Support for the New Semester

A new semester is a new opportunity to shift your relationship with academia, to start to practice releasing the academic grind, to align how you spend your days with what matters to you, and to really find more satisfaction in your daily life. Today, I'm going to be answering your questions about the new semester and providing my take on how to approach the challenges of the new semester.

I invited your thoughts and concerns and struggles with the new semester via Instagram, and I got some really amazing comments. So thank you all so much for responding and for sharing your concerns as we start this spring semester. So my responses to the kinds of things that you all are looking ahead to experiencing this semester are really based on your wellbeing.  I'm going to be putting your wellbeing first in my responses. I am going to be thinking about your emotional life, your health, and what matters most to you.  And really at the core of this is my belief that within the structural issues that plague academia in the 21st century, which create so many barriers for faculty, we do have agency to adjust, build, and transform our academic lives.  You are not alone. So my responses and my ideas and my guidance come from this perspective.

Before I jump into that into your amazing questions and comments, I wanted to let you know I have a new mini-program just this month in January to help you plan your semester. It's my “Plan your Semester Pop-Up.” I created an amazing workbook with this awesome assessment that I'm super excited to share with you to help you identify where you want to focus, and what's going to make the most impact for you and your daily life and your wellbeing this semester. So you'll work on the workbook, and then you'll have a one-hour coaching session with me to figure out really how to create the kind of semester that you want, and how to sustain your vision when things get tough, because we know that in a couple of months, things are gonna get tough in the semester. You'll also have two email check-ins with me, and I'll follow up with video responses for you. so I can support you with anything that comes up for you in the first couple weeks of the semester. So again, this mini program is really based on my belief that you CAN create your own satisfying and humane semester, you DO have the agency to put into place what you want and need. So if you've been curious about working with me, this is a really great way to dip your toe in. And you can find more details linked in the show notes.

So here's what came up for you in your questions and concerns about the new semester:

• Prepping a new course

• Coping with dysfunctional administrators

• Feeling like my best laid plans inevitably get derailed by mid-semester

• Staying tuned in with myself and listening inwards.

These are the four topics that we're really going to focus on, these four concerns and questions, because I think these are things that are important, and they impact so many of us. So thank you to those of you who offered these concerns and things that are on your mind as you're starting the new semester.

There are some themes that I notice in these four concerns that kind of unite them. One is just the idea of managing an overwhelming workload. You know, this is a structural problem as staff has been reduced at our institutions, more and more administrative tasks are falling to us, and these take time. We have to think about how to manage those administrative tasks in relationship to the work that we traditionally do—preparing our courses, serving on committee, doing our research, right? The other theme that I noticed is making time for self-reflection and what matters to you, and sustaining that.  This is a huge issue with many of the folks that I talk to and with my colleagues and with myself as well. How do we sustain our commitment to reflection, to the things that we really want to do because they matter to us in our academic work?  And then another theme of dealing with difficult people.  I think this is something, of course, that everyone deals with. But there are unique overlays in academia, everyone's personal commitment to their work, and the interesting personalities that can be such a wonderful enrichment of our daily lives and sometimes can be leading us to work with really challenging folks. So how we navigate those relationships in academia.

Let's jump right into these questions and these scenarios, and I will share my thoughts.

Preparing a Course

Preparing a course is one of the foundational experiences of every new semester.  This is something that we're constantly doing, preparing to teach something that we've maybe taught before, or preparing to teach something that we have never taught before, something new. When we're setting out, to plan a course, to update it, to start it from scratch, or even just something that we've taught before and present it in a new semester. I suggest thinking about two perspectives:

• One is to find your curiosity, this is what can keep us engaged throughout the semester, as well as drawing us in in this moment of beginning in January. What is exciting to you, what is it that you want to learn in this course? Now, this is something that I think is especially poignant, maybe, or exciting when you're planning a new course, because there is so much to be curious about when you've never taught a particular course before. But I think this can also be a really great exercise for when we're teaching a course again, like maybe it's an intro course that you've taught many times. Where's your curiosity? What's going on in the world that might be really interesting to see how students respond? Or, you know, what are the conditions of your own life context that make different material relevant to you this time around? Finding that curiosity finding that little spark of what might happen—What will I learn? How will I grow in the course of the semester?—can really make the planning process more fun.

• The second perspective to hold on to as you're preparing a course is claiming your expertise Where are you already confident? What is already fun for you? Where do you feel like, if I asked you to tell me a little bit about this topic at a dinner party, where would you be able to start to talk off the top of your head?  Making sure that you feel that expertise in your body as you are preparing that course can do so much good to counter the feelings of uncertainty, and sometimes the destabilization that can happen when we are engaging in planning something new, or extending ourselves a little bit.  It can make us feel a little bit like, Oh, I'm not really sure that I know this well enough. Now, I don't know about you, but one of the main lessons that I learned in graduate school, and then throughout the rest of my academic career so far, is how little I know of the world. Right? I obviously am an expert in what I study and what I write about. And yet, I just have this awareness of what I don't know. And that is wonderful for us to be aware of what we don't know, of the kind of radical uncertainty of knowledge and the production of knowledge. And there IS a basis for your expertise, rooting yourself in that remembering what you're really good at what you know, can be such a strong place to begin.

