"Are You Tired? You Look Tired!"; Or, "Why Aren't You Acting Like My Mom?"

If you read any of my posts, you know that I am thinking a lot about how to balance my love of teaching and the slippery slope that love falls into when I lose myself in their demands.  I'm sensitive to their feedback, worry about each of them, and do, in many ways, feel like their mom. And, as I noted in my last "rant" post, I do this willingly, and the payback is that teaching truly fuels me.

However, this past year's wealth of disasters--natural, political, and otherwise--has worn me (and many of you, and many of my students) very thin.  We're all keeping our heads just above (sometimes below) water, just treading, trying to anticipate when we'll have to take a deep breath to survive the next wave.  I can't help but feel obliged to help all my students do the same, and that sense of obligation is what's really going to drown me.

So, I've started taking some self-protection measures.  Dear reader, do not be mistaken that these are signs that I don't continue to absolutely adore my students and teaching.  I just want to be sure I can keep doing this for the long haul.  Ok, here it goes.  Some confessions:

1. Make it a goal to get worse student evaluations.  Did I just hear you gasp?  It's not that I could actually handle it if they were worse.  It would be like a sword in my heart, to be sure!  But it's a trick I play on myself to release myself of some of the minutae of the worries I have about them.  Being a hair less beholden to those evaluations in my approach to daily teaching life is probably healthy, right?

2. Ask for less feedback from students.  Is that another gasp?  I know, I'm totally losing my marbles.  I have always been one of those earnest professors that asks for feedback at every turn and then implements the feedback, and I have benefitted immensely from students participating in shaping the classes with me, and by them appreciating the transparency of my pedagogy.  I will still solicit feedback, not to worry.  But I am overwhelmed by it.  I'm frazzled, I'm losing my bandwidth to process all of the concerns. I feel like saying, "I'm doing the best I can. Give me a break." Sign of burnout? Yes.  I'll get back on the feedback wagon, but I'm just taking a short hiatus while I tread water.  Also, asking for feedback is weird: I'm getting all kinds of requests to do and solve problems that are not within my purview, and I worry I'm setting students up for expecting that I can solve these problems.  I'll fix this issue at some point, but I think I must have conveyed the message somewhere along the line that my teaching will resolve all their existential crises.  Maybe it's because my teaching seems to be causing all of their existential crises....  Oops.

3. Balance all the ways I identify as a teacher with realizing I'm also other things.  I love Rebecca Solnit's chapter in A Paradise Built in Hell, "Dorothy Day's Other Loves." It makes me cry. I have other loves besides this vocation, even though I love it.  I just have to spend some time remembering what those other loves are.  And I need to retreat into those loves-- just a little bit-- to remember how to breathe.

4. Get told I look tired by my students a lot more.  This one is a double-edged sword, and I can't say I set out with it as an explicit goal.  However, since I started taking some of these protective measures, I am spending less energy and time tripping over myself trying to perform my profound love for students.  When I see them, I don't just immediately light up and gush all over them like I used to.  I don't ask them, at every turn, like I used to, how they are and what's going on in their lives and how can I help?  I'm not acting like a customer service agent; I'm just sometimes thinking about other things like whether I have time to write, or what I want to make for dinner, or what to ask my kids about their day when I see them, or what I was doing on 9/11/01, or whether I should call my grandma, or whether "misplaced" is the right word to describe attention to climate change in the context of Harvey and Irma, or... This isn't about distraction, or denial.  I still love my students and get a lot of juice from them in return for this expenditure of brainpower on them.  But I am just slowing down, a la The Slow Professor, which means I'm just not bursting out of my seams all the time to please. I don't think this is tragic or that this is a sign that I am not absolutely in love with my students and profession anymore. On the contrary, I think it's something akin to sustaining this love.

But you're right, when I hear "you look tired, are you tired?", as I do more and more these days, what I'm really hearing is "why aren't you acting like my mother?"  Also, isn't there a rule that you're not supposed to comment on how a person looks?

Or maybe I really am just tired.