Stress Week for the University Educator
Two weeks before finals is often the most stressful time for educators. This post includes three "hacks" for mitigating this stress
After a few years of teaching I noticed that I was consistently depressed in February, sick in March, anxious in April but energetic in July. But the worst week often seemed to be this week. Perhaps you have heard of “dead week” (or “hell week” depending on who you ask). Dead week is the week before finals, a week that students dread and has been a source of such student stress and sleep deprivation that some universities have placed official restrictions on what faculty can assign. The logic here is that a student cannot prepare for large final exams while they are simultaneously engaged in completing giant projects — projects of the sort that art educators often assign. Students have their dead week. But for university educators, the week before dead week is often the most stressful week of the year. I don’t know what to call it. The mean fifteenth? (the fifteenth week of the semester) Stress Week? There are a lot of reasons for this week being stressful for educators, and they are explained mostly in the principles I have described below.
These three weeks, usually in April, are often the most challenging for students and educators alike. I hope you’re weathering it okay! By logging my various emotional states and journaling about it, I was able to figure out approximately how much of my stress was related to particular irregular circumstances — solo exhibitions, the birth of my child, physical ailments — and how much of my mood seemed to be connected to the academic calendar or the weather. Of course, this is all highly unscientific. But still, knowing that these challenges were coming — and knowing almost exactly when — first seemed to really help empower me to weather the storms.
More recently, I realized I could take a more active role in protecting my mental and physical health and help my students by making subtle changes to my curriculum and lifestyle. After more than a decade teaching at the college level and a few years of attempting to be more mindful about my emotional states, this was the first year that I have been able to mostly mitigate mood swings that were disruptive to my personal and professional obligations. Although this has been true all year, I’ll focus now on this week and on the three big things that have helped me most. I started typing all this out for myself, but figured I may as well share it in case it’s useful to you as well.
Ease Out (Don’t Ramp Up) - By honoring dead week and making your final assignments due the week before dead week (or the Monday of dead week) you give your students and yourself time to ease out of the semester rather than ramp up into the death spiral tornado of obligation that is the way universities typically function at the end of the semester and especially at the end of the academic year. If this means cutting an assignment or project from your curriculum (or even giving students an optional attendance studio day) so that students can spend extra time on the assignments you have already assigned, go for it. The end of the semester is already full of committee meetings and mad scrambles to finish work before everyone collapses into the summer sunset. Resist the temptation to pass the dysfunction of this default setting onto your students by easing out of the semester.
Celebrate & Reflect - Celebration and reflection are important parts of life and work and are often missing from college curricula. If your big projects are due before dead week you’ll then have time during that last week of the semester to help your students celebrate their achievements and reflect on what they learned and accomplished. Meaning is derived in part by communicating and sharing what we have created with others (although this is especially true it is true in any discipline). Opportunities to celebrate and reflect can be more or less structured and may take the form of exhibitions, potluck brunches, roundtable discussions, public readings, etc. These have the advantages of building community and strengthening bonds between students that may endure beyond the classroom. As long as you coordinate these in such a way that they do not add a great deal of additional burden to yourself or your students, time for reflection and celebration can provide relief, catharsis and perhaps most important, a sense of resolution. These emotions often help to mitigate feelings of anxiety.
Embrace Asymmetry - Our anxiety as professors should not mirror that of our students. When students are at their busiest — painting sculpting hot-gluing or whatever they’re doing to complete some giant project —ideally, their professor has already done all the hardest work of prepping the assignment, gathering the materials, delivering some historical context, guiding students through ideating and sketches or mock-up’s, etc. This is essentially why the idea of dead week exists: educators were not sensitive to the amount of work students were doing preparing for finals because the professors themselves were not feeling it. But as long as we are cognizant of it, this asymmetry is a good thing! As an educator (and incidentally as a parter/father/etc) if you can it’s best to organize your life and your curriculum across your courses in such a way that you can be most available emotionally when your students will be most challenged. And then, do not feel guilty if your primary responsibility to your students for a class or two ends up being simply turning on the lights. Let them work! Give them time and space. If a student does need extra help and time, you can be there for them, or at the very least you can cheer them on.
I find that after embracing these three main principles of easing out, celebrating & reflecting and embracing asymmetry, other more general common sense “hacks” are easier to apply. Some of these include: finishing your taxes early (this is an unfortunate fact of life that taxes and stress week sometimes coincide), limiting alcohol and caffeine, exercising or walking even when you don’t feel like it, eating healthy, saying no to optional things, and scheduling activities to look forward to in the weeks after the semester ends. When the semester ends, hopefully you can take some time to enjoy some activities that are for you and about you after giving so much of yourself to your students and employer all year. Schedule it in advance and go there to that happy place when the week starts to feel out of control.
Good luck!