On being spread too thinly

There are a lot of things I want to do and generally I want to do all of them well. There are also a lot of things I am expected to do and I don’t think anyone really cares whether I do them well or not – as long as I appear to be doing them. I was greeted today by e-mail from a militantly drab individual who has developed an inflated sense of self-importance in recent months. The e-mail was a follow up to one of the many e-mails I receive each month from different parts of the university wanting me to document everything I have “achieved” in a given period. The time period varies all the time and sometimes overlaps with previous requests just as the required information constantly changes. There appears to be an industry in information requests at my place of work and I have decided to stop responding to them. The militantly drab person referred to earlier had the front to send round an e-mailing complaining about the lack of response. The fact that we are approaching the most intensive part of our teaching right now seems to have escaped her notice. The fact that most of us will not have had time to conduct and publish research, apply for a multi-million pound grant and set up a spin-out company since we were asked to document our “achievements” last month will also not have crossed her mind. Despite my rather bitter tone I feel like I have achieved quite a lot in the seven weeks of teaching we have had so far this year. I managed to get a student to give a presentation to a class when she was terrified. It sounds small but this girl had literally run out of the class in previous years and more recently been ill with stress and unable to do it. My class was the first time she had been able to stand there with her slides and talk to the group. She came to see me on the morning before the presentation and looked grey and tearful – I didn’t think she would manage but she did. She was delighted afterwards and I was really pleased for her. I have had many little moments like that over the weeks where I have helped someone do something they couldn’t do – where I have seen the metaphorical penny drop. I have been reading my students’ reflective learning assignments and it has been great to see how much they have enjoyed learning how to do something new or how to see material from a different perspective. One of my girls is presenting her work at a conference next week and I spent time today helping her plan her slides and going through her statistics and analysis. It is important that students come to university to develop personally as well as intellectually. In our society where things are only valued if they can be measured financially or put into a table of some kind, I get really pissed off sometimes and wonder what the point of my job is (other than to fill out forms).

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