…and neither are their teachers.
This is all anecdotal, I guess, but I’m a college professor, and I am having a really rough semester. But so are most of us that I’ve talked to, on my campus and otherwise. We’re at a point in the pandemic where we’ve hit a horrible point of burnout. But so are our students.
Professors have gone from in-person to “there’s a pandemic” lockdown with no time to prepare. We sat at tables at home with students who had to adjust how they learn. We had to learn how to reach people virtually, and only some of us had experience. It was a crisis, and we adjusted to crisis mode. I loosened deadlines and adjusted everything constantly. I switched to asynchronous teaching quite a bit, did a number of lectures for the stressed, talked students down in moments of stress. And I did that for whole semesters, while taking a temporary pay cut to help the university. And I spent several months of that teaching my son while teaching my students, breaking from one teaching to do another. That doesn’t make me special; a lot of professors and teachers did similar things. I point this all out to say educators have given up a whole lot for this to all work, and that’s been recognized in the media in a few stories. But most people weren’t “on the ground” to see how much we did. We are burnt out, and we know it.
But there are our students. They’re burnt out, too. They have watched so many of their relatives and friends get sick, and in many cases die. They’ve had to go to funerals. They’ve had to miss their own high school proms and graduations. They’ve had to work to help their ailing families. They have struggled to learn in homes that aren’t safe, that aren’t quiet enough for learning.
They have gotten sick themselves. They’ve been put under quarantine during classes, since we’ve moved back into the classrooms. They’re exhausted from having to adjust to everything put on them. They’ve been doing okay for a while, but we’ve reached a big burnout moment for them, too. I’ve got so many students who just won’t try. There are so many students who don’t try; that’s part of the reality of education. But I’m taking record numbers. I’ve still got final exam week to get through, as I write this, but I’m going to have an all-time worst failure rate for my career, and I’ve been teaching college since 2004. Even good students, when taken out of class for a quarantine for two weeks, will struggle to catch up, and I’m saying there are lots of students leaving and coming back throughout the term. They’re burnt out, as are faculty. This is a trying time to be in college, either as faculty or student, and we generally recognize that. But we’re hitting a wall, emotionally. Students have quit trying; for those who are still trying, they’re not trying as hard. Even “easy grade” assignments are getting weak results from those who even bother.
So please recognize the pandemic takes a toll. I’m sure similar things are happening in other industries, but I’m definitely seeing it in education. Your faculty and teacher friends could use your support (buy us a gift card to therapy or something), but most definitely so do your friends in high school or college. If you know a student, encourage them. Make sure they know all of this is temporary, and if they need to take a break, let them. Now is not the time to complain about how gap years mean somebody will never go (back) to college. Is it better to go from high school to college, exhausted by the pandemic, only to drop out with student debt and bad grades, or is it better to wait until you’re ready to do the work?
This wall is real, and we’re reaching it.
Bill Abbott, poet, web page 