Edited to add: I think I figured out some of my malaise: the idea of coming up with a set of ecology labs, figuring out cheatproof testing, and figuring out how to teach statistical analysis without recourse to SPSS access, all of those are great big mountains. Oh, I'll probably figure it out eventually but right now it's standing at the foot of a mountain you have to climb, and it looks REALLY steep, and the thing is, once you've climbed one, you've got two more to go. There are way too many quests in the video game my life has become, and there's no way of Leeeeroy Jenkins!ing it through.
Hopefully tomorrow will be better but I am just having a bad, sad night emotionally.
I have to go cook dinner in a minute but I thought I'd post quickly just in case anyone worries on weekdays when I don't post.
(I don't know. Maybe no one cares that much. But there are some people whose journals I read online that if they don't post for a few days - or if it goes longer than the usual gap between posts - I worry).
I'm just....this was not a good day. Without giving too much detail, in a committee meeting today we wound up coming to a joint conclusion that was bad news for someone. They took it okay but I was really hoping today would feel more like one for the W column. No, the L here wasn't any of my own doing, but....I just didn't like that person having to get the bad news.
it was also an hour and a half long Zoom meeting and those are exhausting.
And more bad news coming out - the potential death total has been upped yet again, close to 150,000 now, and I am angry and sad and feel powerless because there is literally nothing I can do that will make anything any better.
Had an e-mail conversation with a colleague about "we may well be opening up online this fall" and what that means in re: labs, and while I can probably figure it out, it's going to be a tremendous amount of work and it's going to be a less-good experience for the students and there's not a lot "free" on the internet for ecology that's any good/appropriate for upper-division college students, so I'm going to have to do a lot of either reinventing the wheel OR expecting my students to pay a lot more money for another online resource, and I object to that. So I will probably be quixotic and make labs from scratch. (I am wondering if there's some kind of "testing the effects of changing environmental conditions on sourdough starter" that can be done. I'm serious. I'm going to have to do a LOT of lateral thinking in this, I suspect).
Okay, that's too much word vomit, putting the rest of my spiralling behind a break, but I am in a very bleak mood this evening.
And I can't help but feel that......if a lot of people in a lot of places had been more honest and more proactive, I wouldn't have to be doing this. I am freaking powerless in this, literally all I could do was to try to teach online as well as I could this semester just passed and try to plan "better" for the fall. Even though I am broken and hurting and my mental health is spiralling down and I can FEEL it. I have taken to carrying one of my stuffed animals to my home desk with me every day just to have something tactile in my life to hold on to, and I was NEVER that bad before.
I'm going to need meds and years of therapy when this is over. IF this is ever over. IF I survive this.
I am terrible at teaching online, and that just makes me feel worse. I no longer love my job, and I feel like I'm bad at it, and so one of the major reasons for existing has been stolen from me. I guess I have to find a new reason for existing. (And having very limited contact with other people doesn't help in this).
Is there even going to be anything worth coming back out to? That's what I wonder about. If it takes 20 years for the world to recover after this, I will be almost 72 - nearly my whole life over - when that happens. Again: if I even make it that long, if I don't starve in an alleyway or get sick or die of loneliness.
Anyway. I didn't intend this much word vomit. I wanted to just write "I'm still here, today wasn't a good day" but....here we are.
1 comment:
oh if only we could all leeeroooy jenkins thru this part. That would be lovely.
I don't teach much. I teach knitting at the LYS every other month and once a year in the fall for an event. And right now neither of those things are happening. It isn't much. But I enjoy it. And I can only imagine how difficult what you are/will be doing is.
Sue is taking a zoom watercolor class. And yesterday the teacher couldn't be seen bc his wife was doing an IEP meeting on her device and it was using too much bandwidth for his internet. So they could hear him but not see him. It all feel insurmountable. The mountain description is apt.
Post a Comment