Back to Work, sort of

Though we've had no complaints whatsoever about retirement, we've recently rejoined the working world for a couple months here in the mid-winter, and it certainly is a trip. About a year and a half ago when we were embarking on full-time leisure, we picked up definite vibrations from colleagues and the media that people in our position would, of course, be looking for ways to continue "working." The assumption was that we'd be bored and restless, and, naturally, want--if not need--additional income to supplement two teachers' pensions.

Well, we haven't been bored, not for a second, and we haven't been cutting back on food or anything else, for that matter, that we have a taste for. But here we are now getting up at 5:45 a.m. five days a week, putting in eight hours a day out at the University--carrying a lunch bag most days--and shuffling all the household "business" to the weekends. Even our gym hours have had to be re-arranged.

We're working stiffs again, but with a difference: It's entirely a matter of choice, and though we're committed to the task--methodically reviewing and scoring admissions applications from candidates desiring to make up next year's freshman class at UCSB--we are not embroiled in it or consumed with it or left sleepless by it in the way that a good teacher always is with teaching. It's a job; we try to do it well, but we don't take it home, nor do we need to. There's no outside preparation necessary, and when we leave campus at the end of the day, the work stays behind--both physically and mentally. The evenings and weekends are entirely our own. And if one of us is sick, we stay home and recuperate. No need for lesson plans or substitutes.

And, perhaps best of all, we work with and for some very competent and interesting people. We have learned much from these people who have greater experience in the field, and we have come to respect their wisdom about what may be seen generally as a very murky process. As teachers we were headstrong individualists and skeptics, if not malcontents, but in our second career as application readers our goal is to be malleable and conform to pre-established norms, and, you know, it's kind of soothing.

What we do by the hour is peruse UC admission applications--each an 8-page document filed online and printed in what looks to be 8 or 9 point Microsoft Verdana--to evaluate the student's "academic promise" and assign each a number from one to nine. That number totes in with a couple other numbers based on objective computations that consider grades, SAT scores, and socio-economic status and leaves the individual student somewhere on a vast continuum of students. At some point later on--before acceptance letters go out in early March--a cut off line is established along that continuum. To a great extent these students' fates are in our hands, but like the soldiers in the firing squad, no one really knows which rifle chambers the live bullet--in this case, when the score we give is ultimately decisive. The kid's fate may have been determined entirely by the strength or weakness of grades, or by test scores, or even by the challenges of a family background that has made the very eligibility for UC an impressive accomplishment. Anyway, we also have no idea whether the applicant really wants to come to UCSB in the first place. Fewer than one out of four who UCSB offers to accept will ultimately enroll.

But we play it straight with each application and try to find as much as we can of the qualities that the UCSB faculty has identified for us as desirable. Ironically, we must give a number to the whole panoply of factors in a student's academic record and personal experience that have not otherwise been boiled down to numbers. We work from definite guidelines and scoring rubrics, but in the end it is subjective, and we must make a judgment call that could be decisive for a student's future. Everyone who has earned eligibility to UC in general can attend some campus within the nine-campus system, but UCSB has within the last decade earned the reputation that allows it to be selective, and it wants to make the best use of that privilege which it shares with the big boys at Berkeley and UCLA.

It's an intellectually engaging process, especially when we break the silence and converse with one or several of our colleagues about a specific issue that has arisen with a particular application. The discussions are lively and necessary to keep us together as a team. We work as individuals, but our standards are necessarily shared. Large-group norming sessions are a required weekly affair, but the small group in our particular room--usually about five of us--are continually norming ourselves throughout a typical day. And the sheer diversity of human stories captured in the three personal essays that each student writes is astounding even to jaded former English teachers.

The only drawback seems to be the totally sedentary nature of the work. We've never before experienced the complete inertia of office work, and our tail bones and muscular-skeletal systems are about to register complaints with Cal-OSHA. And God knows what the constant supply of junk food means for our blood glucose levels.

But we'll survive through February and celebrate retirement again with a renewed appreciation. Of course, there will also be a 2007 freshman class to assemble. That batch will include the last students we taught as ninth graders at Dos Pueblos. It seems to have been a very gradual process of bowing out for us. Perhaps we're not destined to ever quite leave school behind.