The Fading Away of a Former Life
My own great resignation from academia
The fading away began when the last of my former students — former, because it had been months since I last taught — turned in their belated essays at the beginning of 2022.
Fireworks were setting off for the third pandemic year, hopefully the last. In the Philippines, we were yet to reopen schools to in-person classes, the last in the world to do so. And as though to ceremonially put an end to that inchoate period of “goalposts” instead of deadlines, “movable” due dates and course requirements that were never final till the very end — and then not yet still, because the due date was compassionately moved, again, and students were permitted to negotiate, again, what they could reasonably do to survive this major assault on their mental health, never mind their teachers’ — the university where I taught finally, compassionately, declared an irrevocable deadline for all things overdue and pandemic-related. For all our sakes.
So the new year began with a finality I hadn’t felt since the pandemic messed up our calendars, clocks, and circadian rhythms. Finally, I could close my grade books to students — with or without legitimate need — who kept knocking on virtual doors. Finally, I could terminate tutorials that extended for months, bleeding into my next batch of courses to…
