It’s Halloween, so y’know. Eek. And you don’t have to look far afield to find reasons to be fearful.
Let’s not look far afield.
It has been awhile here. Not that there’s anything unusual in that, in general, and in especially as the teaching juggernaut ploughs without mercy into its shiny new year. It has been an exhausting term, and not even half over; though the more difficult half, probably.
That undergrad module, encompassing almost 1000 students — thankfully not all on my watch — is nearly as much of a goatfuck as anticipated. It’s quite fun in its way, but also stressful and overwhelming and, as the young people say, a lot. I’m running on fumes, frankly, and have spent most of the last two months on the threshold of running amok with an axe. Probably only a metaphorical axe, but still.
Since being nudged into this teaching lark a few years back, I have consistently tried to maintain some boundaries, to draw lines in the sand. I’ve refused offers of more time (I’m nominally on 80% FTE, ha ha ha), declined to put in for promotion, done my best to abjure additional responsibility. Teaching is the sort of job that metastasises without limit, has no compunction about filling every waking hour and waking every sleeping one. And UCL is the sort of institution built on the expectation that things will work that way, that it can suck every living instant from your life and scatter your desiccated husk in its wake. Perhaps all institutions are.
I’m too old for that bullshit. I don’t want your fucking money, I want my fucking time.
And yet, here we are. Refuse, decline, abjure; to no avail. They can’t — won’t — take no for an answer. It’s a constitutional impossibility. The ratchet must be ratcheted, the screw turned, the corpse drained to the very last drop.
So here we are, as we likely will be all year. Used up and on edge. Weighing the metaphorical axe.
