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Once upon a time, a hardworking but harried young academic named Bittersweet Girl was looking for a place to do her work.
BSG made her way to her office, where she can close the door and have supreme privacy to focus on her grading. She cleared off her desk, arranged her piles of essays, and set to work. Ahh … working in the office. But, what’s that? Could it be the graduate student whose office is next door, separated by only the thinnest wall that allows BSG to hear every sound from her neighbor’s office? And, could it be that Graduate Student has elected today to be the day that she sits at her desk and makes phone calls for hours, engaging in an endless stream of inane chitchat, as well as a few poorly-chosen comments about faculty in the department, so that eventually BSG feels as if Graduate Student is standing right behind her and talking in her ear?
BSG, realizing that her office wasn’t the right place to work, considered her other options, packed up her papers and went home. At home, she thought, I can put on some comfy sweat pants, sit at my kitchen table, make a cup of tea, and get back to work. Ahhh … working at home. But, what’s that? Could it be the stench of a cat box that hasn’t been cleaned in several days? Is that an enormous pile of dirty dishes and crumbs on the countertops? Is that the dog whining at the door to have a walk?
BSG, realizing that her home wasn’t the right place to work, considered her other options, packed up her papers and went to her favorite coffee shop. At the coffee shop, she thought, I can sit at a large table overlooking the river, with the trees turning beautiful colors outside, there will be some lovely music playing, they will bring me a steaming cup of chai, and I will get back to work. Ahhh … working at the coffee shop. It was just right.
Except that there are no coffee shops in Unnamed City, where BSG lives (except in her imagination).
So, what did BSG do? She got in a very bad mood, snipped at her much beloved partner, finally broke down and cleaned the cat boxes and the kitchen, and took the dog for a walk. Then she wrote a blog post about it.
Eventually, she will get back to work. And, only tomorrow, when (or if?) she returns all her students’ papers, will it be just right.
I can see the end in sight — tantalizingly close. But, to get there I have to first summit an epic mountain of work:
* Grade 120 essays (which are sitting at my elbow as I write this, and which I am clearly avoiding by writing this).
* Finish reading the novel that I am supposedly teaching.
* Complete & send in article review.
* Complete major departmental service work that has an inconvenient deadline in the middle of next week and that I have not even begun. Gulp.
* Research materials necessary for Xmas break writing project and submit ILL requests before ILL shuts down for the holidays (always just when I need them).
* Write, proctor, and grade 3 final exams.
* Calculate final grades.
* Deal with my students’ never-ending array of ornate end-0f-the-semester crises. Including the inevitable grade complaints.
* Try not to lose my mind.
From my email in-box this morning, edited for content:
Dear Ms. BSG,
My name is Stu Dent and I am a graduate student of Related Field at Random University in Major City. I am writing a research paper on Broad Historical Topic and came across your article on Jstor. I wanted to know if you could brief me on the Another Broad Historical Topic as well as Even Broader Topic. I know this is a lot to ask so if you are unable to answer these questions that’s fine.
Thank-you for considering,
Stu Dent
–
Shall I enumerate all the ways this email pisses me off?
1) “Ms. BSG.” You are going to write me an email that cites my scholarship and asks for me to freely dispense my knowledge, but not address me by my professional title?
2) “Your article.” Which one, you lazy little bastard? I’ve actually written many articles on this topic — indeed, it is the subject of my (maybe one day forthcoming) book. You have the time to look up my email address but not to look more closely at my CV and see that I have several publications that may be relevant to your research?
3) “You could brief me.” Sure! It’s super-duper easy to sum up this very complex historical issue — not to mention all the literary and cultural implications — in an email. And, I’m totally happy to do that for you, even though you are a complete stranger, I have my own students lined up outside my office door to get help on their papers, and a few hundred other responsibilities right now. I can’t wait to “brief” you!
4) “I know this is a lot to ask so if you are unable to answer these questions that’s fine.” Gee, thanks. I appreciate your understanding that this might be a completely inappropriate request. But, don’t let that stop you from making it!
I’m really tempted to do some research on Stu Dent, find out which professors s/he is working with, and drop them a friendly email about their student’s research methods.
How did we come to this, people?
• That all my efforts to coax, cajole, bully and bribe my students into doing the reading and participating in class discussion have ceased to have any effect in the face of an outright, collective refusal to work.
• Students who don’t even attempt to mask their contempt of me anymore.
• All the stupid “stepping stone” assignments I assigned back when I still believed in good pedagogy. (h/t Bardic)
• The student who is outrageously failing my class, hasn’t turned in any major assignments, and yet comes to class every day.
