Een positieve beoordeling van een beoordelingsgesprek

We take for granted a lot of behaviors, nice or not. People saying "excuse me" when they bump you in the street. A stare from across the metro if you are speaking too loudly. Someone who does not hold open the door after them, even if you are following close behind. So when you receive a gesture of kindness that is unexpected, it can be a surprise.

This happened to me recently at my annual performance review, or A&D (assessment and development) in jargon. After half an hour discussing what I have accomplished over the past year and planned for in the next, my supervisor seemed ready to wrap things up. She looked at me and asked, "how are things going for you?". At that moment, a wave of emotion surged through me. I looked at her and then started to cry. "Actually, I'm not great. Things have been rough." I then let her know how I have been feeling about work, life, and health, which have not all been good. Yes, workloads are heavy, especially in a period of transition for my faculty; and adulting is hard, especially when dealing with injury or illness. How much of my sharing was necessary in a performance review I don't know, but in that moment I was overcome with gratitude that someone cared enough to ask how I was.

I write this not because I have particular insight into how to handle adversity, but because both physical and mental health are important and not always recognized in a classroom or work setting. When I was teaching in Melbourne during the Covid years, I gave my lectures on Zoom and faced a sea of black rectangles that represented my students. Very few turned their cameras on and almost none interacted with me in the chat or through reaction icons. This really bothered me, not because I thought the students were not paying attention, but because the human interaction between us was lost. If students did not understand what I was teaching, I could not tell from their faces or body language. It was like speaking to a void and I did not know what to do about it.

One initiative that I learned about during this time was a program called "R U OK?". The organization behind this was for suicide prevention, and there is an R U OK day (second Thursday of September) where you ask someone if they were okay? I thought to myself, I don't know how my students are doing and maybe it would help if I asked them. So I wrote individual emails to my students to check in, and the response was tremendous. Many wrote that they have never had an email from a professor asking about their well-being, and some shared really difficult stories about friends or family passing, their struggles to stay motivated, how life under lockdown was so bleak. My reaching out to them was a kindness that they really appreciated, even if we have never met in person, and their responses helped me to know them a bit better behind their black screens.

Thinking back on my performance review, I am grateful to have supportive colleagues who also asked if I was okay. At the time, I was not, but knowing that others cared and that I was seen made a big difference to getting me back to being better, even okay. So next time you meet someone who seems a bit glum, a simple question asked in kindness may help them too.

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