The Annual Renewal

Most professional careers evolve as a near-continuous stream of work, day to day, month to month, year to year. It is true that they sometimes experience jumps in the level of responsibility; sometimes there are moves to completely new jobs, at a different organization. In service careers, clients might be new, but their issues might be similar to those of earlier clients. In manufacturing, each week brings new production problems, of course, but the fact of production problems is not new. However, the basic raw materials of one’s work often remain the same.

Thus, it is rather distinctive that academia runs on a very strict annual cycle. There is a start, early each fall; there is a finish, in late spring.

For faculty the summer is often an intense refocusing on their intellectual passions, pursuing their scholarship near full-time. They’re off to archives, field locations, their home office, their laboratory, or, for a few, the relative quiet of summer on a university campus.

Then in the fall the cycle begins again.

What’s refreshing about this life is the real sense of renewal at the initiation of the new cycle. It’s a fresh start.

While the course being taught might be the same course as last year, each new offering permits an updating. How should the course incorporate new work in the field that has emerged in the past year? Can my own research work over the last summer be used to inject new energy into the course?

Even if the course design is relatively unchanging, the students are new. They bring fresh energy to their studies. Each set of energy is different. They bring with them vivid reactions to world events that impinge on the coursework. Each of them is an individual; understanding their approach to the work requires individual attention. This gets our diagnostic juices flowing – what will work to open up the learning for them?

This newness each year also allows instructors to move on from any suboptimal performance on their part from the prior year. They too can be new. They have the freedom to learn from failings in last year’s class edition to try a new approach at an explanation or a new set of Socratic questions to facilitate learning.

The differences across years almost always produce some student asking a question that makes instructors think anew about key issues in the field. It refreshes the instructors and sometimes makes them think about their own research in a new way. This is an infrequently noted benefit of the combined job of teaching and research. The two sides of this life act as facilitators to each other. What might appear on the surface to be an naïve comment or question, when reflected upon by the instructors over the subsequent days, becomes a new approach to a key problem in their own scholarship. Those classes that allow the instructors to integrate their own scholarship into the class are precious resources, in that regard.

None of this could happen as efficiently if academia didn’t have this built-in annual cycle of renewal. Each fall is a fresh start. Each fresh start brings the promise of yet unachieved success. We’re lucky that way.