And teaching today

 I nearly lost my stuff in front of my lab class today. Oh, it was nothing they had done; it was circumstances. For one thing, I'm just tired. It's the height of allergy season here, we've had very high winds (so: more allergens, plus dust, blown in). It's Thursday, my hardest teaching day of the week. I was dealing with some student e-mails where stuff was being asked of me that I could not - and should not have to - provide.

So anyway, I walked into the class (this is the one where I have 45 minutes between my last class and this, during which I need to eat lunch and skim over the information again to be prepared to teach it). Checked some of the materials. The wrong materials were out. (This semester, the TA they have setting up? Is not doing their job right, or the person supervising them isn't. It's supposedly not my circus or my monkeys so I shouldn't have to find out who it is and supervise them myself, but - this is about the third time something's been messed up).

So I told the class to hold tight, I'd get the right materials. I found them without too much trouble but I should not have to. (Also: there is a section of this same lab that meets on Wednesdays and I guess the person teaching it didn't care it was the wrong materials? Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one who really tries with this class)

Then I went to start the prelab and one of the students stopped me: "Professor, there's a **wasp**"

Yes, there was. More than one, in fact. It's an ongoing problem. I don't know how they get in to the building but they do. So I sighed, said "sit tight, I'll take care of it" and ran to the ecology prep room, got one of the insect nets, scooped them up, shook them outside.

THEN I was ready to teach.

But: the whiteboard pens were almost dead. I just stood there looking at the barely-legible mark in disbelief, and I admit something in me briefly snapped: not only do I have to fix preparator screw-ups, not only do I have to play pest control, but this benighted place can't even provide working whiteboard pens and this is EXACTLY why I said we needed proper chalkboards instead of whiteboards because you know when you're almost out of chalk but it's too easy to let-George-do-it on the pens being nearly out. 

And that's where I almost lost my cool. I was just briefly, flaringly, ANGRY - angry at the whole system. Angry at a world where we faced an existential threat for two years, are now facing a DIFFERENT one, and all the people with power pretty much act like we should just be back to normal by now, and it's still the same (expletive deleted) austerity we saw before that made things harder and worse, all for the want of a $3 whiteboard pen.

Once again, I sighed, and said "hold tight, I'll get a better pen" and went and stole a couple from the lab next door (the person who normally teaches in that lab is on maternity leave, teaching from home, with everyone doing virtual labs).

And then I taught.

But it is sad and bad and exhausting to have to dig through several layers of, pardon me, crap, before you can actually settle in and do the job you were hired for.

And yes, I'm dealing with the hitting-the-wall again, and I'm not the only one. I don't know if you'll be able to see this Chronicle of Higher ed article without a subscription, but the upshot of it is: everyone is tired. The students are showing unprecedented levels of disengagement and no one can tell for sure whether it's:

1. They got so used to the comfort of attending class online, in their jammies, they now expect such a thing. (And if so? So sad, too bad, for lab sciences, you have to do labs in a lab to get good at doing labs. And I also - from my own experience - find that students attending in person during the time I offered both in person and online as options, do better. Yes, online can be done well but passively sitting and listening to an online broadcast is not a good way to learn, and I don't have the brains or the energy to run two side-by-side but different ways of teaching - and even if I did, they wouldn't pay me double, which is what it would take for me to do it)

One professor interviewed noted: "Do students actually want to be in college? Had they gotten so used to online teaching that simply leaving their dorm rooms seems too hard right now? Did the accommodations that grew out of the pandemic — including flexible attendance policies and fluid deadlines — foster a belief that they could catch up later, but they don’t? Or is it that the world itself feels so out of control that students find it hard to care about their classes?"\

And yeah. I don't know. While I tend to believe "be kind, for everyone around you is fighting a hard battle you know nothing about," there is a point where....well, if you're being too lenient, people aren't learning. And that will have knock on effects later on - it's just putting off the eventual problem of "they're not learning" to hit at some future time.

2. They lost/never learned study skills during a couple crucial years. I see this in the intro students; some of them are just lost because they've not had to take notes during the last 2 years of high school, some of them barely took tests or wrote papers, and asking them to do that now seems like too much to them. My older students - the ones who were first-years in the before times - are handling the work a LOT better.

