This started out as a comment on Dr. Crazy's post, but it got so long I turned it into my own post in order not to highjack the comments there.
I am one of those who drags their feet and goes for the fake assessment. I have bitched long and hard about that. What I think I haven't been clear on has been that I don't totally oppose the general idea about assessment. After all, there are certain things that students should be getting out of our classes, especially at our school when many will transfer to a four-year institution at which they will be expected to have certain skills. Given where many come from and where they hope to go, we really are much like grade 13 when it comes to academic skills. Their success elsewhere is our real assessment.
Like Susan says in Dr. Crazy's comments, we already have those sorts of conversations among the faculty about what our students can't do and what they should be able to do and the ways that we can figure out how to help them do it. Codifying it, however, becomes not only a lot of time (made more so by having faculty spread across three campuses), but it also doesn't provide the type of data that the Ass-essment Borg at our school craves. As Shaun Houston says in the comments at Dr. Crazy's, "I am reminded of this whenever I listen on one side to how various tools will be acceptable for assessing student learning, but see on the other side that only quantitative data that can be crunched through whatever assessment package the university just bought is being used or taken seriously." What we the faculty do and the numbers that the Ass-essement Borg demand are two different things.
Furthermore, despite all of the statements of "this is faculty driven," it is not. There is a right sort of "tool," they won't tell us what it is, and they will make us redo and redo and redo until we give it too them. To their credit, they prefer essays, but they prefer essays with rubrics that are so specific as to be essentially a template for a "right answer" essay...if that makes sense.
I think one of the ways to get around this would require changing our outcomes. All of our outcomes are content based. Skills are implied, as in "students will be able to analyze the causes of the American Revolution," but not the focus (and don't get me started on the time wasted over the back and forth between us and the Borg over "students will analyze the causes of the American Revolution" and "students will be able to analyze the causes of the American Revolution"). So, when we try to assess the "analyze" part, the Borg wants the "American Revolution" part. So, we can't design a means of assessing the analyzing part without becoming as specific about the information part on the American Revolution part as the assessors want, which then becomes very rigid and begins to hint as some of the conformity that the educrats want.
By conformity I don't mean that "all professors cover the American Revolution in their classes," but that "all professors are going by the same script about the American Revolution in their classes." That issue is more obvious in their online "common course" travesty, which is another story for another time.
The American Revolution part, as important as it is, isn't the more important thing that the students will take away from class. The analyze part is. To be able to demonstrate the analyze part, of course the student will have to demonstrate knowledge of the Revolution, more so than if we have them tick off "Stamp Act" or "virtual representation" and so forth on a content-based "tool." So, the Borg is asking us to go about this bass-ackwards.
Now, my solution would be to add to our assessments something more skills-based. "Students will be able analyze historic documents" or "Students will be able to write a research paper with x number of sources" or something like that. We need something that moves away from a focus on content that turns history into a game of multiple choice trivial pursuit (which, less face it, is what a vast majority of people seem to think historians do all day -- hence the complete bafflement that we need to do research). After all, that's where are students are weakest, that's where they are being failed by NCLB, and that's what will determine their success outside of our classes. That, in fact, is what makes them educated people: the thinking and research skills.
To change the outcomes, however, we would have to go back to a curriculum committee to get approval. That means taking a well-established general education course -- several of them -- and putting them through the whole process of course proposal. Again, remembering that we are spread across three campuses, that on two campuses a full half of the (2 person) full-time history faculty are chairs over not just history but other disciplines, that we all teach a 5/5 load, and on and on -- well, the incentive is just not there to do that. (It certainly isn't with me since the meetings would all be at that Self-Proclaimed Main Campus and that is not just the time for the meetings out of my day, that's up to 2 hours in traffic, too.)
So, the real work of assessment is done as we, in our yearly all-college meetings, talk about how to design papers and assignments that address our students' astounding inability to think or to function with the written word, and then go out and implement those assignments. What we turn over to the Borg is bullshit. While the desire to change this may exist, the incentive does not.
My most cynical self also imagines that, should we find the incentive and reform what we can on our end of the process, the Borg would send back a detailed rubric for analyzing historical documents and say something like, "which document?" and "I don't see any history in this." I imagine them telling the math department which numbers must be included in a particular function (no x + y = z, but 2 + 5 = 7).
Anyway, watching the frustrating, infuriating process at my school, and listening to other discussion about this, I can see the camps split, and a lot of the split has to do with how the whole assessment business is handled at a school. Does the school really turn the process over to the faculty and trust that the faculty know what they are doing? Or does the school dictate the process and demand certain sorts of data that are not necessarily respecting the professional expertise of faculty nor the needs of the students with whom that faculty work? Plus, it does seem like a whole hell of a lot of work to either codify what you already do, which has its merits, or produce bullshit to keep a Borg off of your back so you can go about what you already do, which does not.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
B!tching-blogging
Lately, I've been too tired and too busy to blog. Also, some of the stuff that I want to blog about, I cannot blog about because it drifts into things that are perhaps not wise to air. I'm also getting tired of bitch-blogging. Actually, I'm getting tired of being just plain bitchy, and blogging is sort of my therapy for getting the bitchiness out of my head. Instead, I've been bitch-twittering.
For the most part, I really don't have too many things to bitch about. There's the usual: I hate online teaching, especially when I am the only one at my campus who can do the online teaching for history. There's the "I really need to cowgirl up and accept that I am lucky to have a job" bitching of "5/5 doesn't leave me with but two days to research, much less to things like grocery shop." There's the indication that I've regressed to my 19 year old anorexic self with the "but I just have to lose 10 lbs." (That's actually quite exhausting unto itself. No wonder I abandoned eating disorders!) Then, there's the indication that I've gone off the rails with, "goddamn but I need a 1950s Stepford Wife to take care of the mundane stuff like cleaning the bathroom and doing the grocery shopping." Really, the bitching itself is moving from the "blowing off steam" end of the bitch-o-meter to "it's taking up too much space and time in your life as an end unto itself" end.
