Remember, you may find a cathartic post here at any time. I realize how Gothic these sound but I have absorbed many decades of dire warnings and discouraging words. Every post in which I repel those who say you cannot do it makes me stronger and I am going for that, full on. Y’all don’t pay it no mind.
This is my own process but it is incidentally taking place in the context of teaching five courses, including but not limited to three sections of beginning foreign language totaling 95 students in those courses alone; doing one administrative job; writing one large external grant proposal; and LSAT preparation and research, in a university system where tenure has been redefined to mean a year’s notice once your program is terminated.
The production of student credit hours and the amount of external funding generated are paramount. Normally I would be compassionate with the sufferings of others, like the Prince in Bambi, but in the current situation I only have interest in those I have known a long time.
My question of the day would be: do you think the insistence upon suffering while working is another epiphenomenon of American Puritanism? In my department it is sometimes said that showing interest in work is a Calibanesque Anglo-American thing, and that to show true Latin authenticity we ought to cultivate the dolce far niente. I do wonder, though, whether suffering while working is not the truer Puritanism.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I think suffering while working – and enjoying it – is 100% American Puritanism. The good Puritan is to suffer and labor on this corrupted earth in trial and sorrow until released from this vale of tears to go to heaven. Me, I am unabashedly pagan in outlook so you can guess my opinion on this.
Then that explains it. I am not necessarily pagan but I am an unbaptized heathen at the very least and I do not understand the suffering as virtue thing at all, at all.
But you are being so overworked. It’s not right. The part I would simply not be able to deal with would be having to use inferior teaching materials. I have been known to throw out such stuff and use my own selections. This has not been a smart career strategy.
When I think of my career, I call it my “so-called career.”
But Hattie, there are now virtually no foreign language textbooks suitable for multisection courses that do *not* have an e-workbook and website served from Cupertino. And what we have is one of my top choices of books. And all the other courses have books chosen by me with 100% latitude. Where are the inferior teaching materials? We really need smart classrooms, yes, but I never meant to suggest we have inferior teaching materials here!!! Unless you mean my remarks about how *I* as an individual don’t like *any* foreign language textbooks, would rather study from a dry grammar sheet and then just the radio/movies.
Oh, good. I misunderstood and thought you had no control over teaching materials.
No, seriously, this is a real university, with upper division courses, graduate seminars, PhD programs, and everything! Usually there’s only one faculty person competent to teach a particular thing and they’re the only one competent to order books for that. So yes, we order our own books, like everyone!
Larger point: yes I’m being overworked but the people I am complaining about are those who think a 2-2 load plus research and low service is torture.
If you want to show true Latin authenticity then you need to do a dance like the Taki Unquy (“disease of the dance) in the Peruvian Andes in which the indigenous people would dance during the 16th century in opposition to the predations of the Conquistadors and the effects of the European diseases which they brought with them. When I feel like I’m suffering then I turn up the volume on this video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBsWlUpNVpc , and do my little dance.
And if you want to get out of your Eurocentric mode of thinking about the insistence upon suffering while working as another epiphenomenon of American Puritanism , then consider the Japanese where they have undocumented unpaid overtime (サービス残業, sābisu zangyō) followed by Karōshi (過労死) which translates as death by overwork. Better to read “La noche oscura del alma”” by Saint John of the Cross. I find this also helpful so I have multicultural solutions to suffering. As Friedrich Nietzsche said” That which doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. “
*My* Eurocentric whatnot? !Ahem! Crosscultural resistance strategies, all right, but look:
1- Taki Unquy is specifically and pointedly *anti* Latin. It is *against* the Spaniards and the Mediterranean culture which was imposed.
2- I hate that phrase of Nietzche’s and don’t agree with it. Torture is designed to weaken permanently. St. John, for example, (cf. your comment and also mine below) never recovered fully from what he went through in prison, even if it is true the C. E. would not have been written without that.
3- Do the Japanese enjoy overwork, have competitions about suffering when they aren’t really, and enjoy complaining the way Americans do?
4- Once again, remember what St. John was going through when he wrote that poem. I would not compare academic overwork to it.