I know, I know...I'm a few days late. But here we are. It feels like everyone I know has taken a collective sigh of relief that the madness of 2020 is now in the rearview mirror. Really, though, how different has the new year been from the old? I'm not sure there is something magical in closing the old calendar and opening up a new one. And yet, I find myself feeling hopeful for the new year, perhaps more hopeful than I've felt in sometime.
This past year I continued my practice of capturing one second of video every day using the 1 Second Everyday app. I smashed all of those seconds together again into a six and a half minute video recap of my year. As I watched it, I'm struck by how clearly I can remember so many of these one-second slices of life, both the highs and the lows. You're welcome to watch it here, if you like:
That last second of my 2020 is my niece leaping off of a chair in our living room. Her shout got cut off just a bit to squeeze the whole leap into one second. It was actually a, "Let's go!" And I can't think of a more fitting way to think about leaping into the new year: "Let's go!"
This is often the time of year where I--like many people--reflect on setting goals for myself. There is something about the milestone of the new year beginning that makes this seem right. Last year, about this time, I wrote a post wondering about the value of "resolutions" and whether goals need to be measurable to be attainable. I'm still wondering about this, I guess. I'm not really making any resolutions this year, and I'm not sure I'll set any measurable goals either.
Oh, yes...I could stand to lose a bunch of the pounds I packed on through stress-eating my way through 2020. And, yes...I'm planning to be out pedaling as soon as the snow and ice are done for this winter...and I'll probably shoot for 2000 miles on my bike again, since that has been about what I've been pedaling for the past couple of years. And I do intend to keep up the blogging, at least a few times each month. And, gratefully, I'm getting more intentional about spending time in prayer and reading scripture again, with the support of a new devotional I got for Christmas. And professionally, I have broad ambitions of both starting a podcast with a colleague this year, and drafting a book, as well as teaching to the best of my ability in our ongoing pandemic world.
That looks like a lot of goal-setting, doesn't it?
But I think my actual "goal" for 2021 is to be fully present in the things I'm doing. I want to take a cue from my niece's joy in jumping in with both feet, with a "Let's Go!" attitude.
I've said to a few people that this past fall semester was the most demanding for me since my first year of teaching. Most of the challenge was that I have such high expectations for myself and my teaching practice...and I fell short of those expectations.
A lot.
Here's the thing: the HyFlex model of teaching sounds great in theory. But it's really, really hard to do it well in practice. HyFlex is "hybrid flexible," and the basic idea is that students should be able to fully participate in class whether they attend in person or via distance learning. Early in my doctoral studies, we considered HyFlex as a pedagogical approach in a case study in one of my courses. One of the biggest problems we identified is the huge cognitive demand for instructors using this approach. You have to be able to teach students in the room and students joining via videoconference simultaneously, and either of these modes of teaching is already plenty demanding...let alone simultaneously!
To do HyFlex teaching well, you basically have two demanding tasks--teaching face-to-face, and teaching via live videoconference. These require similar skillsets...but not identical skillsets. And the difficulty is that you have to do them both at the same time. It's a problem! And, I think that's why I felt like I was failing almost all of the time this fall: I couldn't focus on my normal face-to-face pedagogy, because I was constantly distracted by trying to keep my Zooming students involved in what was happening in class. But the Zoomers were always the minority (just my students who were in quarantine, most of the time) and if I focused on good distance pedagogy, everything felt lifeless in the room, where the majority of my students were. And here was the most-likely-to-fail point for me: I couldn't do either of these things well (or at least, not well enough to meet my own high expectations for my teaching), so I felt a constant sense of frustration that I wasn't doing enough to support at least one group of students' learning. But what made it most difficult for me was that I was also recording each lesson, because some students were not able to join the live class meeting via videoconference, particularly if they were sick. And while teaching is always a public endeavor (you're always doing it in front of someone, right?) having a video record of my work makes me much more self-conscious!
So, to answer the question prompted by the tweet I shared above, here's my best analogy...
I can yo-yo pretty well. I was a pretty big nerd in middle school, and I yo-yoed a lot. I can do some fun tricks: walk the dog, loop the loop, around the world, and rock the cradle. Not the most impressive repertoire, but a variety of entertaining tools in my yo-yoing toolbox.
