BINDERS FULL OF NARRATIVES!!!!

My promotion portfolio is due next Tuesday.

That is right.  We are T minus seven and counting.

And I am just curious -- does any other profession require anything equivalent to this?  Not just that, along with doing the basic job of teaching four (and sometimes, as with this semester, five) classes a semester, the professor accomplish a mountain of other work (service to the university, service to the community, research and publication), but that each year she document all this work (the teaching, the service, the research, the publication) to her chair, her dean, her provost, and her chancellor.

Which, that's literally true: every year, once a year, we're required to turn in an annual review, documenting what we've done in those areas.  We get performance scores based on what we've done.  So, you know, every year this is documented already.

So it's not like anyone is in doubt about whether this work has been done.  It's documented.  Our scores are a matter of record.

But nevertheless, when we come up for promotion, we have to massively reduplicate this work, creating an immense portfolio with all this once again documented -- our teaching record; our service record (to the university, to the community); our publication record.

And besides the documentation, the portfolio needs to include narratives, which explain all this: how our work fulfills university goals, as well as our own research and service goals.

Also we have to include narratives, showing how we have responded to feedback given to us in all of our critical areas (that would be teaching, service, research and publication).

Also it must all be in a nice folder, with a nice table of contents, and dividers, and color-coded labels, and that thudding sound you hear is me banging my head on the floor.

(Disclaimer: I know this is whiny and petulant, not to mention a first-world problem.  Ignore me until Wednesday, that's my advice.)