s profoundly political even if they happen to be the lucky ones who do not experience such problems.

The first time I saw The Help, I wound up chatting with an older white woman sitting next to me. As we walked out of the theatre, she gave me the old line, “I’m not a feminist, but….” I don’t remember what she said next, but I do remember thinking it was ironic because I had JUST been thinking that this might be the most feminist movie of the year. When was the last time you got to spend 2 hours watching a movie that revolves around women and leaves the men in the background? When was the last time a movie like this came along to celebrate and highlight women’s efforts to challenge the status quo? (What a contrast to The Conspirator, for example – a film I had huge problems with because it moved women to the background.)

Kathryn Stockett wrote a story based loosely on her own experiences. She’s not a historian, and at a book signing event I attended in May she indicated that research is not really her favorite part of the process (and perhaps not her strong point). Certainly, then, I think it’s good to see historians making recommendations for books to read. I also think there’s a place for critiquing the work, but I’m disappointed in the lack of positive commentary or even more constructive criticism. Instead, I worry that overly negative criticism has been phrased in such a way as to turn off the very audience for whom it was intended.

In the end, of course, writing about it here has become overly long and not really what I’d originally envisioned, but there it is.

Several years ago, another grad student in my department left the program with a master’s and took a position teaching at a local independent secondary school. I took comprehensive exams that spring myself, and it was also a particularly rough spring – I miscarried nearly 20 weeks into my first pregnancy, which is a topic for another time altogether. I was disappointed that this grad student was leaving, but very intrigued in her new position. I told myself that I’d have to remember the independent school teaching option for down the road.* So when the same person alerted me to an opening at her school for the 2011-2012 school year, I was DEFINITELY interested in applying.

While I kept my other application efforts going, I poured everything I had into this job possibility – for several reasons. First and foremost, I was very, very attracted to the idea that I could get a job teaching in my two favorite subjects (history and English). Secondly, I really liked the idea of independent schools as communities – and the possibility that I could be part of such a community environment, contributing not just as a teacher, but as an advisor, coach, etc. Finally, I admit that practicalities played into it a little bit – and by that I mean geography.

The Spouse has lived his entire life in the St. Louis region – with the exception of his time at college (which was still in the state of Missouri). If you don’t know any native St. Louisans, all you need to know is that they tend to be very connected to this area. You’ll meet exceptions, but most St. Louisans I know are utterly attached at the hip to this place (and frankly, they have good reason to be). The Spouse and I spent years discussing my pending job market experience, and I it wasn’t always harmonious discussions. There were places he simply didn’t want to move, and he was seriously worried about transitioning his career. He knew his company had offices in nearly every state, but he had very real concerns about getting a transfer – and I don’t blame him.

People write about and talk about the dual-career academic couple, but I’ve not frequently encountered pieces that focus on the dual-career couple like my family. At the end of the day, if you’re in a long-term committed relationship, there may be choices you have to make when it comes to your career.

What this all meant for me is that I wasn’t really interested in one-year positions or 1- to 2-year postdocs. They weren’t practical for us as a couple. I could’ve commuted, and we thought about it and talked about it – but as those types of positions increasingly became the only ones emerging in the spring job ads, I couldn’t bring myself to apply to many of them. I came to the realization that if I wasn’t willing to adjunct full-time just to stay in academia, I wasn’t really willing to leave my home for a year or two just to go on the academic job market again and/or hope that the short-term position became permanent.

So yes, I loved the idea that I found an attractive job that was already close to home.** But I really loved that I could teach my two academic loves. I gave that job application everything I had. Upper School Humanities Teacher became the job I wanted more than anything else. I networked, I went to an independent school job fair (in part so I could try to connect with the people managing the job search, and in part so I could explore other local possibilities, too), and when I got the interview, I put my heart and soul into preparing.

I accepted the position two days before I defended my dissertation, and I spent the next month encountering questions from colleagues and professors about whether I would go on the academic job market again. Many people wondered if this would simply be a short-term thing, something to tide me over.

The short answer is no. The longer answer is that I have no interest in going back into an already-saturated market just to go through the same stresses again. Maybe I’d do better this year, but why bother? Why should I invest the time and the money (because folks, sending out materials is not cheap, fyi) – particularly when I have the job I want?

