The interregnum between Christmas and New Year’s Day is a weird one in my profession.
The expectation is that you’ll finally have some real time off, but it’s actually incredibly short, or seems so, as you prep for the coming semester. You may teach many of the same classes year after year, but for a lot of us, it’s not a simple carbon copy of what you did last time – the era of the yellow legal pad, covered in ancient notes and carried over semester after semester are long gone, if they ever existed in the real world at all.
For our department, there is predictability, but it’s writ large: fall semester is almost always concentrated on the scaffold of skills classes at the heart of the program ― elementary policy analysis, colloquia or seminars that teach the critical basics in academic writing, an introductory course in international relations and another in public service and public administration…