Today is my first day back at work after a nearly seven-week paternity leave. This was my second paternity leave, and, I expect, my last. As I wrote the last time, I am very lucky to be able to take such a long leave (though the folks in Silicon Valley are taking much more time off), and I’m grateful to the colleagues who picked up my work while I was gone. Because I live and work at a boarding school, I was never truly absent from the community, so I got the best of both worlds: the time off to focus on my family and the loving arms of my colleagues/friends. Every time I left my apartment to walk to my car, I passed a half-dozen colleagues who wanted to know how the baby was doing, how my wife was doing, etc. Fortunately, we’re all doing very well.
A parental leave isn’t meant to be a time for self improvement projects, but there is some (unpredictable) down time, so I did a little reading and a little professional development. Michiko Kakutani’s NYTimes review of Black Leopard, Red Wolf was published shortly after my leave began, and I was sufficiently intrigued to purchase the book on a rare foray outside the house. What with the lack of sleep and such, it took me a whole month to read it, but it is a fascinating fantasy world that Marlon James has constructed. I feel like I need to reread it in order to go back and try to understand things in the first 100 pages that make better sense after reaching the end, but I don’t know when I’ll ever get around to that. In the NYTimes podcast, James said that this will be the first book in a trilogy that tells the same story from the points of view of three different characters, so maybe if I read the next two installments I’ll be able to put it all together.
While on leave I got sucked in by an ad on Facebook (never a good idea!) so I did some business coursework on the Smart.ly app. They tempted me with a come-on about a tuition-free MBA, but there is a legit admissions process for that, and I don’t really need an MBA. Anyway, their basic Accounting units did teach me some things that I had never learned, and the repetitive exercises helped hammer into my permanent memory fundamentals about balance sheets that I’m glad to have digested.
I also decided to avail myself of a month of free access to LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com). I found this to be a great resource, and I might pony up for an annual membership. There are tons of useful videos to improve one’s skills with Microsoft and Google software, so I learned some things about pivot tables in Excel and did some basic project management coursework. I’m excited to play around with Microsoft Flow, and I want to make another attempt to get my colleagues in the deans’ office to use Microsoft Planner. (It integrates with Teams well.) When you complete courses on LinkedIn Learning, you can automatically post those skills to your LinkedIn profile. This feels a little disingenuous, since watching a ninety minute video on project management doesn’t actually make me a skilled professional in that field, but the behaviorist carrot still led me to want to watch more and more videos. Because parenting makes it harder for me to get away to conferences, having this bottomless learning resource that lives in an app on my phone and iPad seems very convenient. They could improve the UX, though. I found it hard to get back to videos in progress if I had to interrupt a session, and other online video portals have that figured out. (YouTube and Netflix, for instance.)
Now the hard part begins: working full time while also being a dedicated parent to a three-year-old and an infant. I’m going to miss lots of developmental milestones in my daughter’s first year of life while I’m at work, but spring break is coming up soon, and summer vacation not long after that. It’s tragic that so many parents don’t have half as much time with their children as I do.
ericafterschool 