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This week

• Monday, 09 March met with a teacher from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim to talk out a workshop I will be doing for his teachers-in-training in April
• Tuesday, 10 March facilitated two water and writing workshops for 10th graders at Kruseløkka Ungdommskole in Sarpsborg. Then took the train to Oslo to have dinner with the Fulbright Norway Executive Director.  
• Wednesday, 11 March co-facilitated with a friend the second session of a multi-session teacher workshop on effective assessment design at Halden VGS in Halden
• Thursday, 12 March met with a teacher at Hiøf to chat potential next steps after my talk for the teachers-in-training and other teacher educators on defining and enacting justice. Then walked up the hill behind the fort to work with 4th-6th graders at Halden Montessori on slang. Their teacher is from Loveland, Colorado! What a teeny tiny world!
• Friday, 13 March (happy Detroit day!) met with a master student (doing her masters at Hiøf) to help her brainstorm her ideas about her masters thesis
• Saturday 14 March (happy Pi day!) met with a teacher from Halden VGS to workshop her written mid-term exam questions
• *I absolutely adore the range of students I get to work with! This week I worked with 9-year-olds and masters students!

As you can see from above, this week was super busy! But I was also sick with a head cold. I spent a lot of time this week not just teaching, but expelling a lot of mucus from my face. Before Wednesday’s workshop, I told the teachers that because I’m American, I have no sense of when I should take off work when I have a cold. If I have a fever, am throwing up, and/or some sort of stomach issue where I need to be close to a toilet, I know I should take off work and have done so in the past. But when I just have a head cold? Take my American-strength cold medicine, stay about 2 meters away from others, and press on, right?

But because I book workshops with teachers and can’t just do tomorrow (or next week) what I was going to do today, I feel like I have to teach. It’s really hard to reschedule. But I also knew I had to shake this cold. And I didn’t want to get others sick. So my compromise was that I would stay home and work from home and only leave the house when I was teaching. At home, I slept in, took it easy, expelled mucus from my face, streamlined my priorities. After teaching I would eat, and then basically just read or lay up on the couch and binge my latest show, Younger. 

I feel better every day, and it has helped that I have been cognitively and physically resting and allowing my body to recover. It also helps that I’ve reduced my number of commitments this year so that when I do need to take some time off I’m not getting super behind on my work. On the Nike Running Club app, the head coach always says that when you’re not running, you’re recovering. And what he means by recovering is taking care of your body: eating well (food that tastes good and that is good for you), hydrating, sleeping. I’ve noticed that when I’m taking week-long breaks from running all my recovery items deteriorate. And that those decisions make me feel kind of crappy. Now that the snow and ice have all melted, I’m getting back into a regular running routine, which also affects what I do during recovery. When you’re not running, you’re recovering. 

I kind of took the same advice this week: when you’re not working, you’re recovering: eat, even though I didn’t always want to, and to eat well, even though I lowkey just wanted ramen (the from-the-package kind—I can’t get ramen ramen in my town! What do you think this is, Oslo?!). Hydrate with water and the million packets of emergen-c I brought with me. Rest. Sleep. Leisure. The rest part was not just physical rest in sleep, but also in resting my mind and my body.

To be honest, it was kind of boring sitting around and “doing nothing” while my immune system got to work. And I think I only felt like I should be doing something because as Americans we are obsessed with “doing something” and “being productive,” like we are machines. We aren’t machines. We are living beings who need care and rest and time to relax and engage in leisure. 

Sure, it feels super great to be doing stuff. I love writing and doing research and teaching and going out to shows and meeting up with friends and shopping and cooking and building my puzzle and reading and hosting friends and going on walks and going on runs and exploring new places and being a tourist. But I have spent a long time throughout my life measuring my worth on how much I can do. I have spent a long time measuring the success of a day by how much I have produced. I have wondered, if I don’t measure my day by what I have produced during the day, how do I measure it? What does it mean to have a good day outside the measurement of what I have produced? 

And I know thinking about how my day was by my production is a capitalistic trademark. And that’s a major reason why I want to get away from considering each day valuable only insofar as what I have produced. But it’s hard to get away from this mindset because so much of how we are judged externally is how much we produce, by what we do on a daily basis. I’m going up for tenure in a couple of years and will submit my file next year. And one of major ways I will be judged as to whether I can stay on at Colorado State University is how much research output I have produced (even though research is only 35% of my effort distribution; in other words, even though most of my time (50% of it) is supposed to go to teaching, what I have published will have an outsized influence on whether or not I am a “scholar.” So our society says I need to be productive to be a worthwhile member of society and at work I’m told this as well. 

It’s been advantageous to live this year in a country that doesn’t really value work in the way it’s valued in the United States. Sometimes it’s hella frustrating because the pace of things (read: change) moves so slowly because no one works and is hiking or skiing instead, but I can appreciate the downplay of productivity and work. And it’s so hard to live a life of rest in the US because it is so countercultural. In Norway it’s bizarre to overwork, like Americans do. 

Earlier in the year (Oct 18; when I was 12 weeks into my year of living in Norway) I posted about learning how to rest and do nothing. Rereading that post, the two paragraphs below are still resonating with me (is it pretentious to quote myself? I don’t care. This year is also about learning more about who I am and what I value and if that requires me to look back at a past version of myself I am here for it).

With about 14 weeks left of my year abroad, I’m noticing the ways in which being sick forces me to pay attention to myself as an embodied person. That when I take care of myself, I am not just taking care of my brain. And that when my body breaks down, because it is sick, for example, it requires me to pay even more attention to my body. 

But what would it be like to pay attention to my body all the time? Instead of just being forced to do so when I’m sick or when I have the luxury of time? What would it mean to learn how and when to rest? To engage in work and in leisure? What would it mean to measure my days and time not just by how much I can produce? I’m working on it.