I'd been meaning to sit down and write a post about work. This term has been very challenging both because I have a bunch of high energy students who are difficult to manage and because my colleagues have decided to revamp the curriculum and make huge, sweeping changes requiring a tremendous amount of additional work. The changes are likely for the good but the process was undertaken in a way what failed to include a number of instructors from the outset and I now find myself frantically racing to get up to speed. Put simply, my job is eating my life.
There are very good reasons why I've consciously chosen to work part time. The most important, of course, are my children whose education and well being are hard to support when I am sitting in yet another meeting away from home. I feel my teaching is also suffering this term as I am spending so much energy and attention on the new stuff and planning that the daily part is suffering. I am stressed and tired and not doing a particularly good job at mothering, teaching, or anything else.
So, while there's plenty on my plate these days, I've had something huge come up that has really shaken me. It seems that one of my college's campuses (and not, thank thank G-d, the one where I work) was closed down yesterday and today due to a note found in a college restroom referencing the recent massacre at Virginia Tech. Honestly, through all the news last week, the nearly non-stop coverage of the tragedy across the country, never once did it occur to me that something similar could happen here. Not once until I got the news about my college. Everything feels completely different today and I find myself jumping at little things like noisy students in the hallway. This is doing nothing for my stress level.
2 comments:
Oh, man. Jumpy? That would make me scared stiff. Here I was just hearing today about a bomb threat at a high school and thinking, thank God my kids are homeschooled, and I think I'll go ahead and keep them at home. But we can't do that forever, can we?
My son attends that campus. The thought unfortunately had been at the back of my mind. I didn't find out about it though until Thursday morning, he hadn't told me he was sent home early the previous day. I am thankful they didn't find anything on campus, and hope they find the person who did it.
Kind of funny along the same lines, our neighbor said she had heard of a similar incident several years ago, where there was a threat every Thursday evening. Ok, so why didn't that person just drop the class and quit subjecting everyone else to class cancelations!!
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