Two things right now have me annoyed. These fall into the "excellence without money" category. The first has to do with my lovely new office. Because I became women's studies coordinator for my campus, someone somewhere decided to move me from my triangular office in an asbestos-ridden building over to the newly gutted and redesigned building. Really, the new office is quite lovely with its logical design and new car smell, and its location in the same building as some of my classes. I'm even one of the lucky ones with a window (or at least part of a window). Which is all to say that my bitching about anything about this office has the distinct flavor of "looking a gift horse in the mouth."
Yet, I do.
You see, someone else -- or maybe it was the same someone -- failed to include a printer into the budget for the suite. We have seven professors and administrators and one administrative assistant, and they did not budget a laser printer to which we can all be networked, just as is done in every other office suite on the entire campus (and probably in the entire college). Heck, they didn't even budget a printer at all for the administrative assistant. She had to go scavenge for an old one that was not being used in her former location. She got in trouble for that, but she told them that she absolutely needed a printer. If they could produce one for her before the next budget cycle (this was in January), then she'd be happy to give that old, abandoned one back.
The rest of us have printers in our individual offices, but these are those really slow, ink jet sorts, several generations out-of-date, that are one step above a dot-matrix. Given that most of us have multi-volume syllabi and mid-terms and a zillion other multi-page documents to print, the ink jet printers do not get the job done and run out of ink very quickly. We all generally use the laser printer in our suites.
Except we don't' have a laser printer in our suite.
This has been a problem since January. A dean, two program directors, and the administrative assistant moved in then. They all complained. They were told they could just go over to the computer labs to do printing. All but one of the computer labs are student labs with limited hours. The faculty/staff lab is unreliable in terms of help, actual connections to the printers (none last Friday) and even being open. They told the administrative assistant that she was still networked to her old office printer, so she could use that. Her old office is half-way across campus. They told the rest of us the same thing.
They said that a printer would have to be written into the new budget. Before that could be done, we would need approval from about three or four levels of administration all the way up through the campus provost to the college capital budget office. We need to justify our need for a printer. Again, this was back in February. We are all still waiting for the approvals. The old veteran administrator in the suite laughed cynically and said, "this isn't going to happen any time soon."
Whoever made the mistake or the argument not to give us a printer -- I would like that person to go a week without a printer themselves. That would be the hell of their own making.
Not that this is a hell. You learn to work with it. Still, it seems typical of a certain sort of thinking in which someone made a mistake and, rather than own up and fix the mistake, tells the people who have to live with that mistake that it isn't really a mistake at all and that they are the unreasonable ones for noticing the mistake. I've been on the receiving end of that before! (Quite a bit of it is the corporate culture of the Self-proclaimed Main Campus).
The other, bigger instance of "excellence without money" has to do with my lecture series, which is also connected to some of my duties as coordinator. Last year, I did pretty good in getting that lecture series on the Anniversary of a Big Historical Event going. In fact, if I must say so myself, I rocked! I intend to keep it going, and to do similar things for women's studies.
The problem is that I've rather tapped out the expertise of our faculty in relation to the Big Historical Event. To move beyond our faculty, I'm going to need money. Some of my colleagues don't understand this, but you cannot ask a published scholar from another school to come give a talk, even if they are just across town, and not at least offer transportation costs. There is a ton of talent in the city, but they should receive some recognition that, by giving a talk at our school, they are doing work. It's a matter of respecting the value of their labor.
I do plan to apply for an internal grant to cover next semester or next year's speakers, but this year is looking pretty skimpy. I've lined up an historian from out of town who will be in town promoting his newly published book. The book is on the election that led to the Big Historical Event, the talk will be on the day before election day, and the historian has a pretty strong publication record. All he is asking for is enough of an honorarium to cover his airfare, which is a very inexpensive airfare and which is very generous. Guess where this honorarium is going to come from?*
Additionally, since he is a pretty important historian, I would like to have him speak in one of our theaters and to have his talk filmed for a podcast. The ITV department has been very very accommodating, considering that they are on the Self-Proclaimed Main Campus, short staffed, and in demand for everything else. They do it for free.
The theater, on the other hand... Well, this theater has been the subject of much controversy. When it was proposed and money budgeted for its construction, its stated purpose was to use it for education, but also allow for-profit shows to rent it in order to defray the costs of running the building. Seems wise, right?
Once it was built, however, the now-ousted president decided to use it only to turn a profit with little to no educational use. That is, student groups could not use it for year-end ceremonies, productions of the ubiquitous Vagina Monologues, or performances of any sort. This all culminated in a huge scandal connected to the firing of the college president and in which a very very famous performer was booked for the official opening of the building, and the costs of meeting that performers rider far outstripped any revenue coming in from that performer's show. We are talking 5-6 digit losses.
So, the whole control and use of the theater building was restructured, and now it is supposed to be used primarily for educational purposes, and some for-profit.
Well, they seem to be running it primarily for-profit anyway. They have many many outside shows coming in; but those shows are using the large theater. I just wanted to reserve the little theater for my speaker. No problem, right? Just notify the manager of the theater, book the room, and we are set.
First, getting the manager to answer my e-mails asking merely how to do so has taken nearly a month. Second, you have to pay $40 to use the theater. The theater that belongs to the school, that is supposed to be used for education, for which you are using for education, requires a fee.
Is that normal? Shouldn't the school's facilities, when used for the school's mission, be free? I don't have to pay a fee for the classrooms. I don't have to pay a fee for ITV. Yet, I have to pay a fee for the theater.
Now, I can simply book my speaker in another room on campus -- and I will. What do I do in the spring when the women's studies students put on the ubiquitous Vagina Monologues? Women's studies on our campus (but not on the Self-Proclaimed Main Campus) has no money, and the Vagina Monologues is not the sort of thing that you can do in a classroom. I'm going to have to be very creative on this, maybe even play with the format just enough, without violating copyright, in order to pull this off.
