Top ten (real top ten)

Because I have to balance the bad with the good.

There are a lot of frustrations involved in teaching college, but there are also a lot of good things. So here's my list of "good stuff":

1. Explaining something a different way, or asking "leading" questions, and seeing the student's eyes light up and them go, "OOOOhhhhhhhhhhhh...."

I often get students that I describe as "smarter than they think they are." They psyche themselves out, they convince themselves they're "not good at math," they decide that the subject is too hard and they need to switch majors.

And I try working with them. Because I've found in at least some cases, they really DO know they stuff, they're just letting their fear-of-failure or their fear of looking unfeminine/too "white"/unmanly/whatever get in the way. (Mostly, it's fear-of-failure).

I ask a lot of leading questions or I try to get them to attack their mental block from another side. It doesn't always work, but when it does, it's quite beautiful.

2. Students who DO have a sense of enthusiasm and love for something. It's a lot of fun to teach people who care. They go beyond, they try to understand things more deeply. I have students who e-mail me articles on topics like those I discuss in class because they found it interesting and think I would, too.

I like to say that it's only 10% of the students that are the real dead-heads who frustrate me. But fortunately there's a 10% who have that passion that (on a good day at least) more than balances out the "Can I have my diploma now and go work for my daddy's company?" people.

3. Being able to be somewhat of a nonconformist.

If you saw me - especially if you saw how I dressed - you would realize why I would not fit into the corporate world. (Think a bit of "Miss Marple meets Annie Hall" and you're not too far off the mark).

I never, ever have to wear pumps to work. I never would even have to wear a skirt if I didn't want to. I have colleagues who shop at thrift stores and wear what they find to work. (And yeah, sometimes I bitch about it a little. I do like the look of a man in a suit.). But there's a line - my brother used to work in the corporate world and all the women he worked with looked like those freaky clone-women in the background of Robert Palmer videos. (Well, not as sexy and distant looking, but they had the same extreme hair and high pointy shoes and lack of color in their wardrobes.)

Me? I like color. I wear pink sometimes. Or green. Or even small amounts of plaid. And I wear flat shoes because I figure I am tall enough already - and I have knee problems that heels would surely exacerbate.

I mean, don't get me wrong - if you're picturing "Ugly Betty," you're on the wrong track. I do have SOME fashion sense. It's just...it tends to go in a slightly different direction than most of the typical "corporate ladies" clothes out there today.

4. You are surrounded by (mostly) intelligent people. Oh, they have their blind spots, but when you learn to navigate around those, they tend to be funny and gracious and good to talk to.

I have had wonderful bizarre hypothetical conversations with people. One centered on if it was possible to make a photosynthetic animal. I was agitating for the world's first photosynthetic animal to be a toy dog (my argument being they'd be a lot mellower than normal toy dog and you wouldn't have the poop issue). My colleague was unimaginatively plumping for a pig.

But the fact that we could discuss it at all - or the fact that I can make comments like "I'm quite fond of eskers" in class and people don't think it's TOO strange - well, that's worth something to me.

5. The access to information. I'm an information freak, an information junkie. It is actually bad for me to have the T1 line access at school because I am always looking up obscure points of knowledge for my classes during my downtimes between classes. (Students in an unglaciated part of the country probably really don't need to know about kettle-hole bogs, but I find them fascinating! And there are pages and pages of stuff on them! And on the Moundbuilders! And on predatory mites! ....Look! A bird!)

I'm the same way about the library. I have to be careful going in there or I wind up checking out 23 books, exactly 2 of which I will have time to read. And I usually won't wind up reading the two I originally went in to get.

I love to learn! For me, working in a university setting would be kind of like someone who adores bread working at a bakery...except I've not yet got sick of information, and a friend of mine who worked at a bakery said it took eight months after she quit before she could stand the thought of pumpernickel again.

6. I've decided I like doing research. Well, planning the projects is a little scary, but tracking down background information is fun. And reading the papers is sometimes fun. And it's exciting to come across a point that is VERY VERY important to your thesis in one of those papers. And collecting data can be fun - looking for the patterns, the just simple mindless work of counting or sorting or weighing.

It's also satisfying to have a journal article come out.

(We will not speak of the writing or revising process here. It is with good reason that Darwin said, "A naturalist's life wouldbe a happy one, if he had only to observe and never to write.")

7. Labs. Teaching labs is enjoyable. You get to know the students better - it's more casual, there's more chance to talk one-on-one. You get to see people DOING things. I've known students who did not do all that well on tests, but put them in a lab, give them an experiment to try or a simulation to run - and they're all over it. They love it. It makes sense to them. And they do these beautiful writeups and you feel better about your teaching because you feel like you're not totally screwing things up for them, that there's some area where they can do well under your tutelage.

8. Just being a part of campus. I think I wrote before about how I'm a professor's kid, how I've always at least marginally been associated with college campuses.

They are places I feel comfortable. They are places where I know who I am, and I don't feel like I have to play some fake role - I've been in other situations where I felt like I couldn't really be myself, people wouldn't accept me, because I was too far off the continuum that was considered OK for that milieu.

But on campus, I can be my somewhat-weird self. (And I'm actually not all that weird in the grand scheme of things. I mentioned Miss Marple before? Well, I'm Miss Marple weird in a world where there can be people who are Hunter Thompson weird, or Howard Hughes weird. I'm weird but I'm COZY weird. People tend to trust me and tend to open up to me because I guess I'm kind of dumpy and nonthreatening.

9. Opportunities to do just fun random stuff. There are regularly plays on campus. And concerts. And art shows. And they offer continuing-education classes.

Now, granted: city dwellers will go "huh? How's that stuff so special?" But when you live in a small area - a small rural area - if there's not a university, you don't have the same options. If it weren't for my college, I'd probably have to drive an hour and a half to the nearest big city to hear live classical music. I probably wouldn't have the opportunity to learn German in the evenings, or ceramics, or aqua kickboxing. (Someday. Someday I will take that aqua kickboxing class. It doesn't work with my schedule now but I so want to take it).

There are also campus clubs: a chemistry club and a ceramics club and an outings club (outings-trips. Not the other kind of outings that have become fashionable these days). And faculty have the opportunity to contribute and take part in the various clubs as their interest dictates. (Again: city-dwellers also have these options. But in the town where I live, the university-offered options are IT. There is nothing comparable offered through the town).

10. Flexibility of schedules. It's not a 9 to 5 thing. It's an 8 to 3 thing, or some days an 8 to 7 thing but with a couple hours off in the middle of the day, or a noon to six thing...and if you're done with your teaching and office hours and you don't have any research that's holding you in your office, you can take off in the middle of the afternoon and no one says "boo." As long as you get your work done, your hours are your own.

And you know? I know far too many people who work - or worked in the past - as receptionists and stuff, and they were basically told, "You need to sit here from 8:30 am until noon, and then from 12:30 until 4:30. And if it's a slack time, you will just sit here - if you are reading a book or knitting or doing your nails, it will look too unprofessional if someone walks in." And you know? That would very rapidly drive me insane - sitting at a desk 8 hours a day, with nothing to relieve the slack times other than perhaps a bit of computer solitaire. (At least one person I knew - her company blocked most internet sites so even surfing was forbidden).

And yeah, I work weekends quite often - or at least Saturdays - but that's my choice. I do more than "minimum" or more than "just competent" because I care about what I do and I enjoy doing as gooda job at it as I can. And frankly, some days, it's such fun to sit down at my desk to try to interpret data results, or to try and figure out a new and different lab exercise to do with my class, that it doesn't seem like work at all.