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| Can I Take a Mulligan on This Semester? | 2004-03-19T09:23:50-05:00 | /can-i-take-a-mulligan-on-this-semester/ |
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Or perhaps it would be best just to cut our losses, hold our collective breath, and just plunge on through.
Really, I’ve never been one to look longingly backward in time. I wouldn’t go back to my childhood, I’m fond of saying, not even for cash dollars. The good parts of the past come along with way too much bad, and there’s no guarantee that a do-over would include the kind of knowledge necessary to avoid the bad parts the second time around.
So, okay, this semester has been way too painful to want to repeat it. No mulligan. What I need instead are strategies for getting through the second half without succumbing to the stress produced by the quantity of overdue work surrounding me or the despair that is pervading the campus this week.
It occurs to me, though, that the academy is — or maybe it’s just the academo-bloggers I read — living through some kind of protracted Friday the 13th/full moon/millennial-type period. There are scandals afoot everywhere I look: a university president accused of plagiarism, another firing tenured faculty on spurious grounds.1
Perhaps it’s simply, as I opined at Invisible Adjunct last year, that having found myself in the midst of an academic community in crisis, such crises are all I can see.
So: breath held. Plunging forward.