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!)
Are we allowed to ask what you topics you plan on writing on?
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.
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.