Choosing a career outside of academia has not been necessarily the most popular choice – meaning that I didn’t exactly get a lot of kudos from people in my department. Three of us who went on the academic job market last year (from my department) got jobs: one is about to start a postdoc, one is a new assistant professor, and I’m teaching high school. I won’t lie: it took some time to get over the feelings I came away with from the department as a whole. The further out I’ve gotten from the university, the more confident I’ve felt in my decision. It’s not easy when people are second-guessing your choices or asking why you won’t at least keep your eyes open on the market this next year.

But I’m really, really happy with the way things turned out. Every new job – whether in academia or not – is a bit of a gamble and a hell of a transition. I spent the past few years in a place where I had an established (good) reputation, and I’m making the move to a place where I get to start over and have to learn how to fit myself in. I’m excited about this, and I’m confident that in two weeks, two months, two years, or even two decades from now, I’ll still look back and say that this was the right path to take.***

*Ironically, this isn’t the first time I’ve done something like that: my first job in the St. Louis area came about from similar circumstances, when one of my friends told me about her job and how it entailed lots of writing and research – things that were right up my alley.

**Note: this was certainly not the first job in this region – I’d applied to two community colleges and another private college, all hiring for someone in my field on a full-time basis. I heard nothing from any of them.

***All of this has been to say, I suppose, that I think it’s a good thing to be flexible about your career plans. There’s more out there for you than you might initially think.

The logistics and mechanics are one thing, but the feeling of being On the Market is completely separate. Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m an incredibly organized individual, so the fact that I could create and follow a strategy for approaching the job search and finishing my dissertation was not surprising to anyone who knows me, I’m sure. And I don’t care if you don’t think you’re an organized person – you can totally approach these two monumental tasks the same way.

But I can’t give you advice on how to approach the emotional aspects of being on the job market.

For me, being on the academic job market was one part enthusiasm, one part possibility, and two parts anxiety and – well, not worthlessness, but the feeling that it was impossible to get it right by some point.

I loved the process of creating my application packet, of trying to express why I would be perfect for a job I’d begun dreaming about. Advisors will tell you not to apply for jobs you don’t want, and this is spot-on. For me, I would’ve been happy to move practically anywhere, and with every opening I found I’d experience this combination of elation over “ooh, they would want me to teach THAT subject?” and “oooh, look at that campus!” and “wow, how fun would it be to live in THAT part of the country???”*

And all that gives way to silence. Sure, there might be a confirmation that “we have received your application,” but mostly you spend your time waiting for some sort of news – and the closer you get to the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in January, the more nail-biting things get. And of course, you stay on top of The Academic Job Search Wiki because it’s better than nothing. It can be demoralizing and you have to take EVERYTHING on there with a mammoth grain of salt, but it can also be helpful when a school simultaneously rejects all applicants with an auto-message 12 hours after the application deadline. (Without the wiki, I wouldn’t have known immediately that it must’ve been an error.)

One of my advisors likens the academic job market to the lottery. You can do EVERYTHING right, he says, and still get nowhere on the academic job market. This past year, I lost that lottery. And in the middle of it, it was devastating. As people I knew slowly got AHA interviews and I became the only job seeker in the department withOUT an AHA interview come January, well, it sucked. I’m sure there were plenty of people whispering about it behind my back.

And you know, it utterly and completely sucks to put yourself out there and get nothing. One of the rumors going through at the AHA was that a lot of schools hiring in American history were simply throwing out the applications of anyone who didn’t have a PhD in hand (not entirely true, as two of my colleagues got interviews at the AHA). I suspect, though, that this WAS a common occurrence this past year, and I also suspect that my interdisciplinary position – an American history dissertation topic, but one focused on women’s history and straddling military history – might also have been a difficulty.

Look, if you’re going on the job market for the first time or approaching it in another year, I don’t say all of this to freak you out and demoralize you. I was gung-ho, I was as positive as anyone could be. I still think I did everything within my power to position myself to the best of my ability.

At the end of the day, I know and my advisors know that it wasn’t me, per se. Of course, it’s awfully hard to really wrap your head around it when you’ve been rejected (explicitly or implicitly) by 50+ schools. (You’ll hear back from some schools. Others won’t ever acknowledge your existence.)**

Going all-out on the academic job market was an experience I wanted to try, but I never, ever planned to spend multiple years straining for an academic position. I told The Spouse and my advisor and other professors flat out that I had no intention of adjuncting full-time just so I could be in academia – it wasn’t something I ever had an interest in doing, nor do I think I have it in me.

