Thinking about personal troubles
Thinking about personal troubles
Even when you’ve spent the last twenty years of your life teaching about personal troubles and public issues, it's easy to forget the difference.
One day this week, I was moving things around on Moodle, our online learning management system, a task which has become a larger and larger share of my work life as a professor during the pandemic. There is nothing pleasant about moving things around on Moodle. It feels about as far away from teaching as you can possibly get. When I decided I wanted to be a professor, staring at a computer screen for big chunks of my day was not what I envisioned.
Moving things around on Moodle is also tedious and as I shifted assignments from one week to another, I was exhausted. “It’s your fault, though,” I said to myself. “You keep changing your syllabus. If you’d just leave your syllabus the same, you wouldn’t have to do this.”
If this were true, it would be an example of what sociologist C. Wright Mills called a personal trouble. A pain in the ass, yes, but totally something I could fix myself. And for a moment, I believed this mean and misguided voice inside my head telling me this was a personal trouble. But I’m trying to become more aware of negative self-talk inside my head and maybe it’s working, because after a moment I frowned, my hand poised over the mouse.
“Wait at minute,” I said. “It’s not my fault. It’s a PANDEMIC!”
Maybe it’s menopausal brain fog or pandemic brain fog or just straight-up dissociative amnesia,1 but for a moment, I completely forgot that I’ve had to re-design my syllabus, several times since March of 2020. In the last year and a half, I’ve gone from pre-pandemic in-person, to total panic online, to hybrid-ish but with students doing remote learning, then online again, back to hybrid-ish, and finally in-person masked and socially distanced with only mild levels of panic, but in very crappy classrooms.2 I don’t even have enough brain capacity to count how many permutations that is, but, of course, that is why I’m exhausted. Not because I chose to re-do my syllabus over and over again, but because I had to.
My exhaustion was not a personal trouble, but a public issue. It’s bigger than me, located in larger historical trends and social structures. It’s the pandemic, stupid!
Because it’s a public issue, I am, of course, not alone in this exhaustion. We all have our equivalent of endless syllabus re-design. We easily forget that this is not how things should be because, first, we are incredibly adaptable creatures.3 Second, we forget because this connection between personal troubles and public issues is a very hard thing for people in a highly individualistic culture like the U.S. to absorb, even when you’ve spent the last twenty years of your life teaching about personal troubles and public issues.
We forget the real trauma of this particular public issues and that we have every reason to be struggling right now, even as cases go down and some parts of our before-lives return. We are all trauma victims now. The pressure to forget all of this and just get on with our lives is strong, but repressing trauma never turns out well.
In this state of exhaustion while being unable to even remember why we’re exhausted, it’s hard to see things clearly. Am I tired of teaching because I’m living through a global pandemic and all the trauma that comes with that or am I tired of teaching because I’ve been doing it for twenty years and I’m ready to move on to something else? Should I join the ranks of the Great Resignation? Are these students harder to teach than the students I taught before the pandemic or are they just struggling in the same way we all are? Have I lost whatever energy made me a good teacher in the first place? Would escaping the college actually make me happier? What do I really feel?
I don’t have any of those answers at the moment, which is okay. Wherever you are right now, it’s okay. It’s not a sign that you’re flawed or a failure or lazy or weak. Understanding the difference between a personal trouble and a public issue helps us realize how much of our lives are beyond our control. I cannot stop the pandemic. I can’t influence the seismic changes happening in the world of higher education. I can’t even much control which classroom I teach in. Our culture (and especially in the U.S.) works really hard to convince us that most everything is all our fault. As a sociologist, I know better, but I still forget this important truth.
Here’s what I do know. This week after Fall Break, I went back into the classroom once again. My intro class had actually watched the documentary I assigned about social class in the United States and they had a lot of say about it, which isn’t always the case. One of the students who seemed mostly indifferent to sociology at the beginning of the semester, asked if I taught other classes in sociology that he could take. A student in sociology of gender told me our class was the best part of being at Hanover for them. Even with the collective exhaustion and grief and anxiety we’re all experiencing, we’re still plodding along, doing the best we can. All of that made me think that at least for now—for this week and this semester—I’ll keep going.
Thank you to all my new subscribers and everyone who’s been liking and sharing and commenting! You’re awesome! I’d love to hear this week what your personal troubles are and how you’re keeping going (or not).
I’m close to 100 subscribers and if there’s anything you can do to help me get there, I’d appreciate it!
Since I read The Body Keeps the Score, I’m a little obsessed with trauma. This week, I flashed back to the moment in March of last year when we all found out Hanover would be closing like every other college and university in the country. I was in seminar, a class full of senior majors. They already sensed that this might mean no spring term, no graduation, none of the normal rituals with which your college career ends. They were crying, of course, and there was nothing I could say or do to make it better. They filed out one-by-one and I hugged the ones who were okay with being hugged, because we’d not yet decided hugging was deadly. That is a traumatic memory and I was just watching the students, not experiencing it myself, but I had mostly forgotten it. Shoved it away. It’s hard not to forget your trauma because the capitalist overlords want us to forget our trauma. They want us to fill the holes in our lives with stuff they sell us and we fall for it, filling our houses until we can’t move. But the trauma doesn’t go away.
The worst classroom by far was the recital hall, built for three hundred people, with acoustics designed to suppress any sound not coming from the stage, and there I was trying to teach a discussion-style class. We were not on the stage. We gave up on that room about halfway through the semester and went online. This semester, I’m in a lecture hall—still better than a recital hall. But I haven’t had a room with a chalkboard since March of 2020 and I love chalkboards. Every time I pick up a piece of chalk to write on the board, the little kid in me who used to play teacher wants to jump up and down with joy. When I have a NEW box of chalk? I can barely contain my joy. Sometimes I don’t. There are so many horrible things about teaching in a pandemic—the fact that I’ve now had students for multiple semesters without being able to see their entire face. But the chalk deprivation is also hard. My kingdom for a chalkboard!
I listened to a podcast this week—an interview with Mary Catherine Bateson—and she talked about how incredibly adaptable humans are. Unlike other animals, we never stop learning. A wolf learns how to track and kill pray and that’s pretty much it. But for our whole lives, we’re learning new things and in this sense, we stay child-like. This is a lovely thought.