3. They think they can do other things as well as go to school. When we were doing the online option more heavily people would tell me "oh, I scheduled my work hours during the most profitable times and I'll watch the recordings of class later" (narrator voice: no, they did not, because the assignments I made during the class and the extra credit (even!) I offered went undone, so I knew that they weren't, in addition to low test scores)

4. Trauma. Maybe? I don't know. I know I have days it's really hard to come in here and care and do my job but somehow I force myself even if I know I'm not hitting on all cylinders. We've offered tons of help - from counseling, both in person and online, to group sessions, to "destress activities" to all of that. And I've been freaking generous about deadlines and allowing redos on things like quizzes and all that to the point where I'm worrying I'm not being rigorous enough for people who might be med-school bound. 

And another quotation from that article: "“Students seem to have lost their sense of connection with the university and university community, and their sense of purpose in attending,” said Stephanie Masson, who teaches English at Northwestern State University, in Louisiana. After two or more years of masking, they feel as if it’s not OK to get close and talk to someone. “It’s almost like they just prefer to sit in their little cone of silence.”"

5. They've given up. They feel like there's no future for them and they're just going through the motions because this is a place to be that's maybe slightly preferable to other places that they can be, but no place is actually a good place to be so they're just, you know, existing and stuff. And yeah, I kind of feel this one too - I've had a much harder time in recent months working up a great deal of enthusiasm and some days I do very much feel "why am I doing this, this is really pointless" but the thing is: I don't know any more what DOES have a point to it. In the worst of it, okay, maybe being in medicine had a point. Or delivering groceries to people who couldn't go out. But in the Forever Now....well, it's just harder to find a point to hang on to.

And yeah, I guess professors are feeling that, too - but in a lot of cases it DOES seem like we're expected to soldier on without much help - either if we really NEED help, we find it on our own (though I will say EAPs seem to be easier to get now than when I sought grief counseling in 2019). Or it's assumed we have loving families and friend groups to support us (narrator voice again: not all of us do, at least not to the extent we might need)

"Many professors note that students’ feelings of exhaustion and anxiety mirror their own, and that perhaps they feed off one another. “We’re as tired and burnt out as our students are,” wrote Shannon, of Grand Valley State, “but are expected (and do genuinely try) to be accommodating and empathetic with their struggles. It’s hard to find the line between being supportive of struggling students and just giving up entirely on academic rigor.”" Yup. And we're expected to be the adult in the room. I felt bad for nearly snapping (and muttering a bit about "no decent whiteboard pens") in class today because I know I'm supposed to be in charge, including in charge of myself. But there have been days where I was on the verge of tears, or on the verge of yelling, and just barely managed to hold it in.

Two last quotations from that article: “Our administration has shifted responsibility onto faculty more and more. I am now expected to be an instructor, career counselor, mental-health adviser, and personal coach.”
—Biology instructor at a California community college

“Who is caring for the faculty who are supposed to be doing all this extra stuff for students without extra (or even adequate) compensation?”
—Literature professor at a public university in North Carolina

Yup. Also a lot of the paperwork burden has shifted on to us, there are new online "portals" for stuff that we used to fill out forms or call an office for, where the online form-filling-out is much more arduous and counterintuitive and confusing, and every single site requires a Fort Knox level password and I can NEVER remember any of them so on sites I use infrequently, I have to reset them every time I use the site.

 

There's talk about "college needs to change" but the thing is? Don't ask the profs to change it, especially not while we continue to teach 4/4s and do our research and serve on committees. We're all exhausted, we're all nearly burnt out - and asking us to take the lead on "remaking" college? No. The thought of taking on yet another big project, with very little guidance, makes me want to cry, and if I had to change the way I did everything all over again? I'd rather just take early retirement, take the hit to my pension, and hope I have enough coming in to keep food on the table and pay my property taxes and utilities bills as inflation creeps upward.

 

I don't KNOW what the answer is. Maybe we just close colleges for most things? And only do the engineering/medical/law/architecture type stuff, and have everyone else apprentice? Of course that means I'd lose my job, but....I really don't know any more. I keep working because I can't do otherwise but some days I really do wonder what the point to what I'm doing is any more. And that's scary because I remember when I felt like what I did was meaningful and important - either I was lying to myself before, or things have changed in a scary new way.