It’s been a long, hard term and a break from teaching is welcome even by those of us who genuinely enjoy it. I think the students need a rest too! However, those friends and family outside academia often mistake our breaks from teaching as actual holiday, thinking that I, for example, get three weeks off at Christmas. NO! This is not true, here are some of the things I’ll be working on during my so-called holiday…
First of all I have quite a bit of marking to do: 16 essays of 3000 words each. These marks also have to be officially recorded on spreadsheets. Also on the teaching front I have several keen 3rd years who I am supervising for their dissertations who want to send me chapters to read and comment on over the holidays. Now this is a really pleasant job, but in order to do it well you have to give it 100% attention: by not reading them when full of mulled wine and mince pies in front of a good film!
A larger and more horrid job for this Christmas is converting 11 chapters of a book I am co-editing into camera-ready-copy. For the uninitiated many academic publishers now cut costs by getting authors to in effect do their own typesetting. It is now all done electronically of course, so I have had to learn how to lay out a page of text. It’s a fiddly and time consuming job, a good skill to have perhaps, but not the most enjoyable way to spend the dark days of December.
And finally, my other big and horrid job over the holidays is starting to make my external funding applications for next year. This is part of every academic’s life and is another fiddly job. The forms which have to be completed are very detailed and long-winded and every funding body is looking for something slightly different. And you can’t shake the knowledge that these awards are so competitive that your chance of getting some money is less than 20%.
So, I certainly won’t be slacking over Christmas, the opposite in fact! And before you know it, the break will be over and we’ll be back into another 12 week term. Still, I know I am lucky to have a job that I enjoy so much and that gives me such a degree of personal autonomy: certainly a reason to be full of Christmas cheer. And watch out for a brief blog entry from me next week on the excitement of the RAE results; they’re due out this Thursday!
