academia and stress

I know students complain of stress this time of year--and I always tell them, hey, I remember what it was like. The first time I felt this level of stress was during my senior year of college: grades mattered, absolutely, because I was trying to get into grad school. And since I hadn't yet been accepted anywhere I had absolutely no idea what my future looked like--what I'd doing or where the money would be coming from. Or where I'd be living, for that matter. I remember the muscles in my neck stiffening until I could barely turn my head either way....a day after finals, the pain and stiffness mysteriously vanished.

So that was the first time. Since then this kind of stress has been an off-and-on fixture of my life. Certainly you're crunched for time when you're a student--you're always thinking about those seminar papers due at the end of the semester, and you're wondering how you're going to write them when you're simultaneously keeping up on the daily reading, your language classes, and the classes you teach for the university. But that doesn't go away once you're a professor....if anything, it gets worse. You've still got the papers due, usually under deadline. Only now you can't take an incomplete--tenure doesn't wait. Every semester you teach three courses, not just one. And now your job rides on how well you impress those students.

The simple writing courses I taught as a TA in grad school required little advance prep--thinking, yes, but not the kind of prep I have to do now. I'm teaching a 200-seat Intro to Lit course now that uses the latest Clicker technology: neat, but every day requires a thought-out powerpoint-like presentation that integrates Clicker questions. Assuming I've already taught the text at hand and have notes prepared, each presentation takes about three hours to prepare. I do two of those per week. That's on top of reading the book and preparing the basic notes.

That takes time enough, but I've also got a book that was due at the press last July. We're way over deadline. Every spare moment at home I spend drafting, editing, and revising. And then of course there's all the other stuff associated with the job: the applications of new students that need to be read, the recommendations that need to be written, the courses that need to be planned, the various committees that need to be attended to. Add to that a small child to take care of and an ex-husband who refused point-blank to sign a court-mandated settlement, and you've got a lot of stuff on your mind.

Gah.