I can also juggle fairly well--with three beanbags, if I have both hands available, or two beanbags, if I have just one hand available. I was still a pretty big nerd in high school, and taught myself to juggle one afternoon, just because I decided I wanted to learn how.
I also can balance a meter stick vertically on my foot for quite a long time. I was able to balance a meter stick on my hand for years and years...and early in my middle school teaching career, I realized I could also balance it on my foot, much to the delight of my students. (Middle school teachers, am I right?) :-)
Now, here's the thing: I think HyFlex teaching is sort of like yo-yoing with my right hand, while juggling two beanbags with my left hand, and balancing a meter stick on my right foot, all at the same time. It's keeping the face-to-face teaching going, while also getting the online teaching going, and then an awareness of the camera, and how this all looks to the students who are watching it after the fact. I might get the yo-yo going (in class students), and keep the beanbags flipping and flopping (Zooming students), but then I'm suddenly derailed by the meter stick dipping--maybe a tech problem with the camera--which has me dropping beanbags, or tangling my yo-yo string.
Ugh. It was an exhausting semester.
But there were bright spots for me. My students were GREAT throughout--they were very encouraging, despite my feeling that I was failing. My colleagues were amazingly supportive in a "we're all in this together" sort of way. My fully online courses (the ones that were planned to be offered online) went really, really well, which was a buoy for sure.
I think the biggest lesson for me was that I have to be okay with letting "good enough" be "good enough" sometimes when it comes to my teaching practice. (This is HARD for me...) I will do what I can to support and encourage my students' learning, obviously, but I have to check my own expectations for teaching during a pandemic, I think. Sometimes I'm going to drop a beanbag, or get a knot in my yo-yo string, or trip over the meter stick I'm balancing. Who wouldn't flop sometimes, with all of that going on?
Maybe it's more amazing how often it all worked than the 10% of the time that things went sideways? I guess the real take-away for me is what I always tell my students, future teachers that they are: if you ever stop learning, perhaps it's time to stop teaching?
2020 has been weird, weird year. If you've spent any time at all on social media, I'm sure you've seen all the posts and tweets and reels and memes about how this year has been the absolute worst. And, yeah, I feel that too. It's been an emotionally taxing year for me in almost every way. And yet, there has been good, and beauty, and surprises.
In the month of December I've started several posts for the blog, and ended up discarding a couple of them, and saving a few as pieces of string I might unspool in a future post. But I didn't want to end the year on a down note...and most of the posts I had been writing were cynical or downright grumpy.
But, against all odds, I found some Christmas cheer this year.
My church has had rough times this year, but our traditional Christmas Eve service was exactly what I needed. Singing carols, celebrating communion, and a hope-filled message helped me reframe and remember just how much I love these people I worship with each Sunday.
Several of my family members have moved to the same small town where I live this year, which meant spending time with loved ones I don't typically get to see at Christmas. This was a joy!
I've made deliberate time to rest, to do unproductive things. This has been an exercise in intentionality, as I typically strive to be as productive as possible to feed my inner achiever. (Ah, the joys of being an Enneagram 3...) But over the past week or so, I've taken a lot more time to read for pleasure, to play games, to spend time with my wife and kids...and none of this is wasted.
Silly as it might sound, the hyped-up "Christmas Star" conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was a lovely reminder that the world is a wonderful place. The science teacher in me marveled at this celestial moment, and the child in me was reminded of just how much I love astronomy. (Seeing Halley's Comet in 1986 left an impression!)
I am seriously thinking about starting a podcast with a colleague in the coming year, and I've found joy in brainstorming about what this could look like. Working with colleagues who continually inspire me to sharpen up and keep learning has been--and continues to be--a tremendous blessing.
Even the blizzard we experienced in Northwest Iowa this past week was a surprise blessing. I have realized I feel disappointed now if we don't have snow at Christmas (which is a little weird for this former Californian!) and it was looking like it was going to be a brown Christmas for us this year...until we got six inches of snow chased by a ferocious wind two days before!
I'm generally a pretty positive person, but the stresses of this year have gotten me down. I suspect I'm not alone in this.
But I hope that you, dear reader, were able to find joy in the midst of a hard year. I wish you a Merry Christmas; I hope you are able to experience a sense of hope, and peace, and joy, and love as we close out 2020.
If you spend much time at all online, I'm confident you've seen the sentiment being shared about all of the awfulness of 2020. It's a fair complaint, I think. This year has been rough for many people in many ways.
