Perhaps I'm past the need for "avoiding" burnout and well into the need for "coping with" or "recovering from" burnout. I had written a long and eloquent post about being burned out, but decided not to publish it. Heck, I may do the same with this one, too, because I just cannot stand myself in this mood and yet writing is the only way to bleed this poisonous humour out of myself.
In the writing of the last post, written in the midst of a depressing batch of papers and finals, with not only a huge batch behind me but more and more of the same stretching out ahead of me, I figured out what I hate most about grading. In grading, I come face-to-face with futility and hopelessness. Sometimes, I blame myself for their poor performance. "If I had done this, they would not fail," I think. "If I had only done that, they would not fail." Blaming myself, however, means that I can do something next time to improve my teaching and therefore improve their performance.
What I face right now is (not just) the self-blame. What I face right now is the overwhelming awareness that most of my students are not at all ready for college and that I have absolutely no idea how to make them ready, nor the energy to implement the ideas should I have them. On top of that, I am also coping with their chaotic lives, which makes my life more chaotic, and I am worn to a complete frazzle in doing so (although, at least I get paid to deal with their chaos, they have to pay for the privlege of this particular element within their chaos). I am pretty sure that most of them feel the same way about their abilities and chaos, too.
Every day, I feel like I am throwing myself against a huge boulder, trying to move it but ending up worn out and not having budged the boulder one inch. I feel like what I am doing for a living has no point. My book has a huge point; and I don't care if only the people who review it read it, the book still has an enormous point. The teaching seems to have less and less and less of a point with each semester. That's what disappears, even as I bounce back: that sense of doing something useful.
This huge cloud of futility hangs about me every day. I can't stand it and can't stand myself, yet I don't know how to dissipate it. The Gentleman Caller looks at my job and says that the big problem is that there is no balance to it; and he is right. He isn't talking about the kind of "work/life" balance around which these discussions usually revolve. He means that, if you put research, service, and teaching on a three-way scale (if such a device existed), the teaching tray would thunk immediately to the ground and scatter everything else across the room. Then, in the teaching, if you were to put the actual preparation for class and teaching about history against the grading and accommodating the perpetual string of crises, the grading and crises would do the same. That's some heavy-duty lead weights that make up those last two, and they drag me down.
Sometimes, I feel as if I am not a history teacher but a social worker. To be honest, 80-90% of the crises they bring to me are real. They bring me things like unplanned pregnancies that cause them to get thrown out of their homes, job losses, spousal job losses, deaths in the family, deployments in the family, foreclosures on homes, two babies a year apart who get the flu, husbands who do nothing to help with the family, the flu, muggings, sexual assault -- REAL problems, not just the whiny snowflakey cluelessness (although they are there, too).
I really do feel for these students; and, if you do the math in which you add together the high risk lives that these students live, the urgency of the semester, and the way that they overtax themselves out of necessity, then multiply by the number of students that we are assigned, well, you see a depressing sample of this Great Depression That Is Not A Depression. You also have a pretty huge caseload and absolutely no power or resources to do anything to alleviate their real problems. I do what I can: an extended deadline here, a make-up exam there. Still, it takes so much out of me and I end up being overworked in accommodating their crises, I end up being worn out with sympathy, and I end up feeling like an uncaring bitch trying to hide how frustrated and overwhelmed I feel.
All of which leads to burnout. It happens; but I honestly don't know how to avoid it nor how to alleviate it. How do I get my groove back? How do I deal with this social work aspect of the job? How do I not feel so overwhelmed and frustrated? How do I get back to approaching this lack of college preparation as a problem to be solved rather than a bonfire in which I am trapped or a sea in which I am drowning or a gigantic safe that is flattening me like a cartoon coyote?
I feel very alone in feeling this way, too, as if I'm expressing a gigantic character flaw that unentitles me to my job and my profession. After all, aren't teachers supposed to be superhuman, caring entirely about all students all the time and just love love LOVING our job so much that we don't care that we are every politician's strawman for the problems of the education system and love love LOVING our job so much that we don't care that our pay is cut and the resources for doing our job have disappeared? Hell, I have a job, so I should just shut up and be happy or get the hell out.
At least, that's what I hear in my head: that I am not entitled to my job because I feel so overwhelmed and so I should just quit and do something else and let someone more entitled who will love love LOVE it and not feel overwhelmed and burned out take my place. That just seems too harsh an assessment. That seems too wrong because, really, I feel more like I'm in a stressed marriage in which both parties do not want a divorce, and yet both parties do not want the marriage to continue as it is because they are so unhappy.
