I have come to the realization that I hate teaching. I didn't used to, but it's become a nightmare for me. I spend my weekends preparing my classes, and put so much energy into doing what I think are fun/interesting activities, but:
1. I can't get students to put away their phones and laptops. I tell them put them away and out they come again 10 minutes later or they do it under their desks where they think I can't see them.
2. They seem bored no matter what I do. I've had them tell me explicitly don't "make them do anything, just lecture".. i.e. I'm supposed to do all the work in their learning.
3. More than half of my class is now international--not second gen, but first gen and they can barely string a sentence together in English, which is why I suppose many of them don't interact (with me). If I bring the pace and language down to their level the other half of the class gets annoyed.This is a bigger problem in higher education that is going to get worse (our university's response to recent budget cuts is to bring in more internationals).
4. They don't want to do homework, just get a 90+ for showing up. My colleagues all give out 90s and they hate me for making them work for 90s. This year I'm just not giving AF and handing out 90s but now I hate myself for it.
5. I don't teach majors or grad students, just undergrads who I don't see for more than two semesters at most of their careers, so I don't have the experience of watching them develop, form bonds with any of them, etc. I just show up, teach, and go home and cry.
6. The inability to follow clear directions or remember what I tell them 5 minutes later.
7. Constant accommodations now for anyone with anything from a sprained finger to mild anxiety, and increasing numbers declaring they are depressed and in crisis.
I'm struggling with severe depression and I'd like to think this is "just me" and it's all in my head, and some of it is but clearly most of it is not (grade inflation, increasing int'l student #s, not wanting to do the homework). I used to find teaching energizing but now it just drains me
I'm trying to find something else I can do with my life, and have applied for work outside academia, but even cutting my pay in half I can't find anything suitable.
help?
I have a lot I can say about this, but I will probably cough it up in small chunks rather than deluge you with it all in one shot. Probably most if not all of us have been exactly where you are now in regards to how we feel about teaching. Some initial thoughts:
1. Yes, many incoming undergraduates -- both domestic and international -- expect college to be nothing but eight semesters of sitting silently in a classroom and regurgitating facts that are forgotten as quickly as they are memorized. You might want to explicitly inform students, in the syllabus and in class, that your courses don't work that way. Then reinforce the point with a few simple graded assignments early in the semester. The students who don't complete the assignments, or who do badly on them, can be warned that it is probably in their interest to withdraw. I have adopted open-book quizzes on syllabi for all my courses, auto-graded by LMS, as one component of this strategy. A student who can't be bothered to read the syllabus to respond to a handful of questions that count toward the final course grade has no interest in learning and I don't want that person in my class.
2. Look for ways to simplify tasks so that you are doing less of the heavy lifting. For example, I still cannot understand why so many college instructors assign the un-scaffolded 20-page research paper that is due at the end of the semester. The effect on student learning is small to non-existent, and grading garbage papers written the night before they are due (or trying to identify which were plagiarized) is a nightmare.
3. Do you have a CTL or instructional designers on campus? They are often wonderful resources.
4. There are some online "tips and tricks for teaching" venues that I've found quite helpful. One is the Jedi Mind Trick thread here/on the CHE fora. Another one is http://activelearningps.com/ (http://activelearningps.com/). Your professional disciplinary association probably has a journal on teaching, and there are probably teaching-oriented email listservs in your field also.
Edited to add: don't believe the "teaching is a calling" hype. It's a job like any other, with pleasant and unpleasant aspects. Figuring out how to minimize the latter and maximize the former goes a long way toward making the job at least bearable.
I'm in a pretty similar situation at my new institution (apart from 1 and 7), and it's really demoralizing. My only hope is that this is mostly just what summer teaching here is like, and that the regular semester will be better. Even my scaffolded essay assignment (it's broken into three parts) is falling apart because (almost) nobody read the thing their essay is supposed to be based on, and (almost) nobody can follow my instructions, even with extensive peer feedback on their work.