So these two elements of expertise and curiosity can play so well together when we are starting out the semester in planning a course.

Coping with Dysfunctional Administrators

So the next concern or question about starting out the new semester is a question that I think really gets to the root of some of our challenges within academia and this is about coping with dysfunctional administrators.  So when I say that, I get in my stomach this kind of feeling of like a pit in my stomach, and I don't know if maybe you all have a physical response as well, to the idea of dealing with challenging institutional gatekeepers. So in this situation, when you are in a position where you are either in conflict, or really worried about inflexibility or the direction that your university or college administrators are taking, I'm going to suggest something that I learned from a colleague at my institution:  which is to really think very deeply and seriously about what you can control and what you cannot control. This is really hard. And I think that we often want to be able to control more than we really can, on the one hand, and on the other, we sometimes overlook some of the small ways that we actually have more control than we think. Some dedicated reflection on these two poles:  What can I really influence?  Where is my zone of possibility in this situation, and what is outside of my ability to influence? 

This can be difficult on a couple of levels, because you have the frustration that can come of not being able to fix the problem, or help your student, or facilitate a process that really should be easier than it is—that can feel really frustrating. So taking the time to acknowledge the feelings that come up, when you think about what you can and what you cannot control. Another emotion that I see in relation to challenging situations with our institutions, and with the people who make decisions, is grief. There can also be some grief that comes up when you are in a situation of conflict with an administrator or with an office. First, why does it have to be like this? That's something that I hear from folks a lot:  It doesn't have to be like this!  Why does this relationship, this process, have to be predicated on conflict?  There's so many other ways that this could happen. The other piece is grief around changing relationships. So at some institutions, at a small college, for example, relationships can be long running, you might have a relationship with someone who becomes an administrator, or whose administrative policies or way of leading has changed, and that can bring up a sense of loss for us. And then, of course, there's just plain old-fashioned anger:  that you're in this situation, that it's so unreasonable that you've had to waste your time and energy on this. Taking the time to really sit with those feelings is uncomfortable, and we don't like it. AND it is so necessary to move into a place where you can think about your capacity, it is so important to consider your capacity when you're dealing with conflict. What is my capacity to address the situation? When you think about capacity, and you think about control, and your agency, within the situation, you get a fuller picture of where to spend your time and energy. If your capacity is limited for this situation, that helps you direct your attention to that list of things that you can control and to be able to choose. This is not easy, and it's something that we all encounter at some point. It may not be an administrator, it may be a colleague or a peer or another person who is a decision-maker in your institution. And it's a difficult situation.

I do want to emphasize here that there are so many highly competent, and really, truly wonderful administrators in higher education who are doing their part to transform academia and to make it a better place for all of us. Some of my best friends are administrators or have become administrators. It's also important to remember that administrators, like faculty, are very pinched for time and resources often and often the context that they're dealing with and the challenges that they're dealing with are invisible to us as faculty.  Whenever you can partner with administrators at your institution, and frame your own concerns and challenges in the broader contexts and concerns that they have, I think the more successful we can be in communicating across that divide.

Our Best-Laid Plans Get Derailed by Mid-Semester

So another question was about feeling like our best-laid plans inevitably get derailed by mid-semester.  This resonates so much with me, and I hear this from folks so often, that we start out every semester with this, I think of it as the “sharpened-pencil smell” of optimism:  we are going to make time for ourselves, we're going to do our writing, we're going to spend time on the things that matter to us, and not work at night, whatever it is that you tell yourself every semester.

The first thing to do is to have compassion for yourself. Change takes time, it takes experimentation. And of course, our brains are going to default to the habits, and the behaviors, and the activities, and the ways of making decisions that we've done for a long time. And if you're trying to change that, those thoughts of wanting change, of craving change, matter, regardless of how you implement them in a particular semester. So stepping back, having compassion for yourself, giving yourself the flexibility to fail, because you are changing, because when we are trying to change and divest ourselves of academic grind culture, it is not easy. Having that gentleness with yourself, and that empathy for the experience that you are going to have throughout the semester.

