I spent much of my one day of rest before the start of the midyear semester groaning, practically immobilized in bed. I suppose I spent too many hours these past couple of weeks hunched over my desk or over the floor, marking hundreds of pages of student work, that by the time I finally submitted all of the grades last night, I was feeling pain creeping from my eyeballs to the back of my head to my nape, and down my back. When I woke up this morning, I couldn’t get up. Every time I tried to move my head or turn my torso, a sharp pain shot through my upper back and neck. So I cancelled my morning appointment, whined about aging to my siblings in our group chat, and just lay in bed, wishing I hadn’t skipped my daily yoga practice come grading crunch time. Accumulated and ignored stresses always catch up with the body to make one pay, and as one gets older, the debt interest gets dearer. But anyway, at least the grades for the last semester are DONE (but for a number of INCs), and at least I have this one day before midyear busy-ness commences.
Every day that I sit down at my desk, I stare at my 2022 agenda taped to the wall, noting how the boxes for June, July, August, and September are bursting at the borders with items to tick off, and hope that I didn’t overcommit myself to the point of breakdown. I know I’d easily manage all of these things if I sacrificed weekends, family time, and socials (as I did for most of my twenties) but I’m tired of living that way. So I need to figure out how to work smarter and jettison what merits none of my energy and attention. When the leaves of my plants turn irrevocably yellow, I take the shears from the drawer and snip them off. Like those leaves, not all projects and relationships need to be maintained, just because I’ve already sunk time into them. I am living my days with greater awareness of limits and economy, is what I like to think.
Corners that can’t be cut: sufficient sleep and rest, a healthy diet, daily movement, time to dream and to breathe and to, as they say, delight in the flowers. I wish to take care of my mind and my body and be careful about all that I take in and consume and metabolize (physically, intellectually, energetically…), not because I want to live long (I don’t), but because I want to live well. This is what “success” means to me now: sanity in a world that drives people insane in the name of profit, of power. Is sanity then a function of privilege? In this world, it is; in a better world, it wouldn’t be. What ought one to do with one’s privilege? — a question of whats and whys and wherefores. Why am I working so hard, what am I working so hard for, that sort of thing.
By way of an answer, I wanted to share my concluding message to my academic writing class, the only class I permit myself to be a little sentimental with at the end of the semester, because with me it can be quite a taxing course, especially for those new to university-level scholarly work.
Dear All,
You may now view your grades, as well as the comments on your analytical papers, which I have shared with you individually.
I have also read your reflection essays and was delighted to hear about how you and your groupmates have supported one another throughout this grueling semester, despite all of the difficulties of coordination and emotional labor and understanding that any collaborative activity entails. I think that as long as everyone is willing to pull their share of the load, and as long as there is at least one conscientious member who reminds everyone to do the assigned task on time, group work can be a motivational and mutually enriching experience. Everyone is struggling with something, and everyone has their own set of qualities and skills and values, some of which they may not be aware of yet. Group work can be a space for individuals to figure out where their strengths and weaknesses lie and how they can play to their strengths in order to realize group goals. Everyone can take on different roles depending on their capability, so that one person doesn’t have to do it all — isn’t that what belonging in society is about?
I have noted, too, all of your suggestions, including lessening the earlier exercises to allow more time for the discussion of sample inquiry and analytical papers later in the semester; designating more synchronous sessions not only for class discussion but also for designated group activities in order to ease the difficulties of scheduling, and; including more workshops in the course outline. I wish our semester were twice as long (not), but I’ll try to figure out how to incorporate these suggestions in the next iteration of the course outline. I change my course outline every semester, so I value your feedback regarding course design and pedagogy.
Grading is always the most difficult part of the semester for me, because I honestly wish that we could just learn together without worrying about grades. The grading scale is a standardized and standardizing instrument that recognizes as well as maintains hierarchy. But this scale — because it is standardized and standardizing — is inadequate in reflecting the intellectual and personal growth that you may have undergone from the beginning to the end of the semester. Some students’ final output may not be as great as some of their peers’, but that does not mean that those students have not learned and improved a lot, relative to their own performance. I am still thinking about how to reflect this in course design, how to implement ungrading when the overarching system maintained by the institution of the university still puts a primacy on numerical grades and the hierarchies those represent. Most ungrading models I’ve examined depend on continuous feedback and opportunities for multiple revisions until the student and instructor are both satisfied with the work. Hence, these models tend to be very laborious on the part of students and more so for instructors, who handle multiple, writing-intensive classes.
But I am rambling again.
I wish to thank you for all your work in this class, especially those of you who regularly attended synchronous discussions. Your presence, engagement with the assigned texts, and willingness to share your ideas with your groupmates and the rest of the class made this course worthwhile for me, and I hope, also for you. Whatever grade you got, I hope that you leave this Classroom with a little less ignorance and a little more interest in the world around you. I truly enjoyed learning with and from you, even if, as one of you wrote, I “murdered [your papers] mercilessly.” But you know, thinking and writing and learning through it all… as Meg & Dia sing, “these things take time … these things take backbone.”
I wish you all the best in your future endeavors. Take care (and see you around, if we ever have face-to-face classes within the course of your stay in UP).
Best regards,
K
What I didn’t tell the bagets: that when I was writing my undergad thesis and when I was learning how to run and when I was poring over spreadsheets of metadata in the office until 2 a.m. and when I was recovering from heartbreak and bulimia and mood disorders and when I was revising my dissertation, and even now I keep these words taped to the edge of my computer monitor: “these things take time, love / these things take backbone.”
The entirety of that song has stayed with me for the past fourteen years. Have a listen:
tenant on the top floor 