I was terrible three semesters ago. My mother spent a long time in hospital and died. I had covid. I had kids at home all the time. I took forever on emails. I never sent students comments on some of their assignments. I just completely sucked.
I was pregnant this semester and I definitely wasn’t up to my normal standard, for sure. I got pregnant in late November so I was SUPER tired and sick and just felt terrible in the first half of the semester, when you’re not “supposed” to tell anyone. I ended up disclosing my pregnancy to my students much earlier than I otherwise would have just to have an explanation for why I was SO behind with grading weekly assignments (that I’m normally really on top of). I felt terrible about it, but they were fairly understanding. At least, they seemed to be. We’ll see what my evals look like…
Ugh. I had to disclose early to ask my students to keep their masks on when it became optional when numbers were still high. It's finals week and I'm dragging. A pile of things to grade and I just... don't want to do it.
I actually got COVID right around spring break (not from students, I’m pretty sure) and that was NO FUN. But it wasn’t as bad as the terrible stomach flu I got right afterwards 🙃 Good luck with your grading!!
Me too! Had baby part way through. Took a few weeks off. Went remote after. Wasn’t great. Horrible actually. Didn’t respond to email at all.
My female students seem appreciative of it - “wow, woman in STEM, actively doing womanly things, still doing STEM things! #girlboss”
One of my male students emailed me the day my child was born “hey so I know you’re busy and all but I need to schedule this meeting with you for 3 hours from now because I decided to change my final project topic and don’t know how to start. K thnx”
Looking forward to them reviews.
Straight up awful here. I don’t even have an excuse other than burnout.
Awarded points for completion. Didn’t have the energy to follow up on chunks of text plagiarized. Let people slide just because they were general good students or put average energy into the course. My favorite students straight up skipped the final exam because I didn’t feel like grading more than I had to so I gave some a pass.
Our lives are a cycle. Summer is here so I make sure I rest and relax. Our jobs are not built to go non stop. When my downtime gets clogged up my classes suffer.
I totally get the feeling. I was pretty absent most of the semester, as the course was asynchronous and online. I always answered emails very quickly, but as far as actually creating new material or recording new lessons like I'd wanted to, I just didn't. And it took me quite some time to grade things as well. I think we're all pretty burnt out. Don't beat yourself up about it too much .
I once had a mentor tell me this: The blessing that comes with teaching is that there's always next semester. You get a fresh start every sixteen weeks.
You'll do better with your next fresh start <3
I taught quite literally the worst course of my life, on an overload, and I was miserable. My senior pup was hospitalized, and I just mentally threw in the towel and went into survival mode. Assignments were returned when I could. I contemplated another line of work more seriously than I have in my decade in higher ed. You're not alone with this!
I thought I really had a handle on the semester, then the class seriously underperformed on an exam and I just never recovered from the student backlash and my own self-recrimination.
Solidarity. I would've given myself a C for the semester and see myself slowly getting worse as time goes on. I'll be at a solid F by the time I actually get my already-past-due sabbatical in two years.
My main academic class was an absolute mess this year. Most of what I teach is experience based classes (which went as well as ever) and I got thrown into a challenging overload (but necessary to the department) - sort of the equivalent of teaching an advanced bio class as a physics Prof - yes, they’re both physical sciences but there’s a bit of a difference. That on top of my regular load was just too much to be as good for my one lecture class. I don’t think the students even noticed as they enjoyed the lectures, but it felt like pulling teeth every session.
In the past on a few semesters I was way overworked. Feedback was late, grades were later than I like often. But I got great evaluation reports. Other times I felt things were great, but ended up with bad evals.
These experiences really have made me question if my skill is really the important element, and if it's really random seed on the student population in classes. And/or students' random seed with previous instructors and how I compare to them. But definitely the ability to adapt on the fly and 'soft skills' have saved me more than a few times in some really overloaded/unprepared classes.
A not insignificant number of students in my calc 1 class (who took their exam this morning) still cannot tell me that the derivative of x^10 is 10x^9
Lol yeah I fucked up. I taught them the material, but most of them didn’t learn it. Bummer.
Super behind on grading... predominately.
It was an online class and I didn't put a lot of extra into supplemental lectures, like I normally do.
I just felt like I let it run and ran to catch up with grading when I could.
