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Teaching through pandemic brought home two basic lessons to me: What happens in our students’ lives affects their performance in the classroom. Professors are mere human beings who can only do so much before our health suffers. Both seem obvious. Surely, I knew all that even before the pandemic? Perhaps. But I hadn’t internalized it, and I certainly hadn’t acted as though it was true. I see many of my colleagues do the same. The pandemic was the first time I taught in a situation where my students and I were all doing poorly at the same time. We were jittery and frightened. We were trying to carry on as usual, but nothing was normal. It quickly became obvious that the pandemic would affect our students’ ability to work. In March 2020, kids in my class who had been great students the previous week suddenly become incapable of following basic instructions. They kept emailing me with oddly clueless questions. Expectations had to change, and I began settling for my students at least learning something. I assigned easier and shorter readings, more videos, and shorter papers. I gave more extensions, excused more absences, and talked to many more students about their mental health struggles. But my own workload didn’t lighten. I worked much harder than normal. And my life was in upheaval too (along with everybody else’s!). I would have benefited from the same sort of break and support that I was giving the students. My doctor considers me high risk for pandemic-related burnout because I’m a female professor at a small college. She sees me as a member of the helping professions. I initially downplayed her concerns, pointing out that healthcare workers have it much worse. They do of course. But she is right. I see signs of impending burnout in myself and in many of my colleagues—especially younger women and especially those with children. This isn’t sustainable. We’re just like our students. We can only do so much before our performance and our health suffers. Our limitations need more attention and more action than we have been giving them so far. We are, I hope, coming out of the pandemic, but in higher education we’re emerging into an uncertain future. Many of our institutions are deep into discussions of budget cuts; the crisis of the humanities continues, and programs are being eliminated. And mental health issues among our students are at an all-time high. It won’t stop being hard. Going forward, how can we respect our own limitations and set clearer boundaries with our institutions, our students, and our colleagues? How can those of us who are tenured and more experienced help our junior colleagues do this more effectively? And how do we do all this while continuing to be there for our students? Those are big questions, and figuring out how to go forward will take collective action. Institutions need to change, junior faculty need to be protected, and we need to get better at allowing people real time off. I have no idea how to make all that happen. So, I start small. My individual actions, for now: I will do for myself what I did for my students—I will recognize that my expectations of myself have to change. I can’t continue to work at my regular pace. I’m too tired. I and the people around me will have to settle for me doing less. And I will tell them that. Over the summer, I’m going to rest. I won’t try to catch up on my research (neglected for the past two years). I won’t revise my fall courses. They are good enough. I’ll read, following my curiosity and meandering from book to book. And I’ll write if I have something to say. I’ll take a few weeks off, and I’ll stay off email when I do, away message in place. I’ll rest. In the fall, I’ll work with an eye to my limits. If I’m still drained, I’ll accept that and I’ll say “no.” A lot. I’ll think about how to shift the cultures around me in a more sustainable direction so that rest isn’t just a privilege for faculty with tenure. I’ll think about how to help junior colleagues and students to set and maintain boundaries. I’ll remember that my students won’t be back to normal in the fall either and I’ll continue to treat them with compassion and understanding. It’s been a long two years—for all of us.   References and resources: “Burnout and How to Avoid It” from one of my favorite authorities on happiness, Dr. Laurie Santos at Yale. It’s part of her podcast The Happiness Lab. Santos is going on a leave of absence. She’s noticing that she is heading for burnout and thus wisely changing course. Newspaper article about that here. For more on showing compassion to ourselves as well as to our students, see Kristin Neff and Dr. Chris Germer’s work on self-compassion. A massive number of articles in the Chronicle, including the report Burned Out and Overburdened (which I haven’t read it yet).

