So I am sit­ting here in my bed­room, pil­lows prop­ping my back up against the head­board, and I know I should be grad­ing papers, specif­i­cally the sheaf of revised intro­duc­tions writ­ten by my devel­op­men­tal writ­ing stu­dents that is wait­ing for me in my back­pack. I am try­ing to move them sec­tion by sec­tion through an essay – intro­duc­tion, body, con­clu­sion – by ask­ing them to write only one sec­tion at a time so that they can focus on the spe­cific rhetor­i­cal and other con­sid­er­a­tions that are priv­i­leged in each sec­tion. So, when I taught them intro­duc­tions, for exam­ple, I spent a lot of time get­ting them to unlearn the advice that so many high school writ­ing teach­ers give and that is so rad­i­cally mis­un­der­stood by the over­whelm­ing major­ity of stu­dents, espe­cially devel­op­men­tal stu­dents, that I have taught: start your intro­duc­tion with a state­ment that will grab the reader’s atten­tion. What these teach­ers mean, I am sure, is that a good intro­duc­tion com­mu­ni­cates some­thing of why the topic of the essay in ques­tion ought to be inter­est­ing to the reader. What these teach­ers don’t mean is what an awful lot of stu­dents under­stand: start your intro­duc­tion with a pro­nounce­ment so grand that the reader will be wowed into awestruck silence at how pro­found you are.

This mis­un­der­stand­ing gives rise to intro­duc­tions that start with sen­tences like, “There are many dif­fer­ent cul­tures through­out the world,” or, to use the topic that my stu­dents this semes­ter can’t seem to get away from when­ever I ask them to give an exam­ple, “There are many dif­fer­ent opin­ions about abor­tion,” or, per­haps my favorite one of all time, “There are many sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences between men and women.” Each of these state­ments, of course, is true, and each of them points in the direc­tion of very inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions and debates, but the state­ments them­selves are so obvi­ous – and I am so tired of read­ing essays that begin with state­ments like them – that I some­times have con­sciously to restrain myself from writ­ing, “Really? No kidding?”

I don’t blame my stu­dents for writ­ing intro­duc­tions that begin with sen­tences like that, and I don’t blame the writ­ing teach­ers they had before me for those sen­tence either; but I do get tired of read­ing them, just like I get tired of read­ing tech­ni­cal writ­ing and cre­ative writ­ing assign­ments – two dif­fer­ent classes – that stu­dents have clearly not both­ered to edit and/or proof­read in even the most cur­sory of ways; and just like I get tired of those fresh­man com­po­si­tion stu­dents who com­plain, and I hear this every semes­ter, that I ask too many ques­tions or that I just like to make things hard for them when I ask them to be pre­cise with their lan­guage and to take respon­si­bil­ity for their own ideas.

None of this is new, of course, but this semes­ter it seems to be hit­ting me harder than it usu­ally does, in part because my classes are – like most classes now – ridicu­lously over­crowded, simul­ta­ne­ously increas­ing the vol­ume of such mate­r­ial that I have to deal with and decreas­ing the amount of time and energy I can give to each indi­vid­ual stu­dent to deal with such issues. I feel this decrease most espe­cially in the devel­op­men­tal writ­ing class, where indi­vid­ual atten­tion from the teacher can really make the dif­fer­ence between a stu­dent get­ting and not get­ting what­ever “it” it is that I hap­pen to be teach­ing at the moment; but I feel it as well in the cre­ative writ­ing class, where being able to sit with indi­vid­ual stu­dents at least once a semes­ter to work in detail on a par­tic­u­lar piece of writ­ing can also make the dif­fer­ence between the semester’s work “falling into place” or not. In fresh­man com­po­si­tion, which is for many of the stu­dents who come to my school one of the classes in which they first start learn­ing how to be a stu­dent,  a student-teacher con­fer­ence is a won­der­ful way of intro­duc­ing them to what it means for them to take respon­si­bil­ity for their own ideas and work far more com­pletely than most are ever asked to do in high school; and in tech­ni­cal writ­ing, those con­fer­ences can help to focus stu­dents – most of whom are in engi­neer­ing and don’t like to write and who also have only the faintest of glim­mers that writ­ing might actu­ally be impor­tant in their cho­sen field – in ways that class­room lec­tures just can’t.