• The student who parrots whatever his classmates say in order to appear to have done the assigned reading, and thus “fool” me into thinking he’s a responsible student.
• The fact that the previous two statements describe the same student.
• Everyone who has asked me for a syllabus for classes I’m teaching next semester.
• Students who don’t buy the books.
• Dead grandparents, broken printers, car accidents, car breakdowns, traffic jams, emotional crises, breakups, swine flu, regular flu, generic colds, exotic illnesses, court dates, work obligations, assignments for other classes, sports trips, and every other excuse my students are digging out of their arsenal to explain late assignments, missed classes, poor quality essays or exams, and a general failure to perform at adequate levels.
• Grading. Endless piles of grading stretching from here to the horizon of time.
In which our intrepid young professor, who has suffered some major professional setbacks recently, questioned herself as a scholar, and struggled to keep her chin up in the midst of a bonanza of grading and depressing faculty meetings, opens her email and discovers that she has been given an unexpected, un-hoped-for, and startlingly large raise.
I know. I was surprised too.
We’ll return to our regularly scheduled complain-a-thon soon.
Public Service Announcement to Students Everywhere:
The term you are searching for is feminist, not feministic. In fact, feministic is not a word, which your computer may have been trying to alert you to when it kept underlining it with a red line.
It’s great that you are making an effort to utilize appropriate terminology in your essays, but it’s a writing strategy that will be even more effective if you get the terminology correct.
Feminism is …
Fantastic.
Realistic.
Dynamic.
Strategic.
Democratic.
Anti-chauvinistic.
Down with it.
The fucking shit.
But it is not feministic.
Word.
I am a bad academic in more ways than I can count. By “bad academic” I don’t mean “unsuccessful academic” – although these days I don’t feel like a very successful academic. Rather, I mean that I often don’t fulfill the preconceived notion of what academics should do or be. Initially, I thought I’d list some examples, but the list got long and unwieldy, so I’m just going to say: See Previous Blog Posts. That’ll tell you everything you need to know.
The latest evidence of the fact that I’m a bad academic emerged last week, when I was at a conference. (The conference, by the way, was awesome and my presentation went really well and I got lots of lovely compliments about it – further evidence that I am, sometimes, a successful academic.) At the conference I was asked a particular question by numerous people, ranging from close friends to recent acquaintances – a question that academics get asked all the time but which I’ve decided is one of the worst questions ever:
So, what are you teaching this semester?
After some reflection, I’ve figured out why I hate being asked this and why I never ask it of others. The question sucks in large part because of the answer it demands. There’s really only one way to answer it: to list your classes. “I’m teaching intro class A, survey B, special topics C, and grad seminar D.” Blah.
Of course, once you get through this tedious recital, there can be further questions that elicit far more interesting answers, but, really, can’t we just cut to the chase and ask what we really want to know?
I am not interested in knowing the list of classes you are teaching – sorry. What I want to know is whether you’ve had any particularly interesting or challenging experiences in your classes, whether you’ve developed any effective or innovative teaching techniques, whether you’ve read anything new and exciting, whether you’re using your research in your classes, or whether you’ve got a good group of students or a bunch of losers.
May I propose that we dispense with that boring ol’ question “What are you teaching this semester?” and try a couple of new conversation starters:
How are your classes going this semester?
Have you faced any teaching challenges this semester?
Are you teaching anything new this semester?
How are your students this semester?
I’m going to try to use some of these myself – but I’m also going to try to answer the implied direction behind the “what are you teaching?” chestnut: tell me something interesting about your teaching life.
Just a taste of my email inbox this morning:
Student 1: “I’m sorry I missed the test yesterday — can I make it up? I was at the ER all night because I’m having GI bleeding and I am also 18 weeks pregnant so my main concern is my baby’s health. But I will try my best not to inconvenience you …”
Student 2: “I want to apologize for missing class yesterday. I have spent most of my day waiting for a tow truck to pick up my old mess of a car. It did not thrill me to miss class especially knowing your attendance policy and my previous two absences. This appears to not be the best start of a semester.”
Student 3: “I missed the exam on Tuesday. I was home with my daughter, who got a flu shot on Monday. She had fever and all the flu symptoms. Thankfully, this only lasted overnight on Monday and about 12 hours on Tuesday. She will return to daycare on Wednesday. May I make up this exam?”
Let the Fall semester deluge of apologies, explanations, pleadings, deals, and promises begin.
***
By the way, this is my 200th post. Who would have thought I’d ever make it to 200? And maybe 2% are actually worthwhile!