A couple of years after joining the faculty at Concordia Seminary, I decided to audition for the Saint Louis Civic Orchestra, a community orchestra made up of professional, semiprofessional, and accomplished amateur musicians from the greater St. Louis metropolitan area. My training on the double bass goes back to my middle-high school years at the conservatory in Panama City, Panama, where I had my first orchestral experiences. Coming to the US for high school and undergraduate studies still afforded me opportunities to play in concert and jazz bands and take double bass lessons. That changed with graduate studies. The pressures of performing well in school in a foreign language, increasing time constraints due to important family and work obligations, and very few chances to play the instrument in ecclesial settings led to a period of decline in creative engagement with music. Not an uncommon problem among graduate students and teachers of theology and religion, I spent so much time focusing on the True and the Good that I ignored the Beautiful. By the time I started my first job at the seminary, Beauty had become the Cinderella of my life: Truth and Goodness made it to the Ball. Beauty got left behind. And my life was the poorer for it. But joining the symphony carved out a space once again in my life for the gift of play. What is play but the habit of reveling in the beauty of God’s creation, delighting in its colors, sounds, aromas, tastes, and textures? Being alive in the body! Being engaged by the senses! The symphony became my playground in the theater (better yet, in the concert hall) of God’s creation. [caption id="attachment_250618" align="alignright" width="376"] (Leopoldo A. Sánchez M. has been a member of the Saint Louis Civic Orchestra for fifteen years, the last eight as Principal Bass. He is pictured third from the left. Photo used with permission.)[/caption] So, where’s your playground? We all need one. When I talk to my seminary students about the place of play in life, I frame our conversations in the context of the need to establish a rhythm in life. Got rhythm? Yes, a rhythm, just like in music! A regular, steady, habitual pattern of sound and movement in which we live, and move, and have our being. I use the Genesis story to show that humans were not only created for movement and labor, but also for repose and sabbath rest. The first day of creation already sets a rhythm for life on earth, evening and morning—what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls the dialectic of creation. Yes, we were created to be responsible stewards of our gardens. But we were also made to be thankful stewards who carve out time to stand still and delight in the Creator’s handiwork. As in music, there is in life a time for sound, a time for silence, and a time for play. Indeed, sound, silence, and play in music may be seen as extensions or embodiments of the musician’s own rhythm of movement, rest, and delight. Music imitates, breathes life. Getting into the rhythm of the orchestra reminds me of the need for rhythm in my own life as a teacher. It reminds me to ask myself: How do I embody in the classroom not only a strong work ethic, but also a restful presence, and a joyful wonder about God’s world? In conversations with students, I use the metaphor of the garden, the mountain, and the playground. We were created for the garden and the mountain, for labor and rest. Rest includes time with God in prayer, praise, and thanksgiving. Ora et labora, work and pray, as the monks proclaim. Rest also includes literal rest, especially sleep. Had enough sleep lately? Busy teachers tend to be quite knowledgeable and hands on when it comes to the gardens they are called to tend to. But it can be quite difficult to find that mountain to retreat to amid piles of papers to grade, articles to write, and meetings to attend. It can be just as hard to find time for the playground, for cultivating curiosity and wonder in the beauty of God’s creation. Playing in the symphony has become that creative space between work and rest for me. Like playing the double bass in the symphony, play involves practice, honing a craft, activity, movement. You can’t exactly wing a symphony! And yet weekly practices with the symphony do not feel like regular everyday work. They are more like oases of refreshment in the desert. And more than that, they are like being in a workshop where you imagine and experiment together with sounds, bowings, fingerings, rhythms, and colors to make something beautiful together. The symphony reminds the teacher in me to see my activity and time with students not only in terms of fulfilling a task, but in terms of finding and embodying a rhythm that allows for time in the garden, the mountain, and the playground. Like playing with colleagues in the symphony, life with students is a creative endeavor that glorifies the Creator and enriches all our lives with beauty in ways that allow us to do things together with curiosity, imagination, and delight. Got rhythm? Let’s play!

WHAT DIVERSITY IS DOING If you are on the underside of it—on the wrong end of the seeming hospitable invitation—you are likely surviving diversity. Diversity is hardly a cordial experience. It is tolerated, lived through—sometimes agonizingly. To understand this sentiment, we must center the recipient of such an invitation—the one whose presence is absent and thus summoned to right the longstanding wrong of a monochromatic existence, institutional or otherwise. Minorities of all stripes know the damaging diversity dynamic all too well. A majority community’s desire for minoritized presence, voice, stories, or sharing of experience is merely ornament to the core of a preexisting context. The desire for diversity is not organic, but reactive. To process one’s being desired as an afterthought is frustrating at best. And it is so because diversity veils the reality that so many name without truly naming it at all: we all need each other. We all need each other. In many cases, the marginal person needs basic human recognition from the majority community because, whether or not they want it to, this recognition and basic respectful treatment means something to them. Marginalized people do not want to feel like additions to an environment already established, adornment on the exterior of a vocalized ambition to be “diverse.” In many instances the majority person simply wants to do the right thing, for doing the right thing implies that they are the right thing—that they are being good people. So, they arrive at a place where they want to “survey the land,” they do so, and decide it is too bland or monolithic. It needs people that don’t look like them; said people are subsequently invited into the space in order for it to not be bland or monolithic anymore because again, this is the right thing to do, and good people do the right thing. So, in the midst of parsing out what this diversity thing even means, we have people who long to feel like people and people who long to feel like good people. “Needing the other” is present in both camps. These deep-seated feelings of desire are genuine, complex, and even serpentine. Surviving another’s moral mission in order to conjure your existence in this world is a twisted venture. These desires are coded, tortuous, and agenda-ed, but I wonder if they are brave, for I believe that to broach a diversity conversation honestly, we need brave people.   