Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

 When I first started teaching, I felt like email would never end! In my courses, student emails constantly poured in, and I became hypervigilant about checking my inbox at all hours, including outside business hours and on weekends. I felt like I was the only one between my students and catastrophic learning outcomes. Many years later, I can see how that behavior was unhealthy and that the feeling did not reflect reality, but it was very hard not to fall into that junior teacher trap! [ Also posted on Medium. ] Since then, I have thankfully built much better boundaries and designed a communication system in my courses that results in only a few student emails in my inbox that are very specific to that student’s personal context and no emails related to things like course content, logistics, or policy questions. And this system works for all my courses, from my small 15-student class to my 100+ student class. Moreover, what started as an attempt to improve my efficiency has also ma...

Spring 2025 was rough for me. I was teaching a new course alongside one of my usual courses, which had over 100 students. On top of that, I was learning the ropes for the spring term responsibilities of my new role as Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in the department. [ Also posted on Medium. ] In one of my lower moments of feeling weighed down by it all, I asked Microsoft Co-Pilot to create an emoji to express it all. This is what I ended up with. And it now lives in a few of my Slack workspaces to give some levity during those moments of overwhelm that never seem to entirely stop happening. That aside, overwhelm is real, and I feel my peers and I are especially prone to it in academia. And a computer science concept that helps me be realistic about what I can actually do is priority heaps. So I thought I’d share in case you also need a useful metaphor, and to ask you all if you have a metaphor of your own that helps when in overwhelm. What’s a priority heap, you ask? It’s...