Janet D. Stemwedel (whose nom de blog is Dr. Free-Ride) is an assistant professor of philosophy at San Jose State University. Before becoming a philosopher, she earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. Email her at dr.freeride@gmail.com.
I'm on sabbatical for academic year 2008-2009. This being summer, you'd think I'd consider the sabbatical officially begun.
Not quite. But I'm getting closer. All that remains:
- Grading the papers from the graduate seminar that I was persuaded to team-teach.
- Calculating final grades for the students in the aforementioned graduate seminar and filing those final grades by Friday.
- Helping my advisees usher two masters theses into final form.
- Helping a student from last fall complete an "incomplete".
- One last committee meeting.
There's also some desk cleaning and family vacation taking. But then I am free to withdraw from my everyday academic milieu and do some serious writing.
Assuming I remember how to do that. (Eeep!)
Education & Careers
Comments
Are we allowed to ask what you topics you plan on writing on?
Posted by: SteveWH | July 15, 2008 9:37 PM
Janet, you're clearly in the wrong discipline. For supervising 6 weeks of field camp during the summer, a professor in the geology department at your university gets a semester off. Admittedly the summer job is intense, and requires a temporary relocation to a place where there is no cell phone service, relatively little air, an excess of grumpy students, and no nearby services whatsoever; however, the instructors who run the field camp certainly seem to enjoy it... and make the most of their sabbatical semesters.
Posted by: Karen | July 16, 2008 7:05 AM
Surely you will spend most or all of your sabbatical off campus rather than showing up and thus being a nuisance.
In our faculty handbook, one place a sabbatical is a privilige, while in another it is a right. I've been on several committees charged to fix this. In each case, we dissolved with out forwarding a recommendation. An instance where the cure is more problem than the disease.
Posted by: Jim Thomerson | July 17, 2008 5:15 PM