"It's Just Stuff"

I started my new job yesterday, heading on a trajectory I hadn't anticipated. In order to mentally be in my new place, I needed to clean out the old place. I have been a teacher for more than twenty years and at the campus I just left for ten. Although it was my third office on the campus, moving offices has involved having the maintenance folks move fully loaded filing cabinets and my carrying one box at a time, unloading and reloading until the work was done.

This time was different. I probably will teach again, but I don't know when. So packing up my office felt like packing up my career. I needed to arrange things so they are accessible again. I learned that I am a hoarder of office supplies. I filled countless recycling tubs with extra handouts, articles, assignments, and meeting notes while shredding at least three huge bags of student records. Still, I knew that some things would travel with me so I could put the things I love in my office--my jar of rocks from my parent's cabin in the UP, my fishbowl full of chocolate, my stuffed hot dog guy signed by a former student who used to be one of the racing sausages for the Brewers. 


Meanwhile, one of my colleagues has retired. She is going through many of the same tasks I am of sorting, pitching, shredding, recycling, remembering, and keeping. But it is different, I think, at the end of a career. I shared this story with her, and she suggested that I share it here as well.

Cleaning out an office can be such an overwhelming task--physically, mentally, and emotionally. It is draining.

When I was a student worker in college, I helped a French professor who was being forced to retire to clean her office after a 50-year career. She sat and cried the entire time, while I gently boxed up what I could and asked her to tell me about her favorite students and scholarship and about some of the items in her office. It took three days to whittle her office down to one carload of her most precious mementos. She sent me flowers.

Six months later, her house burned to the ground in a huge fire. I thought of the boxes that contained the distillation of her office and sent her a sympathy card. She sent me more flowers, with a note that said, "It was just stuff. I still have the memories, and that was all the stuff was for--to remind me of who I've been. I lost my stuff, and I still know who I am and who I've been."

Change of Life, part 1

I've been trying to figure out for a while how to write this post. There are some things in life that feel so momentous that it is hard to know how to process and articulate them. There are pieces of this that are like that. And while this is not a political post, it is grounded in a political-based reality.

The simplest way to say it is that I am changing jobs. But it isn't that simple, for me. Since my very first job shelving books in the children's department of the Freeport Public Library (back in its original space constructed with the help of Andrew Carnegie), I have been a public employee. Okay, I did have two summer jobs that weren't public--one as a camp counselor at my church camp and one as a receptionist for a title insurance company. I worked at the library and then at my community college as a student worker, a state university as a student worker and then as a graduate assistant, then at a community college as a professor, then at a two-year state college as a lecturer.

Although I haven't often thought of myself as a public servant, it has always been part of who I am professionally. I've known that my salary would be limited, since my institutions were accountable to taxpayers. It has always mattered to me that I am part of the army of public servants trying to make their place in the world a better place in some small way.

I've been a teacher since 1988, when I first stepped into a college classroom as a graduate assistant in charge of one writing class. After 23 years, the line between what I do and who I am has blurred. Being a teacher is part of my identity. Even during the five years I did part-time administrative work, I was still a teacher.

I have been very committed to the access to public education afforded by two-year colleges. Having started my own college experience in such a place, I have seen the transformative power of education for those who are unable to go to a different school due to financial reasons or a need to be placebound. People's lives change when they have the opportunity to explore who they are and what they think in the context of guided and structured scholarly work.

A change of jobs means, on one level, a change of self. I am staying in higher education, but it is a very different kind of position. I will be coordinating the Academic Resource Center at a private women's college. It will be a major shift in many ways: teacher to full-time administrator, public school to private school, co-ed to women's school, two-year associate degree to bachelor's and master's degrees.

I start my new job tomorrow. I don't know who I will be. At the age of 46, such a new adventure is a bit exciting and quite terrifying.

People in faculty-type positions tend to think of their careers differently than do people in many other kinds of positions in higher education. Many of my friends in student affairs work talk about building a skill set and gaining experience and then moving on in five to ten years. Faculty-type folks talk about tenure and the long haul and being in an institution over a period of their professional lifetimes, building their career by participating in important committee work, engaging in scholarship, writing grants, and getting better and better at what they do. It's a different mindset, so even I am a bit shocked that I am making this change.

So why on earth am I making the change? This is where the political-based reality comes in. As an employee of the state of Wisconsin, I was about to get socked with an extra $300 in deductions each month. Now, if I were one of those high-paid employees, I might not be able to muster much sympathy for myself. But I'm not. I'll spare the details, but my position pays less than $35,000 a year. I live in a county with a fairly high cost of living, yet this is the same salary as people in my position in other counties around the state had--so my salary has gone less far than it has for my peers in, say, Baraboo or Manitowoc.

Despite the claims that public employees haven't been affected by the economy, my husband is in an industry that was hit hard. After three job losses in two years and an extended unemployment, he is finally in a job in his industry again--but only part-time, so he continues to look for more work. Our family's finances have hit rock bottom, and we simply don't have any place in our budget to cut $300. I already do some online freelance consulting work, and I was starting to look for more.

The bottom line is that I knew I had to be open to possibilities, because Scott Walker's policies were about to have a serious negative effect on my family. So I am changing my life, and while I think it will be a good thing for me, I wouldn't have done it without his policies. So now there is another state job open (the one I just vacated), one I'm sure he'll take credit for creating.