If you teach at university, which aspects of your job do you enjoy?

[Whatliesbeneath707]

This is my second career and I joined the university over 7 years ago. I'm really struggling to find the enjoyable elements to the job anymore. Increasing intake numbers and decreasing staffing numbers are having an impact on us all. It's like the elephant in the room as the management push for us to teach on more modules or take on extra roles.

I imagine I'm not the only one to feel like this. I'm even considering going back to clinical practice, as I feel I'm not going to fall back in love with the university role.

I feel your pain - and we have lost several people back to clinical practice who find it less stressful for all sorts of reasons. There's more students, (who need lots of study and pastoral support) Academic staff are difficult to recruit and retain. Increasingly the stress is driving long term sickness which increases the stress which increases the etc

I'm usually teaching way out of my expertise to cover vacancies/sickness and often just a page or two in front of my students. However, I really enjoy teaching, been doing it for a long time and I'm quite good at it and get energised from it but it's exhausting.

Realistically Its the relative autonomy and flexibility that an academic post offers which keeps me here

I just love hanging out with the students, seeing their enthusiasm and celebrating their successes. It's the hardest job I've ever done, 6 day weeks, admin overload and horrific pressure. Then you go into a session with a group of students and it somehow becomes worth it.

I've lost all my teaching mojo. Being overloaded with modules and marking, lots of admin, and then growing pressure to spoon feed coming from NSS obsessed management mean that I have little enthusiasm for it.

It sounds like we are all having similar experiences.

Yes, seeing more & more students needing increasing pastoral support for very complex issues is becoming more common.

Also covering sessions for ever rising sickness levels is draining, too.
I'm not sure what the answer is, sadly.

It's my first career -- I'm early 40s but started teaching a lot really early on so have been teaching for 20 years. I'm fed up with it and preparing to resign; doing so a bit earlier than I would otherwise have done because of changed personal circs but it would have happened anyway I think. I know lots of people, especially women around my age, doing the same thing. I think the pandemic teaching experience just sped up a process that was happening anyway in terms of increased demands/worse conditions/fewer perks.

Have you got an alternative job lined up @consideringachange
This is the part I'm really struggling with! I need a job that pays similar or slightly less but feel my skills in my previous career are no longer up to date. I feel backed into a corner. I have another 10 years of working ahead of me, so I need to find something suitable/enjoyable.

Glad it's not just me. Second career for me too, have been there more than 10 years and can barely get myself out of bed on the morning. I do like teaching but it's almost an insignificant part of my workload now.

Constant changes in university processes, students needing so much additional support, both pastoral and academic. Fewer staff and particularly fewer support staff pushing all the administration and everything else onto academics.

But have lost confidence and been out of my previous career too long, I totally understand the backed into the corner feeling. Stuck.

@namechangeforHE I agree, the teaching is the enjoyable part but it seems to be such a small part now, sadly. The needs of the students has changed dramatically over the 7 years, & I feel and that together with increasing admin demands has changed the job into something quite different.
I too feel very out of date & I'm busy looking for clinical roles that I can feel safe with & where I can perhaps dip my toe back into to test the waters. The trapped feeling is a dreadful, overwhelming one for me & I need to work a way to sort it.

I worked in a central unit in a university dealing with quality assurance, policy, validations, and general issues concerned with improving teaching, learning and assessment. I ran workshops for academic staff on e-learning and disability awareness as well as taking part in validations and writing various policies. Is there any chance of a move into something similar where you are?

No I don't as such -- I have a couple of small paid consultancy roles that I'll continue with, I will probably do some freelance editing for income and I'm also in the early stages of exploring more commercial kinds of writing. But we are in the fortunate position that I wouldn't need to earn as much as I do now for us to manage. I mean, I can't earn nothing indefinitely, but as long as I can earn a bit we'll be OK. So the tricky bit is not so much financial (obvs we are very lucky with that) but the decision to walk away from the "career". There are lots of facebook groups for people leaving academia though with loads of ideas in case you haven't looked at those yet.

Second career for me too, I moved from the financial services.