There's a lot I can't change now, mid-semester, but which I'm going to have to change for future iterations. Basic things like reading quizzes/responses, because this kind of class, on this subject, just can't work properly if literally nobody apart from me has done the reading. Finding an effective way to force compliance on that front will make a huge difference to everything else, I think. I'm also going to refrain from posting slides until and unless they demonstrate that they've done the reading, because my slides are nothing like a substitute for the reading. They're just a complement, and have minimal information on them.
One thing that has worked relatively well for getting them talking--where group work and other techniques have failed miserably--has been having them give presentations, either solo or in groups at the beginning of class, with the aim of connecting a real-world case to our topic for the day, and of raising questions for group discussion. I'll need to rejig them for the future, with stricter (and more basic) criteria, but the basic idea seems to be working. It's the one thing I look forward to each day, because it gives me 1/3 hours when I don't have to pull everyone's teeth.
In the meantime, we just have to find our rewards elsewhere.
I became bored with teaching and moved into an administrative role. More money but a 12-month assignment instead of a 10-month assignment, and less time flexibility.
Still, I get to flex my brain in new ways and leverage the network within the college I have already built. So it has been a good move for me, personally.
People ask me if I miss teaching. Well, I miss students, but I don't miss grading. Would I go back? I don't know. I like what I am doing now.
Maybe a break is what you need?
Quote from: pedanticromantic on May 26, 2019, 07:04:23 AM
I have come to the realization that I hate teaching. I didn't used to, but it's become a nightmare for me. I spend my weekends preparing my classes, and put so much energy into doing what I think are fun/interesting activities, but:
...
I'm struggling with severe depression and I'd like to think this is "just me" and it's all in my head, and some of it is but clearly most of it is not (grade inflation, increasing int'l student #s, not wanting to do the homework). I used to find teaching energizing but now it just drains me
Your classes sound very demoralizing. However, I recommend against making major decisions while depressed. One's viewpoint can be skewed. Things that seem catastrophic now can become manageable annoyances when one isn't depressed. Can you put less of your energy into teaching and more into working on your mental health? That's more important than a bunch of students who don't care. I wish you a swift recovery.
Another comment: our students, other than a few very rare exceptions, are not like us. While many of us were happy, or at least willing, to delve into the minutiae of pretty much any subject, our students are only concerned with doing the bare minimum that they believe is needed to earn a particular course grade. Any task that does not obviously affect the course grade is believed to be irrelevant. For example, students will not read assignments prior to class unless they are regularly tested on or forced to apply the information contained in what they were supposed to have read. The testing or application has to count toward the final course grade. So this might lead to something like a simple 5-minute auto-graded quiz on the LMS taken at the beginning of every class, or once a week. Even if the quizzes are worth only 5 or 10 percent of the final course grade, students will have a clear incentive to read material as it is scheduled in the syllabus.
I wish this principle had been explained to me in graduate school. It took me three years of teaching part-time and almost two years of teaching full-time to figure it out.
Quote from: spork on May 27, 2019, 03:04:42 AM
Another comment: our students, other than a few very rare exceptions, are not like us. While many of us were happy, or at least willing, to delve into the minutiae of pretty much any subject, our students are only concerned with doing the bare minimum that they believe is needed to earn a particular course grade. Any task that does not obviously affect the course grade is believed to be irrelevant. For example, students will not read assignments prior to class unless they are regularly tested on or forced to apply the information contained in what they were supposed to have read. The testing or application has to count toward the final course grade. So this might lead to something like a simple 5-minute auto-graded quiz on the LMS taken at the beginning of every class, or once a week. Even if the quizzes are worth only 5 or 10 percent of the final course grade, students will have a clear incentive to read material as it is scheduled in the syllabus.
I wish this principle had been explained to me in graduate school. It took me three years of teaching part-time and almost two years of teaching full-time to figure it out.
Just to put this in perspective, when I was in first year chemistry assignments were optional and didn't count in the final grade. I never did a single one of them, and wound up with an A- anyway. So I can't completely complain about "these kids nowdays" since I can relate. (And that was 4 decades ago!)
