Mondays are going to suck all semester long. For every Monday, I have to put together a shiny new lecture, and I have to assemble a set of thought-provoking, sophisticated questions to accompany that lecture, which students will think about during the talk and discuss afterwards. That was my day, and then I had to prepare for tomorrow’s class, which is not ready yet, but will be by 9am. Wednesday will be easier, because I’ll have done all the prep work to get that discussion going.
At least now I’m home and tired and ready to take a shower and then read in bed before succumbing to fatigue. I’ve more or less front-loaded every week with lots of work so I can coast through to the weekend…except that my writing class is going to produce lots of stuff I’ll have to grade, and I’m not sure where I’ll wedge that in yet.
I still can’t believe I get no sabbatical next year, and that I probably have 4-7 years go on my sentence, before I can retire. Maybe I’ll drop dead sooner and surprise everyone.
Don’t do it.
Living longer will confound your oppressors.
Hmm. Pissing everyone off is a good motivator…
Living longer will also please your blog readers.
Don’t drop dead PZ. What will the rest of us live for. Tell me why?
Mondays do suck!
I suspect that elders dropping dead before being able to retire is the GOP plan. That way, they can gift the social insecurity money to their betters.
Re: wzrd1 @ #5…
That was the original plan…by Otto von Bismark. Average age at death was 65, so that’s where he set retirement. The US just picked up the same number and ran with it.
As for you, PZ… Don’t do it. Think how it would devastate your wife. (I say that as a surviving spouse after being married for 51 years. I expect to be in mourning for the rest of my life…however long that happens to be.)
I think it would be nice were you (PZ) to have the option of working less than full-time, but that’s for people like me with ordinary jobs. I can imagine that were your course load were halved, the amount of effort you put into the remaining courses would be doubled, to no net easing overall.
So I guess not really an option for you. I know I was very happy that the last 13 years of my working life were 3 days per week — a 60% duty cycle. Two weekends per week, so to speak. Really reduced stress.
Since I began reading your blog (an excellent diversion, starting with the original lab incarnation) I have been amazed by the hours you put in on the odd occasion you mention it.
Which is good, I suppose … early to bed, early to rise etc. :)
As an aside, my wife is not currently teaching part-time, but when she did, the worst time sink was grading.
And, as English was her subject, that meant reading closely, which quickly adds up.
In this gig economy, she only got paid for attendance hours and a travel allowance, but I know she used to spend around 1.5 hours grading for every hour of teaching. She did like the classes where she could mark a multiple-choice exam or anything else with an answer key, the marking was, ahem, markedly quicker without a concomitant diminution of care.
To fuck over the system, hire a lot of Greenland sharks. They will live long after retirement age.
Or hire reptiles; they have a lot of anti-senescence genes all the mammals lost in the mesozoic. Galapagos tortoises will really cash in on the pension system.
I felt better about my retirement resources after talking to a financial advisor. Your situation is none of my beeswax, but you’re old enough for “full retirement” Social Security as well as Medicare, and you appear to live pretty modestly. It would a shame if you were forcing yourself to work longer than you needed to.
I was born on a Monday, and blame that for everything that’s gone wrong since.