Marathon training
Over the weekend I resumed my half marathon training plan. It was getting a bit more manageable to fit in multiple runs per week that require a bit of concentration and dedication. It’s good to be a roadrunner in more than word T-shirt slogan alone.
I think today I really began to feel that “All Of This” (and you know exactly what I mean) is not a sprint but a full marathon. The full 26.2 miles. I get bored on my long runs. I can physically go on, there is nothing wrong with my body, but the mental stamina isn’t there all the time if I’m not in the Zone with capital Z. It takes a constant internal dialogue to just keep myself going and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
I’ve pondered and talked with a few people about what I am feeling about my teaching today. It’s not boredom per se, but the fact that we have in our courses (our= me and my students) settled into a routine. That’s nice, and it saves me time not to have to reinvent the wheel all the time. But the problem is that I now feel like I’ve cracked the nut, by and large; technical challenges resolved. The course hovers in my opinion between mediocre and crap compared to the on-campus experience, but I cannot afford to keep tinkering with it and changing things up. This is most definitely NOT the course I would teach as an online course. I don’t know what that would look like, but that’s the reason the Digital Fellows at Muhlenberg get five months of training IIRC before they’re allowed to go anywhere near an online course: it takes time to develop a good course, to experiment, to ponder.
Instead I’m stuck with a format that works for engaging the students up to a certain level, but it leaves me drained. And where an in-person class can similarly leave me drained, I also get something in return: the dynamics in the room can be energizing at a different level. Now… well. You’ve all been in a video conference call or a meeting with your classes and you know that it’s different, and it’s rarely as good as what it’s trying to replace. (I am aware that “replacing” is part of the problem but again: we were not given time to figure this out properly.)
So I’ll have to figure out how I will motivate myself to keep showing up with my best version of a teacher, because my students deserve it. We all know nobody signed up for teaching or taking an online class, let alone this hot mess of emergency remedial remote learning. My inner dialogue may well find its way into these blog posts, because I cannot possibly believe I am the only one who feels like this. Right now, I feel like I’m in mile five and wondering what the heck I got signed up for and where the next twenty-one miles will come from. But hey, I ran a marathon once, so I guess I can do it again! And if it’s a true marathon, there are plenty of others running alongside me, and there are crowds cheering us on at the roadside, and there are water stops and First Aid tents. I just have to learn what they look like in this new world of teaching.