Quote from: spork on May 27, 2019, 03:04:42 AM
Another comment: our students, other than a few very rare exceptions, are not like us. While many of us were happy, or at least willing, to delve into the minutiae of pretty much any subject, our students are only concerned with doing the bare minimum that they believe is needed to earn a particular course grade. Any task that does not obviously affect the course grade is believed to be irrelevant. For example, students will not read assignments prior to class unless they are regularly tested on or forced to apply the information contained in what they were supposed to have read. The testing or application has to count toward the final course grade. So this might lead to something like a simple 5-minute auto-graded quiz on the LMS taken at the beginning of every class, or once a week. Even if the quizzes are worth only 5 or 10 percent of the final course grade, students will have a clear incentive to read material as it is scheduled in the syllabus.
I wish this principle had been explained to me in graduate school. It took me three years of teaching part-time and almost two years of teaching full-time to figure it out.
The level of cynicism and willingness to game the system is definitely upsetting to those of us raised to believe in the value of knowledge for its own sake and to accept the possibility that we might someday find use for things we learned that weren't immediately or apparently relevant to our own (very limited, one now sees) daily life.
Getting people to see the wider, longer, higher dimensions of life is one way to help shift that viewpoint, but if they won't even look up to the white/black/chalkboard/filmscreen from their (tiny, limited, reassuringly hand-sized) phones, it's a hard stretch.
Mice and giraffes have the same number of vertebrae, but one had to stretch for food...
M.
OP - you sound "burned out." Being burned out on teaching is understandable, especially if you have been expending a lot of physical, mental, and emotional energy on your classes with very little return on the investment.
After the initial excitement of being in my own classroom, the hard work of prepping classes the first time, and the wide-eyed optimism of trying all those fun techniques to make learning engaging, I "burned out" on teaching, too. I was shocked by the students' apathy, saddened that they seemed bored instead of engaged no matter what I tried, and exhausted from the constant prepping and grading (also the lack of support from my "customer-service" oriented university was also dispiriting). I began to dread the classroom and "hate teaching."
However, I know that I have really enjoyed teaching in the past. So, what was new? That's when I realized that I was "burned out" and that I could take steps to feel better.
Here is what I did:
(Caveat: I do not have depression, so taking these steps on my own helped me feel better. If I were depressed, I would have sought help from a therapist or other mental health professional)
1. I realized that I was not alone. Being "burned out" happens to even the greatest, most dynamic teachers. Therefore, I looked for resources for how to overcome it. Resources that I found especially helpful were blogs and YouTube videos from actual teachers sharing their experiences with burn out. I also talked to trusted co-workers and teacher friends who also experienced burn out. This gave me some strategies to try and the reassurance that I could feel better.
2. I took a fresh look at my teaching - the actual work of it. I asked: Where was I investing more energy than the students? For example, I over-prepared for class, spending hours making handouts, slides, etc. Then, the students zoned out in class. Also, I was clearly spending waaaaaaayyyyy too much time grading papers. I spent a lot of time reading papers and providing lengthy feedback. Students ignored the feedback, which increased my frustration. I decided to streamline both my preparation for class and my grading process. I realized I was trying to be a "great" teacher, but going about it the wrong way. Now, I try to focus on just the most important elements of prepping and grading while also having a life outside the classroom. I think that I am a much more efficient teacher and a better teacher all at the same time.
3. I evaluated my emotions. I discovered that I was caring more than the students about everything! I cared about the course content more; I cared about the discussions more; I cared about the assignments more; I cared about their grades more. Moreover, a lot of my course adjustments were actually intended to make them care more. That meant that I reacted strongly to their apathy; I took it personally! I realized that I couldn't take it personally. I recognized that I had to respect that the students have their own priorities and I can't make them care about this one class. Now, I focus on helping them learn the course content, not necessarily care about it. I offer opportunities for them to learn and if they choose not to, well...that choice is theirs to make. For example, I no longer worry over the students who don't hand in assignments. I do due diligence by reminding them of the late policy and offering extra help, but I don't stay awake at night worrying over them. If they don't hand it in, then I record the zero and move on.
