a full plate with a side of stress

Leaving aside all the things I love about the job, what I dislike the most about it is how unbalanced the workload is. I only work over the 13 weeks of semester twice a year, and although the one month-ish break in winter is a nice time frame to recharge the batteries, I get almost four months to grow idle and apathetic over the summer before the university year begins again. There is nothing in moderation. I’m either twiddling my thumbs and flirting with notions of writing a novel or redecorating my house or I’m either working around the clock with seemingly endless hours of making lesson plans, marking, classes, answering students emails, trying to manage emotional students who are irate about their marks or the course, and the list goes on. I find I have to learn to compartmentalise my life and adjust to the fact that I might have to abandon my personal life for a few months or be deprived of intellectual challenges in the others.

This semester in particular has been draining. I have two friends getting married in 3 weeks (both on the same weekend), and this is when the bachelor/bachelorette parties have been abound. I had a particularly fun night out a couple of weekends ago, but I’m honestly heartbreakingly, soul-crushingly disappointed that I have to miss out on another next fortnight due to work. I’m particularly close to this couple and they have been such great friends to The Cat and I. They’re very cool so they’re not splitting up into ‘all-boys’ and ‘all-girls’ groups, but rather, they’re having a joint weekend away in the Hunter Valley. Knowing that I would have so many events on this half of the year, back in May, I signed on to tutor 7 hours a week and assist three weekends of an intensive course so that I would give me plenty of moolah to spend on gifts and festivities. It just feels especially painful that the reason why I’m able to afford such festivities this year means I can’t go.
The Cat however, offered a few “awws” but signed on to spend 3 days in the Hunter Valley anyway. I didn’t realise it was having an effect on me until a few weeks later and it dawned on me that I was working so hard to pay for both of us, but if I have to stay in Sydney, then not only does my feline other half get to party hard, but I also have to make my own way to and from work, cook, and clean up after The Cat Who Stayed, Salmon. Needless to say, The Cat didn’t know what hit him.

And isn’t it funny that when you’re stressed, the smallest things can become life or death? Perhaps things you never would have even given a second thought to before, become laden with ulterior motives and meanings. Small ignorant or insensitive remarks sound like racism, condescension, manipulation, inauthenticity, or one-upmanship. I’ve gotten annoyed at things that I just know I’ll laugh at in a few weeks time. Several times a day, when I’m buckling under the weight, I want to throw my hands up and say, “I’ve had enough!” but you push on and it gets a little bit better.

I have avoided my blog for a while because I would have rather written this in a couple of week’s time where I am laughing about it and can frame this more like, “Oh I was so stressed before, but now everything’s peachy!” but I think every now and then, it’s not so bad to reveal a little humanity and just be honest that things really suck right now.

what tutoring has taught me about parenting

I want to begin this post with three anecdotes.

The first happened to me today. This semester for one of the subjects I’m tutoring, each class is divided into four teams for group work. At the first tutorial, I went around the room and gave every person a number between 1 and 4. In one of my classes, after two weeks, one team realised they had one too many people. That means that one of them would have forgotten their numbers and mistakenly joined their group, leaving another group one short. Now you wonder if this happened to you, the questions that you’d think you’d ask might be, “We’ve realised we have one too many and another team may now be disadvantaged. Should one of us join their team to make sure group work is balanced and fair in our class?”

Rather, the question that found its way to my inbox today was, “So you’ve put an extra person in our group. Are you going to mark us more harshly because we have more people?”

A friend of mine lecturing this semester explained to her students in the first week that they will have 5 essay questions in their final exam, from which they choose 3 to answer. One of her students raised her hand and asked if they will be given the questions before the exam. My friend replied, “Yes, of course I will” sarcastically, but to her shock, the joke was lost on her Masters students who genuinely believed that they would be spoon-fed in their advanced postgraduate degrees.

Lastly, in the previous semester, I tutored in a subject where two students had to give a presentation every week. When I sent a pair of students their great mark and feedback, one of them responded with a long dispute of my feedback and blamed the students in their class for being “stony-faced” and “unresponsive” as the reason why their presentation may have seemed any less than perfect. She furiously argued that she deserved the highest mark for their presentation.

On the surface level, these three anecdotes depict some common annoyances with a job I otherwise adore, but I think they also reveal something very sad about the way the values these students hold. I love students who have a thirst for knowledge and love to learn, but to hold academic achievement in the shallow form of grades above consideration and respect for others to me is appalling. I think a very simple way to avoid bringing up adults (my students are generally between 19 and 24 years old) who put how they are assessed above fairness, expect their teachers to do everything short of taking their assessments for them, or blame everyone else rather than accept their own shortcomings, is to maintain conversations with your children throughout high school and university and even Masters degrees and PhDs about what they are learning rather than the grade they received at the end of the year.

When children are rewarded only for the marks they receive, they learn that in order to gain your attention and encouragement, they need to get high grades at whatever costs, regardless if they really learnt anything. Unfortunately, this means that in university when group work and class discussions become assessable, these students perform badly because they don’t know how to suspend judgement, remain open-minded and exercise critical thinking skills. They just want to arrive at the ‘right’ answer as quickly as possible. In worst case scenarios, I’ve seen this erupt into aggression or descend into depression. But just having conversations with children regularly at home about what they are enjoying the most or finding the most interesting about their lessons, and rewarding them for applying effort, especially to challenging subjects that they are not naturally good at, I believe, will lead to happier adults who function better in university.