Wednesday, February 27, 2013

OCD, teaching and the fear of grading papers

It was one of the scariest days of my life.
It was my first day of teaching English. I was 22 years old, and I had a classroom full of 18-year-old college freshmen looking at me. I had to do something.
I followed the script I had carefully worked out before class. I could barely speak, but I managed to call out the names on my class roster. I made a pen mark beside each name.
But I was so nervous that I had to slide my arm along the desktop as I made the pen marks down the list. If I had lifted my arm, everyone would have seen how badly I was shaking.
As scary as that day was, the scarier times were soon to come, when I had to start grading papers.

I was in the first year of my master’s program in English at Bowling Green State University. I was teaching composition classes, where I reviewed the basics like sentence structure and paragraphing.
It stands to reason that if you’re teaching writing, the students have to practice it. And if they practice it, the teacher has to read it. And evaluate it.
That triggered my obsessive-compulsive disorder, especially my checking.
I was obsessed with fears of not reading each essay completely and fairly. I was afraid that I would miss something important or judge the paper unfairly.
So I compulsively read and reread each essay. I painstakingly wrote long comments explaining my critiques. I reread my comments and rewrote them when necessary, using liquid eraser fluid to cover the changes.
If I completed grading one 500-word essay in 30 minutes, I was making good progress. It took me hours to review and grade 20 to 25 papers.
This fear and this ritual continued as I taught English for four years while in school, and then for about two and a half years after I left school.
Even though during that time I started treatment for OCD in the form of medication, which tremendously helped my obsessions and compulsions, it could never wipe out the reading and checking OCD related to grading papers.

How this expression of OCD would have benefited from Exposure and Response Therapy.
I can just imagine how I could have “exposed” myself to a student essay, to read once, then again as I made comments. Then I would have worked to prevent my compulsion to do the whole thing over and over again. I would have worked at living with the anxiety of not checking each essay “just one more time.”
I enjoyed much about teaching: the interaction with the students, the joy of seeing them learn and practice new concepts and reach their goals. But memories of the joys of teaching are overshadowed by the memories of the fear I had of grading papers.

Have you ever had a job or volunteer task that caused you a lot of anxiety? What did you do about it?

20 comments:

  1. Oh my that is a stressful job for anyone let alone some one with OCD , I think you did very well. I cannot speak in front of a crowd and have went to township meetings and talked so fast and my voice quivering I am sure no one understood me. I still try to avoid that now. Take care B

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    1. Thank you, Buttons. I don't like public speaking either. I got used to speaking in front of a classroom, but it was never my comfort zone. I'm much more comfortable talking one-on-one.

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  2. Do you still teach today? If so, do you still have the re-reading compulsion?

    I have had several jobs that have been stressful - mainly when I worked in the restaurant business lol.

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    1. Keith, no, I don't teach anymore. I haven't taught in a classroom for years. I have done some employee training in past jobs, and I enjoyed that. No papers to grade!

      I worked as a grill cook in a restaurant one summer when I was young, and it was very stressful! :-)

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  3. I used to have a job that I loved, but the boss was awful. One day she asked me to do something I felt was unethical, anad I refused. After that, she made my days really hard, and I had constant anxiety. I used to cry on the way home, simply because I knew I'd have to go back the next morning. Thankfully, I found another job.

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    1. Lisa, that's awful that your boss made your job that you loved unbearable. I've had some jobs where I cried after work in the evening and in the morning before going to work. Not fun!

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  4. Almost every job I have had has had some negative effect of OCD in it. I was a Lab Tech at a hospital and one of the duties that drove me crazy (checking) was when I would blood compatibility for transfusions. I remember sitting out in my car after work crying because I wanted to go back in and check all my work out again. I rarely left the lab, but occasionally had to go draw blood and meeting the patient made my checking even worse, I was so afraid I would make a mistake and kill somebody. I quit that job, too stressful. Years later I would work with an engineering firm to do analytical sampling in the field for respiratory particulates, lead exposures, etc. Now I felt responsible for the lives of not only our company employees but a entire ship of sailors. I did stress and re-check calculations occasionally but I did so much better and I know it was because I was aware this time that I had OCD and had some tools to fight it. I enjoyed that job immensely so it was quite the different experience.

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    1. Krystal Lynn, what a difference it can make to know that what you're experiencing is OCD and to have ways to fight it! I think I would find those jobs stressful, too, but I'm glad you were able to enjoy the engineering firm job.

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  5. I taught Sunday school for a number of years, and then had a break down and I found out I had OCD. But even though I got well enough again to teach, the people in the church thought that someone who was seeing a psychiatrist could not teach Sunday school. Still think that was stupid, but I just didn't feel welcome anymore and eventually left that church all together.
    It destroyed a lot of the trust I had in other people. And in churches.

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    1. Klaaske, I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with the church. There's still so much stigma about mental illness and seeing a psychiatrist. I'm sorry you had to face that.

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  6. I recently started volunteering at our local community theatre, and I still with anxiety, even though I have great skills and everyone is appreciative of what I have to offer. I'm doing the work primarily because it scares me -- I think it's a great exercise for me to use my tools. With each week that passes, I get a little more comfortable, but it's still hard for me. The good news is that the people who work there are all creative types, so I'm among people who understand the gifts and challenges of my personality.

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    1. Nadine, I admire you for doing something because it scares you and makes you uncomfortable--what a great way to face your fears and conquer them! I'm glad you're in a supportive environment at the theatre.

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  7. Ugh, that sounds awful!!! I can't imagine how terrible that was for you, Tina.

    Yes, I had a volunteer job for a government agency. When you signed up, they made you sign this form that if you leaked confidential information that you would be charged $50,000 for each offense. Of course, I would never knowingly leak confidential information, but oh my goodness, I was PARANOID about every little thing I said and did. It was tormenting. I hated every moment at that job. I finally had to quite. I just couldn't take it anymore. It was a shame, because I do think I was helping people.

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    1. Sunny, I think I would have been stressed out by that, too! Just the worry that I would say something I wasn't supposed to would be terrible.

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  8. I actually used to teach also, and found it very stressful, mot likely because my heart was never in it and I didn't feel like a very good teacher. I made a career change after only one year!

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    1. Janet, I'm glad you were able to make a change when you realized that teaching was not a good fit. I think it's sometimes hard to even realize that a job that we trained for and studied for is not a good fit after all.

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  9. Wow, I hadn't really thought much about the teacher side of grading the papers I worry over. I hadn't thought of teachers using white-out to rewrite their comments. But with OCD, it makes sense. I'm glad you have better treatment now.

    OCD has influenced my carreer decisions. It also made working in a day care difficult, but I stuck through that one (and started going to therapy midway into it) and it has gotten much better.

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    1. Thanks, Abigail. I'm glad that you were able to stick with the day care. I don't know if I would be teaching now if I had gotten better OCD treatment then or not. I don't know if it was really the best choice for me for many reasons.

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  10. I used to want to be a teacher but when I got to college and really thought about germs in classrooms, public speaking, grading papers and all the other stuff that goes along with teaching that are OCD triggers, I switched my major to History.

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    1. Elizabeth, I kind of fell into teaching without a lot of planning beforehand. I decided to go to grad school, and a teaching assistantship was provided. So suddenly, I was teaching!

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