BRAVE PEOPLE Brave people not only recognize that an imbalanced practice of desire is at work in diversity work, but they ask why: why do we need each other? They ask the hard questions and expect real answers. And when they don’t get them, they are not afraid to tell it like it is: we need each other because power structures and systems have designed social life in such a way that one group’s need is material and the other’s need is moral. Brave people ask how the moral and material are entangled—how one’s goodness is tied to another’s corporality, how right moral standing to one is signaled in basic human recognition of another. (The answer is connected to the religious, but that’s for another conversation.) Brave people see the connections others simply cannot acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge, for they are a little too close to the foundation of the life they’ve worked so hard to build. Brave people in the academy upon hearing the question, “How do we begin to tackle diversity in the classroom?” respond that it is the wrong question. They answer slowly explaining that it only is so because we have not even figured out how to acknowledge what the term “diversity” alone might do in people of the institution, students, staff, and faculty alike. Brave people ask questions assuming that we are all human—and thus we want human things like recognition, and thus do human things like avoid what is hard. Diversity in the classroom, they answer, begins with the teacher, a representative of the institution. What the teacher feels, what they emote, is what the students will feel. Look at the teacher; there is information there. Is the teacher surviving, too, or are they intellectually intrigued by this diversity charge? Do diversity initiatives tear away at their bodies, too, or are they energized and excited to be around something new? Is diversity draining to them, too, or entertaining to them? Do not look away: what is happening within the teachers reflects what lives inside the institution. Brave people ask: what is inside the institution? And, do we want it?   MASKS AND MAGIC To be clear: brave people can come from either group – more likely the diverse persons diversely “hosted” and not the majority persons “hosting” diversity—but they distinguish themselves by taking their line of questioning a step further than naming “what is.” They risk their voices to ask why what is has continued to exist, what it is propping up. Then they ask if we need that structure at all to live well in this world. Other brave people will say no, we do not this structure. Fearful people wearing brave people’s attire will worry about how to exist in this world without some kind of structure in place. Though they want to call themselves brave by agreeing diversity the right thing, their bravery is a mask. Since diversity is survived, we in the academy, especially the theological academy, need brave people. We need to empower them with influence like presidencies, deanships, VP positions, majority board demographics, abundant resources, and decision-making abilities. We need to let them live in a structure different than the conditions that warrant diversity in the first place. We need to take a step back (for several years—probably for decades or centuries) and see what magic their bravery can conjure. Maybe, then, we can be magic, too.

It’s a heavy time at our university. The pandemic is still with us (a funny/not-funny tweet I read recently said, “i didn’t realize 2020 was gonna be a trilogy”). Within the first few weeks of class, I had six students from my Religion and Pop Culture class out with COVID symptoms or positive diagnoses; there are only 17 of them enrolled. Throughout the semester, they have emailed me with health updates, how they’re feeling, when they’re getting tested, what the test results were. I myself got sick at the start of the semester and had to cancel the first day of class and hold the next two online. Worse, if possible, there was a shooting on a college campus just a few miles from us, at the beginning of February, resulting in the deaths of two beloved campus safety officers; this is a college always considered one of the safest places to attend, in a town always considered one of the safest places to live. Many of our students, as well as faculty, hail from the surrounding areas, so this event affected our community deeply. And then, just a few weeks later, there were two suicides on our campus. Information was scarce, privacy protected. The administration sent out emails of support, with urls and phone numbers for crisis hotlines, but nothing seemed like enough. Faculty and students were struggling, are struggling still. Mental health issues are on the rise. We are not all trained counselors. Nobody is equipped. Life isn’t stopping. But there is something we can do. We can acknowledge the difficulties, the events, the overwhelm. We can give them a name. We can convey our shared humanity. We can create space for processing. We can say something. This seems so basic, but it is crucial. After the Bridgewater College shootings, I came to class and told my students I was really sad about what had happened. I said it felt utterly stupid to me to be trying to talk about the definitions of pop culture (our topic for the day), in light of the tragedy. I opened up space for them to share any feelings or reactions. Many students chose to talk. They said they felt scared. They said the event brought up memories and connections to other shootings, other trauma in their young lives. They said they were left with a “it can happen anywhere, it can happen here, to us, to me” sense. I then led them through a gratitude exercise. (Gratitude, as a practice, has been shown to increase happiness.) I asked them to write down what they were grateful for having in their lives. I told them about a quotation that struck me many years ago: What if you woke up tomorrow with