So, what we have here are two problems. First, I was given the charge of the speakers series in order to "prove myself" to people who were not impressed, but it was such a success anyway that there is a small demand and expectation to keep it going. Keeping it going will require money. I don't even have a history department fund from which to draw to keep it going. Second, I have a position that calls for a performance of a play, which will require money, and no money to produce that play.
You can only do so much with nothing. I may not be at the end of that so much, but the end is in sight. Maybe that is a good thing? Maybe that means less work for me at my job and more time for me to research?
Meanwhile, in the "money without excellence" category, our online course platform keeps malfunctioning, students and instructors complain about the lack of IT help, and anyone who actually works on the platform just shrug their shoulders and say "I'm sorry" without fixing the problems.
I know that these are just marginal, bitching problems. These are privileged problems to have. Still, I see them as symptomatic of the overall problem that goes with "excellence without money." Faculty and staff are furloughed and don't get any cost of living increase or step increase as the cost of living does, in fact, increase, then are told "but we will still be giving excellent service to our students, and do it with a smile" as if we won't do our jobs even as more students bang on our office doors wanting into our overfull classes and the support services they receive dwindle while their tuition climbs. It's rather like asking those scholars to speak on campus without any compensation: do your job and do it well, and just be happy that you get to do it. Don't expect it to be worth anything. After all, you get to do what you love!
Something is going to give. It has to, doesn't it?
-----------------------------
*I'm willing to get the honorarium from there -- that is, my own bank account -- in order to prove the success of outside speakers in order to strengthen my grant proposal, since, as I said, many people don't understand why you might want to have a budget to pay a speaker. This, despite the fact that a whole program collapsed because the person coordinating it was told that she had to get major authors to visit campus and speak, but couldn't pay them.
For the most part, I really don't have too many things to bitch about. There's the usual: I hate online teaching, especially when I am the only one at my campus who can do the online teaching for history. There's the "I really need to cowgirl up and accept that I am lucky to have a job" bitching of "5/5 doesn't leave me with but two days to research, much less to things like grocery shop." There's the indication that I've regressed to my 19 year old anorexic self with the "but I just have to lose 10 lbs." (That's actually quite exhausting unto itself. No wonder I abandoned eating disorders!) Then, there's the indication that I've gone off the rails with, "goddamn but I need a 1950s Stepford Wife to take care of the mundane stuff like cleaning the bathroom and doing the grocery shopping." Really, the bitching itself is moving from the "blowing off steam" end of the bitch-o-meter to "it's taking up too much space and time in your life as an end unto itself" end.
Two things right now have me annoyed. These fall into the "excellence without money" category. The first has to do with my lovely new office. Because I became women's studies coordinator for my campus, someone somewhere decided to move me from my triangular office in an asbestos-ridden building over to the newly gutted and redesigned building. Really, the new office is quite lovely with its logical design and new car smell, and its location in the same building as some of my classes. I'm even one of the lucky ones with a window (or at least part of a window). Which is all to say that my bitching about anything about this office has the distinct flavor of "looking a gift horse in the mouth."
Yet, I do.
You see, someone else -- or maybe it was the same someone -- failed to include a printer into the budget for the suite. We have seven professors and administrators and one administrative assistant, and they did not budget a laser printer to which we can all be networked, just as is done in every other office suite on the entire campus (and probably in the entire college). Heck, they didn't even budget a printer at all for the administrative assistant. She had to go scavenge for an old one that was not being used in her former location. She got in trouble for that, but she told them that she absolutely needed a printer. If they could produce one for her before the next budget cycle (this was in January), then she'd be happy to give that old, abandoned one back.
The rest of us have printers in our individual offices, but these are those really slow, ink jet sorts, several generations out-of-date, that are one step above a dot-matrix. Given that most of us have multi-volume syllabi and mid-terms and a zillion other multi-page documents to print, the ink jet printers do not get the job done and run out of ink very quickly. We all generally use the laser printer in our suites.
Except we don't' have a laser printer in our suite.
This has been a problem since January. A dean, two program directors, and the administrative assistant moved in then. They all complained. They were told they could just go over to the computer labs to do printing. All but one of the computer labs are student labs with limited hours. The faculty/staff lab is unreliable in terms of help, actual connections to the printers (none last Friday) and even being open. They told the administrative assistant that she was still networked to her old office printer, so she could use that. Her old office is half-way across campus. They told the rest of us the same thing.
They said that a printer would have to be written into the new budget. Before that could be done, we would need approval from about three or four levels of administration all the way up through the campus provost to the college capital budget office. We need to justify our need for a printer. Again, this was back in February. We are all still waiting for the approvals. The old veteran administrator in the suite laughed cynically and said, "this isn't going to happen any time soon."
Whoever made the mistake or the argument not to give us a printer -- I would like that person to go a week without a printer themselves. That would be the hell of their own making.
Not that this is a hell. You learn to work with it. Still, it seems typical of a certain sort of thinking in which someone made a mistake and, rather than own up and fix the mistake, tells the people who have to live with that mistake that it isn't really a mistake at all and that they are the unreasonable ones for noticing the mistake. I've been on the receiving end of that before! (Quite a bit of it is the corporate culture of the Self-proclaimed Main Campus).
The other, bigger instance of "excellence without money" has to do with my lecture series, which is also connected to some of my duties as coordinator. Last year, I did pretty good in getting that lecture series on the Anniversary of a Big Historical Event going. In fact, if I must say so myself, I rocked! I intend to keep it going, and to do similar things for women's studies.
The problem is that I've rather tapped out the expertise of our faculty in relation to the Big Historical Event. To move beyond our faculty, I'm going to need money. Some of my colleagues don't understand this, but you cannot ask a published scholar from another school to come give a talk, even if they are just across town, and not at least offer transportation costs. There is a ton of talent in the city, but they should receive some recognition that, by giving a talk at our school, they are doing work. It's a matter of respecting the value of their labor.
