Burned out yet?

I'm starting to feel burned out. Not a "I don't like this job" burned out, but a "I wish I didn't sit at my computer in my office until 2 AM every night" sort of burned out. I swear, the super late nights were fun the first few weeks. But now I'm just tired.

I've tried to give myself a break. The past few days included some sleeping in and some going out. Unfortunately, it didn't do a lot of good. It was nice grading with some tasty pretzels and beer, but that only took care of part of the grading. The rest of my grading is still sitting on my desk (or assembled in the electronics lab).

I'm not terribly behind on intro, mostly because I keep prioritizing it. I have my slides together for tomorrow, I have the reading quiz graded, and I've even started brainstorming questions for next week's test. I don't have the homework solutions written up (I have brief notes on most of them), and I don't have a practice test (or equation sheet) together yet. Luckily, because of the test, I don't need to have the next homework created this week. But I will have homework to grade this weekend and a test to grade next week.

Modern feels pretty bad. I graded the test, and it went more-or-less how I expected. The students are not masters of relativity, which I knew. I haven't graded their lab yet, since I was disheartened by none of them knowing what I meant by "draw a schematic". It isn't their fault - they haven't been asked to do labs at this level before. But I feel particularly ineffective as an instructor when I keep finding out after the fact what I should have been teaching them. So, for Thursday, I need to do grading, prep a lecture on solving atomic physics problems, create more labs, and figure out what to teach them about labs.

And then there is electronics. I graded the tests this past weekend and it went better than I expected. Yay! Well, the students did better than I expected. A number of my hardware test questions failed - the students had strange measurements that I saw as well, now. I swear the circuits were working at the beginning of the test. Anyways, we are now moving onto transistors. I knew this was going to be difficult, but it has proven impossible. It turns out I don't remember/understand electronics at all. I wanted to build a demo circuit for them - something cool, like an audio amplifier. I spent hours unsoldering audio connections from an old computer card. Perhaps it was a bad use of my time, given that I can't make the audio amplifier work. I think I understand why, but I can't wrap my head around how to fix it so it actually does what I want.

So the hours I put into electronics this week were all effectively wasted. I don't have the labs (from last week) graded, and I don't have a lab for them to start on tomorrow. I can't quite figure out what will help them learn transistors. And since my knowledge on transistors is so shaky, I must do the lab first. I have some ideas, but they might not work at all. Like the amplifier. This is quite problematic, as I either am staying up all night working on it, or I'm cramming it into about 2 hours tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, I found the prospect of working from 2 AM to 4 AM on the electronics lab exciting. Keep in mind, I have a 10:30 AM class tomorrow. Right now, I'm just tired. I want to go home and sleep. I want to have an electronics lab for the students to do and I want my grading to be done. Sadly, sleep is going to win tonight. And it might not make a difference.