Teaching TMI

Today I once again learned why it's important to schedule bathroom breaks and eat when I'm hungry. Although I'm fully house-trained, I still seem to struggle with the notion of "going when you need to", and "consuming proper amounts of nutrients", which I really blame on my teaching responsibilities.

To a lot of academics, teaching is more of an afterthought. Even if we're at a teaching institution, and haven't had a 2x2 load in years, the vast majority of academics are researchers at heart. Sure, we'll tell you how much we love teaching in our cover letters, we'll have elaborate teaching philosophies to prove it, and some of us, like me, might actually like standing in front of a classroom, but deep down inside, we love nothing better than to hunker down in our offices with the lights on low, some groovy tunes in the background, a batch of data, and a looming deadline.

However, teaching is still a very real part of the day for most us, including myself. And although we're a completely different breed from people who actively chose a career in education, we do try. Now most of us do fine. The younger (read born after 1970) crowd has actually had to take workshops and classes on  how to teach while in graduate school, and the looming threat of poor student evaluations keeps us non-tenured academics on our toes. Most of the time.

But in spite of our very best efforts, there are just some things that you never really figure out until several years into your teaching career. Things that I'm sure anyone with an education degree learns on day one. And some of them are downright essential, as in, on a par with breathing essential. And what I'm trying to get to is that today I forgot two of those very essential things. It was not nice.

First, bathroom use. The little orphan "Annie" had it right when she told Ms. Hannigan, "When you gotta go, you gotta go". Only she was never a teacher. Because when you're teaching, you can't just go to the bathroom when you want to. You need to learn to go before your class starts. Even if you don't have to go right then and there. And woe betide if you don't; you will suffer. You see, while your students can us the bathroom when they want to, you can't. And no, you can't always schedule a break when you need to go. Some classes are just too short for a break (but long enough to cause you serious anxiety if you don't plan your waterworks so to speak), while sometimes you just have to get through a certain amount of material to stay on schedule, and other times you really don't want to leave all your stuff in a classroom full of bored students. Thankfully, my body has developed some sort of survival-teaching mode, where I tend to forget about any physical discomforts (headaches, fatigue, bathroom desires) when I'm up there, but that doesn't mean it stays gone when class is over. And you try running to the bathroom with a laptop bag, a projector, a bag full of extension cords, your binder, and thirty students papers, while fending off twenty students with questions about something. It's interesting.

Second, food. You need to make sure you take care of any munchies before you go into class, as again, unlike your students, you can't eat during your lecture. It's just not right. Unfortunately, hunger isn't covered by the teaching-survival mode I mentioned above, so if you're hungry, well, you're just out of luck. You'll just be hungry for however long your class is, while watching your students eat their way through breakfast, lunch, or whatever snacks they could get their hands on. Not only is it extremely uncomfortable, you also find yourself using lots and lots of food-related examples which make a lot less sense when students regurgitate them back to you on their next test.

Today, I hit the jackpot. I had to use the bathroom, and I was hungry. It was not good. For all my experience, you'd think I'd have these two basics figured out right now. Perhaps I could make them part of next year's teaching goals "fulfill physical needs before class starts". I wonder what my chair would think about that...