{"id":1266,"date":"2016-11-01T10:57:28","date_gmt":"2016-11-01T08:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=1266"},"modified":"2016-11-01T10:57:28","modified_gmt":"2016-11-01T08:57:28","slug":"professional-anniversaries-missing-ritual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2016\/11\/01\/professional-anniversaries-missing-ritual\/","title":{"rendered":"PROFESSIONAL ANNIVERSARIES: MISSING RITUAL <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I started working for the Universitat Aut\u00f2noma de Barcelona on 15 September 1991, which means that I have just celebrated my 25th anniversary as a university teacher (not just as a teacher, as I had been already employed teaching English by diverse language schools for a few years). ‘Celebrate\u2019, however, is perhaps the wrong word in this context, as, in the end, I have not had any celebration. <\/p>\n

I told myself that I would do something, anything, but then I started asking around and it turned out that none of my colleagues at UAB, past the 25th year mark, had celebrated this kind of professional anniversary. I have not yet discarded my original idea\u2013giving my students some candy as little kids do in schools!!, silly as it may sound\u2013 but somehow I lack the motivation. I also realized that if I did something in the Department (colleagues offer cookies or chocolates on birthdays or other relevant personal occasions) I would be forcing everyone else to do the same. So I let it be\u2026 I am actually writing this post to encourage myself to finally do something before it is too late and I reach my 26th anniversary.<\/p>\n

Why\u2019s 25 such an important figure? After all, I didn\u2019t write anything here when I hit the 20th year mark, 5 years ago. Well, 25 is more critical because although, if all goes well, I will retire having reached the nice figure of 40 years as a teacher (20 multiplied by 2), I know at this point that I don\u2019t have other 25 years ahead of me professionally speaking (I certainly don\u2019t want to retire at 75 after 50 years as a teacher, my gosh!!!). Also, this year I\u2019ve celebrated my 50th birthday, which means that I have been a university teacher for exactly half my life, which impresses me very much. Where does time go, we ageing teachers wonder?<\/p>\n

I explained to a friend whom I met in one of my earliest years as a teacher (he was my student 24 years ago!) that the strangest thing is looking back and thinking that I knew nothing when I started as a teacher. In these 25 years, I have never stopped studying\u2013for this is what research is all about in the Humanities\u2013which means that, logically, I should be much wiser than I was at the beginning. Funnily, I have the simultaneous impression that I\u2019m both wiser and more stupid, as I notice now much more than I noticed 25 years ago how little I know but also how much I\u2019m beginning to forget. I think that no matter how hard you study in your own area and no matter how convinced you are that you know at least something, many specific points still escape you. Otherwise, I would not need to update my class notes every year.<\/p>\n

In part, one of the reasons why I have not celebrated my anniversary with my students is the embarrassing feeling that they might think I should be a much better teacher after a 25-year-long experience in the job. Ageing in public is not easy and some days students are, as every teacher will say, very difficult to face, with their demands and expectations, and their youthful faces. I was myself a very demanding student and I often wonder how I would have reacted to my own classes: would I find that I digress too much? (I think I do), would I find that I\u2019m not systematic enough? (always something to work on). Writers often say that they never have the feeling that they improve as they write, as each novel is a different challenge and I\u2019m beginning to feel the same as a teacher. I\u2019m not a better teacher than I was 25 years ago, I just know a few tricks of the trade. Certainly, each course is a new challenge, if only because students are never the same ones.<\/p>\n

As a teacher, one important barrier is crossed when you first double your students\u2019 age (they\u2019re 18, you\u2019re 36) because this is when you start seeing yourself as part of a very different age group, no longer an elder sibling or young aunt\/uncle. The second barrier is crossed when you realize that you\u2019re their parents\u2019 age, which puts you definitively in a different generation. As a Coordinator, I was often surprised to see that students were accompanied in their registration day at UAB by fathers and mothers already younger than me. Since I don\u2019t have children myself, I cannot have the perception that students are my (hypothetical) children\u2019s age, but I\u2019m sure that they often make the connection between teachers and parents as obnoxious authorities\u2026 I wonder what this is like for colleagues with children in the university.<\/p>\n

Back to the idea of the anniversary, I\u2019m not sure what should be done. UAB used to offer in the good old days a sabbatical (thus ignoring in quite a cavalier fashion the actual meaning of \u2018sabbatical\u2019, which is \u2018every seven years\u2019). Now the much yearned-after sabbatical is gone, swept away by the economic crisis, to be replaced by nothing in particular. I joked with a friend who narrowly missed her anniversary sabbatical that perhaps we should be given a pin, or medal, soviet-style I would add. Of course, celebrating the 25th anniversary of teachers would open a Pandora\u2019s box, with teachers demanding to celebrate next 30, 35, 40\u2026 years in the profession. There is somewhere a nice absurdist short story to be written about a university where teachers are colour-coded in their dress according to seniority (\u201cWow! You\u2019re finally allowed to wear green! Congratulations!\u201d).<\/p>\n

Generally speaking, we\u2019re abandoning ritual in our lives. On the personal front, many people no longer marry, christen their babies or celebrate their children\u2019s first communion. This, of course, has to do with the waning interest in religion in what used to be a deeply Catholic country (I had a crazy, hilarious conversation yesterday with a colleague about what exactly we commemorate on 8th December, the day of the \u2018Inmaculada Concepci\u00f3n\u2019). On the professional front, as I\u2019m reporting here, nothing much is happening, at least in my work circle. We have just celebrated the yearly graduation ceremony, but this is for students, not for us teachers, just as birthdays are for children but not for parents (they should be). Yet, to my surprise, I see that many teachers reject the only ritual we maintain: their retirement ceremony. That should be a good reason for a party\u2026<\/p>\n

So, this is it, time passes\u2013with mixed feelings. On sunny days I think \u2018My! So many years to retirement, so many interesting things to do. 50 is nothing, 25 years even less so\u2019. On cloudy days, like today, I think, rather, \u2018Gosh, I\u2019m tired, I can\u2019t go on like this, being my own tyrant for 15 more years at least. I\u2019m getting old, I want to rest!\u2019. But then I shut up, thinking that a) many chronically unemployed (or underemployed) people surely wish they were so lucky, b) it\u2019s up to me whether I go on at this manic pace or call it a day and start braking down for deceleration and a soft landing.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a candy store on campus\u2013perhaps I should visit it next week, see what my students might like.<\/p>\n

Comments are very welcome! (Thanks!) Just be warned that I check them for spam; it might take a few days for yours to be online. Follow the blog updates on Twitter: @SaraMartinUAB and download the yearly volumes from http:\/\/ddd.uab.cat\/record\/116328. See also: http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/
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I started working for the Universitat Aut\u00f2noma de Barcelona on 15 September 1991, which means that I have just celebrated my 25th anniversary as a university teacher (not just as a teacher, as I had been already employed teaching English by diverse language schools for a few years). ‘Celebrate\u2019, however, is perhaps the wrong word […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching-tools-and-rules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}