I have been working like mad on the “Interactive CV” portion of www.martiandances.com. It is really the whole point of having a website, because people who don’t know me need to know who I am and what I’ve done. For those of you not in academia, a CV, or curriculum vitae, is something similar to a resume. It is not like a resume in that a resume is a summary of one’s relevant experience and accomplishments. A CV, on the other hand, tells everything you’ve ever done in your professional life as it relates to the field you purport to be an expert in. It gives detail that would be unacceptable in a resume. My resume, which I keep up to date, is two pages when I print it out, depending on who is going to be looking. My CV, on the other hand, weighs in at about 12 pages… it lists in detail my compositions, publications, classes taught, jobs held, honors, awards and generally gives the careful reader a fairly good idea of who I am, as an academic.
The point–I was working on my CV, because it should be nice and up-to-date, and for the online version, I have been inserting hyperlinks. I went to search for my very first teaching position, McEvoy Middle School in Macon, Georgia, and couldn’t find a site for it. Not a huge surprise, so I went to the school district’s website. If you haven’t browsed many school district pages, you probably don’t know that most of them have at least a page about each school in the district. I found no such page on the Bibb County Board of Education website. Apparently, the first school where I was ever employed no longer exists. There was plenty on the district web page about new schools that I hadn’t heard of and about redistricting, so it would seem McEvoy Middle School has gone the way of the dinosaurs. It hasn’t been renamed, because none of the other schools had that street address.
Those of you who have known me for some time know that I don’t have many fond memories of that school, or of Macon in general. Matt Specter stopped in Macon once on vacation and got food poisoning, and I think his experience was better than mine.
But it’s strange to think that, in this country anyway, you don’t have to wait very long before the places you once went every day no longer exist. For me, it’s a short list–along with McEvoy Middle School, the only other places I can think of are some old buildings at the University of Cincinnati — Tangeman Student Center, Beecher Hall, and the old Mary Emery Hall (especially the Scrounge). I guess I would throw in the first church I remember, Grace Lutheran Church in Sandyville, Ohio, built in 1830 and sold to another church when they built a new building.
Am I so old?