For me too, really. The year 2020 has been a tough one overall.
Our family did not face the sort of economic pressures that many did, as our jobs are secure and we were often able to work from home as needed. But we have also been very aware of how we are spending money and wanting to be stewardly and frugal in a just-in-case sort of way. I recognize the privilege of this position, even as I write this. But it's still something I think about, and an added pressure.
Pandemic teaching has stretched me far out of my comfort zone; I think this has been my most difficult year of teaching (so far) since my first year. The spring emergency distance teaching adventure was stressful. This fall's revolving door of students in and out of quarantine has been stressful, not to mention dual-mode teaching with most of my students as "roomies" in our face-to-face class meeting and a handful of "zoomies" joining in via web conference. The emotional labor of teaching has never felt more palpable and demanding.
Likewise, our church has been in a very difficult spot with our pastor abruptly resigning this spring. I've been serving as an elder, so this has been an extra burden of congregational care for me. The challenges of dealing with pandemic decision-making related to how and when we should meet, which ministries we should try to continue in the short term, and how to keep encouraging faithful worship and discipleship have been taxing.
And then the political drama of 2020: ooof! With all the political polarization in the U.S. this year--and all of the related ridiculousness on social media--several formerly-close personal relationships have been strained, with some of them perhaps irretrievably damaged. (Time will tell, I guess?) More than this, the social distancing of pandemic quarantining has left me feeling more socially-isolated than normal in spite of spending even more time online than normal. And while I have a pretty strong introverted streak, this has left me craving more normal social interaction. I miss being able to go out regularly and easily. But I'm willing to make the sacrifices for communal good, and trying to protect the most vulnerable folks in our community as much as possible. That said...I will be happy to be done with masks!
And...having COVID-19 was no picnic either! Overall, I can't complain too much--my case was pretty mild, all things considered. But even though I've been over it for several weeks now, I still find myself tiring out easily. And I worry about the long-term effects that we don't yet know. How concerned should I be about a lingering cough, and a little tiredness?
All together, this has added up to an emotionally exhausting year. And we aren't even to the end of it yet!
This week was Thanksgiving. Honestly, I wasn't feeling very thankful coming into the week. It was a crazy busy week for me with preparing for completing our academic semester (after a short Thanksgiving break) online. I had a lot of extra meetings with students and colleagues on Monday-Wednesday. And along with this, my wife and I were preparing to lead worship at our church's Thanksgiving Eve evening service on Wednesday.
And that's where things came together for me. In our Thanksgiving Eve service, our guest pastor (Ben Wiersma, who is a gem) preached on 1 Chronicles 29:10-20. This passage is mostly a prayer of King David, in response to the generosity of the gifts people had given to build the Temple. But it's significant that David's prayer is mostly a prayer of praise and thanksgiving to God and not about the things the people had, but about who God is. This really hit me...because so often Thanksgiving is about saying "thanks" for stuff.
The song of response we sang was "Goodness of God" and it just hit me: this song might be my theme song for 2020. It helped me reframe (again!) that it's not about me. The chorus of this song goes like this:
And all my life You have been faithful
And all my life You have been so, so good
With every breath that I am able
Oh, I will sing of the goodness of God
If you aren't familiar with the song, here's a recording by one of the Dordt worship teams from this past spring--this video was used at our livestreamed commencement ceremony earlier this year:
The combination of this message from Ben and this song has been such a great reset for me...and it's helping me get over myself a little bit. The song keeps running through my head, and I keep coming back to the message of who God is as something for which I can (and should) give thanks.
Is this a panacea that has suddenly snapped me out of my 2020 funk? Nope. But it's helping me reframe, and find that there are many things I am actually thankful for.
I love my wife and kids, and while it was stressful for all of us to be together so much throughout the spring and summer, we had a lot of great times to make memories. I'm grateful that we largely grew closer together through this experience.
I love my work, and I am so, so grateful for the team of educators I get to teach alongside. Not to mention the incredible future teachers I have the opportunity to serve!
I love my church, and while it has been a rough year, I'm grateful to walk with these people, even through the hard times.
I love my extended family and friends, and I am truly grateful that we've been able to keep in touch via technology, even when we can't always meet up.
