I’m in my non-teaching semester now, though it hasn’t been a lot of downtime so far. I seem to have a mountain of projects that were just waiting for the seemingly vast stretches of time that would come with my semester off.
Except that the vast stretches of time didn’t seem to materialize. I actually think I get more done when I’m teaching and the pressures keep my schedule ticking along on track. In this non-teaching-semester world, meetings seem to expand to fill time and nothing seems to get finished. Or maybe I just have so much on my plate from the buffet that even when I finish the chicken balls, the fried rice mountain topples over to fill the space.
I had a few quick projects to wrap-up right at the end of the semester — a book review and a revision of a piece for a collection — and I found the transition back to writing from teaching astonishingly difficult. I wasn’t really surprised by this, if I’m honest. I knew when I finished the PhD that the world of teaching motivated me and energized me much more than the world of scholarship. Don’t get me wrong. It’s an important part of my life as an academic (and I think it’s important to being a vital and in-touch teacher!), but I guess I hoped it would feel less like pushing a boulder up hill than the dissertation did.
In my non-teaching-but-still-academical life, I’m working on a few major projects. Most importantly, I’m revising my dissertation into a book — happily, the query has been accepted and the manuscript should be ready for peer review just after the first week of July. I’m also working on an anthology project, the proposal for which scampers off to its own peer reviewers this week.
I’m sort of staggered by the scope of both projects, and I get a little nauseous if I think about them too much. The peer review process feels so desperately exposing to me right now, baby scholar that I am. I keep thinking that the impostor syndrome will die — when I got accepted to the PhD / passed my comprehensives / finished the PhD / got a job — but it never seems to!
Ah well. We all just keep plugging along.