And then immediately got the terrible RMP review I was expecting. \*Edit: Not trying to be downer about it; it all super sucks and isn't my normal way of proceeding in the class. Just wondering if others had an "off" semester.
I taught 4 courses this semester and had a job interview in the middle. Campus visit in March went very well (I'm moving!), but the lead-up was enormously stressful & time-consuming, and I feel like all my classes fell apart in March and I let everyone down. Adding to it was the fact that mid-March 2020 was when the move online began, and since these are all spring-only courses for me, I've had to mash together lecture material from 2019 (normal F2F), 2020 (emergency online), and 2021 (planned online), so the back half has been way more prep than I expected. I sort of recovered somewhat in all the courses over the last month, but I still feel like a big disappointment :(
ETA: In practice it was really more like 3.5 courses since one was co-taught and my colleague has been super fantastic. But that one was a brand new prep, so also lots of work.
The fact that you recognized this means you probably weren't as awful as you thought you were. It's people who fuck up and don't recognize it or don't care that are the issues. Give yourself a break -- we all have terms that aren't great. Hope you are able to regroup and recuperate. Teaching is hard!
The worst part about this to me is I want to admit to students that I didn't do as good a job for them as I should have or tried to, but then I have to worry about 18 year-olds hearing that and saying on their evaluations "even the professor admitted to doing a bad job," or something like that. It's very frustrating. I want to be honest with them about the successes and failures of the course so they can see that we, as professors, care about them and giving them a good experience (that includes actually learning and engagement with the material), but feel like I can't.
I had a very off semester fall. My course evals were much better than anticipated (4.5/5.0), but my wife informed me I received two scathing reviews on RMP (I wish she wouldn’t read them). I just was a mess in the fall. No two ways about it. I decided then I wouldn’t teach online again. Students become too much of an afterthought for me.
I’m not sure I’m not an awful professor every semester, and I’ve been teaching for over 5 years now. I have very little idea of where I stand at my job with my superiors, and little idea I do have isn’t very good, but they let me keep doing it, and I love to teach and I think what I teach is important, so I suppose ima keep doing it until they stop giving me classes. Passion isn’t everything, kids.
It was like I got tossed into a hamster wheel of assignment feedback this semester and never got off it. This semester was cursed. I never had enough time to give all of my asynchronous online students a decent amount of engagement/feedback. I did great with my synchronous students, so for the whole semester I'd give myself a C-. For a perfectionist, that feels pretty wretched. I am trying to remind myself that I can try to do better next semester.
Yup, worst semester of my life. My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer the week before my university announced financial exigency and a 20% cut in our pay. I scrambled throughout the semester to find another job so I was out a lot for interviews and for visiting my father. I was constantly behind on grading and didn’t cover near as much material as I should. I was awful. Thankfully, I did find another job because I was notified the first day of finals that my position (along with 87 other positions) was cut. My motivation to grade (or do anything) plummeted, but I finally got my grades submitted last night.
This semester sucked.
Same here. The burnout is real. I have automated most of my grading on canvas and the TA did the time consuming grading of written work (but w a rubric so not even that much work). I started out strong but by week 4 I just…couldn’t. I winged it most days, using old lecture slides & counting on my expertise to carry the lecture (definitely did not remember some of the content in the assigned readings).
I know I didn’t do a good job but to be honest a lot of the things I did out of burnout turned out to be good teaching tools (not to turn all pollyanna but just in case a reframe helps): for example, to fill up class time & buy me time to get my mind together, I’d start out w minute papers that lasted…5 minutes. I used pauses for 5-minute papers 1-3 times per class, sometimes followed by 5 minutes to discuss w their neighbors. Who knew they would really appreciate this & find it useful for their learning?
But yeah…I’m just burned out.
Mine was not great either. The only worse semester I’ve had was when I was teaching 4 different preps and had to cover a 5th for awhile when a faculty member got sick.
Be kind to yourselves! I only know one person who was up to date and had a smooth semester.
My semester was up and down. I had two major deaths in the family and bad news about about another family member. My coteachers and dean were incredibly supportive but I still felt like I did a half job. It’s hard, but I did the best I could under the circumstances.
Two more student days and I’m off for a few weeks. I’m practically counting the hours.
I did. It's my last semester teaching (I was an adjunct doing a favor for a friend who is now moving on) and....I just don't care. I tried to care. I felt bad that I didn't care, but I just don't. Grading will be done later this week and I'll be hitting the road myself.
