could this be the end?

Warning: rant to follow. (what else is new...)

An hour ago, I just finished giving my last spring quarter final. I'm obviously taking summer quarter off of teaching, but I'm also using the time to decide if I want to continue teaching college at all.

Once upon a time, I dealt with the craptastic pay, the needing to balance multiple schools to make a reasonable living, the notion of schedule changes at the last minute to accommodate those lucky enough to be full time -- just for the excitement of sharing science with the new generation of sponges who soaked up the information. Not every day was rainbows and unicorns, but the good always outweighed the bad.

Nowadays, the growing number of needy and demanding students is driving me out of something I used to love to do.

Exhibit A: a recent group of students (for all I know, they may be reading this) from winter '08 squeezed every last drop of blood out of me. I gave and gave and gave. The rapport I feel with every class -- it just wasn't there. (I'd had several of these same students in the previous quarter, too, and I felt the rapport with that group -- what happened?) In any case, as this was majors chemistry, I gave them 6+ pages of practice problems posted on the web each week. I had a one-day turnaround on exam grading. These were also topics I hadn't taught in four years, so I studied a lot at home. For 8 hours of contact time per week, I was putting in 40+ hours per week for these students. Still, in the classroom, things felt icy.

What else could I do? I jump high, the students said to jump higher. I could never meet their demands, as they were infinite. In fact, I seem to recall after the one day I took off for illness (viral bronchitis, sinus infection, and a fever -- otherwise, I never cancel class), a student told me that she wished class hadn't been cancelled, because since the book sucked so much, she needed lecture. (Uh, missy, neither did you have a 100% attendance record.)

I was very glad to be done with the ultra-critical group, but little did I know how much they ruined me until the 10th week of spring quarter, when I read my evaluations. I'm thinking they talked with each other. Me, formerly getting teaching awards (recent, too), got SEVERAL evaluations from that class saying that I was their worst teacher ever, that I obviously didn't care about them, that I obviously never put any time into them...

Yeah, right.

Meanwhile... At the beginning of that quarter, a good friend, recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, took a turn for the worse. Now, any ordinary person would say, "I should spend more time with my friend while he's still alive", but I felt pressured to work for my needy students. I visited Erik, but nowhere near enough -- one of my BIGGEST regrets, for sure. And you know what? All the extra time that I put in for your sorry asses clearly meant NOTHING. And it's too late to visit now...

So, what has teaching done for me? It's caused me a great deal of regret these days. And I do need a break from it all. But I will thank my groups this quarter for being so easy-going in spite of my shortcomings. Best of luck.

ETA: if you are a student at a college anywhere, think twice about your part-time faculty community. Many of us scrape along with multiple jobs for the love of teaching, to evangelize our favorite subject matter -- and our schedules may change at the last minute, often to a class we haven't taught in years. This quarter, I have held five part-time jobs -- seamlessly so, for the most part! Just some food for thought before you think "teachers must have it easy".