Professor Sharon

100 Days Project – Day 9 – 8:23 p.m.

The long days of teaching are certainly that, aren’t they?  Long days.  I just took a quick look around the web for  work/life balance information for teachers.  Quite a lot is out there, even some interesting self-assessments with accompanying suggestions for readings or how to seek support.  Almost too much – you could get stressed out trying to figure out what is the best article and information to read!

I did some good research around the issue of burnout for my doctoral research and although it’s about 6 years old, I recall enough of it to know the issues haven’t changed much.  In fact, I do wonder if the threat of burn-out isn’t even worse given the economic challenges that more and more of us face – but that’s for another blogger to cover.

What I was reflecting upon today is the huge prioritizing act I must do to put my teaching first.  I’m decent at it when I’m at home.  I work hard not to grade papers or prep every single night at home; this means really being efficient during the hours I have at school.  But it’s challenging.  What is especially challenging is  balancing the requirements of my chair duties with teaching with community service expectations and more.  Sometimes the meetings are endless and inefficient – I suppose these are the ones that try me the most – as sometimes, okay, maybe more than sometimes, meetings have inefficient leaders.  And, in this world of email, attachments, learning platforms, etc. I do think there is a fair share of material that can be discussed asynchronously via some electronic format.  But I suppose again that’s another blogger’s sound bite to chew apart!

Teaching four classes today was invigorating, and exciting, and add any other labels you can think of in the arena of providing joy and pleasure in one’s work.  However, and but, I have to prepared in order to have efficient, interesting, involved learning experiences for those students.  And preparation takes time.  As a colleague said to me today, it’s early, we’re still organizing and getting rhythms.   I would really be content to do nothing but prep and teach classes – but, again the but, there’s this requirement for other moments that support the running of the learning environment for the student.  And, I do think this is important.  I still have the goal of getting some reading and reflection done around particular books and articles I want to spend some effort on, and I’ll get there.  This week is about relearning how to work in a restricted number of hours per day:  today I am thinking about how to prioritize.