Perpetual Deferral

I am going to try to keep this short because that is all we can deal with right now. I took a few days off last week because I have too many vacation days and I needed to take some said the school. I took time because it was a holiday weekend and I knew I needed to take days and not because I thought I could rest because how can you so close to the end of term? And as expected I didn't rest at all. I was just thinking about a zillion things and also dealing with IT email disaster at the college I teach at where they decided to transfer instructors to a new server and new way of logging into email right before exam week. Super clever right? So I had to do some sort of jenga to get email back on my phone and even to access it through a browser. No apologies, no acknowledgements that they picked the worst time in the world to do this. 

All of this bad time, no time, next time, please can I have more time that I have witnessed this week has me thinking about how we are all living in a state of perpetual deferral and this is having a real impact on our health, and the overall wellness of educational spaces. The etymology of deferral is from the Latin for to carry apart and we are literally carrying and embodying this distancing. This push to "back to normal" is of course ableist, and one of the many reasons why it feels so icky is that systems are saying everything is fine, while our phenomenological experience in the world is saying, this isn't safe we need to defer things; we still need to uphold measures that can keep disease apart. This tension becomes embodied and leads to exhaustion and burn out. 

I finished grading very late last night and I will say that like most other instructors this was probably the hardest term in all of my 17 years of teaching. Not because my class, no my class was great, the students were awesome, we had great discussions, I met super interesting folk. It was hard because by embedding care and flexibility and understanding in the course because no one has energy to devote to things when they are worrying about a pandemic, being sick, family members, war, inflation etc., a sense of perpetual deferral builds. And systems being what they are, they cannot support perpetual deferral. Instructors, students, and staff search desperately and wait in anticipation for deferred time that can be reclaimed, and like Bergsonian duree, those moments are gone and will never return. Assignments become due, things pile up, reports need to be written, emails get sent, once, twice, three times "sorry to bother you" "just checking in." Because we care, because we want to support, but time and systems stop for no one. Working in the systems is tricky and a lot. And what happens when you push against them is that you end up having to spend the day in bed like I did today because my body literally stopped being able to be upright the second I pressed the send button on my grades. 

The perpetual deferral is even more icky when you try to enact change in places and folk say "this isn't the time" "this isn't the place" "we will get back to you, next month, next year, maybe never." There's a lot of discussion on Twitter about the importance of focusing on progress, and yes sure progress is lovely. However, if you give folk a "progress, baby steps" out that almost feels like a backward movement, because how long do you wait for accessibility? How long do equity-deserving folk wait for equitable access? Twitter was founded in 2006 and just this week have they made a caption toggle.16 years for a caption toggle! This perpetual deferral means nothing actually happens in people's life times, or within the time they would use a service. If an undergraduate student is at an institution for about 5 years and communication strategies exclude them for the 5 years they are at the institution, one will they stay (likely not which is why disabled student retention is what it is), and two will they tell their friends to go to that institution (also likely not). Basically I am like this The Trews song (links to lyric video of the The Trews "Tired of Waiting") and I know I am not the only one.