I spent much of the summer just slightly the wrong side of depression - felt worn out most of the time, no energy, etc, which meant I couldn’t take advantage of the free time I had being unemployed. I also felt tense about the financial costs of being out of work. I started to feel better toward the end of August. I think this was all partly because I really wore myself out around May and June. University started up again right after Labor Day, after a trip to visit family and attend general assembly of the union (all told, a really good trip but intensely draining), and the strike here started at the same time. That’s over now, in a somewhat demoralizing way and certainly took a lot of energy, and life is again stressful and enervating and rushed. Still the right side of depression, but I have moments (”what in the hell am I doing all this for? oh yeah, because I don’t think I have any other options,” not a restorative internal dialog by any means).
What is restorative is teaching. Actually, no. Strike that. What in the hell was I thinking?! Teaching isn’t restorative at all. It’s really tiring! But it’s also energizing. It doesn’t restore so much as makes me want to exert the remaining energy I have, if that makes sense, as opposed to just feeling listless.
So far we’ve spent 5 or 6 weeks (ish) reading most of the first 7 chapters of v1 of Capital. The students are getting it. They can speak Marx-ese now. That’s a lot of fun. We just switched to reading Fortunati. The book is short but dense and badly translated and edited. Several students commented “I wish we were still reading Marx, that’s so much easier to read…”, made me laugh. Later we’re going back to Marx briefly (primitive accumulation, then Federici on same only in relation to reproductive labor.)
Anyhow, the made-my-day-part: In class today we discussed what the relationship of the students to the university is. There was immediate agreement that the students purchase something from the university and in the end they expect to emerge with formal qualifications and substantive abilities. Some thought the higher salability/price for labor power (ideally) post-graduation meant that the students are capitalists. Other said “no, we’re changing our labor power and its price but we’re not doing M-C-M’ because we’re not selling something that we buy from the university or selling something that someone else’s labor produces which buy for less than we sell it for.” That moved people. It’s really fun conducting discussion like that. I talk some, if no one makes a point I think is important I’ll eventually speak up. What’s the most fun is when a student comes up with that point first, then all I have to say is “yes!” and maybe restate it the way I want them to remember it. We got to the subject of students as unwaged laborers after talking about the labor of instructors. I said,”I’m the only one paid in this classroom, but am I the only one working? I’m definitely not the main person talking” and someone joked “hey, we’re doing your job!” It was funny. After class a student pulled me aside, one who is a bit older and returning to university after a few years out, and said “This is a really good class Nate. I wasn’t excited about it, the material or the time” - it’s an early morning class three days a week - “but I really like it. The way you facilitate discussion is really helpful.” That was really nice to hear. I’ve been enjoying the teaching all along and whenever someone has said “how’s the class going?” I’ve said “I’m not sure if the students are learning much but I really like it,” it’s really gratifying to get a bit of feedback on the former. I was telling my wife about all this after griping about what feels to me like way the fuck too much work to do over the next three days, and she said “it’s good that you’re doing this, it’s stressful and you dislike a lot about working there, but you’ve always been happier when you’re teaching than at other jobs.” That’s also tremendously gratifying, and among other things helps me not to feel like going back to university was a mistake. (Now if only someone would do all this stupid work for me.)
I feel this way about teaching, as well - that it’s simultaneously exhausting and energising. It’s good watching students refract the sorts of things that happen in the classroom: I remember one point last term (when I had a horrific teaching load, and was really barely managing to cover it all), I happened to be standing beside the door as students were trickling into a stat course (which is far from being the thing I teach best, and which has had a reputation for being something students really dislike taking), and I could overhear all the students making stat jokes with one another - as in, not jokes about the class, but jokes that deployed some of the concepts we had been covering - it was a lovely unintentional demonstration of the way things were actually sinking in, and making some difference in how the students think…
A friend who was teaching for the first time this past term was really struck by how difficult the work is - how much time it takes to prepare, how much energy goes into all of it - and was basically asking how they get anyone to keep doing this. But it has its own strange attractions…
On the issue of your work in a broader sense: if it helps, I like your voice, and think you are placing important things into the general discussion - if you get tempted to walk away, let me know, and I’ll yell at you a bit… ;-P
Comment by N. Pepperell — October 20, 2007 @ 4:28 am
Nate,
Based on the helpful, courteous, and affirmative mode you’ve always exemplified in our (limited) correspondence and your general comportment, I have little doubt that you are a really good instructor (I wish I were in your course on Capital!).
I taught for a year after completing an MA, and thus had the advantage of putting all my focus there (no simultaneous research or grad work). It was revelation to me, because I was finally socializing and sharing my knowledge with dozens of young people. It was, at times, supremely frustrating teaching English 101 to disaffected commerce students, granted. But when things “hit,” I’d leave classes feeling high.
