101 Joys of Being�A Professor��by��Andrew D. Cohen��with illustrations by �Ely Sarig�

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The rationale for this collection�

• When university professors are asked how their work is going, the response may inadvertently focus on the difficulties associated with the profession rather than on the joys. My son, about to enter his senior year at college, has commented more than once that he certainly would not want to pursue the career. So, I gave the issue some thought and realized that his point was well taken.

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• The talk that I have generated, participated in, or heard others indulging in has been about topics such as: the difficult colleagues that need to be contended with, the insurmountable work load, the difficulties getting material published (in the right places), the difficulties finding time to complete writing projects, the hardships of trying to conduct research given the growing number of constraints, the demands of the university administration to have professors spend more hours in the classroom and thus having less time for all the other pressing demands, and the need to sit hours in sometimes fruitless committee work. It is likely that these are just a few of the many difficulties that are raised for discussion.�

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• What about the joys of being a professor, like the joys of cooking or the joys of sex? What are the joys of being a professor? What about the plusses that the tens of thousands of professors out there would want others to know about in choosing the career as their career? The result was the following collection of entries, categorized according to different aspects of a professor's professional work.
• This is essentially a feel-good collection ─ to demonstrate both to those in the professorial profession and to all those others interested in it some of the ways in which the profession is joyful. The collection is also intended to be of interest to those readers who are contemplating the possibility of making this type of career choice.

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• My deep thanks go to the following colleagues for their contributions to this listing of professorial joys: Elana Shohamy, Joel Levin, Sally Magnan, David Nevo, Rebecca Oxford, Shira Koren, Claire Kramsch, and Merrill Swain.

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Dr. Andrew D. Cohen�

Professor Emeritus�University of Minnesota�e-mail: adcohen@umn.edu

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�© Andrew D. Cohen 1998�

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the author.

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Having students teach you about developments in a field ─ for example, by passing on to you readings you were unaware of, providing you new ideas and new ways of thinking about an academic theme.

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Having the extra time and effort you put into the preparation and delivery of a course reflected in the high ratings your course is given by the students.

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About the Author

• Andrew D. Cohen was a Peace Corps Volunteer on the High Plains of Bolivia (1965-67) working in community development with the Aymara Indians, taught in the ESL Section of the English Department at UCLA for four years, and was Professor of Language Education at the School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for seventeen years, during which time he served as a Fulbright Lecturer/Researcher in Applied Linguistics to Brazil (1986-87). As of 1991, he became a Professor of applied linguistics in the English as a Second Language Department at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He is now emeritus from the university.

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• During his Minnesota years, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Hawaii (1996-7) and at Tel Aviv University (1997), and a Visiting Lecturer at Auckland University in New Zealand (2004-5). He co-edited Language learning strategies with Ernesto Macaro (Oxford University Press, 2007), co-authored Teaching and learning pragmatics with Noriko Ishihara (Longman/Pearson, 2010), and most recently authored the second edition of Strategies in learning and using a second language (also Longman/Pearson, 2011). He has also published many book chapters and journal articles. A number of his publications on bilingual and immersion education, along with writings on various other topics, are available on his personal website: https://z.umn.edu/adcohen.

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