I have just been working on my annual report for 2014. It is a tiring endeavor. I have to copy things from my CV and move them to the report form on the WWW.
This should be at least a little gratifying. I had a good year and got a lot done. I am happy with my productivity. I should get a pretty good rating, and should qualify for whatever pay raise we may be getting. All that should be gratifying.
It is not.
It seems more of a pain than a reward. I have little expectation that anyone will carefully read, or reward, my work. I could do little, and I doubt it would make much difference.
Why knock yourself out when no one really appreciates it?
Because I know what I do. My students may not necessarily appreciate it now, but some will come to appreciate it one of these years. I know that I am doing a good job. I feel very blessed to do work that I enjoy and find rewarding. I work "as unto the L^rd" and not as unto man.
As I have said before, my goal is to hear, "Well done thou good and faithful... SERVANT!"
This should be at least a little gratifying. I had a good year and got a lot done. I am happy with my productivity. I should get a pretty good rating, and should qualify for whatever pay raise we may be getting. All that should be gratifying.
It is not.
It seems more of a pain than a reward. I have little expectation that anyone will carefully read, or reward, my work. I could do little, and I doubt it would make much difference.
Why knock yourself out when no one really appreciates it?
Because I know what I do. My students may not necessarily appreciate it now, but some will come to appreciate it one of these years. I know that I am doing a good job. I feel very blessed to do work that I enjoy and find rewarding. I work "as unto the L^rd" and not as unto man.
As I have said before, my goal is to hear, "Well done thou good and faithful... SERVANT!"
One of the things that is interesting to me about annual performance reports is that some of the most valuable and time consuming work we do doesn't really count. When you have the good fortune to spend many hours listening to students' (and colleagues') problems, when you spend countless hours writing good reference letters, when you use hard to grade essay questions for an exam instead of multiple-guess, none of this shows up.
ReplyDeleteIn my brief tenure (ha, ha) as a professor, one of the most surprising aspects has been how much work we do that is off the record. And I'm sure you do a ton--from picking up garbage to carefully editing a friends article and others.
One of the other shocking aspects to me is the wide gap between how little some professors do just to keep from getting hassled (I call this Bishop's Law of Minimums) and the enormous amount of work others do.
If it makes you feel any better, I sure appreciated all you did for me and I was never even of your students. :-)