Significant shift of gears for non-appointment time

I had four appointments in a row today--still not the full six I could have had--and they were pretty easy. Only one was a repeat student, and this was only the second time I'd seen her. She is a relatively typical student here: very street smart but "talks street," as the kids would say, and is slowly learning to write, at least, in a more formal way. She's not quite like Word Salad (who originally was on my docket for today but ended up canceling), but she still is capable of writing a sentence that completely derails part-way through, and of using words that, well, aren't actually words. But she wants to learn, and today she told me I was very good at "peer review" (well, I am, but that's not what we're doing, as we're not exactly "peers")--specifically that I explained things in a way she could understand. She also told me, to my dismay, that one of my colleagues here has been telling her the wrong placement for the comma that precedes, not follows, a coordinating conjunction in a compound sentence. I'm a bit perplexed about how to handle that; I don't want him to spread the error among our students, who create enough errors on their own without our help.

The other appointments were a mixed lot. Two involved explaining to students why their work did not actually fulfill the parameters of the assignments--and not much in the way of actually working on their writing itself. One involved working through a worksheet with a student who is in a very early stage of learning English. Important to her, but a little like working with a second-grader for me. She also was a trifle maddening, as she couldn't get herself pulled together to come back to my cubicle and get rolling on our appointment. I went to get her, she started packing up--and ten minutes later she still wasn't sitting with me, so I went to find her again; she and a friend were at the copy machine, doing what I don't know. I had to tell her she was wasting her appointment time--and that finally got her to come back and sit down with me.

But for the last hour plus, and in the interstices between appointments, I've been working on an application for adjunct work at the community college in the town where I will be when I relocate at the end of the summer. I don't really want to be back in the classroom at all. I mean, I really don't want to be back in the classroom--but I realized over the weekend how much I've been relying on the revenue stream generated by my work here in the Center, and I realized I would feel infinitely more comfortable to have some kind of regular influx of income, not the sporadic, unreliable fits and starts of freelance work, including what I might get by hanging out my shingle as a tutor. I don't know what that college pays its adjuncts; I know the pay for tenure-track faculty is abysmally low, and one of my contacts out there said that, as an adjunct, he is essentially doing "pro bono" work--but then again, I think his salary before he retired was probably a great deal higher than mine, so what he considers peanut-pay might seem a little more beneficial to me.

So, I drafted up a letter of interest, which needs lots of going over (and I'll probably recruit Paul to vet it for me)--but I also thought I should rework my CV ... again. I realized that it doesn't include any of my committee service, which has been extensive and which speaks to my "ability to maintain effective and positive professional relationships" and "demonstrated communication, presentation, educational service, and interpersonal skills," which are among the "Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities" required for the position. I started out trying to dredge things out of my memory banks, but then I remembered that I'd have tons of information--probably more than necessary--in my various promotion applications. So I've been raiding from those, but it's time-consuming. And it also means I get to futz around with formatting the whole CV ... again. Once I start including all that committee service, even if I try to truncate what I include pretty significantly, the thing gets very long and unwieldy very quickly. I probably need to do a Google search to see examples of CVs, see how other people handle the insane amount of information that goes along with a professorial career.

So, no crafts project today, no reading my current popcorn read, no playing around with my own fiction writing, not even the perennial favorite time-using device of research. But as I was working on the application letter and CV, I checked my personal email and saw that one of my Met contacts got in touch with me to say she's gotten the green light to offer me a freelance contract. And I did finally hear from the exhibitions person at the NYPL; they'll use me for a project coming up at the end of the year. Hooray on both counts. I may be a very, very busy woman once I'm in Montana.

But for now, I'm a woman who wants to be very busy getting out of the Center and over to the office to chat with Paul for a bit, assuming he's still there. We'll see how tomorrow shapes up, both at the Center and in terms of the massive purge project in the office. Because, well, you know what tomorrow is. And I'm sure I will be stronger.