I cannot describe semester's end

So I will cheerfully accept help from this meme

I forget when I first stumbled across this meme, but think of the back end of the horse as the beginning of the semester, when your heart is full and there are so many new ways to deliver old and new concepts. You’re learning the students. They’re learning you. Life is good, if busy.

Sure, I can be on that committee!

Supervise that independent study! You bet.

And then you arrive at mid-September (the horse’s flank) and you start to realize that you’re buried under grading. You remind yourself that you are the teacher who chooses to assign multiple low-stakes assignments, as opposed to a mid-term test and a final paper, because that seems to work best for delivering Knowledge. So at this point, all your wounds are self-inflicted and you cannot really whine about that.

Then, around the end of the month (or maybe before, academic life isn’t necessarily linear), that lecture or activity or PowerPoint you slaved over lands like a wet fart. In a short skirt. At a party.

And then — oh, look! — it’s mid-terms. Classroom technology goes blinky. It’s dark when the alarm goes off. The students are mostly cool, but you find yourself in academic meetings wondering if there’s a point to all this discussion — and what is this meeting about again? You use the meetings to answer emails after you apply your critical thinking skills and decide that is a better us of your time. And you hate meetings.

Today, just a few days from semester’s end, you’re doing well to even find the front of the horse, which looks happy in this meme but inside is dying. Colleagues stopping by your office (where you keep a bowl of candy) share the latest indignity, and it all seems funny because, honestly, it is. You’re too old to get bent out of shape about silly things, but your work life has taken on the feel of a human-sized game of Whac-A-Mole.

And then you remember what an old colleague at an old newspaper once said:

You win some. You lose some. But you suit up for every game. Good luck to all of us.