Overall, I have made a commitment to my own physical, mental, and emotional health. I make a conscious effort to have fun while teaching and to have a more balanced life. So far it has worked for me, but it is not always easy. Beating burn out definitely takes constant effort!
(OP here)
Thanks for the thoughts. I think I have already cut a lot of corners on my teaching, particularly this past year, but it has shown in my evaluations, which dropped significantly last semester.
I am definitely burnt out, and not sure how to deal with it--I am teaching summer semester and won't get a break until next January.
I'm worried if I cut too many more corners on feedback/grading or preparation that my evaluations will continue to be low and it will affect my income and promotion (I'll be up for full next year).
So, I'm half trying not to care, and half trying to do the best job I can do, and trying to balance both and getting neither right!
Any recommendations for help coping with burnout would be useful, thank you.
Hi pedanticromantic,
First, I am so sorry that you are going through this. You are depressed, burnt out, and struggling. You have mentioned elsewhere that you have been seeing a doctor, and that's really important. All of the usual advice like finding something pleasurable (even if it's a little thing) is also important. I find that particular songs can distract me for at least a little while.
In more specific terms about teaching and burn out, you might like Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach. (I burst into tears while reading some parts of it). Stephen Brookfield has also talked about teaching and clinical depression. Our profession often valorizes burn out. That's just wrong. I hope you find some ways to sustain yourself so that you can return to flourishing, but if you don't feel OK, that's OK. Morden
Quote from: pedanticromantic on May 27, 2019, 09:31:42 AM
(OP here)
Thanks for the thoughts. I think I have already cut a lot of corners on my teaching, particularly this past year, but it has shown in my evaluations, which dropped significantly last semester.
I am definitely burnt out, and not sure how to deal with it--I am teaching summer semester and won't get a break until next January.
I'm worried if I cut too many more corners on feedback/grading or preparation that my evaluations will continue to be low and it will affect my income and promotion (I'll be up for full next year).
So, I'm half trying not to care, and half trying to do the best job I can do, and trying to balance both and getting neither right!
Any recommendations for help coping with burnout would be useful, thank you.
1. It might be worth seeing if you could find ways to teach some different kind of courses. I teach a lot of intro and gen-ed courses too, but I'm also always teaching an upper level course too and it really helps in terms of getting to strech different teaching muscles.
2. I think you'll do better if you remember that the issue is not really the students, but how you are feeling about them. Students are always basically the same. Yeah, phones are annoying, maybe students are a little more careerist than they used to be, but it really isn't dramatically different. You can find academics bemoaning the lack of interest students show in the material a long way back in history. It is basically a feature of the job. That isn't to say you can't break through it sometimes, or find students who show a real interest, or get some students to care about the material.
3. Cutting too many corners can get demoralizing. I think the trick is figuring out how to maximize the parts of the job you value and minimize the parts you don't. You can't get rid of grading but you might be able to find ways to grade more interesting things as some people have suggested upthread. Maybe you can figure out how to do more of whatever you like most in the classroom in other ways?
Quote from: pedanticromantic on May 27, 2019, 09:31:42 AM
I am definitely burnt out, and not sure how to deal with it--I am teaching summer semester and won't get a break until next January.
...
Any recommendations for help coping with burnout would be useful, thank you.
Lots of good advice in prior posts.
I'll add that between-semester-breaks/summer breaks from teaching can help a great deal. Since you're teaching this summer and note you won't have a break until January, try to keep at least your weekends/holidays free of teaching work.
I strongly recommend you put some effort into engaging with the broader community. That could be a cooking class, a weekly book club, or anything else that is not directly related to your job, but will get you more people who have a different perspective on what a good life means. Teaching can be all-consuming while you're doing it. I know that I've had better luck dealing with bad teaching situations when I had more things in my life that helped dilute the unpleasant teaching aspects.
Quote from: pedanticromantic on May 26, 2019, 07:04:23 AM
5. I don't teach majors or grad students, just undergrads who I don't see for more than two semesters at most of their careers, so I don't have the experience of watching them develop, form bonds with any of them, etc. I just show up, teach, and go home and cry.
