August  & Anxiety

Today began our first day of meetings before classes start. These are meetings for Valdosta State University faculty and staff. I have meetings every day this week. Today was the convocation, tomorrow is the College of Education & Human Services (COEHS) from 9:30 am to 3 pm, Wednesday & Thursday are Courageous Conversations (all day-both days and at the Rainwater Conference center) and Friday is our Department retreat—not at the beach, but at the home of our new Interim department head, but he may live at the beach-I don’t know yet.

But, what do I really need to be doing? Preparing for classes (syllabi, rubrics, lectures, materials, guest speakers), revising and writing book chapters for the book I am second author on, and finishing an administrative evaluation that was due months ago.

But, I have committed myself to doing weekly blog posts on teaching related stuff, and today at the convocation one of the topics was student retention. Retention sounds like an administrative thing rather than a part of sound teaching, but I got a list of “Seven things we can all do for retention” and I thought this would be a good framework for my blog for the next 7-8 weeks.   Each week I will discuss how I am applying one of these seven (1) Get to know students, (2) Connect our students with activities (3) Connect our students to resources (4) Understand the challenge of the first grades (5) Encourage experiential opportunities (6) Assemble the team (7) You are Valdosta State to our students.

I do teach graduate students-MSW students and that is different than undergraduates, and in looking at these seven at first it seems that they mainly apply to undergraduates-beginning students, and with these seven, #4 was the one to get my attention. “Understand the challenge of the first grades.”  To me grading is one of the most challenging parts of teaching-students want to do well-they want to make “A’s” and with grading we communicate numerically and with words what students are doing well, and what they need to improve on.

As I have taught I have realized that this communication about student performance doesn’t end when we return the assignments—it is ongoing, and as Professors we have our performance too. Performance in teaching and communicating with students. (Remember last week when I discussed how many assignments to give? Well, I still haven’t figured that one out).

Communicating—for me communicating about student grades and performance when they are not excellent can cause great anxiety.   I just have to work my way through the anxiety-knowing I am not perfect. I embrace and learn from my failures, but as a tenured Professor I have lots of experience with failure and anxiety.  I’ve learned they aren’t going to kill me-they haven’t yet . . .

But, that brings me to “Courageous conversations.” And, this is not to minimize this two-day event comparing conversations about grading and evaluation with conversations about race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual orientation, politics, religion, national origin, health status, learning, age, education and much more.  I think we need this—I could say, “Oh, we don’t need two days of Courageous Conversations.” Or “I’ve had this before.” But, this me—this 54- year old me at this time, has not had these sessions with this group of people—my College of Education & Human Services colleagues. I am excited about COEHS becoming a more cohesive unit. We are just starting to come together.

I hope I am able to finish everything before next week.

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