I do plan to apply for an internal grant to cover next semester or next year's speakers, but this year is looking pretty skimpy. I've lined up an historian from out of town who will be in town promoting his newly published book. The book is on the election that led to the Big Historical Event, the talk will be on the day before election day, and the historian has a pretty strong publication record. All he is asking for is enough of an honorarium to cover his airfare, which is a very inexpensive airfare and which is very generous. Guess where this honorarium is going to come from?*
Additionally, since he is a pretty important historian, I would like to have him speak in one of our theaters and to have his talk filmed for a podcast. The ITV department has been very very accommodating, considering that they are on the Self-Proclaimed Main Campus, short staffed, and in demand for everything else. They do it for free.
The theater, on the other hand... Well, this theater has been the subject of much controversy. When it was proposed and money budgeted for its construction, its stated purpose was to use it for education, but also allow for-profit shows to rent it in order to defray the costs of running the building. Seems wise, right?
Once it was built, however, the now-ousted president decided to use it only to turn a profit with little to no educational use. That is, student groups could not use it for year-end ceremonies, productions of the ubiquitous Vagina Monologues, or performances of any sort. This all culminated in a huge scandal connected to the firing of the college president and in which a very very famous performer was booked for the official opening of the building, and the costs of meeting that performers rider far outstripped any revenue coming in from that performer's show. We are talking 5-6 digit losses.
So, the whole control and use of the theater building was restructured, and now it is supposed to be used primarily for educational purposes, and some for-profit.
Well, they seem to be running it primarily for-profit anyway. They have many many outside shows coming in; but those shows are using the large theater. I just wanted to reserve the little theater for my speaker. No problem, right? Just notify the manager of the theater, book the room, and we are set.
First, getting the manager to answer my e-mails asking merely how to do so has taken nearly a month. Second, you have to pay $40 to use the theater. The theater that belongs to the school, that is supposed to be used for education, for which you are using for education, requires a fee.
Is that normal? Shouldn't the school's facilities, when used for the school's mission, be free? I don't have to pay a fee for the classrooms. I don't have to pay a fee for ITV. Yet, I have to pay a fee for the theater.
Now, I can simply book my speaker in another room on campus -- and I will. What do I do in the spring when the women's studies students put on the ubiquitous Vagina Monologues? Women's studies on our campus (but not on the Self-Proclaimed Main Campus) has no money, and the Vagina Monologues is not the sort of thing that you can do in a classroom. I'm going to have to be very creative on this, maybe even play with the format just enough, without violating copyright, in order to pull this off.
So, what we have here are two problems. First, I was given the charge of the speakers series in order to "prove myself" to people who were not impressed, but it was such a success anyway that there is a small demand and expectation to keep it going. Keeping it going will require money. I don't even have a history department fund from which to draw to keep it going. Second, I have a position that calls for a performance of a play, which will require money, and no money to produce that play.
You can only do so much with nothing. I may not be at the end of that so much, but the end is in sight. Maybe that is a good thing? Maybe that means less work for me at my job and more time for me to research?
Meanwhile, in the "money without excellence" category, our online course platform keeps malfunctioning, students and instructors complain about the lack of IT help, and anyone who actually works on the platform just shrug their shoulders and say "I'm sorry" without fixing the problems.
I know that these are just marginal, bitching problems. These are privileged problems to have. Still, I see them as symptomatic of the overall problem that goes with "excellence without money." Faculty and staff are furloughed and don't get any cost of living increase or step increase as the cost of living does, in fact, increase, then are told "but we will still be giving excellent service to our students, and do it with a smile" as if we won't do our jobs even as more students bang on our office doors wanting into our overfull classes and the support services they receive dwindle while their tuition climbs. It's rather like asking those scholars to speak on campus without any compensation: do your job and do it well, and just be happy that you get to do it. Don't expect it to be worth anything. After all, you get to do what you love!
Something is going to give. It has to, doesn't it?
-----------------------------
*I'm willing to get the honorarium from there -- that is, my own bank account -- in order to prove the success of outside speakers in order to strengthen my grant proposal, since, as I said, many people don't understand why you might want to have a budget to pay a speaker. This, despite the fact that a whole program collapsed because the person coordinating it was told that she had to get major authors to visit campus and speak, but couldn't pay them.
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
What Do My Messed-up, Overly Long Childhood and My Difficulties with Teaching Have In Common?
The fact that I have a tortured relationship with teaching is no secret; but I'm starting to allow myself to look at the parts that make this relationship tortured and the most stressful part is directly connected to some of the detritus that I'm cleaning up in analysis.
I like teaching. I don't LOVE it, but I like it. I like especially the parts in which I can read and learn more generally, and I really like the parts in the classroom, even on less than adequate days. I like the learning, and the sharing, and the act of creation that goes into preparing and presenting a lecture or lesson. I like the performance and I like the improv. I like figuring out how to make things better the next time through. The hours ain't so bad either, nor is the infinite variety of the week and the relative independence of my workday. Really, there aren't too many other jobs that I would like to do nor that fit a significant portion of my socially awkward, easily exhausted, curious, doesn't-work-well-with-others-or-respond-to-authority self.
I don't like the grading (does anyone like grading?). I also despise he endless bullshit of paperwork that mostly goes with online classes and the kind of grade 13 stuff that we are supposed to do with community college students to essentially teach them how to do school -- not just college, but school -- by granting small rewards of grades (I call them "cookies") along the way for doing the sort of stuff like reading the books, attending class, and so forth. Quite often, this second despised point contributes to the first despised point, and together they consumes way too much of my time outside of the class that I think would be put to better use in that reading and learning more generally. After all, that's why you get a specialist with a PhD to teach college. You want their expertise, and you hope that their expertise remains current. Sadly, the parts I hate tend to interfere with remaining current.
