My voice is my instrument

Every year or two, I seem to get a cold, keep teaching, and then lose my voice. I am going through one of these right now. When I think about the skills required to be a professor, I rarely list having a voice but it is pretty important. As a statistician, my research is collaborative. To help students with research, you need to talk about their progress. And, of course, to teach you need to be able to talk. I remember watching one of my high school science teachers struggle with long term vocal chord issues and it always is in the back of your mind. What would you do without a voice?

So I cancelled my classes for today. I had an idea of doing a silent teaching day (like a silent movie) and see how the students react to jestures and subtitles. Maybe using software that does text to speech to fill in some of the gaps that I could prepare in advance. Instead I just cancelled classes. For one class, I am providing them scanned copies of my notes to read and then they will have an easy quiz over the material. I would have done the quiz anyway, but this way I can make sure they got some comprehension out of reading it. The other class will just be getting a homework assignment to start working on. I will sort of make up that class later this week trying to meet with them about their projects outside of class.

I had gone a year without getting fully sick - probably the longest stretch of my life. I knew working with 50 undergrads would expose me to all kinds of evil. Last week when I first got sick, I just kept working. I had deadlines at the end of the week and managed to meet them. And earlier in the week hopped into an interesting NSF grant proposal and made some progress on work on another project. And had to write some new materials up for both classes. I managed all that but didn't make any progress on my grading pile.

But I did overdo it (especially on Thursday and Friday when I should have been resting) and am now suffering the ramifications of working too much. I haven't spoken above a whisper in three days and am almost getting used to the silence. Hopefully that silence will be short-lived.