Another Week

Just submitted podcast recordings for my classics lecture this week and with that this week's absolute deadlines are met. Teaching online remains, as I said before, twice as hard and half as effective as teaching normally does, just one more source of sourness and anxiety among so many others right now. Students are quite understandably grasping for more face-time in their isolation and uncertainty on top of everything else, and so I find the boundaries I have constructed in the past separating the sometimes punishing demands of work from the comparative reparative sanctuary of home have been demolished and there is no respite any longer. One of the ways I overcame my insomnia crisis a couple years back was to strictly demarcate my sleeping space from places where I do other more demanding or distracting things, but now because we are both working from our rather small apartment I am recording lectures (always an incredibly fraught business of trying to get everything just so) and zooming meetings (also stressful and disturbingly alienated) here where I also try to sleep and in consequence I find my thoughts racing away when I try to sleep in here now. With sleeplessness and stress I find myself feeling objectively more stupid, less capable of extended or intensive attention, less sensitive to my surroundings and others' communicative cues and so on, in short, less good at teaching, and all this adds to the worry. On social media I am hearing lots of teachers being criticized for being too demanding or too insensitive in certain circumstances, and inevitably people pile on with criticisms, threats, or demands for firings and heads on platters. Almost always I see where people are coming from in the criticisms and I am trying to be very aware and supportive myself, but I hope people understand that teachers are also human beings who make mistakes, who have a right to be freaked out, who don't know how to discharge responsibilities they probably take very seriously under impossible circumstances, who face the same existential threats we all are in this moment of pandemic, climate catastrophe, economic disaster, and rising right-wing authoritarian danger. Lots of teachers arrive at this moment of extreme demand after years and years of amplifying precarity and institutional dismantlement and a bewildering collapse of norms (which is not to deny many academic norms needed and still need demolition), and this feels less like a temporary setback we can all pull through together with a song in our hearts and more like the last straw that may bring on a longcoming collapse. I can't think of a time when I have been working harder than I am right now. And this is AFTER I have been told my school is closing and I am on the verge of unemployment and so all this heartbreaking effort feels like it is completely for nothing. This is not an easy time for anybody. This is not an easy time.