Finally, I HATE the feeling of being pecked to death that begins about the end of the 1st week of class when people start wanting into your class that is full beyond capacity and continues through the "I can't" and "it won't" and "I didn't" and "I don't" statements that have nothing to do with understanding the subject and everything to do with technological failures and student time management issues, both often being things that I can do nothing about and both often expecting me to go above and beyond the call of duty to accommodate someone else's failure.
Actually, that last part of that last sentence is not fair; but I'll get to that in a minute.
I can't really do anything about the grading because that just goes with the territory. Any grading is too much grading in my estimation, so even the elimination of the cookie grading that I probably wouldn't be doing if I didn't teach community college wouldn't alleviate that part of the equation. Grading is just a case of sucking it up and getting it done in an efficient and effective way that becomes more of a communication with the student rather than a crushing avalanche of despair that it can so easily become with over 100 students and a gabillion assignments.
The busy work also goes with the territory. I still get pissed that no one will step up or make anyone else step up to take some of the online load, where the majority of the busy work (and my sense of failure as a teacher) lies. Even one class less might help a bit and allow me to be a better teacher online; but, I will digress if I follow that train of thought. I also think that I would have less busy work if I weren't having all of this cookie grading to do, too. As it is, where I am, I have to do it; and, like the grading, it goes with the territory. I like being employed, you know.
The last part, however, the pecked apart bit, that's a whole other issue. In fact, the issue there runs through the other two parts of teaching that I hate, especially the grading.
Sometime in the last year, somewhere in analysis, I began to look at the irritation and annoyance that built up to some shockingly unreasonable levels through the semester. I partly wrote it off as being unsuited to teaching, something that is not entirely untrue, but also not entirely true. Like or love your job, you can also be unsuited for it for whatever reason. I feel drained by too much interaction with other people, even when I'm enjoying myself. So, the constant interaction of teaching, especially the part in which all of the constant individual demands from so many individuals do leave me feeling pecked to death, leave me feeling bled to death by the end of the week. Part of the problem here, however, has more to do with the levels of interaction rather than the interactions themselves. Again, over 100 students all expecting individual attention can be overwhelming to an introvert over time. Half, or even 3/4 of that number, might make this less of a problem.
Still, that's not the core of the problem. The core, I discovered, lies in my whole attitude. For every student who comes to me at the end of the semester saying "I know I only showed up for 1/2 of the classes, didn't do any of the quizzes, didn't turn in any draft of the paper, and flunked all of the tests, but I think I deserve a C because my F this semester was twice as high as my F for last semester and my life will be royally fucked if you don't give me the C and history isn't really important to me so it shouldn't be fucking up my life and you are a big ole meanie who is probably racist and hates men/women/people who wear t-shirts like this one and you don't really know anything anyway because you are a girl and have a PhD and...." -- you get the drift -- for every one of those, you have 10 or15 or maybe even 20 who suck it up, do the work, and do well. For every student for whom it's always something -- the car broke down, their computer crashed, they are moving, they can't take a make up because they don't have time in their schedule, and so on and so forth -- there are 10 or 15 or maybe even 20 or 30 who have one legitimate issue in a whole school year.
I suppose my point is that most of what irritates me and ultimately provokes the anger of an annoyance build up has nothing to do with the numbers or the nature of the incidents. These are just students being students. This is just their nature, good, bad, fucking up or doing well. My point is that I'm not responding to it with the rationality of "heck, this is just them being them." I'm responding with the feeling that their, more often than not, legitimate and class-related problems, their poor performance on their work, their overwhelming ignorance resulting from not just a school system but a whole anti-intellectual culture that seems to WANT to perpetuate ignorance even in the midst of education -- I'm responding to this as if it is a personal and malicious attack on me.
Does any of this sound familiar, parallel to things I've talked about in other posts?
Teaching has a certain care-taking role. It's a limited caretaking role -- and it HAS to be limited, at least for me -- but it still involves caretaking. Perhaps a better word here would be "guidance."
I learned one thing in my whole life about caretaking and guidance: it ain't worth it. Actually, I learned that about any social interaction, but this is the one at hand. With something like two or three notable exceptions, which grew less frequent as I learned to trust less and less and therefore gravitated towards the untrustworthy more and more (you know, because at least they were open about their untrustworthiness, for the most part), no one in a caretaking role in my life was particularly good at it. In fact, they either saw that caretaking role as an irritation or annoyance with my existence as the one who needed the guidance a major inconvenience, or they completely exploited the role to the point of abject malice. I'm trying to understand one that I talked about earlier in the summer, but that's for another time.
I've also learned that, when caretaking was required of me, the reward was abuse. Abusive parents, abusive boyfriends, abusive advisers.
Holy crap: as I wrote that, I realized that parents and advisers really shouldn't have been reacquiring me to take care of them. At least, not in the way that they were requiring that care and guidance from me. Their requirements were outside of the bounds of the reciprocity that fosters respect between superior and subordinate roles in those relationships.
My analysis matters professionally because, in figuring how I wasn't cared for or guided a key points in my life, I also figure out how I'm totally failing in that regard in my own profession and job. I'm failing in that regard as a person. I want to guide and teach and care for these students' education, but I don't know how to do so, and I don't know how without feeling this resentment that all of the work, all of the energy, all of the care that goes into that role will only receive punishment -- even in the face of evidence to the opposite.
In analysis, I've been identifying the laws by which my life operates unconsciously. Not the things that, if asked, I'd give a somewhat different answer. For instance, if someone asked, "what is love?" I would of course answer, "Love is respect and admiration and kindness." That's the ideal, what I want to believe, and what I know is the expected answer. The actual law of operation (until recently, as I have gushed about like a 16 year old) was "love is exploitation and abuse with a sense of obligation."
Here, if the question is, "what is teaching?" my law is pretty much the same as that of love. My law for most social interactions is the same that of love; and that isn't fair to the person on the other end of the equation, be they a boyfriend or a friend or a colleague or a student. That is also not the law that I want to live under. I want to change the law. I want a revolution!
