April 2007 Archives

Burn out?

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I haven't written much here on Writing Instructor of late.  Perhaps that is reflective of a general problem.  I am finding teaching harder and harder to do, just to drag my sorry ass into the classroom. Perhaps that has to do with my current trials and tribulations on the personal front.  Death of a mother, pneumonia and also sorts of other assorted crap.

But I think it has to do also with my having taught writing as my primary mode of income since 1973. That's over 30 years.

I may have written about this elsewhere, but I was walking from the parking lot with a senate faculty person from the English Department.   We were both talking about how long we had been working at UCSB.  And when I mentioned how long I had been teaching writing, he said something like, OMG, I don't know how you stood it.

He's a good guy and I don't think he meant it like I interpreted it, as: "OMG you have wasted your whole life doing rat shit work in the salt mines." Or something like that.

That's the general perception though.  Teaching writing, as I teach it, 8 classes a year, one writing class after the other, with no sabatticals or any significant breaks, over and over is perceived, relative to the life of the true professor teaching 4 classes of lit a year and making twice as much money, as nearly slave labor, not to mention the waste of a life.

How have I stood it so long?  This life of living hell.  Well, possibly because relative to the jobs of people in the working class from which I hail, the job I have isn't so bad.  I have a hell of a lot of flex time in my week, and that's good for me personally.  I need it.  I don't do heavy lifting or have to hang out with toxic waste or risk having a block dropped on my head. 

But this is a complex topic.  Perhaps I should write something on teacher "burn out." 

 

 

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About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from April 2007 listed from newest to oldest.

March 2007 is the previous archive.

May 2007 is the next archive.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.