only what you were grateful for today? I encouraged them, if any people appeared on their list, to let those people know. As the shootings show, you never know what can happen. Later, a student told me I was the only one of her six professors who had said anything about the incident. The only one. I imagine, of course, there could be many reasons for such silence. It could be that folks didn’t know what to say or how to say it. It could be that they felt awkward. It could be that they didn’t want to make things worse or cause harm. It could be that they didn’t know, or want to presume, what students needed in that moment. It could be that they didn’t want to get too personal, especially if this was out of character for them or the learning environment. It could be that the lesson plan for the day didn’t seem to allow time to detour. It could also be that they themselves were feeling traumatized. It could be that this event was indistinguishable from other shootings on or around campuses (like what happened near Virginia Tech just recently), or the other acts of violence in other spaces, that continue to happen on a regular basis. It could be that they have reached a point of compassion fatigue, a numbness that has been settling over us all because of the terrible things that keep happening and our inability to cope with it all. I understand all of these hesitations. It’s hard to know what to do and difficult. But I still think we have to say something. Even if it is imperfect, halting, awkward, uncomfortable, uncertain. It’s similar to the way social justice educators recommend we handle microaggressions in class (e.g., here and here). Don’t let the incident pass in silence, in avoidance, in complicity. Silence is damaging. It itself communicates something and that something, I worry, is: nothing of note happened; I don’t care about you all as whole humans, only the topic or lesson at hand; people died and it didn’t matter. There are a lot of moments in class where we can acknowledge and honor our students’ humanity, and our own. When terrible events, like shootings or suicides happen, these are moments to stop, to slow down, and to say something.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds…   Romans 12:2a (NRSV) Students are stressed today, and Omicron is not the only culprit. Twenty-four-hour access to social media and our preoccupation with it has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. With every posting that stirs divisive issues like Critical Race Theory, attacks on voting rights, or the “anti-vax” movement, what may have begun for students as an average day can quickly lapse into chaos. “This is really nothing new,” faculty might whisper to themselves. Educators have always been challenged by the effects of life’s storms that impact adult learners. What is concerning now is that tempests seem to be rising at an alarming pace. During the past two years we have witnessed: (1) The COVID-19 pandemic taking the lives of almost one million Americans; (2) The cruel public murder of George Floyd by a law enforcement officer; (3) The violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021; and (4) The brazen slaughter of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery and subsequent criminal conviction of his unrepentant assailants. You undoubtedly have your own list that may include one or more of these tumultuous events. Consider George Floyd’s death. Students throughout the world were outraged by the inhumane treatment inflicted upon Floyd. Organic protests spread from Berkeley to Budapest. On the other hand, a vocal segment of Americans believed that Floyd caused his own demise because he unlawfully purchased cigarettes with a counterfeit 20 dollar bill. In a June 8, 2020, article in Inside Higher Ed, Lindsay McKenzie noted that many university presidents called for social change following Floyd’s killing but very few offered concrete ideas for implementation. That fact was not lost on discerning college students. So, what did you share with students and what did they share with you in the wake of these critical events? Perhaps the prospect of discussing the “COVID/Floyd/Insurrection/Arbery” incidents with students raised problematic classroom management issues for you. Did any of these events create anxiety for you personally? Were you transparent with students? Was it your first impulse to offer solutions or solace? Did you squarely address the tough questions raised or did you conspicuously sidestep the deeper issues? I regret that I was not actively teaching courses during this period. However, I personally experienced moments of reckoning in the classroom following the murder of Trayvon Martin and the mass shooting deaths of 20 precious children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I also witnessed the rise of disparaging racist speech leveled against Barack Obama and his wife Michelle following Mr. Obama’s first election as US President; I recall adult students arriving in class expressing despair or anger while others sat in relative silence. Those incidents led me to reexamine my responsibility as an educator in the aftermath of a social crisis. A number of my colleagues found themselves distressed by the feverish hostility expressed by competing political factions. Some faculty were reluctant to share with students because the subjects of controversy were outside the scope of their field of scholarship. Others found it safer to tread lightly on the periphery and not address contentious student concerns. But this message is not intended as a critique; now is a time for grace. In an era when student feelings of isolation often predominate, adult learners need a sense of community with their peers and with educators. We are listening to students, but do we hear them? If we can encourage students to boldly go into the world and speak truth to power, then we must also be willing to bear witness to each student’s truth—even when it is raw or unscripted. Effective teaching is essential, but it is not without limitations. When instructors teach, we facilitate student acquisition of information and the development of discrete skills. But when we endeavor to educate, we answer a higher calling; a calling rooted in a belief that each learner has the potential to experience growth and gain insight in ways that can ultimately transform the whole person. When we educate, we are not tentative—we are intentional. During times of crisis, we cannot permit ourselves to be constrained by the four corners of cherished syllabi. It is imperative that I operate “in the moment” and not become a hostage to the moment. We must seek first to educate; we can always teach tomorrow.