Finally, a few days to myself during the spring break. I'd been really looking forward to it. I hadn’t managed to take any time off since Christmas. As April slowly approached, I realised that my resilience had really suffered as a result. With a tight schedule, discipline and plenty of evenings and weekends spent working, I was working my way towards those days off. But as is often the case with grand plans and tight schedules: things turned out differently.
My co-author, who was due to edit my article before a tight deadline, fell ill. My co-lecturer dropped out just as we had to mark 200 exam questions and 20 essays. Students wanted their marks (which was entirely understandable) to determine which resits they needed to take, or because they wanted to graduate. Meanwhile, our revamped Master’s programme also needed a bit of ‘TLC’ to get everything properly sorted for the new academic year.
So how do you choose? Nothing is off the table. We do it for the students, for the programme, for the greater good. For that article that could make a difference, if it ever gets published, that is. “Do you think of yourself too?” I’ve heard that a lot over the past few months. But how? Because teaching comes first. Or to be more precise: teaching is the most urgent. Education and Examination Regulations (EERs), deadlines and friendly yet firm system reminders make that crystal clear. And with only 40 hours in a working week, something has to give somewhere.
It’s rarely your teaching. Often it’s your research and your private life. There’s no system in place (in the short term) to nudge you and remind you that this needs to be done too. No automatic email saying: “Hey, you haven’t worked on your article for three weeks.” So it gets put off. We’ve all heard it before: “I’ve taken some time off so I can write that article in peace.” Doing your research during what should be recovery time; we’ve almost come to see it as normal by now.
My private life does sometimes make itself felt, but not with a deadline in the subject line. So it’s easier to ignore it. I was recently gently reminded at home that I’d been developing a sort of mantra for a while: ‘Just two more weeks, then things will calm down. Once this is done, I’ll have time again to…’. It rarely turned out to be true.
I don’t have a solution, but I do think we desperately need to take the next step of acknowledging and appreciating one another. Not because all that hard work makes us exceptionally good at everything, but because it helps us keep our education system afloat and, hopefully, ourselves and one another as well. And by that I don’t mean we should start every meeting with a round of applause for ourselves. But rather that we have a conversation with one another about what we’re all doing, what we perhaps shouldn’t be doing, and where we want to develop and where we can achieve more if we use each other’s strengths to help our colleagues move forward too. You know, those conversations we don’t really have time for anymore because urgency takes precedence. Perhaps we should call it Reflecting & Appreciating instead.
It’s my birthday next week. What a lovely present it would be if we could all have a proper chat with our colleagues about what drains our energy, what gives us energy, and how we can ensure we all stay on our feet together. Whilst maintaining our individual and departmental resilience. That’s exactly the kind of present I’d love to receive.