Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group
Find support with others who have gone through a traumatic experience. Whether you have chronic or acute PTSD, we are here for you.
Oh. My. God. When I started teaching Spanish 40 years ago, the technology I had to handle was a hardbound (not a paperback) textbook and a piece of chalk. No screen, slide projector, in-classroom tv, much less any computer built into a console at my desk.
I was great at Spanish, and that was the focus of my work. I was nominated for teacher of the year twice. 20 years ago I added teaching nursing classes on the treatment of terminal patients into the mix, but I've enjoyed continuing to teach Spanish all along, too.
Today none of that mattered. Now it's all about technology, and Spanish takes second or third or even fourth place. I'm "teaching" a Spanish class online, if you call this teaching any more. Though teaching Spanish is supposed to be about communicating through language, it's become a mockery of communication online, just like a lot of things are nowadays through cellphones instead of in person.
I am humble enough to say that when I set up my online Spanish course, it seems I bungled some due dates in our online instruction program. It's hard for me to keep numbers straight in these computer programs. But the over reaction from adminstrators above and students below about it today sandwiching me in the middle was just silly.
I never mistreat people like I was mistreated. One of my new students took a screen shot of my mistaken due date online and sent it to my community college dean instead of even asking me about it. We were all off to the races after that playing phone tag, text tag, and email tag all day long, with the screen shot being sent to my department head and others to embarass me before I even heard about it.
Another new student wanted to do all of the whole semester's exercises ahead of time now at their convenience without waiting week to week like the rest of his classmates, and was upset when I couldn't cater to him. He threatened to drop the class if I didn't, and that got to my dean and my department head all over again to embarass me.
I played phone tag, texting tag, and email tag about all of this with my community college bosses and these students the entire day long until my online Spanish instruction provider kindly stepped in, treating me with a little respect, and fixed it for me. Bless him.
I had already planned to retire to Mexico come the end of this year's classes. I have contracts with two authors there to translate their novels from Spanish to English, since Spanish is what I know. As to being fluent in this computerese, I feel like I'm being expected to pilot several airliners while also working the tower as air traffic controller, too, besides teaching Spanish. I'm clearly obsolete in today's computerized instruction. My bosses and my students made that clear. 40 years of teaching counts for nothing, it's all what fancy online computer program have you shown me lately.
Mexico, where I grew up, is a less modern country, granted, and that results in poverty and illness, true. But it's also more traditional and has some respect for elders still, like some other older cultures outside of the USA still do. It will be nice to be treated with some respect 96 days from now.
In the meantime, please support me through my career's last 3 months as I humbly accept my obsolescence. I've tripled the enrollment in the Spanish program I took over 10 years ago even while my community college has lost 10% of its general enrollment and it continues to fall. Yet my bosses behave as if no good deed of mine should go unpunished.
I think my administrators have given up on trying to stop the steady dropping enrollment at our school. From what I see among my peer coworkers of my generation, they intend to make ends meet with their budget otherwise. Rather than give up their higher administrative salaries or finding ways to attract more students to pay for them, it looks like they have another financial plan. From how they've started treating coworkers my age, the plan is to take away offices, make technical demands without training us, and generally force older full time faculty like me with salaries and benefits to retire early. That way we can be replaced cheaply by part time adjunct faculty who are only paid by the course with no benefits.
I get it that it's all about capitalism and market forces and that none of us is indispensable. I accept that there comes a time to pass the baton to the next generation. I'm ready to do that asap, which happens to be July 1st, when my retirement pension kicks in. Still, to be done this way after teaching for 40 years leaves me very hurt and discouraged. I live alone, I have kidney damage from a doctor who overprescribed Seroquel for my PTSD nightmares, so I'm at risk for COVID-19 and forced to teach online instead of face to face now like I do best.
Your support, which I admit is also online, is all of the support I get at the end of the day. Support very, very welcome, then, as I stare down these last 96 humbling and humiliating days that confirm, day by day, how I must be going as soon as I'm vested in my pension plan July 1st.
What a sad way to go with all of this stress and anxiety added to my PTSD, huh?
-
Hey All...I hope that you have a lovely, peaceful beginning of your weekI have a bunch of chores that need doing but may put them off til tomorrow and just hang out with my landlord/roomie todayWhat about you?...Anything special going on?Have a great day and take good care of you!!..Xo
-
Once again I've had a fever today. I'm not going to the hospital because that's a huge waste of time but I did schedule a dr appointment for Wednesday afternoon.
What a terrible day,i'm so sorry....
Praying that these 96 days just fly by for you.
You so deserve respect.
Support,Always.
I think, IMHO, that it's a problem a lot of profs have been encountering ----- one prof friend I have online only (ironic?) is not yet 40 and is at a loss b/c her bosses aren't doing great at training them on software, or notifying them of requirements for this or that. I can't even imagine the nightmares you have about this. It's just... surreal. And after a year of this.... people have no resilience, regardless of PTSD status, etc. It's crazy-making.
I wish you hugs and a techno-angel to help you out!
