Tuesday, September 21, 2004

 

Conferences + Teaching = Exhaustion

Three hours of conferences. Three hours (ok, only 2 hours and 45 minutes) of teaching. My brain is fried, and I've got to be back at school at 9 AM for three more hours of conferences. I know that this is good for my freshmen (I will only go to these lengths for them), but it is... draining. I hate it when sound pedagogy translates into self-flagellation. It just sucks.

In other news, I haven't really gotten started on my job search materials. I'm wondering whether I'm procrastinating as a way of not letting myself take the risk of going on the market? The whole thing is just horrifying to me in a way that I can't even articulate to myself yet. I'm just so afraid that nobody will like me (because I'm an asshole).

The teaching continues to go amazingly this semester, though, especially in my non-freshmen classes. Not that the freshmen classes are going badly, but they're so busy just trying to figure out how to be in college that they don't really believe that they are learning anything yet, and so they aren't exactly... engaged all of the time. But in my other classes, well, I'm feeling very, very good. I got my first set of papers in one of them tonight, though, and so we'll see if I still believe that after reading them. Oh god. I have to grade in addition to all of this conference misery. I hate this. And I have two committee meetings at the end of the week, for committees I really wanted to be assigned to but that promise to be huge time-sucks (curriculum, strategic planning). So yes. I guess what I'm saying is that the semester is underway, and I'm at that midpoint where I feel completely overwhelmed and I do not see the light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps I shall drink some wine tonight and call long-distance friends on the phone, as the only positive benefit of conference week is that I have no prep for Monday/Wednesday/Friday.

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