Teaching under the influence of exhaustion

It's that time of the semester where everyone is exhausted.  We've gotten through midterms and we've settled into some doldrums.  We're just beginning the projects that will be culmination of the semester.

And I, at least, keep waking up stressed out at four in the morning.  I've got too much to do and not nearly enough time to do it: I've barely made a dent in my to-do list this week because new, more pressing things keep happening.  And we're in the middle of advising students for next semester, so that takes some time. Also, meetings.  And travel for conferences.  And ... and ... and ...

It's exhausting and I'm exhausted.

I was thinking about that this morning while jogging. (I decided to forgo the extra sleep I could have taken this morning to instead continue week four of getting back in shape. I thought that would be better for my stress levels, since there's always coffee.  Though maybe not enough.)  It occurs to me that my teaching really declines when I'm exhausted.

By that I don't mean that I'm totally terrible in the classroom.  I still bring the energy to the classroom (which in my case often involves some melodramatic arm waving and rather performative readings of texts).  I still have a lot to say about whatever we read.  I still love the literature and I think the students are listening.

But that's the problem: I'm talking, the students are listening.  We've lost the type of engagement that I want to foster in my classroom.  While it's true that in my class yesterday, my majors did have a fair amount of things to say about "The Lady with the Dog" (enough, even, that we ran out of time), I feel like we missed an element of discovery that comes with student leadership in the classroom.  It became more about my walking the students through a story that I love and less about the students engaging directly with what they noticed about the story, less about the messy work of their developing interpretations of the story.

Perhaps the students don't mind that.  They're exhausted, too.

But this does remind me of how very time consuming student centered teaching is.  It is so much easier, somehow, to simply go to class and hold forth.  I'm just not sure that it's better.