Kind of flat

 This is partly, I am sure, allergies. My allergies are *awful* right now, which is ironic, as we've had a lot of rain, which supposedly washes pollen (tree pollen is one of my worst allergens) out of the air.

But everything is just kind of hitting me today. I am tired and sad and can tell I'm grumpy. 

First up: low attendance (both in-person and on Zoom) in my classes this week. Yes, it's the week after spring break. Yes, there have been storms in the area that have messed with people's wifi. But I am also noticing that more and more, people seem not to want to do the "synchronous" work and instead are going "meh, I'll watch the video later" (narrator voice: many of them actually do not watch the video). And I get people doing things like going "but you never ANNOUNCED there was an exam coming up!!!" when in fact I did announce that like every darn day in class for a week and a half, and also there was an online notification, and I am so tired of it all.

I have decided, if we are still "expected" to do an online component in the fall? I will be very, very, very insistent about "I am NOT posting recordings, recordings will only be made available with a clear and reasonable advance excuse" like if someone has to take their kid to the doctor. Kind of like in the before times that if you had to miss class, you just had to miss class. I am tired of enabling people to put off doing work to a point where it's not tenable to get it all done. And I am frankly tired of dragging my butt out of bed every morning just so other people don't have to.

Also it takes an extra fifteen minutes or so per day just dealing with Zoom - I have to go to class earlier to get all the tech to talk to each other, and then after they've processed I have to rename the recordings, and turn off the "passcode protection" (easier than posting the code and making students deal with it) and copy the link and add it in to Blackboard and some days that DOES feel like a lot. I want to stop doing that. 

I also want to go back to doing in person exams; it's too hard to prevent the sort of simpleminded (and therefore: no one learns from it) sort of cheating that goes on on online exams. If I allow more sophisticated "cheating" (like: "you may bring a 3 x 5 card with any notes or formulas on it you would like to use on the exam") that isn't really cheating - well, I remember when I was able to do that in college, and how many times I went through my notes to figure out what I would especially want and - well, they could have taken the card away from me at the door when I walked into the exam and I'd still have done fine; I turned out not to need it because it forced me to focus and study more.

Also, it's isolating and awful to teach to only three people out of a sixteen person class - and two of them are joining online. I read this article this morning and nodded a lot at it. A pull quote: "my Zoom sessions always leave me more drained, and feeling more alone, then when I entered them."

YES. I am often slightly reluctant walking IN to class, but a good day's teaching, with good interactions, energizes me. Teaching over Zoom, with its "shouting into the void" component, is just draining. It's hard to keep your energy up when there are no other people to reinforce you. Apparently some of my colleagues love it? I don't. I need to see that I'm getting through to people, I need students' questions and reactions and their contributions for it to "work."

 

And there are little annoyances: I do my office hours over Zoom (and if things are better in the fall? That's gonna be the first thing to change back to normal). There's no where to put the "obligatory" window that opens that doesn't block some other part of my desktop while I am working, so I have to see at least a corner of my stupid face the whole time my office hours are "open." And I have to move it sometimes when I've put it over some "button" I turn out to need.

I also confess I am getting to the point in the whole "masking in public" thing where I'd rather not leave the house than put it on. Or rather not leave my office if I can avoid it while on campus. Because it's just a whole thing. And I am tired. I mean, yes, I get it, NPIs are still our best defense and even those of us vaxxed probably should still wear them when around other people (and I need to obey the rules of my campus) because we're not 100% the vaccine shuts down transmission. But I am tired of wearing one. And I am tired of circumscribing where I go and what I do; things feel like more of an effort. (I had to get a mailing box yesterday and it felt like exploring the Arctic, going ALL THE WAY across town to the chain drugstore that I know sells them. (Part of it is just all the extra effort involved in course work; I seem to be extra tired and unmotivated come the end of the day)

I think I'm also feeling hard the losses - both recent and past. I've been dreaming every night about taking Amtrak somewhere; every dream ends with me either missing my train or somehow being prohibited from traveling. And I was thinking again this morning about my friend D. and some of the things he enjoyed and did and how those are gone now. And I get into these moods - and I suppose I bring this up in the next counseling session - where I feel very much like "we're all gonna die eventually, and what's more, eventually the universe is going to collapse in on itself, so why bother doing anything?" and yet, eventually, I can cycle into a "but I'm alive NOW" and enjoy the moment or whatever; it's just, Sunday afternoons when I'm alone, or that dark middle of the night when I wake up after an unsettling dream, or that afternoon when I get home at 5 pm and have to fix dinner but don't have the energy to nor the inspiration to make anything good, that those thoughts kind of haunt me. Maybe this is just an aftereffect of the interrupted mourning (interrupted by the pandemic) and the stress from the pandemic, and burnout from trying to be all things to all people in my teaching?

Gah. I probably need to either finish the binding on that one quilt tonight (so I feel like I've accomplished something) or give up temporarily and start the blanket I was talking about (so I have the fun of novelty). This is going to have to be a work-end; I have departmental scholarship applications to evaluate and three papers to technical edit for the journal I am a tech editor for....