Burnout

For some time now, I've been feeling burned out when it comes to reading student papers. This semester especially has been a difficult one. I truly love being with my students and talking to them on a daily basis, but the reading part gets to me. I have had a rough time making myself sit down and actually put the time in. The papers, though they are on topics I like, still have the same problems that the papers have had over the years. When it comes to the kinds of errors and the very basic discussions the students create, not much has changed in the seventeen years I've been teaching writing. Very few students have the ability to write something that totally blows me away, but every now and then, I find myself delighted because a student has written something outside the usual. This just happens to be a semester during which no one has written that kind of paper. Hence the relunctance in reading and evaluating them.

I keep telling myself I need to do something that will allow me to leave the classroom. I don't have many options, though, and this makes me hesitant to think I really could leave teaching anytime soon. I write, but I've only published one personal essay. I love to do videography, but I'm a rank beginner shooting film. I love photography, but I have never thought I could do anything with it that could support me. I keep thinking I should combine all of these somehow, turn my passions into my life work. Perhaps I should stop thinking about it and start doing. A little less talk and a little more action is called for here.

Since I've been toying with some ideas, I told my kids we have a new rule: finish what we start. This includes me as well as the kids. Not finishing what I start has been the thorn in my side for as long as I can remember, well, acutally since I was about fourteen years old. Up to that point, I had no fear. Whatever I thought I could do, I did. Then, somewhere along the way (when my family had to move because my dad was laid off and had to take a job a state away), fear crept in and it has stayed with me. I don't like feeling this fear. I don't like not taking chances, but I really fear failure. I have too many people depending on me to take care of them, and if I all the sudden wasn't able to, how horrible would that be? What kind of example would I be setting? Leave a very stable, decent-paying job to follow a dream? In this economy? The rational part of me says no way, too scary, too risky. I know, though, that I'm only going to become even more burned out if I don't do something. I just wish I knew what that something was.

With only eight weeks of the semester left, I'm thinking ahead to when I won't have to be on campus, to when I can maybe get the something figured out. I really need to get it figured out.

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