I love that my health has been good enough that I met my goal of biking 2000 miles this year. In fact, I've pedaled 2020 miles for 2020--and I'm grateful that my body is functioning well overall.
It has been easy for me to lose sight of things that are actually important and the places where I can--and should--be giving thanks. There have been struggles, real struggles this year. But I am also thankful in spite of the struggles.
God has been good to me; His goodness is running after me.
I've been playing my guitar a lot more regularly at home lately. I'm not 100% sure what that's about. Often I gravitate toward playing when I'm feeling sad, or upset, or having other big feelings that I don't really want to talk about, and instead they come out through the strings of my guitar. Tonight I wasn't really feeling any big feelings, but I still headed to the basement and pulled out my guitar for a while to make some music.
I know my limitations as a musician. I can play fine enough--particularly if I have the chords for a song--I can play pretty much anything, but it won't necessarily sound like it does on the radio. I mostly make a joyful noise, if you know what I mean.
I got my first guitar as a high schooler. I was 16, and I took lessons for a few months. I learned enough to get started, but I didn't exactly take to it immediately. But my guitar came with me to college, and I think that's where I really started to learn for real. I still have some chord sheets that I printed off from the On-Line Guitar Archive in the mid 1990s. (Ah, OLGA...I remember you when...) Maybe you can picture me with a mop of blonde hair (with a center part, because, you know, the mid 90s) and wearing flannel and jeans with holes in the knees, strumming away on my acoustic guitar in my apartment? I can admit now that I harbored some secret dream of being part of an acoustic alternative rock group--it was the age of MTV unplugged and all that, after all! But that's a late-adolescent imagination, I suppose.
Still, it's funny how the songs I played then are the ones I still know by heart. "Time" by Hootie and the Blowfish. "Run Around" by Blues Traveler. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Deep Blue Something. "One Headlight" by The Wallflowers. "Untitled" by Collective Soul. "Walk on the Ocean" by Toad the Wet Sprocket. "All for You" by Sister Hazel. "The Freshman" by the Verve Pipe. "Lightning Crashes" by Live. (Oh, so many songs...) Some of these bands you might know...others probably not. But they left a mark on me, and they are still part of me.
And, of course, my favorite band of all from that era, Jars of Clay. Jars was my go-to Christian band for...well, honestly, for the past 25 years. As my taste in music has changed and expanded over the years, this is one band that stuck: I'm a forever-fan of these guys, and the way they take their faith so seriously, and the way it informs their musicianship. Their self-titled first album...I must have listened to that one a hundred times during the 1995-96 school year. And, here I am 25 years later... and I can still play many of those songs off the top of my head--by heart.
But it's interesting how we talk about "knowing songs by heart," isn't it? Somehow, these songs that I played so often in my apartment got deep inside of me, into...my heart?
And tonight, that's where I was, in the basement, strumming and singing. Like it was the spring of 1996...I was playing one of my very favorite Jars songs, "Worlds Apart." If you're not familiar with the song, I'd welcome you to take a listen:
I love these lyrics. I love the music of this one. The poetry of this song speaks to me.
And in this contemporary moment, where everyone--me too!--seems outraged about everything, maybe this is the prayer that I need to be praying again. (Maybe you too?)
I am the only one to blame for this Somehow it all ends up the same Soaring on the wings of selfish pride I flew too high and like Icarus I collide
With a world I try so hard
To leave behind
To rid myself of all but love
To give and die
...
To love you, take my world apart To need you, I am on my knees To love you, take my world apart To need you, broken on my knees
All said and done I stand alone Amongst the remains of life I should not own It takes all I am to believe In the mercy that covers me
Did you really have to die for me? All I am for all you are Because what I need And what I believe Are worlds apart And I pray
To love you, take my world apart To need you, I am on my knees
To love you, take my world apart
To need you, broken on my knees
...
Not out of any self-righteousness here...but I needed to sing this song tonight. I needed to pray these words tonight. I need to get over myself. I need to stop thinking so highly of myself, and my opinions, and my self-assumed rightness, as if I can look down my nose at people who think differently than I do, judging them as wrong, because I must be right.
Right now, I'm feeling that I need to humble myself a little bit. Try to be a little more like Jesus. Stop trying so hard to build my own kingdom, and care more about building His.
Take my world apart.
Certainly this is not scripture...its poetry, music.
Take my world apart.
But I think this song captures the gospel.