Sometimes I feel like a whiny idiot when I go over the childhood stuff, like I should be over it; but it's not so easy to do things like stop hating yourself or live by more rational rules of operation. You might as well tell a devoutly religious person to stop believing in their deity, that's how deeply these rules of operation go; and those deities know that I would just get over it if I could. It would be a lot cheaper and require a lot less effort. My brother, who suffered worse than I did growing up, doesn't see why all of this stuff matters (and then he finds other drug on which to obsess).
This is why it matters. I may not have children on whom I'm perpetuating some seriously fucked up ideas about the world, but I do have students. Lots of them. I don't want to unconsciously abuse them by resenting them just being them, as was done to me over and over and over. If nothing else, it's not an effective or efficient way to go about the job.
I like teaching. I don't LOVE it, but I like it. I like especially the parts in which I can read and learn more generally, and I really like the parts in the classroom, even on less than adequate days. I like the learning, and the sharing, and the act of creation that goes into preparing and presenting a lecture or lesson. I like the performance and I like the improv. I like figuring out how to make things better the next time through. The hours ain't so bad either, nor is the infinite variety of the week and the relative independence of my workday. Really, there aren't too many other jobs that I would like to do nor that fit a significant portion of my socially awkward, easily exhausted, curious, doesn't-work-well-with-others-or-respond-to-authority self.
I don't like the grading (does anyone like grading?). I also despise he endless bullshit of paperwork that mostly goes with online classes and the kind of grade 13 stuff that we are supposed to do with community college students to essentially teach them how to do school -- not just college, but school -- by granting small rewards of grades (I call them "cookies") along the way for doing the sort of stuff like reading the books, attending class, and so forth. Quite often, this second despised point contributes to the first despised point, and together they consumes way too much of my time outside of the class that I think would be put to better use in that reading and learning more generally. After all, that's why you get a specialist with a PhD to teach college. You want their expertise, and you hope that their expertise remains current. Sadly, the parts I hate tend to interfere with remaining current.
Finally, I HATE the feeling of being pecked to death that begins about the end of the 1st week of class when people start wanting into your class that is full beyond capacity and continues through the "I can't" and "it won't" and "I didn't" and "I don't" statements that have nothing to do with understanding the subject and everything to do with technological failures and student time management issues, both often being things that I can do nothing about and both often expecting me to go above and beyond the call of duty to accommodate someone else's failure.
Actually, that last part of that last sentence is not fair; but I'll get to that in a minute.
I can't really do anything about the grading because that just goes with the territory. Any grading is too much grading in my estimation, so even the elimination of the cookie grading that I probably wouldn't be doing if I didn't teach community college wouldn't alleviate that part of the equation. Grading is just a case of sucking it up and getting it done in an efficient and effective way that becomes more of a communication with the student rather than a crushing avalanche of despair that it can so easily become with over 100 students and a gabillion assignments.
The busy work also goes with the territory. I still get pissed that no one will step up or make anyone else step up to take some of the online load, where the majority of the busy work (and my sense of failure as a teacher) lies. Even one class less might help a bit and allow me to be a better teacher online; but, I will digress if I follow that train of thought. I also think that I would have less busy work if I weren't having all of this cookie grading to do, too. As it is, where I am, I have to do it; and, like the grading, it goes with the territory. I like being employed, you know.
The last part, however, the pecked apart bit, that's a whole other issue. In fact, the issue there runs through the other two parts of teaching that I hate, especially the grading.
Sometime in the last year, somewhere in analysis, I began to look at the irritation and annoyance that built up to some shockingly unreasonable levels through the semester. I partly wrote it off as being unsuited to teaching, something that is not entirely untrue, but also not entirely true. Like or love your job, you can also be unsuited for it for whatever reason. I feel drained by too much interaction with other people, even when I'm enjoying myself. So, the constant interaction of teaching, especially the part in which all of the constant individual demands from so many individuals do leave me feeling pecked to death, leave me feeling bled to death by the end of the week. Part of the problem here, however, has more to do with the levels of interaction rather than the interactions themselves. Again, over 100 students all expecting individual attention can be overwhelming to an introvert over time. Half, or even 3/4 of that number, might make this less of a problem.
Still, that's not the core of the problem. The core, I discovered, lies in my whole attitude. For every student who comes to me at the end of the semester saying "I know I only showed up for 1/2 of the classes, didn't do any of the quizzes, didn't turn in any draft of the paper, and flunked all of the tests, but I think I deserve a C because my F this semester was twice as high as my F for last semester and my life will be royally fucked if you don't give me the C and history isn't really important to me so it shouldn't be fucking up my life and you are a big ole meanie who is probably racist and hates men/women/people who wear t-shirts like this one and you don't really know anything anyway because you are a girl and have a PhD and...." -- you get the drift -- for every one of those, you have 10 or15 or maybe even 20 who suck it up, do the work, and do well. For every student for whom it's always something -- the car broke down, their computer crashed, they are moving, they can't take a make up because they don't have time in their schedule, and so on and so forth -- there are 10 or 15 or maybe even 20 or 30 who have one legitimate issue in a whole school year.
I suppose my point is that most of what irritates me and ultimately provokes the anger of an annoyance build up has nothing to do with the numbers or the nature of the incidents. These are just students being students. This is just their nature, good, bad, fucking up or doing well. My point is that I'm not responding to it with the rationality of "heck, this is just them being them." I'm responding with the feeling that their, more often than not, legitimate and class-related problems, their poor performance on their work, their overwhelming ignorance resulting from not just a school system but a whole anti-intellectual culture that seems to WANT to perpetuate ignorance even in the midst of education -- I'm responding to this as if it is a personal and malicious attack on me.
Does any of this sound familiar, parallel to things I've talked about in other posts?
