Working ain't working
May. 24th, 2006 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scottahillI'm having a hard time getting ready for my class in two weeks, and I want to talk about it. It's probably going to be long, so I'll put it behind a cut.
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So I have this class in mechanics I'm going to start teaching in less than two weeks, and I need to prepare for it. The class is a normal 13-week course compressed into 4 weeks, so there's a quite a bit of pressure to get as much ready beforehand as I can.
As I'm currently unemployed, this should not be a problem. I have plenty of time to do as much preparation as is required. But I can't. I do everything but prepare for the class: read the web, read a book, watch TV, you name it.
Now I know that procrastination is a common enough phenomenon. Add to that the fact that my days are completely unstructured, and my situation would be pretty typical. It still sucks. :) I've gone one or more days where I do nothing, from morning to night, but read the web and/or watch television. And it's not even that I'm enjoying it; I'm miserable because of the guilt. It's not simply a matter of getting myself to start, either; the process can be so painful for me that I'm off on any tangent, any distraction. I've rarely been able to get into any sort of zone.
What I have, pretty clearly, is an anxiety block, and it's not new. In terms of general anxiety, I've been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and was on medication for a little while (though it didn't really work and I got off it). Specifically, I had this problem all through graduate school and my post-doc, where I would just sit in front of the computer, afraid to look at my simulation results, desperately looking for anything to do other than work. (The details of that are another story.)
In the case of the research, the anxiety often arose from not really knowing what the heck I was supposed to be doing. In the case of teaching, however, it comes from my perfectionistic streak. After all, I've seen some baseline physics teaching before, and it's not terribly hard to do: summarize the textbook in class, assign homework from the textbook, give tests from the textbook, blah blah blah. Easy. Given that I tend to be pretty affable in the classroom (through no particular effort), I might even score a little above average on my student evaluations.
But I'm not willing to accept baseline. I read books about physics education, which tell me about how terrible lecture-only classes are in helping students learn, and about all these other methods which work much better. I am suspicious of these big encyclopedic textbooks, and am always looking for things I don't like about them, statements I would have put better, statements I think are flat-out false, etc. Fine and good, but…these alternative techniques aren't mainstream yet. (I asked about "active learning" techniques at Williams, but was met with casual dismissal, from a department I think is pretty good at teaching.) I've only seen these methods put into practice once. And I'm trying to do this on my own, without the active support of my department (I am just an adjunct, after all), without the freedom to choose a textbook or mess around too much with the syllabus. In short I'm trying to revolutionize physics all by myself, to be not just a good teacher, but a daring, on-the-edge, specTACular physics teacher.
Plus, it's just really hard for me to prepare too far ahead in a class. I need to meet the students and see what they're like, before I know how I should present the material. This class in June is on Mechanics and Thermodynamics, two subjects I've never taught before, so I am particularly in the dark about what my students are going to find easy and what is going to trip them up. This happens every time I prepare for a class: I start off two weeks or a month before trying to prepare the entire course at once, but it just becomes overwhelming. I don't know how I'm going to present lesson 7 because I don't know how much they're going to pick up from lessons 1-6. In the past, I've given up on the long-term planning, and just planned each class one or two days in advance, and it's worked…fairly well. It would be useful if I had more advance notice about demonstrations or videos I wanted to show them, less stressful to put together tests sooner than the night before they're due. But maybe that's asking too much. Or maybe it only works after you've taught a particular class a few times before.
So anyway, I'm trying to do too much, and I'm scared of it. And being scared of it, I avoid doing it. And because I'm home all day, I'm not getting anything else done either, so I feel like a useless git who lies around all day doing nothing, and that makes me more scared (that I won't be ready in time, that I'm incapable of being a productive member of society, etc), which makes it harder to do work, etc etc.
What would help? Well, I've tried making lists of things to do, breaking the task down into smaller pieces, but that hasn' t been too successful. What I need to do most is relax, probably. But not by watching television; I've tried that. What I need is more human interaction. Yes, Jen is human and I see her every night, but she's not enough somehow: she's at work all day of course, she often gets home late, and she wants to watch television and go to bed early so she can get up early to go to work. We do talk of course, but with her I'm too likely to slip into whining, and I don't like to pile that onto her too much as it's depressing.
So, other people: I'm really terrible at meeting people. I'm always afraid that, if I get too friendly with someone, I will start dumping all my emotional baggage on them. (You're getting some of it now, of course--but you did click on it after all. :) I've been wrestling with self-esteem and anxiety and paranoia and what have you for a decade or more now, and I've kept a lot of it to myself; I love to talk about myself, but I'm afraid of scaring people away so I hold it in, and so remain distant. Add to that I hate crowds, am suspicious of strangers (whole 'nother story), and am afraid of committing myself to an activity I might not be able to get out of if I hate it, and it makes it difficult to meet people. :)
I've never been good at online communication either, really. I read a bunch of fora online every day (Slashdot, Daily Kos, the Chronicle of Higher Education, etc) and respond to people's comments, but I don't really recognize the people I'm responding to as individuals; I rarely pay attention to the name of the person I'm replying to.
LiveJournal is different because I know y'all already. I've *tried* posting here on a regular basis. There have been many times I've started writing a message, only to delete it because I thought it was too long, or too angsty. (It will take some effort not to delete this one for that reason; I have been encouraged by the proddings ofwavyarms, who assures me that angst is what LJ is for :). ) I feel like I've been silent for so long that I can't talk about what I really feel--the isolation, the anxiety, the inertia--without writing my life story, and then I start twittering about how to do that, should I do it chronologically or by topic, etc etc.
