When the pandemic began, I was teaching at a university in southern Arkansas. My courses were already online before the great pivot, yet I was conferencing, conversing with, and surveying my students enough to witness what many of them were beginning to experience: increased feelings of burnout, isolation, and stress. “Increased” is the operative word. Students struggled with many of these feelings before the pandemic, along with other common health concerns in a university setting, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and addiction. As a professor, I had too. Burnout and stress affected the way I taught, and I felt like it affected my quality of teaching. Likewise, my students’ struggles almost certainly affected their learning.