I’ve also gone through the transmission from a summer something like yours to the stress of being an overworked, “underpaid” academic (my last summer). Not fun.
One of the things that keeps my head up is hearing the voices of old fuckers like Doug Dowd and Howard Zinn. Dowd’s in his eighties and continues to hold delightfully acerbic classes (there’s mp3s on his site: http://www.dougdowd.org/). I find hope and measure in Doug Dowd’s phlegm.
Whatever you do, we’re rooting for you!
Comment by Andrew — October 20, 2007 @ 8:30 am
Thanks Andrew, NP. The post _is_ a bit of a “get by w/ a little help from my friends” kind of thing, a little bit of bragging as well, neither of which I’m 100% comfortable. The other thing is just that, I dunno, teaching is cool! I really like it! Luckily I’m teaching all material that I know really well, it’s material that works well for a discussion heavy class and I’m good at (have much experience at) facilitating discussion and getting folk to talk and talk to each other (I’m way worse at lecture), so the prep time is relatively pretty low. Which is great, given that I’m tired. I do assign a whole lot of writing assignments and whatnot, a bit more work, but so far really generative - they come up with interesting problems and questions and they follow blind alleys and dead ends that it’s useful to address etc. I think I said this already but there was one moment in late September I think that really struck me - we were reading the some passage from Capital and I said “okay, what’s at issue here?” or some other standards kick off question, and three students all at the same time said “it’s the relative and the equivalent forms” or something close to that involving the words “relative and equivalent.” That was absolutely right, which it’s always nice when they get things right, but the timing and the exact use of the phrase was really striking. I stammered a bit for a moment out of sheer enjoyment.
NP, I’m not _really_ going to pack it in, but I’ll definitely let you know if I ever need a yelling at. I don’t know how to do anything else, and bailing short of employability in teaching would be remarkably foolish, having already jumped through so many stupid hoops thus far.
Plus I really do like being here compared to any other option (one form of waged labor corrects the abuse of another, so to speak), particularly the interaction with students.
On teaching vs writing, I just had a thought - one overblown way to describe a difference among people who work as academics is as a continuum between their interest in ontogeny and phyologeny in relation to intellectual work. I’m pretty far from the latter. I have no idea of producing a striking and important new reading of anything. That prospect doesn’t particularly move me. I’m not really interested in inaugurating a novel gloss on Marx, say, so much as I’m interested in personally reading a whole lot of Marx closely and thinking the things that one generally thinks - becoming slightly different as a person/subject - as a result of that experience. What I am very excited about is the ontogenesis of certain types of thought with students - I really like the idea of helping students write one of their first halfway decent essays, helping them work through one of the first really really hard books they’ve ever read, etc. (No implied criticism here of anyone, just a description that just hit me about the type of work I’m pretty sure I want to do, teach a bunch and engage closely w/ students on things that are novel or at a level of quality that is novel for them, vs the work that some friends are pretty sure they want to do, write a bunch and engage closely with problems and produce work which is novel for anyone because it solves old problems and poses new ones. Of course, the training requires both areas of focus, which is a good thing.
Rambling now, and really should get back to work.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 20, 2007 @ 10:20 am
Nate, you mean to stay you are not driven by an insatiable lust to “make a critical intervention in your field”? You don’t above all aspire to “make an original contribution to scholarly knowledge”?!
Heretic! You must rid your author-function of these egalo-pedagogocentric manias!
Comment by Andrew — October 20, 2007 @ 12:16 pm
yeah i miss this shit about teaching in the small bits i got to experience. I think i’d be good at it too. I know you’d be an awesome teacher, because you convince me of bad ideas all the time but so persuasively!
Comment by todd — October 20, 2007 @ 2:33 pm
Y’all are funny. Todd, it’s true.
I’d like to poison your mind with wrong ideas that appeal to you. Though I am not unkind.
xox,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 20, 2007 @ 2:43 pm
Nate, your post here really struck a cord with me. I find myself often depressed when I am unemployed outside of semesters. And I would agree with you that teaching is both energizing and tiring, at least that is my experience of such work. It is such a great feeling though when you realize students have ‘got it’ and the reason they ‘get it’ is because of your work with them. I also got some lovely emails from students at the end of this semester, thanking me for the experience and just, well, being me in the classroom. But I’m in the doldrums a bit now due to being out of work again…not that I really like work, but I enjoy the contact with people and the money to buy food… I’m not sure tutoring/instructing work is long term viable or sustainable though…? Does that seem the case where you work? Or is that just my crap experience of tutoring?
Comment by e — October 27, 2007 @ 11:01 pm
hey E,
I think conditions for big parts of our industry are pretty bad, and it’s pretty scary for me and I think for a lot of us. I think more of us need to work seriously on unionizing, but it’s easier to day that than to do that. It’s an uphill battle as usual.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 28, 2007 @ 1:01 pm