I consider myself a professional. Today I really didn’t feel like being around people at all but I delivered a class that I think was exceptionally good. It was on paraphrasing and I started with a brief summary of the paraphrasing techniques that were discussed in the lecture. Then I asked students to paraphrase 2 long and academic sounding sentences. It would have been tough! I know that most of them had to Google the meaning of multiple words. There was a percentage of the class that didn’t get past the first hurdle; understanding what they were reading. I gave them almost 10 minutes to paraphrase around 40 words. Most did not get it finished and that was my point.

From there we talked about the skills needed to paraphrase, and the importance of knowing where you are at in relation to those skills, so that you can accurately plan out the time you need for an assessment. We also looked at Turnitin and talked about those skills in terms of plagiarism. It’s all sounding lame as I write it but you have to believe me when I say that I got my on campus class of 13 students really engaged in a discussion on paraphrasing! I am a professional! Because what I was feeling and what I wanted to do was go home, curl up and have a cry and then a nap.

I wont share too much in this medium I will just say that my personal life is a bit of a mess at the moment. I was on track doing full time PhD and part time work. I was keeping up, at least for a couple of months. But now that things have hit the fan I know that something had to go. I can’t do it all. So I have taken a 6 month leave from study and put my PhD (and the stipend) on hold. That will hopefully allow me the space and time to continue being a professional, put the energy into my students and my personal life and hopefully not drop too many of the other balls that I currently juggle.

In other news the article the Wellbeing SIG had published was mentioned in a Student Success symposium the other day and has also featured in the blog the Sally Kift edits! You can see it here: https://needednowlt.substack.com/p/unlocking-success-the-interdependence