If you can handle the German, this little skit about the world's first IT consultation gives me a bit of comic relief over the unrealistic expectations. The sub-titles are great and it is a short skit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xmTTzCAALc
That all sounds so frustrating. If it’s okay to say this ... I’m proud of you amigo, sounds like you are doing the best you can & that from over here you have much to be proud of when you retire.
Sending lots of support & gentlest of hugs <3
But it was cheap!
Oh boy... Puma purrs.
The whole reason the upper management is lacking purpose of connecting technology of learning to the actual perpetuation of the old way - they never had to do it. They are throwing anything and everything under the screen hoping something sticks.
We are all with you and you are so on the target to keep doing your best and we will keep supporting you through this challenging time.
IT is so glitchy .... and there are so often problems that just don't happen teaching in the flesh
The countdown is on.... I have no doubt that you've always been a wonderful teacher.... People get frustrated when computers are working properly and I'm sorry to read that it was taken out of you
Another hug... I hope that today is a brighter day......xo
It reminds me of my favorite episode of The West Wing, the one in which actor Martin Sheen plays Pres. Bartlet having a therapy session with a trauma psychiatrist played by actor Adam Arkin. They go back through the president’s life searching for the cause of his current trauma symptom—insomnia—and land on how his father used to hit him. My father used to hit me, too, so I perked up at this point in the show. The doctor asks if the president realizes his father disliked and hit him out of his own insecurity, not anything the president did or didn’t do as a son. The president admits he gets that. Then the doctor asks if the president realizes it’s no use trying to win a person like that over. The president says yes.
And then come the words I should have tattooed on my arm so I’ll never forget them, because they’re so true to all of us and our perpetrators as we recover from the PTSD we got from being close to them. After the president says to the doctor that he realized he’ll won’t win his dad over because it’s his dad’s problem, not his, the doctor says flatly:
“Good, because it’s NEVER, EVER going to happen.”
That’s true of my own dad. My breakthrough accepting that come 10 years after I let him hit me one last Christmas when he was 80 and I was 52 years old. I finally followed my therapist advice and broke off contact, and without contact I didn’t shrivel up and die like my codependent mind had told me I would. It was hard, but I was free, with boundaries for the first time ever.
Once I made that breakthrough with my number 1 authority figure’s abuse, I cringed less if another authority figure abused me. It’s not that it doesn’t bother me, abuse should bother me. But I know that the answer isn’t to try to people please my way out of it, because as that tv episode put it, that’s “never, ever going to happen.”
When I moved to town 10 years ago and took my job, my boss generously had me stay at her house for a weekend while I unloaded my moving van into my own new place. There I saw up close that she was the sole wage earner married to an unemployed husband who used substances all day. She was the only breadwinner for their 3 kids.
Since I was raised in a codependent family, I could see that was what this family was. Since it took me until age 52 to recognize it and do anything about it, I could expect no differently from my boss. In Alanon jargon, she was his “enabler,” and until she decided differently for herself like I did at 52, my changing that was “never, ever going to happen.”
So this latest incident is just her acting toward me these last 10 years like I acted for 52 years until that last Christmas 10 years ago. That’s when my 80 year old dad hit me again and I realized my changing him with being a good boy was “never, ever going to happen.” My boss doesn’t hit, she gaslights. She gaslights others because she gaslights herself. If she didn’t gaslight herself, she couldn’t be the provider for a husband who doesn’t work and stays high all day despite having 3 kids.
She’s done it constantly for 10 years. I’ve liked everything else about job for these 10 years that I’ve put up with it. But with your help I’ve remembered not to gaslight myself into thinking if I’m good she’ll stop, because as the tv show put it, “it’s never, ever going to happen.” As much as it does trigger my PTSD, that’s a fact. Talking to you all supports me to accept it once again. What IS going to happen is that I’m going to retire in 93 day, as Loo says. That is truly, truly going to happen.
I'm free enough that I told my students today that I'm great at Spanish after 40 years of teaching it, but that as to computer questions about live streaming they'd do better to ask each other, I'm not as fluent in computerese as I am in Spanish. Lo and behold, in one psychology class a student took charge and got everybody entered into my Zoom list live on screen. Another student did it later in a Spanish class. All I had to do was admit my vulnerability.
My bosses will "never, ever" do that, I get it. But if you ever do, it really lightens life's load. Of course, you'll catch a lot of flak from those "never, ever" want to risk that,
Thanks for helping me with this. It won’t be the last time. I’m grateful to you all for your support in following through with these hard therapy lessons I've learned in my sessions that now it's time to apply to real life as I retire. It's not easy, I'm a slow emotional learner since I didn't start until 10 years ago when I was 52. But it's worth it every time I'm triggered. Gracias!
Nobody's happy with schools being shut down and all teaching being done by teachers like me from home on our own computers using our own wifi. Thanks to clarifying a couple of days ago here I took the complaints I heard from her on the ph0ne today better. I just remembered I could talk to her without falling into promising I'd do better when nobody knows if that's possible.
It's probably "never, ever" going to be any better than what I'm doing from home now, and that's just the way it is in our USA's area of the global pandemic.