Wendy Bishop: The Quest for Tenure, Better You than Me

The first thing that struck me in Wendy Bishop’s piece was, of course, her style; I suppose a chair of the CCCC had better have an excellent grasp of style, or the members elect a new chair. However, it wasn’t her beautiful grasp of syntax or near-seamless integration of others’ words but instead her overpowering use of allusion and imagery for the first half of the paper, which then acted as a rhetorical anchor for the rest of the paper. I found this strategy to be very effective. Even when I had little interest in many of her personal examples, I was still drawn to the beauty of her imagery which served both an aesthetic and pragmatic purpose.

As to the content of Bishop’s paper, I found myself vacillating between empathy and apathy. It was not that her argument wasn’t compelling, but I am tethered to university life by the thinnest of threads. I have only a vague memory of what it was like to be in the same room with more than one professor, let alone the conversations regarding their personal advancement within the school or that of their department. That being said, there were several strong connections between what she describes and the life of a writing teacher in high school. The two concepts that touched me most personally were her allusion to an asinine race to the “new,” and an impending feeling of burnout felt by those who are already giving so much of themselves.

In her work, Bishop cites how she felt that “activities and theories were being discarded or overwritten even as I felt I was just beginning to gain success with them” (327). In the past four years alone, my students have been provided with three separate writing models. We trade administrators like the NFL trades coaches; if they don’t make it to the playoffs in the first three years, they’re gone. And oh, by the way, guess who those administrators are glaring at while they watch the inevitable shadow of the ax drop on their necks? Their teachers. So the cycle continues; a new administrator is hired. He or she brings in a new (ha ha ha) perspective on writing; it’s always writing and math, and the teachers are asked to make it work. Three years later, it’s time to do it all over again. I’m not sure what it’s like to be dragged into a hurried race to publish so I can hit the moving target of tenure, but I can explain the feel of trying to integrate bizarre practice of drawing a “camera around the adjectives” and a “cloud around the nouns.”

While the continuous bombardment of the “new” is bad enough, the feeling that I just want to “call in dead” is more profound pain. There was no section that I felt closer to than that of the young man at his son’s soccer game “hunched over, marking student papers” (328). As I began this piece, my older son was right next to me watching Go, Diego, Go. Now I know as a good parent that he should be in bed by 8:00, but I’ve only sat with him for a total of maybe six hours this week. I can actually see the readers of this post rolling their eyes and thinking to themselves, “This guy brought this on himself,” and I suppose they are right, but this is just one more part of the job. It’s no less important than grading the quiz I gave to the freshmen this morning, or the comparative literature paper I’m planning for my seniors tomorrow; those are the next things on my list tonight, right after I find one more scholar to tie into the bib assignment for the Wednesday night class.

So as not to end on too depressing a note, I still love my job; my son still knows his dad loves him (we’ll spend all weekend together); and all of the paper work will get done, but I still can’t help looking at those phys ed teachers without at least a little envy.