My friend and I played the “everything job,” a way to frame improvised scenarios. The premise was — and writing this makes it sound like we’d thought this through, when actually they play was spontaneous — that these two trees represented walls of technology that gave us some collection of imperative tasks. We threw some imaginary levers and pushed some hallucinated buttons in the bark’s deep grooves, and on our screen that only we could see, messages commanded what to do that day at work.

The “everything job” was the right description, it seemed, because we were ready to be tasked with quite possibly anything that was needed and, obviously, to match grand imaginations of what we were capable of and what were tasks worth doing.

Generally, we were tasked to solve crises that could mean the end of the world, or at least a sinister crime at the local scale. Showing up to work on any given day (of which there could be many in the span of one of our afternoons) we might be told we needed to put out a fire, catch someone in a heist, hop on a spacecraft, perhaps blast laser cannons at invading aliens. We could be firemen or secret agents or astronauts. We were never accountants.

When childhood disintegrated into adulthood, I took on what I’ve always thought to be the next best “everything job.” My vocation as a professor is likely about as close to that and its revolving tasks as anything else I can imagine. There’s more accounting, emailing and grading and no space missions, but the cycle of interesting, as-needed tasks is not so different.

So, it’s completely reasonable that many wouldn’t understand what this job actually is. Lately, legislators and other decision makers seem to question it the most. To be fair, I also don’t understand what legislators do most of the time. It would probably be a good idea for me and a governing representative to get to know each other’s work a little better. There are audits and reports of what we do and how effective we are, yet I think these are easy to misrepresent and misinterpret.

Like other faculty, both those who are early in their careers and those like me who are tenured, there’s a continual cycle of evaluation. Each semester, a pile of anonymized student evaluations get sent to me and my department chair, who knows the classes I teach and the overall discipline; and each year I create a report that addresses these and my other work. This gets sent up the hierarchy of the institution so that I’m fully evaluated each calendar year, and then at least every five years (more often for those who are not yet tenured) all of that information and more gets compiled and reviewed by those above me and my own peers, both those in similar fields and others around the university. Even after tenure, my career trajectory depends on the continual evaluation of my work. This maintains the integrity of the university.

My work, like that of others, is comprised of lots of things. At a place like Weber State, we typically teach around four courses each semester. While that’s our focus here, we are also expected to conduct meaningful research and service. Our teaching cannot be simply satisfactory, but must overall rise above those levels as evaluated in multiple ways. And scholarly work must show a national impact and generate new knowledge or contributions to the field. Service ranges wildly, but is typically things like leading job searches, reviewing our curriculum, chairing service committees at local or national levels and, quite possibly, writing regular columns in a local newspaper.

Which is all to say that the job can quite literally be “everything,” sometimes perhaps too much so. For most of my 30-year career, “everything” is what’s described the nature of all the tasks I’ve taken on; and it’s also described the dedication that I, and so many around me, have for this work and what it contributes to our community. It’s why we hold ourselves accountable, not only to the institution, but to the public that we serve.

Adam Johnston is a professor of physics and director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at Weber State University, where he helps prepare future teachers and supports educators throughout Utah. This commentary is provided through a partnership with Weber State. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent the institutional values or positions of the university.