Once upon a time, I was an undergraduate English major, eager and enthusiastic but naïve and largely ignorant of the wide world. And I fell in love. No, not with a shaggy-haired slacker poet in one of my English classes – this is not that John Hughes movie.
I fell in love with Jacques Derrida.
At least, it can fairly be described as a major crush.
I can’t remember exactly how it happened. I took an intro literary theory course and read some Derrida – “Structure, Sign and Play,” if I remember correctly – and I was completely enthralled. I loved the process of unpacking his dense, playful language; I loved all the French double-meanings, which I got since I was studying French too; I loved the feeling of achievement I received when I was one of the few students in the class who “understood” the theory.
Yeah, I was hooked.
I got together with a gang of equally geeky, aspiring-theory-heads and we read Derrida for pleasure. I took every opportunity to incorporate his work into my student assignments (and I shudder now to think how painful that must have been for my profs). On the encouragement of one of my profs, I actually wrote Derrida a letter.
And, yes, friends, he wrote me back.
That’s right – one of the most renowned French theorists of all time took the time to respond to a piece of fan mail from an American undergraduate.
Is there any question about why I was smitten?
Soon thereafter I heard that Derrida was going to be giving a seminar at a university not too far away, so I talked some friends into making the drive with me and we crashed the event. Derrida sat at a table at the front of the room with Gayatri Spivak and a few other guys who are probably Very Important but who made no impression on me. Derrida talked for almost two hours, riffing on Heidegger’s Being and Time and I was basically struggling to just keep up. (I still have my notes, which include phrases like “truth there is, only in as much as being is.”) I had the distinct feeling that I had snuck into an elite and exclusive club, which I desperately wanted to belong to. It was a very heady experience.
So, I went to graduate school – and I think it’s fair to say that my Derrida-crush played a role in my decision to pursue a PhD (along with my love for literature more generally, and not having anything better to do). However, in grad school, I quickly learned that Derrida and deconstruction was considered to be out-moded if not positively retrograde. I learned that the person I should have been excited to see was Spivak, not Derrida. I learned that if I wanted to be “with it,” I needed to hitch my wagon to hip theory schools like feminism, queer theory, or post-coloniality. I left Derrida behind in favor of Foucault, Butler, Said, and others.
Eventually, though I was steeped in theory in grad school, I became disillusioned about all the theoretical bullshit. I came to feel, like many others, that the promises of high theory were not being realized, and that it had become just so much incomprehensible discourse. My own scholarship is primarily historical and textual, and I mostly stick to these approaches in my teaching. I’ve got a reputation amongst the grad students in my department of being one of the “non-theory” teachers – which attracts some students and makes others dismiss me as insufficiently “rigorous.” (Whatever.)
But, this year I find myself teaching an intro to theory course for the first time. As I’ve been in the process of prepping the “intro to Deconstruction” class, I’ve been remembering my Derrida phase and it has been a bit like encountering my younger self – still bright-eyed and optimistic, believing in the power of complex philosophy to change the world.
I watched the 2002 documentary, Derrida, to decide whether it would be a useful teaching tool and I found myself having reactions like: “Oh my God! Derrida’s looking for his keys!” “Oh my God! That’s Derrida’s cat!” “Oh my God! Derrida eats butter and honey on his bread!” In other words, for a brief moment, my youthful self crept back up – so excited to catch a glimpse of the personal side of the legendary figure.
I don’t remember being particularly struck when Derrida died in 2004 – I was so disconnected from that earlier phase of my life. But something about putting myself into the shoes of my own innocent/ignorant undergrads (as I have tried to figure out how to teach deconstruction to them) has made me very nostalgic about my youthful enthusiasm – and made me wonder a bit what my life would have been like had I pursued this route with more persistence. For one thing, I am sure I would not find the theory as hard as I do know – confirming my suspicion that I am not smarter than I was when I was younger, I just know a lot more. Re-reading “Structure, Sign and Play” the other day, I was really frustrated with myself – because I know once upon a time, I understood it (or thought I did) and now it’s really challenging to me.
I still have the letter from Derrida – tucked within the pages of my much-marked-up copy of Of Grammatology. It’s a pretty incredible souvenir and one that seems particularly poignant to me today.
I hereby dedicate this song to those of you who are, like me, returning to classes this week.
This song is by Bob Schneider, an Austin TX based singer-songwriter who seriously kicks out the jamz and rocks the block. It’s the first two lines that make this an appropriate song for setting the tone for the new semester, so listen carefully.
Enjoy!