It both­ers me that I don’t have this time to spend with my stu­dents because I feel like I am short­chang­ing them, because I feel like they deserve some kind of indi­vid­u­al­ized atten­tion and I just can’t deliver it. Of course, the rea­son I can’t deliver it – the over­crowded class­rooms – is directly con­nected to the bud­get cri­sis my school is fac­ing; and it is a real bud­get cri­sis. I was at a meet­ing where the college’s “num­bers guy” – that’s what he called him­self – laid the sit­u­a­tion out for us, and it’s that we are fac­ing a sim­ple short­fall. Because nei­ther New York State nor the county where the col­lege is located have been fund­ing the col­lege at the lev­els they are legally oblig­ated to fund us, accord­ing to how SUNY com­mu­nity col­leges are funded in NYS, the only source of pos­i­tive rev­enue we have is tuition; and because fund­ing from the state and county will con­tinue to be either flat or reduced over the next sev­eral years at least, the col­lege is fac­ing a sit­u­a­tion where costs will keep ris­ing and there is just not enough rev­enue com­ing in to keep up with those costs.

This sit­u­a­tion obvi­ously has impli­ca­tions for the con­tract nego­ti­a­tions my union will be enter­ing into in 2013, and I have no doubt we will have to com­pro­mise on things, or give things back, that will not make us happy, but it is also true that the state and county have been under­fund­ing the col­lege for quite a long time, since well before the cur­rent eco­nomic cri­sis. That retreat from the fund­ing of pub­lic edu­ca­tion, and it is hap­pen­ing nation­wide, is a huge prob­lem. What it means for me per­son­ally, how­ever, and that’s really what I am con­cerned with right now, is that my role as one of the orga­niz­ers of the resis­tance to the way in which our admin­is­tra­tion wants to address the bud­get cri­sis just adds to how over­whelmed I feel.

There is just so damned much to do that I feel par­a­lyzed, but beyond par­a­lyzed, I feel numb, as if noth­ing really mat­ters, and that’s hard, because there’s lots going on that I in fact care very deeply about. It is hard even to pick up my own writ­ing, even though, in some ways, that is pre­cisely what I need to do to help myself start to feel bet­ter. I feel it phys­i­cally when I am unable to write – not writer’s block, but when my life makes it dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble for me to attend to my own work. I get cranky and depressed; I get angry and resent­ful; and I get sloppy about the other work that I have to do; and I find it hard to be fully present in my home and in my relationships.

I don’t like feel­ing this way, obvi­ously – who would? – but the part of this state of mind that has taken hold of me over the past few weeks is the part that wor­ries if I don’t write, if I don’t fin­ish that essay and send it out, or those poems and try to get them pub­lished, or if I don’t work a lit­tle harder on find­ing a pub­lisher for my sec­ond book of poems, or write the book pro­posal for the book of essays on man­hood and mas­culin­ity, or the book about clas­si­cal Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture – if I don’t get that work done, then some­how I am a fail­ure. Objec­tively, of course, I know that I am any­thing but a fail­ure. I have a job that I like – even though I’m now in the mood to com­plain about cer­tain aspects of it – a won­der­ful mar­riage and fam­ily life, and I have pub­lished books that, while they might not have made me any money and are unlikely to make me any money, have made a real dif­fer­ence in people’s lives, and I know this because my read­ers have told me so.

Still, I find myself want­ing a shot at a big­ger audi­ence, both because I might actu­ally be able to make some real money from my writ­ing and because I think some of the things I have to say are wor­thy of a big­ger audi­ence, and this desire has run me smack up against a choice about what it means for me to be a writer that I hadn’t even real­ized was loom­ing in front of me. Do I want to be a writer who is known for what he has to say about writ­ing or do I want to be a writer who is known for what he writes about? Where this choice comes from and why it presents itself to me in this form at this moment of my life is some­thing I need to explore more fully, in part because I am not entirely sure pre­cisely what I mean by the first part of that ques­tion, but it is the choice I need to make, the ques­tion I need to ask, and what is most frus­trat­ing about feel­ing so over­whelmed with work is that I don’t really have the time or men­tal space that I need to live actively with the ques­tion, to let it grow and change and find what­ever is in me that will answer it.

And so the cycle starts again. Because that frus­tra­tion makes me angry and that anger makes me numb and resent­ful, and you know where all that will lead. Even­tu­ally, I will find the time, I know; I always have in the past; but right now I don’t have it and that just sucks.