I don't want to not teach. I want to be able to teach history; but I don't want to feel like this for nine months out of the year, and I don't want to feel like an unprofessional, whining wimp who can't take real work. I don't want to BE an unprofessional, whining wimp who can't take real work. I don't want to walk around in this cloud of futility; and I don't want to keep losing these little pieces every semester and never get them back. I want to feel like I am doing something useful.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
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9 comments:
Thank you for this eloquent post which is a nearly perfect description of my own job-stress. You are absolutely not alone in these feelings.
Your likening a big chunk of your job to social work really struck me. I teach at a regional comprehensive. Most of our students are first generation at U but only one in three hundred have problems that are as striking as some of yours.
I would definitely look into what social supports & strategies work for social workers. A friend of mine is newly employed in that field and talks about how hard it is to find balance. I can't imagine having to do that on top of all the regular stresses and despairs of teaching.
Honestly, I love my job at some times of the year but right now I hate a big part of it. The grading adds an air of hopelessness as some students ask for credit for NOTHING or write things that are unsupportable. But I don't have to struggle with the rest of what you're shouldering.
Definitely, seeing if someone can give you some coping strategies for not becoming too involved with the chaos of the student lives. Not out of callousness, but out of necessity for your own survival as well as the reality of your job.
*hugs*
Hugs and candy.
You've probably mentioned it... but is there any chance of a sabbatical? The very fact that sabbaticals exist at all suggests to me that you're far, far from the only one feeling this way.
More hugs from more north than you, but no snow...
*patpatpat*
Thank you for this. All of a sudden I have a better idea of what my husband is going through. In my department, these students are the minority (1-8 a semester, depending on how many large sections I'm teaching). In his they're a much larger part. He is constantly burned out and desperate... if I try this or that, maybe they'll show up to class and stay awake and learn. It seems like they're all working 40 hour weeks and broke and sick and have sole custody of their two younger siblings at age 21, and so on.
Hang in there and I hope you get some rest in over break.
You are NOT alone in the burnout!!! Honestly, so many people I know (myself included) have or have had serious burnout. The job is pretty conducive to that, methinks.
(((((((((Clio))))))))))))
What you talk about early in your post is exactly what I have been going through, as chronicled in a series of posts over at my place this semester, in which the effort-to-results ratio seems to have been more out of balance than usual. On my good days, I'm able to focus on doing my utmost, and letting go of the results. But that's far from every day.
Oh boy, you are so not alone. Your load is enormous, so the burden is far greater than my own. Confronted with similar feelings, but blessed with time and help, I stepped back during a sabbatical and changed the way I teach. That has truly helped; by refocusing on the goals of teaching history, I let go some of the other things I had done for so long. I stopped trying to teach writing so much - that really helped with getting away from the crushing burden inherent in long bouts of excruciatingly bad written exams.
You are not alone. Accepting that assurance?
Yes, my job is like this, too, although some students don't have this situation and I don't teach a 5/5. But I am surprised at how many colleagues elsewhere are surprised at my description of the situation, and at how many colleagues at my institution say the answer is to just fail them and "set boundaries."
They bring me things like unplanned pregnancies that cause them to get thrown out of their homes, job losses, spousal job losses, deaths in the family, deployments in the family, foreclosures on homes, two babies a year apart who get the flu, husbands who do nothing to help with the family, the flu, muggings, sexual assault -- REAL problems, not just the whiny snowflakey cluelessness (although they are there, too).
Although they bring you these things, it is *not* your job to deal with these things, and you are *not* paid to do so. If they need social work services, then they should obtain those services from professional social workers. You are a professor, not a social worker, and your responsibility to deal with any of these non-academic issues is limited to referring students to the appropriate personnel at your institution.
It sounds heartless, but if you continue to internalize all this extra-academic stuff your students bring you, you *will* burn out and then you will be of no use as a professor at all. This is a matter of self-preservation akin to that employed by physicians: they deal with horrendous suffering and death every day, but if they internalize all of the pain, misery, and death experienced by their patients and patient families, they simply cannot function effectively as physicians. Accordingly, they adopt strategies to distance themselves emotionally from the "chaos" of sickness, injury, and death.
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