I hate teaching.

[pepsi_alum]

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!

[saladdays]

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.

[quasihumanist]

I don't see how it helps to replace despair about the students with despair for the students.

[Hegemony]

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."

[polly_mer]

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.

[miss jane marple]

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.

[summers_off]

 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....

[mamselle]

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.

[pedanticromantic]

@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. 

[mamselle]

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.