My Career ~ Part 2

I don’t remember when I started looking into taking better care of myself at work. There was a time I was asking other teachers how they possibly got all the papers graded. I remember asking if they were able to work 40 hours a week when I was working around 45 or more hours not including breaks or lunch. They would say that they worked over 40 hours some weeks and under on others—depending on whether they had papers to grade that week.

I just could not figure it out. I always worked the 45+ hours. As soon as papers were graded, I would have more planning to do. I could never get grading (or responding to student writing) to less than 15 minutes a paper, some papers took 30-45 minutes. Multiply that by let’s just say 80 students, that’s 4 classes with 8 students having dropped or some smaller classes (and say I had reassignment time for the last class), that’s 20 hours just on grading. I was in class 15 hours a week and I went to meetings and was on at least one committee a semester. Now, I didn’t have a set of papers every week; I could take 2 weeks to get those 80 papers responded to or I’d stagger the papers in terms of due dates. No matter what, though, I could not get my work done with the amount of time I was able to put in.

I never figured out how to get all the work done in the time I wanted to have it done. I learned now that I am pretty detail-oriented, I struggle to skim over things and want to get into the nitty gritty. I also want to connect with students, email each of them back, and work with them individually. Over these years, I’ve made it through. I’ve cut corners—shortened assignments, etc.

It hasn’t felt good that I shortened assignments, and I still couldn’t get past the “what’s wrong with me” that I can’t get this done.

One thing that may have contributed to my frustration is my perfectionism. I used to never think I was a perfectionist because I wasn’t perfect. Perfection to me today, though, is my belief that I need to be the best teacher. Anything less than what I was doing wasn’t “ethical in my mind. For example: is it ethical to spend less than 15 min responding to a paper? Is it ok to not think through an assignment so that it fits in the sequence of assignments? Is it really fair to the student to not type up a full response to a paper with positives and suggestions. I struggled to accept that different teachers can do things differently and that is ok because it works for them. My expectations for myself and my inability to meet them certainly contributed to my struggle.

Focusing on another angle . . . I was always pretty happy with my salary. I could buy new work clothes each year, I bought a house after working full time for 3 ½ years. (I saved enough for the down payment). Then, a few years after that, I needed a car and bought a new one. I know now that my college paid less than all the surrounding colleges. I eventually wanted to make more so I could save more for retirement. However, for a good amount of time, when only focusing on the present (and not on saving for retirement), I was pretty satisfied.

I also started taking summers off after my first year as a full-time tenure track employee. I did some part time work with kids (at my college in a kids’ summer program) and volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club. Beyond that, though, I had a good amount of time off work.

First having summers and spring breaks off was hard. I would want time off work, but I also worked during breaks. I didn’t know how to fill and structure my time without work. I struggled with loneliness quite a bit, but I also didn’t have a ton of friends who were off during the summer.

Over the years, I learned I needed some structure and a lot of freedom over the summers. I learned about what I liked to do and summers became more enjoyable. I found a partner who started living with me in 2010. Then, we adopted our first dog in 2014. Having someone and a pet at home makes it a lot less lonely.

More about my career journey to come!

Peace Out (and In),

Julie