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.
Thanks to everybody who replied to my "Requesting Hump Day Support" thread yesterday. Now as Thursday winds down, I know I'm going to make it as a community college instructor through this hard 2nd week of this pandemic school year's start. I'm teaching 5 classes (3 Spanish, 2 psychology) 100% online using Microsoft Teams, a program for live streaming like Zoom.
Two months ago, I didn't know what live streaming was. There was no time for my community college to give any of us instructors any training for it. We got a Microsoft Teams manual from our community college IT technicians the Friday before school started on Monday.
I've been teaching every day, then, learning on the fly. I've made every mistake in the book in the last 2 weeks. Once I even totally lost everybody in the middle of teaching a class because I accidentally closed my browser. I just booted back up and got going again, there was nothing else to do.
If students are upset at my lack of live streaming experience, they don't show it. Instead, there have always been those students every day who nicely have told me what was wrong so I could fix it. That's how I've had students accidentally create another "meeting" for themselves and still have gotten them over to my "meeting." I've had them help me show them a film clip, a Powerpoint presentation, a Word document with my lecture notes on it.
It's been exhausting, like it was the first time I was allowed to take the controls and fly a plane. It felt a lot like that in that I had people aboard depending on me to get them somewhere without crashing. That responsibility really led to fatigue really fast this week.
The hardest thing has been to keep up my self care starting the school year in this state of emergency. Membership here in DS PTSD, though, helped me insist on taking care of myself. It was tough, as there were so many urgent demands on me from bosses supervising me and students that I, in turn, supervise. I'm behind on answering emails, so there are people who are unhappy with me. But I kept coming here to post every day and I kept taking my nightly walks before bed time.
I am gratetful to you for helping me make it past Wednesday's Hump Day to Friday now. TGIF to you, too.
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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
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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.
I’m happy that you are taking care of yourself, Muji and that you are here on DS. Have a great Friday and a nice weekend. Hope you are taking some time to relax from your busy week. Wishing you peace and serenity.
Thanks for saying I rock, Marah. To be honest, my students are the ones who are really rocking here, getting me through. There's one in particular, whose first name starts with a B, so I'll just call him B here. On Wednesday he could tell I was having trouble getting our class to meet on Microsoft Teams (like Zoom) all together. So B. made a list of fellow students in our class and contacted them offline and brought them all to me to put in a "TEAM" together. What a guy! I never even asked him to do that. I told him if he ever wants a letter of recommendation for grad school, the story of how he did that for our class is going to be told in an entire paragraph from me, that's for sure.
Thank goodness for your support here and for the support beyond here from people like my student B.
Big squishy hug.....xo
I hope your weekend will be peaceful and reenergizing.