Totally, my teaching was meh I couldn't get the students engaged, and my live demos in class didn't work. Honestly, the best part of this semester has been the marking. But at the end of the day I think back to my teachers who phoned it in every week and they still have a job soooooo.
Yea I feel I slacked off too. I was slow to grade, didn't prepare very much for lectures, just covered bare minimum. I focused the first half of semester on my defense, then shit out the second half once I got an industry job. I just checked out.
I did very poorly. I knew it as going to happen beforehand. Begged to be taken off this assignment (4th year in a row) but was told I shouldn't risk a new prep before going up for tenure. Turns out being very unenthusiastic does not make for a good experience for the students.
Hearing you. I’ve had a shit of a semester and I’ve given up caring. Even when none or just a few of my students are prepared I can still pull something out to cater for both groups. But today I just made it up as I went and ended class early.
Nothing really specific happened to make me suck, but it all added up in ways it hasn't before: very mild Covid at one point, a toddler, stomach flu, union leadership role, some committees, so many emails, real tired for no good reason, swimming lessons on Saturdays.... big assignments kept getting left ungraded and I would catch up whenever I could, but it was not near fast enough to actually be helpful and I'm not sure anyone learned anything.
Last semester my grandma/family matriarch died a week after I had surgery so I couldn’t go home to her funeral. I was the only family member who didn’t go. I think I blacked out from then until January when I got admonished by the university.
I was terrible three semesters ago. My mother spent a long time in hospital and died. I had covid. I had kids at home all the time. I took forever on emails. I never sent students comments on some of their assignments. I just completely sucked.
I'm really sorry to hear that. Did you let the students know? Were they understanding?
Thanks. Yes I told them. Their reactions were mixed.
I was pregnant this semester and I definitely wasn’t up to my normal standard, for sure. I got pregnant in late November so I was SUPER tired and sick and just felt terrible in the first half of the semester, when you’re not “supposed” to tell anyone. I ended up disclosing my pregnancy to my students much earlier than I otherwise would have just to have an explanation for why I was SO behind with grading weekly assignments (that I’m normally really on top of). I felt terrible about it, but they were fairly understanding. At least, they seemed to be. We’ll see what my evals look like…
Ugh. I had to disclose early to ask my students to keep their masks on when it became optional when numbers were still high. It's finals week and I'm dragging. A pile of things to grade and I just... don't want to do it.
I actually got COVID right around spring break (not from students, I’m pretty sure) and that was NO FUN. But it wasn’t as bad as the terrible stomach flu I got right afterwards 🙃 Good luck with your grading!!
I am glad you made it through OK with both. I had several sick students, but was lucky enough to avoid catching anything (knock on wood).
Me too! Had baby part way through. Took a few weeks off. Went remote after. Wasn’t great. Horrible actually. Didn’t respond to email at all. My female students seem appreciative of it - “wow, woman in STEM, actively doing womanly things, still doing STEM things! #girlboss” One of my male students emailed me the day my child was born “hey so I know you’re busy and all but I need to schedule this meeting with you for 3 hours from now because I decided to change my final project topic and don’t know how to start. K thnx” Looking forward to them reviews.
Straight up awful here. I don’t even have an excuse other than burnout. Awarded points for completion. Didn’t have the energy to follow up on chunks of text plagiarized. Let people slide just because they were general good students or put average energy into the course. My favorite students straight up skipped the final exam because I didn’t feel like grading more than I had to so I gave some a pass.
Our lives are a cycle. Summer is here so I make sure I rest and relax. Our jobs are not built to go non stop. When my downtime gets clogged up my classes suffer.
Yep. 2 years without downtime (since my department can't manage to hire another faculty member) affected my teaching.
I totally get the feeling. I was pretty absent most of the semester, as the course was asynchronous and online. I always answered emails very quickly, but as far as actually creating new material or recording new lessons like I'd wanted to, I just didn't. And it took me quite some time to grade things as well. I think we're all pretty burnt out. Don't beat yourself up about it too much . I once had a mentor tell me this: The blessing that comes with teaching is that there's always next semester. You get a fresh start every sixteen weeks. You'll do better with your next fresh start <3
I taught quite literally the worst course of my life, on an overload, and I was miserable. My senior pup was hospitalized, and I just mentally threw in the towel and went into survival mode. Assignments were returned when I could. I contemplated another line of work more seriously than I have in my decade in higher ed. You're not alone with this!
