Skip to main content

Picking and Choosing

I turned 61 recently. As I am tentatively (health willing) planning to retire when I turn 70 I feel as if I am now officially in my last decade professionally.

The only reason I bring this up is that I find myself referring more openly in conversation to "when I retire" and "before I retire". This came up several times yesterday in different contexts so whether or not I am aware of it consciously it is on my mind.

Primarily with limited time (and it will fly by) I need to be selective about which opportunities I pursue in my career. The more senior I become the more challenges I am offered by colleagues and I can't take them all on.

I have a lot of organizational strengths and some leadership ability and that seems to be something that I really don't want to waste. Fortunately my professional association has provided me with more; I had been envisioning a time when I would no longer be chairing a committee for them and then I was asked to chair a newly-formed committee so I'll have that for a while.

I'm not bad as a teacher, at least of upper level mathematics. I've been blessed with department chairs who have supported me with these kinds of class assignments which I think has been a win-win.

I've been re-upped for another three-year term as Faculty Ombudsperson. I believe that I have been helping folk. Given the confidential nature of the work the metrics are inherently fuzzy. I don't know (it's unspecified) whether a third term is possible, desirable for me, or good for the university if I become staid. The second term means I don't throw away the experience I garnered in the first term but it's not clear to me that that holds in perpetuity.

Some of what I do I have done for decades, but a decent fraction I only took on in the past decade, which has helped keep the job fresh. I guess that would be the one thing to try and focus on in the time remaining, to not grow stale but to keep every aspect of what I do a challenge that is within my reach.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Standing Your Corner

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Momentum

In my youth my primary social justice commitment was through Amnesty International. As an affluent white male I enjoyed freedoms that I thought ideally everyone should share; in the 1980's we had had the vine of United States support for repressive regimes that were nominally anti-Communist bearing cruel fruit and I in my small part of the world wanted to do something about that.  It was a more active support Amnesty International sought back then; nowadays they just ask me for money. We members were encouraged to write to foreign government officials to urge them to take care of political prisoners that we named, the idea being that as long as they knew that they were seen the cruelty would diminish. One letter per prisoner, because they were all human beings, not just a faceless group. I have no independent way of verifying if the hundreds of letters I wrote eased any suffering; I know that they changed me. Selfishly I am grateful. At the time I made a point of reading journalism...
Post a Comment
Read more