The Moon Hung High, In The Canopy of Sky

It’s hard not to feel a bit melancholy sometimes, given my circumstances. It’s been a good day, full of good moments. I’ve had some wins and have gotten some great news. I’m hopeful for the future and feeling like there are some positive things to look forward to.

At the same time, it’s pretty common for sadness to creep in around the edges. I don’t always notice as it’s happening, until I’m sitting here going “Oh no, I’m sad again”. It’s not like I can be that proactive and head it off at the pass—it usually ends up feeling like a rapid shift from happy to sad. I think it’s more likely that these emotions are on a spectrum, and that the drip drip drip of sad things slowly saturates the moment until I end up surprised that I’m no longer feeling happy.

I’m okay, mind you. It’s not a big enough emergency to reach out to anyone for support, I’m just feeling sort of down. I’ve gotten enough experience at this thing to know I’ll probably be back to feeling fine within an hour or two (or I won’t, and I’ll go to bed and then feel fine when I wake up tomorrow morning at some ungodly hour).

That ungodly hour was 5:30 this morning, by the way. I was able to convince the girls to let us go back to bed until 7, so that was a win.

I’m very, very, VERY happy that my newest class is done and complete and ready for my students to start up with it on Monday. If you know this story already, apologies.

Since my academic program was brand-new three and a half years ago, it’s not like there were any social work classes for my students to take. The field education coordinator and I had to work with the regional campus instructional design team to design and create all our classes from scratch. You may or may not know this, but it’s a TON of work to design a college class. I’ve developed ten of them and the field education coordinator has developed six, but there’s also a lot of work that goes into refining them each semester and updating content and making sure typos are fixed and everything on an ongoing basis.

The professional instructional designers from Kent State, though, are an incredible bunch of folks (especially Elizabeth and Katie, the two that we have worked with for nearly this entire process). I realize that I don’t usually call out friends by name here, but these two deserve every single kudo that I have to give (as an aside, is the singular form of ‘kudos’ ‘kudo’?)—they’re seriously a huge part of what makes this program as effective as it is. Katie and Elizabeth go above and beyond to make sure all the social work instructors have all the tools they need to teach these classes every semester, and I love working with them.

Anyway, I do this thing that has caused me occasional trouble over the years—I tend to want to test myself and see if I’m capable of accomplishing something hard when I get too complacent or settled. Last fall, I got the idea of using my last three years’ experience with instructional design to create a brand-new course that fills in some gaps I’ve noticed within our curriculum. I wanted to design and create it all by myself, just for fun, without involving Elizabeth and Katie in the process. The concept was a class to help students explore career options within the field of social work in a more focused way than we do in our other courses. Talking about whether to pursue a social work license or not, or whether to go to grad school, and learning concepts related to financial literacy before they have to teach those same concepts to clients without having had any education on the subject, that sort of thing.

Well, my idea was to create this class and prove to myself that I’m capable of doing it. Unfortunately, Kellie went to the hospital in December. Things were complicated for us for the next few months, and I kept working on the material but my heart wasn’t in it because of needing to take care of her (as well as getting her set up in private practice and the maze of insurance companies and logistics that took). When Kellie died, I was in a really difficult place with this class. And I had nineteen students registered to start the course, with very little of the content ready to go. That was 25 days before the summer semester began.

I had a whole lot on my mind, obviously. I didn’t know what to do, and this course was the least of my worries (though I still didn’t want to screw over all those students who were expecting to take this class from me this summer). Cue Katie and Elizabeth, who stepped in with a whole list of ideas for ways I could make it happen. I could have cancelled the class for the summer entirely, I could have started the summer semester with the first week of the class done and made sure to finish the second week before the first week was done and kept going like that all summer, etc. I opted to give that a shot, and asked Elizabeth and Katie for their help to get it done (even though they didn’t have to put any effort into this class that I was so convinced I could do on my own).

After two weeks of me doing essentially nothing on this course design, I was pretty panicked (but not panicked enough to do any of the work). It was too much for me, and I didn’t know how to make it happen.

We all spoke, and agreed to push back this course to the last six weeks of the summer, giving us six more weeks to work on finishing it up. That meant that as long as my students agreed to do twelve weeks’ worth of work in six weeks, they could still get the credit for the class in the summer. I could also start teaching my other summer class at the regular time, but wouldn’t be teaching two classes for these six weeks. And Katie and Elizabeth would work closely with me to get the class done.

Today, we essentially wrapped up the project. The six-week abbreviated semester starts on Monday, in five days. There is no possible way I could have finished this class without the two of them, so although I’ve already thanked them both in every way I can, they deserve a shout-out here. Thank you for helping me survive this shittiest of summers. Much love to you both. You both deserve only good things.

So that’s the bright spot for my night tonight. My class is done, and that’s a bigger weight lifted than you can possibly know. And typing that out for y’all has made my sadness dissipate, at least for now. Maybe it was that, and maybe it was Saskatchewan by The Rheostatics, which is currently playing in my living room. Probably a combination of the two.

Let’s all hope for a mostly-happy day tomorrow.

Cheerio,

Matt