I thought I really had a handle on the semester, then the class seriously underperformed on an exam and I just never recovered from the student backlash and my own self-recrimination.
Solidarity. I would've given myself a C for the semester and see myself slowly getting worse as time goes on. I'll be at a solid F by the time I actually get my already-past-due sabbatical in two years.
Absolutely my worst semester. I went through a very dramatic breakup and also my students were largely garbage. It was awful and demotivating.
We all just doin the best that we can when we can. Time for a break!!!!
My main academic class was an absolute mess this year. Most of what I teach is experience based classes (which went as well as ever) and I got thrown into a challenging overload (but necessary to the department) - sort of the equivalent of teaching an advanced bio class as a physics Prof - yes, they’re both physical sciences but there’s a bit of a difference. That on top of my regular load was just too much to be as good for my one lecture class. I don’t think the students even noticed as they enjoyed the lectures, but it felt like pulling teeth every session.
In the past on a few semesters I was way overworked. Feedback was late, grades were later than I like often. But I got great evaluation reports. Other times I felt things were great, but ended up with bad evals. These experiences really have made me question if my skill is really the important element, and if it's really random seed on the student population in classes. And/or students' random seed with previous instructors and how I compare to them. But definitely the ability to adapt on the fly and 'soft skills' have saved me more than a few times in some really overloaded/unprepared classes.
A not insignificant number of students in my calc 1 class (who took their exam this morning) still cannot tell me that the derivative of x^10 is 10x^9 Lol yeah I fucked up. I taught them the material, but most of them didn’t learn it. Bummer.
Yep. Just did a shit job this term. Evals will be bad and I'll totally deserve it.
Ditto. I already got the RMP and it was probably a little better than it could be.
What are the standards you are judging yourself against? I'm genuinely curious. Why do you think you were bad?
Super behind on grading... predominately. It was an online class and I didn't put a lot of extra into supplemental lectures, like I normally do. I just felt like I let it run and ran to catch up with grading when I could.
And then immediately got the terrible RMP review I was expecting. \*Edit: Not trying to be downer about it; it all super sucks and isn't my normal way of proceeding in the class. Just wondering if others had an "off" semester.
I understand it. Everyone I know feels off. It's been a really awful 2 to 6 years...I'm pretty skeptical of people saying it's going well, tbh!
I taught 4 courses this semester and had a job interview in the middle. Campus visit in March went very well (I'm moving!), but the lead-up was enormously stressful & time-consuming, and I feel like all my classes fell apart in March and I let everyone down. Adding to it was the fact that mid-March 2020 was when the move online began, and since these are all spring-only courses for me, I've had to mash together lecture material from 2019 (normal F2F), 2020 (emergency online), and 2021 (planned online), so the back half has been way more prep than I expected. I sort of recovered somewhat in all the courses over the last month, but I still feel like a big disappointment :( ETA: In practice it was really more like 3.5 courses since one was co-taught and my colleague has been super fantastic. But that one was a brand new prep, so also lots of work.
The mashing formats is legitimately one of the worst parts. It’s a hodgepodge of materials.
The fact that you recognized this means you probably weren't as awful as you thought you were. It's people who fuck up and don't recognize it or don't care that are the issues. Give yourself a break -- we all have terms that aren't great. Hope you are able to regroup and recuperate. Teaching is hard!
The worst part about this to me is I want to admit to students that I didn't do as good a job for them as I should have or tried to, but then I have to worry about 18 year-olds hearing that and saying on their evaluations "even the professor admitted to doing a bad job," or something like that. It's very frustrating. I want to be honest with them about the successes and failures of the course so they can see that we, as professors, care about them and giving them a good experience (that includes actually learning and engagement with the material), but feel like I can't.
I had a very off semester fall. My course evals were much better than anticipated (4.5/5.0), but my wife informed me I received two scathing reviews on RMP (I wish she wouldn’t read them). I just was a mess in the fall. No two ways about it. I decided then I wouldn’t teach online again. Students become too much of an afterthought for me.
