I'm tired. No, I'm not just tired; I'm exhausted. I wake up every morning wishing that I didn't have to get up and go work. I sit in the office all day day dreaming about going back to my apartment and curling up in my bed. I come home and all I want to do is take a nap but I have meetings and errands. I fall asleep while still trying to accomplish a few more things - like last night when I found myself passed out on the couch with my laptop and my guitar next to me. I'm not sure how much longer I can do this.
Weekends are usually when I catch up on sleep - but I haven't had a real weekend in a while. There is always something that needs to get done on the weekends. Last weekend, I went to an RHA conference. We left Friday at noon and got back Sunday afternoon. And then Monday, I had to get up early to drop off the van before 9 am and then go back to the office.
My NRHH is starting to become more active; and I'm super excited about that but that adds another meeting to my evenings. I'm now up to at least one meeting every night - more than one some nights.
RAs have now asked to have more professional staff presence at Homecoming practices - we have a flag football team, a lip sync team, etc. So tonight, I ended up going to the lip sync practice and it was fun but now it's 1:30 am and I haven't practiced playing the guitar yet, haven't done the dishes or cleaned the apartment and tomorrow at 9 am, I have to be back in the office.
Oh and have I mentioned that I've had a really bad cold for the past week? But how do you get better when you don't have time to relax, sleep and drink tea?
I'm not even sure if this post makes sense; I'm just rambling. Ha.
But I've been thinking about support lately. What does it mean to support your staff? How do you yourself want to be supported?
To me, support means that a supervisor will listen to me, let me vent, process and problem-solve. It means that a supervisor will help me find balance in my life. It also means that a supervisor will respect me and give me the feeling that my work is appreciated. When I spend countless hours at night and on weekends working on things, I want that to be recognized - instead of being told that maybe I should do more.
I'm not sure what support to my RAs means. I've been trying to find out.
When I ask for feedback, I often get suggestions about changing things on a departmental level - I'm not in a position where I can make those changes happen. Or they want to get rid of a certain initiative or program - something that I and the other professional staff members believe in, something that we know will benefit our residents if executed well...something that just isn't going away. But when you listen to a staff member's feedback and then have to tell them that the change they want won't happen, will they still feel supported and understood? I try to explain. I try to give reasons. I'm not sure I'm being heard.
How do you support a staff that won't give you real feedback? RAs here have the opportunity to give anonymous feedback about their supervisor at the end of the year. I realize it's easier for students to give anonymous feedback - they feel more comfortable and are willing to say more - but is that really helping our department or teaching them anything? In what real job will they be able to give anonymous feedback? Wouldn't it be better if we taught them how to give feedback - in person, directly? And then, if I got that feedback from the RAs directly, we could talk about things, work through these problems, come up with compromises and solutions. When I get the anonymous feedback - especially when half my staff says one thing and the other half the exact opposite - what am I supposed to do with that?
Oh, I'm so tired - not just physically, emotionally/mentally - I'm just drained.
80 more days. And as much as I have no clue what will happen after - if I'll have a job or not, if I'll be returning to this country next year or not - I can't wait. It's gotta get better. It just has to.
In 80 days, I'll stop being tired!!!
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You say you have all these meetings to go to every night and you are so busy and can't get sleep yet why did you cancel a staff meeting to go to a concert with another AC? I would really like to see how that is justifiable.
ReplyDeleteI do have meetings Monday through Thursday night and I have to work many weekends, which makes it hard to have a personal life. So for that one night, I did put my personal life first.
ReplyDeleteI just have a question....do your department and your RA's know you have this blog and they OK with you writing about them? It seems like you write about a lot of things that my department wouldn't let me get away with writing. Just wondering!
ReplyDeleteThe idea of this blog is that it's anonymous - so my department wouldn't know about it and I could be more honest. Also, then other people won't know what school I'm talking about, so it wouldn't hurt the department.
ReplyDeleteWell, if you actually know me, it's hard not to figure out that I'm writing this. So at every institution I've been at, someone has eventually found out that I'm writing this blog. At my last institution, it wasn't a big deal. The staff members that found out kept it to themselves (except saying something to me) and then that was it; no major drama.
This time around it didn't go that smoothly and now quite a lot of people know about this blog and I have had to start being a little more careful about what I write.