Well, I don't really have a nice closing statement for all this, so I'll just end here. Congratulations for making it all the way to the end!
As I'm currently unemployed, this should not be a problem. I have plenty of time to do as much preparation as is required. But I can't. I do everything but prepare for the class: read the web, read a book, watch TV, you name it.
Now I know that procrastination is a common enough phenomenon. Add to that the fact that my days are completely unstructured, and my situation would be pretty typical. It still sucks. :) I've gone one or more days where I do nothing, from morning to night, but read the web and/or watch television. And it's not even that I'm enjoying it; I'm miserable because of the guilt. It's not simply a matter of getting myself to start, either; the process can be so painful for me that I'm off on any tangent, any distraction. I've rarely been able to get into any sort of zone.
What I have, pretty clearly, is an anxiety block, and it's not new. In terms of general anxiety, I've been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and was on medication for a little while (though it didn't really work and I got off it). Specifically, I had this problem all through graduate school and my post-doc, where I would just sit in front of the computer, afraid to look at my simulation results, desperately looking for anything to do other than work. (The details of that are another story.)
In the case of the research, the anxiety often arose from not really knowing what the heck I was supposed to be doing. In the case of teaching, however, it comes from my perfectionistic streak. After all, I've seen some baseline physics teaching before, and it's not terribly hard to do: summarize the textbook in class, assign homework from the textbook, give tests from the textbook, blah blah blah. Easy. Given that I tend to be pretty affable in the classroom (through no particular effort), I might even score a little above average on my student evaluations.
But I'm not willing to accept baseline. I read books about physics education, which tell me about how terrible lecture-only classes are in helping students learn, and about all these other methods which work much better. I am suspicious of these big encyclopedic textbooks, and am always looking for things I don't like about them, statements I would have put better, statements I think are flat-out false, etc. Fine and good, but…these alternative techniques aren't mainstream yet. (I asked about "active learning" techniques at Williams, but was met with casual dismissal, from a department I think is pretty good at teaching.) I've only seen these methods put into practice once. And I'm trying to do this on my own, without the active support of my department (I am just an adjunct, after all), without the freedom to choose a textbook or mess around too much with the syllabus. In short I'm trying to revolutionize physics all by myself, to be not just a good teacher, but a daring, on-the-edge, specTACular physics teacher.
Plus, it's just really hard for me to prepare too far ahead in a class. I need to meet the students and see what they're like, before I know how I should present the material. This class in June is on Mechanics and Thermodynamics, two subjects I've never taught before, so I am particularly in the dark about what my students are going to find easy and what is going to trip them up. This happens every time I prepare for a class: I start off two weeks or a month before trying to prepare the entire course at once, but it just becomes overwhelming. I don't know how I'm going to present lesson 7 because I don't know how much they're going to pick up from lessons 1-6. In the past, I've given up on the long-term planning, and just planned each class one or two days in advance, and it's worked…fairly well. It would be useful if I had more advance notice about demonstrations or videos I wanted to show them, less stressful to put together tests sooner than the night before they're due. But maybe that's asking too much. Or maybe it only works after you've taught a particular class a few times before.
So anyway, I'm trying to do too much, and I'm scared of it. And being scared of it, I avoid doing it. And because I'm home all day, I'm not getting anything else done either, so I feel like a useless git who lies around all day doing nothing, and that makes me more scared (that I won't be ready in time, that I'm incapable of being a productive member of society, etc), which makes it harder to do work, etc etc.
What would help? Well, I've tried making lists of things to do, breaking the task down into smaller pieces, but that hasn' t been too successful. What I need to do most is relax, probably. But not by watching television; I've tried that. What I need is more human interaction. Yes, Jen is human and I see her every night, but she's not enough somehow: she's at work all day of course, she often gets home late, and she wants to watch television and go to bed early so she can get up early to go to work. We do talk of course, but with her I'm too likely to slip into whining, and I don't like to pile that onto her too much as it's depressing.
So, other people: I'm really terrible at meeting people. I'm always afraid that, if I get too friendly with someone, I will start dumping all my emotional baggage on them. (You're getting some of it now, of course--but you did click on it after all. :) I've been wrestling with self-esteem and anxiety and paranoia and what have you for a decade or more now, and I've kept a lot of it to myself; I love to talk about myself, but I'm afraid of scaring people away so I hold it in, and so remain distant. Add to that I hate crowds, am suspicious of strangers (whole 'nother story), and am afraid of committing myself to an activity I might not be able to get out of if I hate it, and it makes it difficult to meet people. :)
I've never been good at online communication either, really. I read a bunch of fora online every day (Slashdot, Daily Kos, the Chronicle of Higher Education, etc) and respond to people's comments, but I don't really recognize the people I'm responding to as individuals; I rarely pay attention to the name of the person I'm replying to.
LiveJournal is different because I know y'all already. I've *tried* posting here on a regular basis. There have been many times I've started writing a message, only to delete it because I thought it was too long, or too angsty. (It will take some effort not to delete this one for that reason; I have been encouraged by the proddings of
wavyarms, who assures me that angst is what LJ is for :). ) I feel like I've been silent for so long that I can't talk about what I really feel--the isolation, the anxiety, the inertia--without writing my life story, and then I start twittering about how to do that, should I do it chronologically or by topic, etc etc. Well, I don't really have a nice closing statement for all this, so I'll just end here. Congratulations for making it all the way to the end!