For me, pursuing “academia at any cost” has never, ever been worth it. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how I came about my new job and my move away from academia.

*I have things to say about being a married person on the academic job market, but that is for the next post. For the time being, I’ll just say that The Spouse and I mostly worked through which jobs/locations he’d be okay with. If I had gotten offers, theoretically they were all at places where he would’ve been willing to go.

**I suspect that if you have a killer year and get interviews by the dozens, then the job market experience looks a lot different.

I also grew up with parents who fully endorsed the idea that I could be anything I wanted, and I ran through ideas constantly. Archaeologist! Teacher! Martial Arts Instructor! International Business Professional! Neurosurgeon! Plastic surgeon! (I was really in to the medical profession as a high schooler, for a number of reasons.) I changed majors in college about half a dozen times, becoming officially “undecided” by the end of my freshman year when I decided to leave school for awhile.

When I returned a year and a half later, I knew I wanted a PhD. I knew I wanted to major in English. In the end, I added a second major in history, got in (but no funding) to the MA in English, and ultimately found success in a PhD program in history. I wanted the PhD – but it took time for me to discover where my real interests lay. I wanted the PhD – but I can’t say I was specifically focused on “I want to be a tenured professor in XX.” (Not that I didn’t think about being a professor, of course.)

I was working for a relocation/career transition assistance company when I got my acceptance to Washington University in St. Louis’s PhD in history program. Basically, I spent my time consulting individuals who were job searching because of relocation or outplacement. I knew a lot about resume writing strategies, job search strategies, the importance of networking, and things like that. In short: I felt like I came into the PhD program with my eyes wide open about the realities of the academic job market, how to best position myself to be a strong candidate in the end, and how to proactively prepare for the job market over my time in grad school.*

During my six years in grad school, I did everything possible to position myself as an excellent candidate for the academic job market. At the same time, I never saw academia as the end-all, be-all. Rather, I saw the academic job market as the most intensive and potentially  most time-consuming arenas of my future job search. More importantly, it was simply ONE FACET of my ultimate post-grad-school job search plans.

Think about it this way: in academia, departments post jobs as far as a year in advance of when the position starts. In summer 2010, for example, Texas A&M University posted an ad for a position designed to begin in August 2011. This means you spend basically an academic year on the job market (assuming you get a job at the end of that year).

In contrast: government jobs can sometimes have long lead times as well – I know people who waited more than 6 months to hear back on government job applications – but that’s still shorter, in general, than the academic timeframe. In private industry, things can move much, much more quickly.**

All of this is to tell you that when I started the job search process a year ago, I came at it with a multi-tiered strategy (which I outlined to my advisors in writing).

Tier 1: Keep abreast of and apply to academic jobs (prep began in spring/summer 2010 and process ran through March 2011)

Tier 2: Identify and apply to government jobs (began keeping an eye out in October/November 2010, but submitted no real applications until early 2011)

Tier 3: Seek out teaching opportunities in private schools and possibly public schools (in Missouri, a PhD makes it possible to get teacher certification to teach public school). (I knew none of these jobs would be posted until the spring.)

Tier 4: Look for opportunities in the private sector (kept my eyes open beginning in January/February, since lead time is so much shorter).

I want to end by noting that I didn’t rank these in order of preference, but simply by logistics of when I should be looking for jobs in each of these arenas. And mostly, I tell you all of this so that you understand that when I went on the academic job market last year, I sure as hell had a Plan B (and C, and D…).

I also had a dissertation that was guaranteed to be defended by the end of the school year (since my advisor had seen every chapter and got a full draft in her hands – intro through conclusion – by October 1). I had a prestigious fellowship from the American Association of University Women, I had a strong record of leadership in my institution (and service in general). I was also, on the other hand, a historian of US and women’s history (who dabbles in military history).

In short: I was a strong candidate in many, many ways – but so were the other five million Americanists on the market last year. In my next post I’ll say more about the academic job market itself, then round out this series later this week with thoughts on why I decided not to keep trying for an academic job.

*Those academics out there might be thinking that private industry is different than academia, so how could I have known what I was doing? Trust me, there’s a ton of overlap. I learned very quickly how to take my skills from the corporate world to academia, partially by paying attention to those how-to-succeed-in-grad-school books.

**Sure, there are employers anywhere who will drag their feet with applications over a two- or three-month period, but they’re not looking for people who can’t start for six months.