I'm feeling fairly burned out and struggling but it's research that's the problem for me. I enjoy teaching.

I like:

My students are bright and motivated and most of them are working hard (much harder than I did as a student in truth). That makes it easier.

Our cohort is small (50 students) and because of my professional qualifications that's the only course I can teach on.

I enjoy the moments of true pastoral support, where you feel like you've made a difference and taken a weight off for a student when they've shared something.

I like being in the classroom enough to make up for all the other shit.

Absolute worst bit is writing exams. I hate that.

Oh and I do love the autonomy. But miss the teamwork. I don't find academia to be very collegial.

Try professional services/academic support if you want the student contact but can afford a paycut. After tax it's not so much different.

I'm the opposite @JenniferBarkley , I feel burnt out with teaching, I think especially as I'm in that draining phase of having young children at the same time as increasingly needy elderly/dying parents (my Dad died recently and my Mum is 80). I just cannot face any of the pastoral stuff, I don't have the emotional capacity and I love my subject but I have never (honestly) loved late adolescents, or found them very interesting, even when I was one. I mean even when I've loved teaching I've always been motivated by the content, not the students, if you know what I mean. (I think that's OK, I think effective HE teachers can come from either direction.) I'm a good, very experienced teacher and I still enjoy it once I'm actually in the classroom but I have come to dread the thought of it which is demoralising and those feelings haven't been relieved by recent leaves. I just want to relax and enjoy being with my children and not feel like I'm spending my limited emotional energy elsewhere. Awful pandemic online teaching was the final straw for me and my feelings about my job haven't recovered from it. I love research and writing though and would transfer to a pure research role like a shot if there was such a thing in my field. It's definitely possible to move to senior admin/leadership + research, and largely or wholly drop the teaching, I know plenty of people who've done that and I'm the right level for it, but I tried a senior faculty leadership role for a couple of years a few years ago and while I was fairly good at it I really loathed it. So have ruled out that option. I have a very strong research profile so should have no problem continuing to publish if I want to, and will try to negotiate some token affiliation somewhere to keep an academic email address. But my most recent book was the big one that I really wanted to write so I also feel sort of "done" in that respect and would like to explore writing for other audiences.

I fully hear all that @consideringachange . I have young DC too and it's so hard to fit everything in. My dad also died in the last couple of years, fortunately my mum is in her 60s and healthy but it weighs on the mind.

I feel the same in not having emotional capacity for anything extra - weirdly I think that helps me with pastoral support. I'm happy to listen and be a shoulder - and then signpost them to support services and leave it at work. I don't have capacity to bring worry about students home.

Also, I was on maternity leave for AY 2020/21 which ultimately I think has helped hugely. I was entering my third trimester in March 2020 and it seemed like terrible timing but in the end it worked out well (once I finished work - my admin role relates to exam boards so March-June 2020 with a toddler, no childcare and late pregnancy wasn't fun). Many of my colleagues feel the same as you in terms of online teaching killing their love (or tolerance!) for teaching in general.

It's really really fucking hard.

This sounds lame but I love the feeling of doing a good lecture. You know when you can see/feel that most of the students are engaged, that they get it, that they're thinking, that they're making connections. I love that, I find it a real adrenaline rush.

I also really enjoy a good workshop where I set the students off with a task or question, it takes on a life of its own and you end up having brilliant discussions.

I like the freedom to teaching in inventive ways, especially if it pays off. I have one lecture where all I start off with one statement and then the whole lecture is the students building the arguments around this statement. Essentially, the students put the lecture together themselves live.

I also love marking 😳I set some really interesting, dynamic and personal assessments for students which have a lot of freedom for creativity. I really do enjoy reading what they've done with these assessments.

It depends what discipline and material you're teaching though I guess. I'm in social sciences so I have a lot of freedom.

@KStockHERO Totally get you on the adrenaline rush of a good lecture when you 'have them' and they are properly engaged. A good workshop/seminar is also a joy. When either fall flat it's quite disheartening.

I actually really like preparing materials - even though it is fantastically time consuming and is one of those jobs where you are penalised (paid less/hour) the better job you do.