I found that greatly reducing the amount of effort I put into courses where I already had good enough prep and putting some of that effort into engaging with students outside the classroom helped improve my tolerance for other items you listed. Being advisor to student groups where our efforts were aligned was a good experience for me. Having students speak with me as a more knowledgable person who could help tended to make me more patient with why students were box checkers in the classroom.
Another thing that helped me was to divert some of the energy into gaining new skills and talking with other people on campus about their jobs that weren't teaching. Transitioning to administrator where far less of my effort was wasted trying to get students to take their own education seriously was a good move for me. Faculty and staff also won't necessarily follow instructions or meet deadlines, but the experience wasn't nearly the same as several classrooms full of students who were actively hindering their own education.
I encourage you to make a longer term plan to get out and start working now on concrete skills and networking that will help you make the change as you continue to apply out. I found that cutting corners to do an inadequate teaching job was personally distasteful because it was wrong, but scaling back on my energy for new prep on repeat courses to instead practice an interesting new skill didn't leave me feeling skeezy. I found that applying many of the Humane Course Policies for lowering my grading effort by using rubrics with just checkmarks in standard columns along with one line of personalized feedback and going very old school with "hand in something for full credit, but you are responsible for checking the work for accuracy using the answer key I provide before the work is due" helped a lot with my feelings towards students.
The outside engagement with community members who aren't academics may also help provide some ideas on new skills to practice that can help you get a very different type of job. If the community is large enough, then you may also get leads on job openings that will never be advertised because they can be filled by network leads. One of the saddest realizations is how many jobs are never advertised, but instead go to someone's best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who happens to be looking for a job and has some reasonable qualifications.
In summary, put some thought into what you owe students who are trusting you to have a class worth having so you can feel good that you've met your obligation for anyone who is trying. However, instead of trying to make students care more, put that energy into your own skills and interacting with humans who aren't in your classroom.
In the promotion package, it would be useful to be able to write that you have found that your old teaching technique wasn't working as well as you liked, so you have recently started trying some new things. While they are looking good (give some details) the novelty is hurting some of the student evaluations.
That's going to be an easier narrative to support that what you are looking at now. And it is one that requires only a modest effort, but it should happen in the next couple semesters.
There's lots of good advice in this thread. Two other suggestions:
1) If you can't take a long break until January, at least weekend break. I've found that leaving town for 3-4 days and doing absolutely nothing work-related during this time is an excellent mental reset.
2) What are your colleagues who are considered to be effective instructors (by campus reputation) doing in their classes? Try to see if you can observe them teach or talk to them. At one of my previous jobs, I remember being genuinely startled when I covered a well-respected senior colleague's class for a day and discovered that they had significantly fewer assignments and shorter rubrics than I did.
I've been burned out at various points in my career, so I empathize with your situation!
Lots of great advice here.
One thing I've found really helps with the feelings of despair about students is to better understand where they're coming from. It's frustrating to teach international students whose English skills aren't what they need to be to take your class, but I've found it's easier when I have a sense of their backgrounds, why they're studying in an English-speaking country, and how hard it is to undertake this kind of work in a foreign language. I'm in awe of the ones who do it successfully, and I can imagine how horrible and lost I'd feel if I were trying desperately to take classes in Chinese, or even Portuguese or German, maybe with my family's whole life savings riding on the outcome.
Similarly, although grade-grubbing students are always distasteful, the increase in this kind of behavior is surely a reflection of the increasingly precarious and debt-laden lives they're graduating into, and their belief (correct or not) that these grades might be the difference between sinking or swimming in a world that is very hostile to young graduates.
That kind of empathy doesn't solve the pedagogical problems—let alone the problems of your burnout and depression—but it gives me more patience with the students. It also makes me feel like the students and I share a common cause: in different ways, both of your lives are being made much harder, maybe impossible, but the larger global work and education environments that we're operating within.
I don't see how it helps to replace despair about the students with despair for the students.
I think feeling genuine sympathy for the students helps avert resentment. We're all muddling through this together.
