Image by Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay

I’ve been reading a lot of headlines lately about “quiet quitting.” Most of those headlines are about how stupid/inaccurate/misleading “quiet quitting” is as a term, which I don’t necessarily disagree with. And yet I’ve found myself thinking a lot about it lately, especially with regard to my teaching.

Quiet quitting, if you’re not familiar, does not actually have anything to do with quitting, which is part of why it’s such a dumb term. But my understanding is that it’s basically doing the bare minimum you need to in order to still be considered doing your job and not taking on anything extra in order to avoid burnout or as a general “screw you” to the constant pressure to always be maximally productive. Most of the people who criticize the term (though not the idea) say that what this is actually called is “setting healthy boundaries between work and other parts of your life.”

Personally, I’ve never had much of a problem with setting boundaries between my work life and other parts of my life. Even during the part of the pandemic where those of us at my institution were mostly working at home, I had no problem with ending my work day at a given time. Did I still sometimes think about work even during my “personal time”? Sure, but who doesn’t? But I wasn’t actively checking work e-mail or actually doing anything work-related. Lucky for me, no one ever seemed to expect me to.

The reason I’m thinking about quiet quitting now is because I find myself doing what feels to me like the bare minimum in a specific area of my work: teaching. Specifically, the credit course that I teach every semester.

(As a note: while I have, on occasion, used this space to acknowledge the ways in which teaching can be a bummer, I don’t generally post negative things about teaching on this blog, mostly because I don’t ever want one of my students to Google me and come across something like that. So on the very slim chance that that ever happens and an actual or prospective student of mine finds this post: please know that this is not about you. Not really.)

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