Keeping Up With The Brewsters

As requested, here is a brief rundown on the Brewster’s lives over the next little bit. Today we are headed to Bloomington to do a little house hunting. Unfortunately, this may be difficult. Being a university town, any rental choices are taken pretty quickly by students. In fact, pretty much everything is rented on an August to August basis because of the university. Which means that if you want to rent a house, you need to start looking in May for an August rental. At this point most of the good places shall be rented already.

Tomorrow I will be talking to my old boss to see if I can have my job back. It looks like she doesn’t have a supervisor position available, so I may have to go back to the phones. Although she did state that two of her supervisors were out on maternity leave, so I may be able to pick up some non-calling duties. It’s funny though, because as much as I don’t want on the phone, the idea of doing supervisor duties with non-supervisor pay irks me to no end. I’m going to push for a higher pay rate considering my three years of experience.

Amy has one last year of course work. She actually only has two classes left, German and Latin, I think. In September she will be taking the exams she put off taking from last September and then again in January. These are big time exams. She has to take 5 of them at about 3 hours per exam. If she fails any of them she will have retakes in January. If she fails again she is out of the program. She has done a fairly poor job of studying so far, so keep her in your prayers so that she can get down to it in August.

Passing her exams she will have completed her studies in May. All that she’ll have left at that point is the dissertation. She will also be out of funding in May as well, thus will begin the job searching. Many universities will hire professors when all they have left is the dissertation with the caveat that the dissertation will be completed within a certain time period.

Landing a professor job is pretty tough. It is a very cut throat field. Generally it works to where a new professor will take a two year position at a university to get some experience and then move somewhere else for a couple of more years. After about ten years, if you have continued teaching, and managed to get a long with a department you might be able to land a tenured position. It is at this point that the money becomes reasonable. Of course, though all of this you must be publishing articles in various journals.

Amy is looking to not get to involve in all of those aspects. She wants to teach at a smaller university, or at least one that has a smaller language department. She really just wants to teach, and not deal so much with anything prestigious or demanding. Ultimately, she’d love to get a job at Freed Hardeman, or any of the C of C schools. The problem with all of them is that they usually have little to no language departments. This is partially why she wants to get on at one of them. She has always said it is foolish to have large departments dedicated to missionaries, but not actually teach them the language to the culture they will be doing the work in.

Barring a Christian school, she will look at any of the smaller universities around the country, or even larger universities with more humble language departments. Hopefully, somewhere in the south.

Me, I’ll just tag along wherever she goes and land one job or another. Being in France have given me the itch to do “something.” I’ve pretty much given up on finding a job I love and all that. But I would like to start taking some different classes, maybe in writing or film studies. Not for anything but my own pleasure.

Well that’s our little bit of life.