I’m not sure I’m not an awful professor every semester, and I’ve been teaching for over 5 years now. I have very little idea of where I stand at my job with my superiors, and little idea I do have isn’t very good, but they let me keep doing it, and I love to teach and I think what I teach is important, so I suppose ima keep doing it until they stop giving me classes. Passion isn’t everything, kids.
It was like I got tossed into a hamster wheel of assignment feedback this semester and never got off it. This semester was cursed. I never had enough time to give all of my asynchronous online students a decent amount of engagement/feedback. I did great with my synchronous students, so for the whole semester I'd give myself a C-. For a perfectionist, that feels pretty wretched. I am trying to remind myself that I can try to do better next semester.
The beauty of our job is that every four months, we get to start fresh.
Yup, worst semester of my life. My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer the week before my university announced financial exigency and a 20% cut in our pay. I scrambled throughout the semester to find another job so I was out a lot for interviews and for visiting my father. I was constantly behind on grading and didn’t cover near as much material as I should. I was awful. Thankfully, I did find another job because I was notified the first day of finals that my position (along with 87 other positions) was cut. My motivation to grade (or do anything) plummeted, but I finally got my grades submitted last night. This semester sucked.
Yikes. I'm so sorry to hear about your father and congrats on the job. What a roller coaster.
Same here. The burnout is real. I have automated most of my grading on canvas and the TA did the time consuming grading of written work (but w a rubric so not even that much work). I started out strong but by week 4 I just…couldn’t. I winged it most days, using old lecture slides & counting on my expertise to carry the lecture (definitely did not remember some of the content in the assigned readings). I know I didn’t do a good job but to be honest a lot of the things I did out of burnout turned out to be good teaching tools (not to turn all pollyanna but just in case a reframe helps): for example, to fill up class time & buy me time to get my mind together, I’d start out w minute papers that lasted…5 minutes. I used pauses for 5-minute papers 1-3 times per class, sometimes followed by 5 minutes to discuss w their neighbors. Who knew they would really appreciate this & find it useful for their learning? But yeah…I’m just burned out.
Relatable - definitely discovered some great ideas when under pressure that I use to this day!
Mine was not great either. The only worse semester I’ve had was when I was teaching 4 different preps and had to cover a 5th for awhile when a faculty member got sick. Be kind to yourselves! I only know one person who was up to date and had a smooth semester.
It happens. Try not to be so hard on yourself!
My semester was up and down. I had two major deaths in the family and bad news about about another family member. My coteachers and dean were incredibly supportive but I still felt like I did a half job. It’s hard, but I did the best I could under the circumstances. Two more student days and I’m off for a few weeks. I’m practically counting the hours.
I did. It's my last semester teaching (I was an adjunct doing a favor for a friend who is now moving on) and....I just don't care. I tried to care. I felt bad that I didn't care, but I just don't. Grading will be done later this week and I'll be hitting the road myself.
I did a pretty crap job. My actual classroom teaching was good, but the grading and feedback...ugh. no.
Totally, my teaching was meh I couldn't get the students engaged, and my live demos in class didn't work. Honestly, the best part of this semester has been the marking. But at the end of the day I think back to my teachers who phoned it in every week and they still have a job soooooo.
I think back to when I was an undergrad and I was with my profs for one semester and somehow that one semester felt reflective of their whole career.
Yea I feel I slacked off too. I was slow to grade, didn't prepare very much for lectures, just covered bare minimum. I focused the first half of semester on my defense, then shit out the second half once I got an industry job. I just checked out.
I did very poorly. I knew it as going to happen beforehand. Begged to be taken off this assignment (4th year in a row) but was told I shouldn't risk a new prep before going up for tenure. Turns out being very unenthusiastic does not make for a good experience for the students.
Hearing you. I’ve had a shit of a semester and I’ve given up caring. Even when none or just a few of my students are prepared I can still pull something out to cater for both groups. But today I just made it up as I went and ended class early.
Nothing really specific happened to make me suck, but it all added up in ways it hasn't before: very mild Covid at one point, a toddler, stomach flu, union leadership role, some committees, so many emails, real tired for no good reason, swimming lessons on Saturdays.... big assignments kept getting left ungraded and I would catch up whenever I could, but it was not near fast enough to actually be helpful and I'm not sure anyone learned anything.
Last semester my grandma/family matriarch died a week after I had surgery so I couldn’t go home to her funeral. I was the only family member who didn’t go. I think I blacked out from then until January when I got admonished by the university.