Take my world apart.
Help me to care more about loving You, loving my neighbors, loving my fellow humans who are created in Your image, loving this world you have made.
Take my world apart, Jesus.
And let me step more and more into Your world, Your kingdom, Your way of being.
I am grateful that I have colleagues who check in on me regularly. My dear friend and colleague in the office next door asked me this morning how the weekend was, and I shared a few of the highs and lows. I'm feeling a lot of anxiety and concern for the church, and the world, and our fractured political climate in the US right now, but being able to share this with a friend who really listens sure helps. As we concluded our short conversation, he reminded me that sometimes we just need to "do the next right thing."
And so, I headed to my office and got on to the many tasks of the day...and I found a song from Frozen 2 running in my head...
And, perhaps strangely, I'm thinking about Psalm 119:105 right now:
Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path.
I once heard a sermon where my pastor pointed out that the psalmist doesn't say God's word is a spotlight that makes every step on the path clear to us. It's a lamp, perhaps so dim that it only gives enough light for us to see our feet on a dark and unfamiliar path, enough light for us to take the next step on the journey. And that's what faith is about, I think. Not that we have every step of the journey plotted out, but that we have confidence that God goes with us on every step of the journey, and that He already knows the path ahead of us, and that's enough.
And I guess that's my reflection for today. Not the "gospel according to Disney," or anything like that. But when I feel like my world is too chaotic and out of control, I'll just take the next step in faith, make the next move that I can in harmony with the message of the gospel, ...and "do the next right thing," trusting that God goes with me, and that's enough for today.
In the age of COVID-19, I'm struggling with keeping up with email. (I mean, I'm struggling with other things too, but this is one specific and tangible struggle.) I have some strategies that I use for managing my inbox, but they aren't always working these days. I'll share a few of my strategies here, but also a nugget of truth that I think I've finally settled on for not feeling guilty about struggling to keep up.
I rarely achieve inbox zero, but because I use my email inbox as a key part of my workflow, I do generally try to keep my inbox to fewer than 30 items whenever possible. I use folders to sort messages I need to hang on to--"department business," and "academic affairs," and "church stuff," and "IMPORTANT" are all folders I use regularly, in addition to a dedicated folder for each course I'm teaching. And I'm learning to delete with abandon--how did I get on so many mailing lists that are only tangentially related to me and my interests anyway? If it's not something I am going to need to keep, into the trash it goes. All of this helps remove the clutter.
I learned in grad school that I had to compartmentalize my day, or I would wind up ping-ponging back and forth between things and losing productive work time. One strategy I practiced then--and have recently reinstated--is closing my email for big chunks of the day. That little pinging email icon with the numerical counter of unread messages is designed to grab our attention. Closing the program and only opening it when I have the time to dedicate to answering messages helps manage this distraction.
My general rule is that I plan to respond to messages within 24 hours, and I almost always am able to do this. I will say that I prioritize: if it's a message from a current student or from a colleague about something time-sensitive, I do try to answer those ones as soon as possible. If it's from someone outside the institution, or something that is less time critical...I try to hold off on those ones if possible.
Setting up a few times a day to read and respond to email does help. One approach I've tried to practice in the past and still mostly successfully achieve is the 2-minute rule: when I'm "doing email," if I can respond to a message in less than 2 minutes, I will do it right now and not put it off until later. This helps free up space in the inbox, and thus in my mental workflow as well.
As useful as these strategies have been, however, I still am finding that I struggle to keep up with the email avalanche from time to time. There are still some messages that get lost in the shuffle, and then I find them days later--far longer than my normal 24-hour window. I hate this feeling, and my first impulse it to send an apologetic email in response.
But here's the nugget of truth, and the associated strategy I've been using lately. Instead of an "I am SO sorry...!" opening to my tardy email in response, I've changed up my language a bit. I am now starting those emails with, "Thanks for your patience with my slower-than-normal response."
Because this is the truth: I think we are all up to our eyebrows in keeping up, and I am finding it relatively easy to extend grace to other people who don't get back to me as quickly as I would like...because I'm so grateful when they extend this grace to me as well. Opening with a "thanks!" message instead of an apology is my way of signaling this.
I hope that we all can normalize this. Certainly there is a sense of professionalism and responsibility in getting back to people as soon as possible. But in the age of COVID? Let's make it "no apologies needed."
