Letting the Term Lie Fallow

Fall 2021 was a transition semester for me. Everything after the pandemic that I was planning to do or planning on happening fell apart that spring. I spent most of the summer wondering what the future was going to be. I felt like I needed to make a plan right away and start developing something.

Instead, after my upper level courses were cancelled and I found myself teaching only into courses, I decided to pile on. The opportunity for extra teaching was there and I thought that a good cure for my condition would be to just hide in labor and let my unconscious mind figure things out for me.

It seems to have done the trick. I let my long-term and project-oriented mind lie fallow, just growing whatever popped up in there. I didn’t plant anything; I didn’t set the field up for a particular crop or expect a particular amount of yield. I just taught and graded and tried to do a good job with a course I hadn’t taught in person in a couple of years.

Reviews were mixed of course, but I saw a lot of student improvement in public speaking this fall. Considering it was all I thought about or did for the entire 15 week term, I am glad that this was the result.

I think that the practice of sabbatical is overrated. Teaching is not in opposition to research, it is letting the productive land do what it wants. When teaching you do not have control over what grows or what is in the soil. You just let it grow and replenish what might have been taken from you in terms of your research agenda. Letting the field lie fallow might be the more productive form of a sabbattical – a sabbatical from the pains of research and writing.

Why is publication the tail that wags the dog in academia? It seems odd that so much time and effort are spent on something that very few people will read or comment on, yet teaching – which has a significantly larger impact – is thought of as the barrier? I used to take the position that research and teaching were similar, but now after this fall I believe that they are in a yin-yang relationship. One feeds the other; one supports the other. You cannot just be a teacher or a researcher, by doing one you are invoking the other, at least in some kind of shadow-relationship.

The yin-yang relationship is one that invokes the rhetoric of “at the heart” or “center” or “what lies deep inside.” These rhetorics are pretty dangerous as they tend to make us forget we are attributing motives and instead lead us to think that we are discovering true essences or substances or foundations, but in this case it’s checked a bit by the idea that the substance or center is really the element of the opposite. So the yin of teaching has the yang of scholarship as its foundation. And the yang of scholarship has the yin of teaching as its foundation. Or center. Whatever word you like there really.

This means you are never not doing the other. When you pick up one you pick up both. This is also echoed by Japanese poet Basho’s famous line, “not one; not two.” As far as what I’ve picked up from teaching so much in the fall I’d say this is what I’m holding.