The trade-off is, the other two days a week I work a split shift. That means I essentially have two work days in one. I get up, fix breakfast, and go to work for six hours. Then I go home, go to bed, get up, fix dinner, and go to work for five more hours. So it's like I work six days a week. And then I have a 3-day weekend to catch up on my sleep, my homework, my laundry, my relationships. You might say, wow, if you love your job, that is a great schedule. On the other hand, if you are tired and burned out, it is an endless grind. Guess which category I fall into.
The long days are grueling, especially if I have to be teaching the whole time. The hours telescope into eternity. There are few things more bleak than sitting in a dim computer lab at 10:15 on a winter night waiting for my one or two students to figure out how to save their work and eject the flashdrives they will lose tomorrow. The short days are deceptively liberating. I always assume I will have time to run errands, see friends, go shopping, have some fun, but I'm always too tired to do much beyond the essentials: buy food. The short days are for recuperation and resting up for the next 14-hour day.
As a consequence of this unbalanced work schedule, I've learned to sleep in chunks of time during the week. Six hours at night, two hours during the day. I make up the deficit on the weekend. The schedule drives my meal times, too. I eat twice a day, before work and between work. I get hungry sometimes, while I'm sitting in that computer lab. I try not to think about it.
Day after day, week after week, I follow the lopsided schedule, showing up for a 10-week term. After nine years, I'm just starting to understand the arc of a term. Ten weeks, 20 days, a few inches forward, a few more grams of knowledge shoved into their rigid and weary minds. After every term I'm left with a few memorable moments to carry with me: a card from the student who cried during the first week of the term, thanking me for helping her believe in herself enough to not give up. A new graduate, walking with a bit of a swagger and tossing back a huge grin over her shoulder as she shouldered her backpack one last time. Little moments, big moments.
It's not enough to inspire me to stop whining. I try to notice and embrace those special moments, but they don't motivate me. They just make me tired. Those little shining moments aren't enough payoff for all the hours spent sitting in a lab with only one student, or listening to a student tell me why he can't turn in his assignment today, or discovering that a cabal of paralegals cheated on their keyboarding transcriptions. All the hours on-stage, all the hours when I should have been sleeping, all the hours spent crafting creative assignments for students who had the nerve to catch up on their sleep during my classes... why should I bother to care? Said the burned out teacher.
Tomorrow is the first day of the new term. I must leave by 6:30 a.m. to drive the 25 miles to Wilsonville in rush hour traffic to get to my first class by 7:50. I'm not well-loved in Wilsonville. (Chronic malcontents tend to be pot-stirring troublemakers. And burned out teachers tend to lack compassion for slackers.) I don't care. My hope is that by this time next year I will be someplace else doing something else (hopefully someplace and something better). I refuse to give up on the dream of creating a new relationship with time. In the meantime, I live for my next nap.