Teaching has a certain care-taking role. It's a limited caretaking role -- and it HAS to be limited, at least for me -- but it still involves caretaking. Perhaps a better word here would be "guidance."
I learned one thing in my whole life about caretaking and guidance: it ain't worth it. Actually, I learned that about any social interaction, but this is the one at hand. With something like two or three notable exceptions, which grew less frequent as I learned to trust less and less and therefore gravitated towards the untrustworthy more and more (you know, because at least they were open about their untrustworthiness, for the most part), no one in a caretaking role in my life was particularly good at it. In fact, they either saw that caretaking role as an irritation or annoyance with my existence as the one who needed the guidance a major inconvenience, or they completely exploited the role to the point of abject malice. I'm trying to understand one that I talked about earlier in the summer, but that's for another time.
I've also learned that, when caretaking was required of me, the reward was abuse. Abusive parents, abusive boyfriends, abusive advisers.
Holy crap: as I wrote that, I realized that parents and advisers really shouldn't have been reacquiring me to take care of them. At least, not in the way that they were requiring that care and guidance from me. Their requirements were outside of the bounds of the reciprocity that fosters respect between superior and subordinate roles in those relationships.
My analysis matters professionally because, in figuring how I wasn't cared for or guided a key points in my life, I also figure out how I'm totally failing in that regard in my own profession and job. I'm failing in that regard as a person. I want to guide and teach and care for these students' education, but I don't know how to do so, and I don't know how without feeling this resentment that all of the work, all of the energy, all of the care that goes into that role will only receive punishment -- even in the face of evidence to the opposite.
In analysis, I've been identifying the laws by which my life operates unconsciously. Not the things that, if asked, I'd give a somewhat different answer. For instance, if someone asked, "what is love?" I would of course answer, "Love is respect and admiration and kindness." That's the ideal, what I want to believe, and what I know is the expected answer. The actual law of operation (until recently, as I have gushed about like a 16 year old) was "love is exploitation and abuse with a sense of obligation."
Here, if the question is, "what is teaching?" my law is pretty much the same as that of love. My law for most social interactions is the same that of love; and that isn't fair to the person on the other end of the equation, be they a boyfriend or a friend or a colleague or a student. That is also not the law that I want to live under. I want to change the law. I want a revolution!
Sometimes I feel like a whiny idiot when I go over the childhood stuff, like I should be over it; but it's not so easy to do things like stop hating yourself or live by more rational rules of operation. You might as well tell a devoutly religious person to stop believing in their deity, that's how deeply these rules of operation go; and those deities know that I would just get over it if I could. It would be a lot cheaper and require a lot less effort. My brother, who suffered worse than I did growing up, doesn't see why all of this stuff matters (and then he finds other drug on which to obsess).
This is why it matters. I may not have children on whom I'm perpetuating some seriously fucked up ideas about the world, but I do have students. Lots of them. I don't want to unconsciously abuse them by resenting them just being them, as was done to me over and over and over. If nothing else, it's not an effective or efficient way to go about the job.
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
The Great Gremlin of Self-Loathing
Amongst my gremlins lies a giant of a creature, tenuously chained to a wall, pretending to be asleep but watching me through half-shut eyes. He -- although sometimes he is a she, depending on the occasion -- waits for his moment when I am weak, when I'm off my meds (still working through that change of doctor right now), when I'm exhausted and facing months of continued exhaustion. Then, he rises, an enormous shadow growing ever more corporeal with webbed wings spreading up and out. He fills every dark crevice of my body, clawing through its borders and ripping off my skin. Like a demon, he possesses me.
I don't remember when this gremlin hatched, but I have an idea. He is only slightly younger than myself, not quite a twin, but close. I suppose no one ever really knows what they are getting into when they become a parent, but I do know that the big secret out there is that some people regret it. The anti-choice people like the trope that women will regret an abortion, but I think some people regret becoming parents. They like the idea, and all, but when the baby shows up, and dirties diapers and cries and ceases to be cute because she is becoming a person with a will of their own -- well, who bargains for that? Some parents accept it, some parents regret their decision. This was not what they wanted when they wanted a family, and they want to return it, but they can't, so now they resent their predicament. My gremlin hatched out of that resentment.
My mother has the stones to admit not so much the regret, but that she didn't know what she was getting into and that being a mother was difficult and nothing anyone should do unless they want to. My father, watching my brothers be fathers, admitted that he didn't enjoy being a parent to at least two of we three kids. If you asked them, they'd say that, of course they wanted us and of course they loved us and of course they don't regret us. If you lived it, you'd know that, of course, they wanted us and loved us (as far as they were able), but they regretted us every single day and -- at least in my mother's case -- told us explicitly that she hated us and wished we would just go away or be something totally different than what we were.
To be fair, I know that, as far as she is capable of being introspective, she regrets that and feels tremendous guilt for it, too. I can feel a lot of sympathy for her because of that. Heck, I love her more, as a woman, for that. Guilt and regret we both know.
I feel stupid going over this, yet again, although I understand it a little more each time. I'm understanding some of my core beliefs, here, the rules that have governed my life without me actually being aware of them. You see, babies don't know the difference between themselves and the world, especially their parents. So, if their parents resent them, regret them, and see their very existence as an annoyance, well, then that baby ingests the complete inconvenience of their being as much as they ingest formula or a belief in a god. The parent is sorry for the baby's existence, so the baby becomes sorry for her own existence and even hates her own existence. That baby becomes a child, who becomes and adult, who makes decisions based on that hatred of her own self, which lead to more self-hatred, which leads to more bad decisions, and on and on.
That is the big gremlin: self-loathing. You don't just get over that, or outgrow it. You chain it up, maybe, and sit in constant vigilance that it might escape. You also try to starve it.