Although I was a smart cookie and loved to read, I myself was an indifferent student in college, because I didn't have a clue how to manage my time, I was very distractable, and I was always getting myself in time-consuming interpersonal/romantic situations that seemed like high melodrama to me then, though now I see they were just regular old teenage stuff. I turned in papers late — very late! — I doodled through entire sets of lectures, I took a whole course in which I only showed up for exams. I failed several courses. I was just really confused and immature. By and large my professors were encouraging rather than punitive, though they often did give me the grades I deserved (low ones). It was a miracle I got into grad school. But in grad school I suddenly grew up and all of a sudden I was studious and on the ball and I turned it all around.
So I try to remember that my own students are under dozens of kinds of pressures I can't see, and a lackluster performance in my class doesn't mean anything larger. And maybe something I say will stick with them. I think kindness always improves things, and though I don't think kindness is my default mode, I am trying to practice it deliberately. That keeps me from thinking the whole thing is quite such a big waste of time. As Anne Lamott says, "We're all just walking each other home."
Quote from: quasihumanist on June 07, 2019, 08:01:12 PM
I don't see how it helps to replace despair about the students with despair for the students.
I don't have to feel despair for the students by acknowledging that their lives are complicated in ways that have nothing to do with my class. Hegemony goes with kindness; I'm in engineering so I tended to go with the practicality of gauging how much of my time/energy/investment will help students and how much is up to the students to step up so my time/energy/investment is better spent on something that matters to me.
I have gained a lot of insight over the years from our community college colleagues who tend to be great at identifying when the professor needs to step up to teach the students they have and when more effort by the professor won't fix the situation. Being able to disengage mentally after having done one's part is an important part of being a team player, especially when it's the rest of the team that has to step up.
There is a great deal of excellent advice here already, so I'm just going to throw in one small morsel. From an operant conditioning viewpoint (oh stop groaning) it appears that a formerly positive reinforcer/reward (interacting with students) has become somewhat of a punishment. Is there some talent or skill you have that you could teach on a volunteer basis -- knitting, cooking, vegetable gardening, softball, or even English/literacy? If you were teaching something you really like to people who really want to learn it, perhaps the reward of teaching would return. It might also provide a little perspective, a success to counterbalance the unpleasantness, so to speak.
Best wishes to you in finding a more comfortable daily life.
I, too, had a bad case of burnout. One contributor to that was grading. I hate grading and find it very demoralizing.
One thing that marginally helped was realizing that I can provide feedback without having to give a grade. In one of my classes, groups of students present nearly every class and I give them oral feedback on both delivery & content, but no grade. I find it much more rewarding, and I notice a real improvement in their performances as the semester progresses.
That and I am counting the semesters until I go on sabbatical....
Checking in--pedanticromantic, how are you doing?
(Being a musician, I keep thinking of your moniker as a new kind of postmodern scale...with lots of carefully-reasoned half-steps...)
;--}
M.
@Mamselle
Yes, my scale goes flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat flat.
I'm looking forward to a week at a conference this summer which will have to serve as a "vacation"... I will likely skip most/all of the other papers and just present and then take a few days to rest.
I'm not managing the workload any better. I keep saying "no", but still feel like I'm spending all day every day, including weekends, just trying to clear things off the never-ending plate. I'm constantly thinking "I just need to get through this next project then I'll have more time" but it never seems to come.
I have picked up an old hobby again and it's given me an hour a day to do something else. I'm trying to summon energy to get some exercise in.
So, thank you for checking in. Can't say things are better, but not any worse.
Just remember that Db is also C#!
Good to hear back; the PA thread has been helpful to people in some cases; I get over there less often than I should, but it's good for having company with others who are flat-out (oops, soorry, no pun intended--I don't think!) with sixty missions to be done in fifty minutes every hour.
Hobby and exercise time sound very good.
If you were here in town with me I'd invite you to the outdoor folkdance tonight (if it stays clear and the pavement is dry....interthreadual reference, there)...!
Equilibration is still a positive use of energy.
M.