I HATE marking though 😬Hate admin even more but I don't have all that much (but that means I don't move up).

I do get antsy if I don't get some me-project time. I'm mainly teaching with a minor writing/research component - but I do really need that and when teaching squeezes that out it's too much. I'd like more project time.

The pastoral/support side can get out of hand - I'm learning to get some boundaries there.

My own dd is 17 I think it's a big help that she is older. I taught part-time when she was younger and only went back FT last year. Anything FT is a nightmare with young children.

@JenniferBarkley I find academia shockingly non-collegiate. Just no teamwork at all. I like the autonomy - but it is extreme!

I love teaching: I'm currently working with undergrads on developing research projects. It's intensive, and they are a bit clueless and not particularly good at planning or prioritising studies over "going home" or playing lacrosse, but when they get it - it's fantastic!

Being back in the seminar room with students after 3 years of C-19 has been a joy.

I'm in the humanities, so am able to taech quite closely to my research.

I'm in the job for the research, of course, and there's nothing I like better than reading for 8 hours a day for weeks at a time.

But as I've got more senior in my job, I spend far more time facilitating , supporting, mentoring & reviewing other people's research. I get a lot of requests to review/evaluate stuff - research grants, journal articles, book mss. I say Yes because I know as an editor how difficult it is to find people to do stuff these days, and also it's a way of keeping abreast of new work. But it is a huge time suck!

But the constant surveillance and uselessness of admin systems really makes me impotently angry. Just this morning I received an email from an automated system telling me to do something I've already done. Going in to the system to double-check, it took me 30 minutes of clicking and going round in web page circles to find the right section. And I was advising a postdoc on something, went to website supposedly where there's a link to yet another web-based admin system, only to find that I needed to search for 3 more hyperlinks to get to the actual system.

I waste so much time on these useless systems which don't talk to each other & make work.

Then I'm reminded by Tweets & emails that Professional Services staff "don't have capacity in their workloads" to do their effing jobs

Been in academia for almost two decades. The teaching has never done it for me. It's me, not them: I'm a good teacher and think I deliver good content (and have the evals to prove it), but it doesn't 'do it' for me. I just spent a term with no teaching and at no point did I even think about it.

Research I love. I like writing, the competitive part around applying for grants, writing papers, getting papers published, and in the last decade or so facilitating research networks and contacts, as well as supervising postdocs and helping them in their first few years of academia.

What I loathe more and more is the constant mission creep that tells me I have to 'excel' at absolutely everything. I must excel at teaching. I must excel at leadership. I must excel at admin. I must excel at research. I must excel at grant capture. I must excel at attracting non-UK students and their fat fees. I must excel at pastoral support. I must excel at kowtowing to Athena SWAN (spare us! Please spare us!), EDI, LGBTQ+++++++, decolonisation, and on reducing the carbon impact of my research and teaching (I work in social sciences, so there is a constant ideological tide coming in).

@consideringachange we may be the same person! I feel exactly as you describe, am at the same stage of life, and also considering an exit strategy. Definitely the admin/bureaucracy/surveillance has ramped up significantly, especially since Covid, and it is not represented fairly in the workload models. The VLE management alone is...exhausting.

I have to say, I never loved teaching. I have fairly severe imposter syndrome/anxiety/whatever around it, and would always dread going into the classroom, despite having spent hours preparing and thinking about how best to deliver the material. If the class went well, I'd be high on adrenaline; if badly, I'd be in the depths of self-loathing. Neither are healthy, I guess. I have found that this has increased, rather than decreased, over time. I suspect this has to do with many things, both systemic and personal, but I'm finding it difficult to handle the emotional stress around teaching currently.

Maybe controversially, the thing that's keeping me where I am currently is the relative flexibility around working hours, and a general light-touch in terms of departmental 'oversight'. I do plenty of working in the evenings/into the early hours during term-time, but I can choose to balance that out outside of term (and I often do, at the expense of my reseach outputs, certainly, but that's a choice I can make). I'm aware of my fortune not to be working in a REF environment here.