One of the treats my Gremlin of Self-Loathing loves to eat is that tension between perfection and failure. Somewhere along the line, I also learned that I have to be perfect or I am a failure. I know, with my rational mind, that this is stupid. Much of what goes on in your head when you have a mental illness is stupid to sane people, but it is every bit as much as real to you as the law of gravity -- although superstition might be a more apt analogy. Knowing that makes you not entirely trust sane people. Not that sane people are bad or intentionally insensitive, just that they don't know the Big Crazy from the inside, so they don't get it, although the good sane people try when necessary. They were lucky. They never hated themselves and not understanding how someone could hate themselves is a pretty sane position.
Getting back to this lesson, in it, not only must I be perfect or a failure, but perfection was always just out of reach. If I only worked a little harder, starved myself a little more, stayed up a little later, woke up a little earlier, studied just a little harder, disciplined myself a little more 00 if I did something -- anything -- just a little more than I was doing it, I'd be perfect. Again, that's stupid, too; and, again, it's just as real as gravity. So, in the effort to outrun failure through perfection, I exhaust myself. Heck, sometimes, in trying to outrun failure by simply getting through the day, I exhaust myself. When I exhaust myself, the Giant Gremlin of Self-Loathing pounces.
These past two weeks, the mundane bullshit of busywork that constitutes at least 75% of my job has exhausted me to the point that some of my lesser gremlins escaped. They wore me out even more, at which point this Giant Gremlin saw his chance. Weak though he was, he saw that I had become weaker, and that I had become overconfident that he was dead, and made his move. Since Friday morning, he has been feasting on me, and he invited even more of all of the lesser, equally starving gremlins to the party.
I'm not sure what to do next. I will, of course, do something next. When I was younger, I just let them devour me. I didn't know any better and, of course, that's one of the bad decisions that were wholly mind. I do know better now, just not better enough beyond getting through the day. I want more than getting through the day, but that will have to do for the moment, especially this particular moment when the day is slipping beyond its beginning point.
I don't remember when this gremlin hatched, but I have an idea. He is only slightly younger than myself, not quite a twin, but close. I suppose no one ever really knows what they are getting into when they become a parent, but I do know that the big secret out there is that some people regret it. The anti-choice people like the trope that women will regret an abortion, but I think some people regret becoming parents. They like the idea, and all, but when the baby shows up, and dirties diapers and cries and ceases to be cute because she is becoming a person with a will of their own -- well, who bargains for that? Some parents accept it, some parents regret their decision. This was not what they wanted when they wanted a family, and they want to return it, but they can't, so now they resent their predicament. My gremlin hatched out of that resentment.
My mother has the stones to admit not so much the regret, but that she didn't know what she was getting into and that being a mother was difficult and nothing anyone should do unless they want to. My father, watching my brothers be fathers, admitted that he didn't enjoy being a parent to at least two of we three kids. If you asked them, they'd say that, of course they wanted us and of course they loved us and of course they don't regret us. If you lived it, you'd know that, of course, they wanted us and loved us (as far as they were able), but they regretted us every single day and -- at least in my mother's case -- told us explicitly that she hated us and wished we would just go away or be something totally different than what we were.
To be fair, I know that, as far as she is capable of being introspective, she regrets that and feels tremendous guilt for it, too. I can feel a lot of sympathy for her because of that. Heck, I love her more, as a woman, for that. Guilt and regret we both know.
I feel stupid going over this, yet again, although I understand it a little more each time. I'm understanding some of my core beliefs, here, the rules that have governed my life without me actually being aware of them. You see, babies don't know the difference between themselves and the world, especially their parents. So, if their parents resent them, regret them, and see their very existence as an annoyance, well, then that baby ingests the complete inconvenience of their being as much as they ingest formula or a belief in a god. The parent is sorry for the baby's existence, so the baby becomes sorry for her own existence and even hates her own existence. That baby becomes a child, who becomes and adult, who makes decisions based on that hatred of her own self, which lead to more self-hatred, which leads to more bad decisions, and on and on.
That is the big gremlin: self-loathing. You don't just get over that, or outgrow it. You chain it up, maybe, and sit in constant vigilance that it might escape. You also try to starve it.
One of the treats my Gremlin of Self-Loathing loves to eat is that tension between perfection and failure. Somewhere along the line, I also learned that I have to be perfect or I am a failure. I know, with my rational mind, that this is stupid. Much of what goes on in your head when you have a mental illness is stupid to sane people, but it is every bit as much as real to you as the law of gravity -- although superstition might be a more apt analogy. Knowing that makes you not entirely trust sane people. Not that sane people are bad or intentionally insensitive, just that they don't know the Big Crazy from the inside, so they don't get it, although the good sane people try when necessary. They were lucky. They never hated themselves and not understanding how someone could hate themselves is a pretty sane position.
Getting back to this lesson, in it, not only must I be perfect or a failure, but perfection was always just out of reach. If I only worked a little harder, starved myself a little more, stayed up a little later, woke up a little earlier, studied just a little harder, disciplined myself a little more 00 if I did something -- anything -- just a little more than I was doing it, I'd be perfect. Again, that's stupid, too; and, again, it's just as real as gravity. So, in the effort to outrun failure through perfection, I exhaust myself. Heck, sometimes, in trying to outrun failure by simply getting through the day, I exhaust myself. When I exhaust myself, the Giant Gremlin of Self-Loathing pounces.
These past two weeks, the mundane bullshit of busywork that constitutes at least 75% of my job has exhausted me to the point that some of my lesser gremlins escaped. They wore me out even more, at which point this Giant Gremlin saw his chance. Weak though he was, he saw that I had become weaker, and that I had become overconfident that he was dead, and made his move. Since Friday morning, he has been feasting on me, and he invited even more of all of the lesser, equally starving gremlins to the party.
I'm not sure what to do next. I will, of course, do something next. When I was younger, I just let them devour me. I didn't know any better and, of course, that's one of the bad decisions that were wholly mind. I do know better now, just not better enough beyond getting through the day. I want more than getting through the day, but that will have to do for the moment, especially this particular moment when the day is slipping beyond its beginning point.
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