You bring up some points that all of us could use to reflect upon. Thank you!

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I understand your struggle. I work in traffic safety, the death of a person becomes aggregated into a statistic. I remind myself that the work that I do has the potential to save lives or improve their quality of life. This what has kept me pursuing my degree during times where I wanted to quit.

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Great post, Lindsay! I really like your questions about how we can make an inclusive classroom and space where students can be their authentic selves.
When people experience battle fatigue I hear the common response is best explained by this gif.
https://media.giphy.com/media/Ozf9DBfaBGT8Q/giphy.gif

“None of us really know what we’re doing,” Dia replied. “We just go out there and do it and have faith it’ll turn out okay.”
― J.M. Darhower, Sempre: Redemption

I was at a near 6 figure engineering job, doing ‘cool stuff’. But I was miserable because, after a long look, I realized that I was no longer doing what I loved and not making a real impact. I love to teach, to have an effect on the people I am around, to mentor people, and I felt that I could only do that at my job at the expense of my productivity, and my bosses agreed. That is why I left for a more rewarding and self-fulfilling job in academia where I can help people, while still doing ‘cool stuff’, having flexibility, and making enough to support myself and the things I want to do outside of the office.
At what point does it go from being a passion to being just a job and a means by which we earn a living?

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Craig, no worries m8. I think the ones who are worried are the ones who often times are the ones who stop to think about their students and are constantly pondering ways to improve. They’re the ones whose toolbelt is always changing and expanding. The question we perhaps should ask is how can we learn to lend our tools to others in the departments that we end up in? Any ideas?

You guys both hit the nail on the head. It’s all about self-assessment and not in that cop-out way that just saves me time, but in the way that allows them to self-evaluate while demonstrating to me that they understand the material…or that they don’t.

I agree completely. While I don’t think memorization can or should be the only method of instruction or education, it can definitely be an important one. There is a long tradition of memorization as an intellectual accomplishment and to wholesale throw it out seems very odd.

I’m also quite skeptical in general about taking educational/teaching/learning advice from someone who has no background in education and who puts them self forward as “an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age.”