by Charles R. Middleton, Ph.D.
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Every December, as the fall term comes to a close and we, along with our students, look forward to a holiday break, I am reminded of that first fall semester I taught full-time. I was brimming with enthusiasm. At last, all those years of study, taking tests and comprehensive exams, and writing both a Master’s thesis and a Doctoral dissertation had paid off with a real job as an assistant professor.
From the get-go, I loved teaching, the multifaceted interactions with my students, and observing them mature intellectually as the semester went on. Even having to write three lectures a week for three classes didn’t dampen my enthusiasm that semester. It was full speed ahead every day, total immersion in the tasks at hand, learning the ropes so I could be a great professor one day, even if it took a while to become one.
Then came December, when the calendar began to manage me, not the other way around. All those term papers due in a single week — 250 of them! Final exams with long and short essay questions — a total of 6 per student. Stacks of Blue Books piling up on my desk as the three hours of writing came to a close.
What was I thinking in September when I set the deadlines?
I ploughed on and somehow managed to get all that grading done. And I fell ill with a really awful cold and strep infection that sent me to bed, immobilized for nearly a week.
Is this what I signed on for?
When I recovered, I knew that I would never survive the professorial gig if I didn’t approach all of this in a more thoughtful manner. In short, I needed to pace myself much, much better and to do so from the outset of each semester.
Pacing our academic lives, as it turns out, is one of those skills that they never mention in graduate school. Even we historians with our passion for thinking in time and looking simultaneously both forward and backward in our scholarly pursuits — even we could use a lesson in the application of this basic principle of career survival and success.
Nature, of course, is on our side. As we age, we naturally slow down as life grinds away on us over the years and decades. Pacing becomes an imperative. But at the outset, it is useful to know that each semester is a holistic experience for all of us and that it needs to be managed accordingly, even or maybe especially by the young and enthusiastic.
What does that mean in practice? For starters, fall and spring (or fall, winter, and spring if you are on the quarter system) are each distinctive despite some obvious similarities. Since I taught only in semesters, my comments reflect that experience, but the principles remain basically the same in either system.
I started with the hypothesis that the focal point of pacing my courses was not solely my needs but also those of my students. I was struck and still am by how many of my colleagues in all disciplines organize their classes with apparent total disregard for the fact that our students are taking five courses a term. When you think about it, it turns out that if you use a student-oriented frame of reference as a starting point, you pace yourself and your classes differently.
A single example will suffice. Why, you might ask, does a “term paper” have to be conceived of as an end-of-semester project? We inherited from our own professors, just as they inherited it from theirs, the notion that the word “term” meant “at the end of the course” when students are rushed and dealing with completing four other classes besides yours.
But what if that wasn’t the only way to think about the matter?
Suppose, for instance, that you conceive the word “term” to mean “sometime during the semester”? In my case, setting a deadline before the midterms actually turned out to be educationally sound. With less competition from assignments in other classes, my students wrote more thoughtful papers and learned more while I had more time to comment and make suggestions for improvement.
How is all this, then, related to leadership about which I usually write in these essays? I think that the basic lesson remains the same for leaders at all levels. If you think wholistically about a semester or, even better, the whole year, you project out over the horizon what you might be able to accomplish given the realities of the world in which we live and work.
Be cognizant of the fact that whatever your responsibilities might be, ours is a very collaborative enterprise. If that is to be recognized, cherished, and even made efficient from time to time, then it is useful to think not just about what you want to accomplish but also what others can practically do to help out, given the many rhythms of their lives.
If you are the leader in any context, plan accordingly and pace all the projects in your portfolio in ways to ensure maximum success for each. This will have the added career benefit over time of conveying a clear message about your values as a leader.
How do I know this works? Well, for starters, I was never sick again at the end of any one of the ensuing 91 semesters.
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