I remember the day that I fell in love with teaching. A few weeks into my first graduate school experience as a teaching assistant, I stood in front of a sunlit classroom brushing the chalk off my jeans and looked at my students. No clacks of fingers on keyboards, no eyes glued to screens–just small nods, smiles as understanding finally came. Statistics has a bad reputation for being dry and challenging (“You teach statistics? I hated that class in school!”), but on that day, I felt like I took a wet cloth to a dusty mural to reveal some beauty beneath.
When did things change? When did I start to notice how much dirt was caked on that damp cloth? Maybe it was a growing realization about the challenges of truly reaching every student. There have always been students whom I’ve struggled to reach, but in the beginning, that was fine. I thought nothing of the fact that I spent my walks to the gym, the recovery between reps, the bus ride home, thinking about those students. I mined my memory for every pre-class conversation, every group discussion I overheard, for clues about examples that would delight them and conversation starters that would inspire them.
This allegro vivace in caring for students was the only tempo I knew, and I continued to sustain this pace throughout my first few years as a college professor. But since the pandemic, it has beome untenable. There seem to be so many more students whose spirits lie locked behind a wall of diamonds. My efforts, my colleagues’ efforts to chip away at that wall, to motivate, to connect, to understand, all seem futile. On top of that, every desperate confession of hopelessness at yet another case of student cheating or apathy is another chord of despair.
On top of that, in order to earn tenure, my college also expects me to produce impactful scholarship, as measured by my peers (just 2 of them!) who will be heavily influenced by the number of journal articles I have published and the reputation of those journals. This viewpoint has been both subtly and overtly reinforced in “mentoring and support” opportunities throughout my time as a junior faculty member, and as such, tenure was always on my mind. Every walk, workout, and drive that I spent thinking about my students, I also spent feeling guilty for not immediately thinking about my research and how to twist my spiral-shaped passions into shoeboxes. So I spent those crucial moments of mental recovery continuing to think at miles a minute.
Enough.
I have come to realize that the brush that has painted the fresco of my career is the same that has painted the watercolor of my marriage. Both began with captivation and have endured agony and strife along the way. My husband and I took the most important step for our marriage to date and sought therapy. It feels like we’ve opened up a new canvas. It’s time for me to do the same for my career.
Love is a verb. But the way that we use it as a feeling, the ultimate emotional aspiration that lets us glide through life, belies its true nature as a process. A process that requires labor from all parties involved. My husband and I have re-committed to this, and already I have seen color spread into our lives again.
Higher education, let’s give this another try. I need to make joy rampant in my work, and what I create will likely be unconventional. Please keep an open mind, and let the colors run.
I am grateful to Ashley Rothwell-Campagna, Chris Cordry, Sachin Bhatia, and Chris Wong for their invaluable feedback and support on this piece.