Tag: burn-out

Imagining Sisyphus Happy?

In this post, Jason Mahn expresses feelings of frustration and burnout amid challenges in teaching, which include lack of student engagement, prison lockdowns disrupting classes, and international students facing visa issues. Drawing on Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Mahn reflects on the gap between ideals and reality, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging despair while fostering hope.

My work as an educator has felt Sisyphean of late. Just this past week, I’ve experienced some acute frustration and setbacks, not to mention an overarching sense of fatigue, ineffectuality, and even cynicism.

Monday afternoon, I found myself walking up the stairwell toward my classroom remembering the apathy in the students’ faces the prior week. I was dreading another session during which I would try—too hard!—to be and sound excited and engaged. I stopped and mumbled aloud to myself: “I don’t want to be here.”  

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The Vocation of Citizenship for the Common Good

The NetVUE webinar on March 25 focused on the vocation of citizenship, urging community engagement for the common good. Speakers Michelle Hayford, Christine Jeske, and Meghan Slining discussed advocacy, mutuality, and compassionate pedagogy, respectively. The session included participant questions and shared additional resources for further exploration of these themes.

The vocation of citizenship encourages individuals to engage actively in their communities, prioritizing the well-being of the collective. By addressing shared challenges, citizens contribute to the common good and help shape a more sustainable future. On March 25, NetVUE hosted a webinar that focused on various ways to explore this topic with students, as well as staff and faculty. In it, the featured speakers discussed their experiences and their recent contributions to  Called Beyond Ourselves: Vocation and the Common Good.

Michelle Hayford (left), Christine Jeske (center), and Meghan Slining (right).
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Self-compassion and the Vocational Journey 

In this post, I will share how the psychological literature defines self-compassion, my observations of self-compassion (or the lack of it) in students, and where self-compassion and vocation intersect. 

In the new NetVUE volume, Called Beyond Ourselves: Vocation and the Common Good, Meghan M. Slining’s chapter, “A Case for Compassionate Pedagogy: Caring for the Public’s Health, Cultivating Sustainable Vocations,” argues that our compassion can keep students engaged during difficult times. Compassion is a way of being with suffering that allows us to see, hold, and acknowledge suffering, while also compelling us to take actions towards reducing it. Slining suggests that training and skills related to compassion can help reduce burnout and support sustainable vocations, which are important for the longevity of caring for the common good. Slining notes that this compassion extends not only to those we serve or the external world but also to ourselves. Within both my previous clinical work and my current teaching, I have been interested in self-compassion, but only recently have I begun to see its intersection with teaching vocation. In this post, I will share how the psychological literature defines self-compassion, my observations of self-compassion (or the lack of it) in students, and where self-compassion and vocation intersect. 

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A Fire That Burns but Does Not Burn Us Out

Jethro’s wisdom matters today, not just because he spots that Moses has a problem, but because he spots that Moses’ problem is about to become everybody else’s problem, too. “You will surely wear yourself out,” Jethro says, adding, “both you and these people with you.”

Remember that booth from the Peanuts cartoons where Lucy used to offer Charlie Brown psychiatric care for five cents? That’s roughly where Moses is halfway through the Book of Exodus, sitting in his wilderness booth, chin in hand, the leader of a newly formed nation of ex-slaves spending his days fielding endless disputes.

It does make you wonder what quarrels the Israelites raised in the wilderness. How do you make a class action lawsuit about manna? How do you have a meaningful dispute about sandals that never wear out?

But humans gotta human. And I confess that on most days in 2022, I would gladly take a number and stand in line for some Mosaic adjudication.

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What Is Our Work Now?

The members of my department have worked together for over a decade… We know intimately how twined and tangled the personal and the professional are for those of us who out live our teaching vocation.

Our Religion department chair always begins meetings with a round of check-ins. The check-in question changes, but the invitation to share from something professional or personal is always there. This feels right—perhaps because the members of our department have worked together for over a decade. Or maybe because we know intimately how twined and tangled the personal and the professional are for those of us who out live our teaching vocation.

This week, a department member opened our check-in saying, “I’m having a rough day, but I’m doing my best in this moment to be present to the work.” Before I could think, I blurted out, “I’m also having a rough day, but I’m not sure what our work is now.”

On the surface, my comment made no sense. The agenda for the department meeting was clear: discuss core curriculum revisions, construct a shared assignment on “identity” for all first year religion and theology classes, and set hiring priorities for the fall (we lost three faculty this academic year). But eight weeks into the semester, five semesters into the pandemic, and two plus years into educational upheaval, my confusion was real.

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Caring for the Care-givers: A Plea

Who is caring for the caregivers? Who is caring for our chaplains? Who is caring for our devoted teachers, especially the ones students trust to have several boxes of tissues handy? These are the caregivers whose vocation it is to provide such care, who want to provide this care. But these are also often the very people for whom, for a variety of reasons, it is very, very difficult to admit that they also need care.

When I sat down at the computer at 4 am this morning, my intention was to write an entry summarizing some remarks I made during a recent NetVUE gathering at Pepperdine University.  Instead, I ended up writing about a conversation I’d had during a car ride at the conference—a conversation that, I think, is the reason I was awake at 4 am. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, and I’ve had several other conversations about it since I got back to my own campus. It was a conversation about vocation, burnout, and suicide.

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Passion vs. Duty

Should work be construed in the terms of passion or of duty? This is the question posed by a recent piece in the New York Times. The author, a philosopher by training, suggests the Stoic wisdom of Seneca as an antidote to our culture’s obsession with finding meaning through work. If we approach work in terms of duty, as Seneca advised, rather than as an expression of one’s passions, we will be less likely to fall prey to the threat of what another writer has described as “the religion of workism,” and the accompanying burn-out that could eventually develop.

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Vocation and the Realities of Burn-out

Finding a vocation in work can fulfill your life. It can also ruin it. I know this firsthand; both have happened to me. I used to be a tenured faculty member at a small Catholic college. For years, I was happy and successful by every measure. I was a respected teacher. I published. I won grants. I led committees that got things done. I was flourishing professionally.

From “Avoiding Job Burnout in Academia”

Until one year, I suddenly wasn’t. I kept doing all the things a good faculty member does, but I did them with diminishing joy and increasing resentment. I started to get furious over small slights. I gained weight. I struggled to get to class on time. I struggled to get out of bed. The only thing that saved me from deeper misery—perhaps even saved my life—was a well-timed resignation letter.

I burned out. As I have explained in the pages of The Chronicle (“The 40-Year-Old Burn Out”) and Commonweal (“A Burnt-Out Case: Aquinas and the Way We Work Now”) that means I exhibited the three major components of occupational burnout, as defined by the psychologist Christina Maslach: exhaustion, cynicism, and a sense of inefficacy. I wasn’t simply tired. I took a semester’s unpaid leave after these symptoms became hard to bear; the time away didn’t change anything. That’s because the problem wasn’t just within me. Continue reading “Vocation and the Realities of Burn-out”