One thing that I found is really helpful at the beginning of semester, taking some time to ask yourself, what do I know about myself in a given semester? What do I know about myself? How do I respond to the kinds of situations that are going to come up for me during the semester?  Going through in your mind or in your calendar, the things that you're going to be experiencing and anticipating how you usually respond.  Give some thought to the things that tend to derail you. Is it a request from the dean's office that comes up at the last minute, and you have to drop everything to plan? Is it student letters of recommendation? Is it grading? Often, I see folks underestimating the time it takes to grade, and grading then takes over and pushes out the other things that we wanted to do.   What are the things that are difficult for you during the semester? Where are those points where you encounter difficulty, or you start to feel like you can no longer not work at night, for example? What is it that usually happens that makes you work at night? So thinking through those situations, using what you know about yourself to support the changes you want to make to support resting, or building in time with your colleagues, whatever it is that you want to do in a semester.  How can you support yourself with what you know about yourself?  Let's go back to the example of grading.  If you always underestimate the time it takes you to grade, then, for one assignment this semester overestimate.  Give yourself three times the amount of time you think it's going to take.  Tell students that it's going to take you that long so that they have no expectation of getting it any sooner and take that time. See what happens. One of the barriers to doing this is that we don't want things to take as long as they take sometimes. So you may feel some resistance to allotting three times the amount of time for grading, you might feel like, “it shouldn't take me this long, I don't want it to take me this long.” Planning for the reality of your schedule is a way of showing compassion for yourself. And this is an experiment, try it out and see what happens.

I'm also going to suggest giving yourself the freedom to notice.  It's very hard in advance to figure out sometimes what is going to derail you.  Maybe this semester is a space of noticing:  What are the ways I want to spend my time that are not aligned?  How am I prioritizing my work? How do I feel at the end of the day?  Simply noticing is so so valuable.  As academics, we want to respond. we want to take action, we want to make change. And simply noticing feels like not enough. But it is so powerful simply to notice, especially when we pair that with a non-judgmental approach. Practice not judging yourself when you notice, “Oh, look, I underestimated the time that it takes me to grade this paper.” Notice, look at that. Okay, that is a huge learning moment. It's simply information, noticing is information.

Just remember that it is never too late to shift to adjust, to give your time to what matters to you. It's never too late to set aside all or nothing thinking. And what do I mean by that? I think when we start to see our best-laid plans at mid-semester starting to disappear or starting to fall by the wayside, I think we often think, “Well, I'll just try again next semester. I'll just put this aside and try again later.” But it's never too late. You know, if you're in April, even in May, you can make small shifts that make a difference to your satisfaction to your enjoyment and to feeling accomplished at the end of the semester.

Staying Tuned in to Myself

So the next question is around staying tuned in with myself and listening inward during the semester. So I think that when we envision staying tuned in with ourselves, the images that might come to mind, are dominated by what this might look like on social media or what it looks like for someone else, or what we think it should look like for ourselves. And I want to just suggest that we can be thinking about what is fun.  That's a really clear window into staying connected, and really staying tuned in, listening, paying attention, connecting, reflecting.  Sometimes I think that social media has given us this very serious image of self-reflection, this like perfect image of a beautiful yoga room with a wooden floor and the light coming in just so, or the most gorgeous journal that you use while sitting with your perfectly steamed coffee. We have this image that is really false! And I think has led us in the wrong direction, really towards a kind of consumption-based view of self care, which is maybe a story for another day! But I think that that has misled us into focusing on the extraneous bits of reflection and connecting with oneself.

So I'm just going to counter this all by suggesting fun. I think that fun is our way in to a more connected day-to-day life. Why is fun so powerful? Because of dopamine! Of course, dopamine is the reason that we want to return to activities, or to moments of reflection or stillness, whatever it is that tunes you in, that connects you to your inner experience, and gives you a moment for that metacognition that is so important to learning and to growing as humans.  I want to give you a couple examples. This might be taking a walk, and taking pictures of the beautiful flowers that you see along the way. It might be doing yoga, it might even be sitting with a beautiful journal and a lovely cup of coffee. But it could also be snowboarding, it could be lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling with your door closed. It could be going to a movie by herself. There are so many ways that staying in tune with yourself and looking inward can manifest and they just don't necessarily look the way that we sometimes expect.  What is truly fun for you?  Give yourself the opportunity to experience that fully and to enjoy it in a low stakes way and see what happens. See what kind of reflection, what kind of connection with yourself you can craft with fun.  You are allowed to simply do what's fun for you as a reflective activity!

So across all of these situations that we've talked about today, I hope that what you're taking from this at the beginning of the semester is that you might want to try out some of these strategies:

• Noticing without judgment

• Finding your curiosity while also claiming your expertise and working from a place of confidence

• Finding the fun

• And then you know the really powerful question of what you can control, what you cannot control, and what your capacity is in this moment.

I think these are skills that we can learn with practice. These are basic skills that really can support a more satisfying academic life that can really help us start to release the expectations of the academic grind and help us find our way the beginning of the semester comes with its ups and downs, and I hope that you'll find some peace and some optimism in some of these strategies.