1. We went to a mandatory meeting to watch a video in preparation for the flu pandemic the University foresees as a distinct possibility. We learned that in a pandemic, supplies and services will be hard to come by. We should always keep two weeks’ worth of food and clean water in our houses. The university will be shut down, so we may want to move essential research materials to our houses if we plan to meet any deadlines falling during the pandemic. Finally, whole towns may be quarantined and roads closed.
A graduate student voiced my thoughts: do they have inside information? Is the government going to fabricate a pandemic so that towns can be cordoned off and used as secret torture centers? Another faculty member said: I think we are all wondering that. And if we have food and research materials in our houses we will not be motivated to go outside and look. Will the pandemic coincide with the 2008 national elections? he speculated.
2. My thesis student is in very good shape but I am grading another set of those pesky intermediate foreign language examinations. On this one, students must write paragraphs of their own invention, but using certain kinds of grammatical structures and a certain level of vocabulary. The same student wrote the first two of the following paragraphs. The third is by someone else, who earlier on wrote a composition about the Mexican “invasion” and how Mexicans have lower IQ’s than “Americans.”
a. I resent my parents’ decision that I must go to college. I resent the university for having specific course requirements, and the professors for designing courses which require study outside of class time. . . .
b. I am glad that I live in the United States because it is the land of opportunity. Here, with hard work, anyone can get ahead. The value we place upon hard work has made us a world leader. If the poor worked, they would get ahead, and if people in poor countries worked harder, those countries would get ahead. . . .
c. If I could change one thing in the world, I would end the Iraq war. I would do this by dropping a nuclear bomb and killing every Iraqi. Friends of mine have been killed in Iraq and I want to bring all the soldiers home. It appears that complete annihilation of Iraq is what it will take to accomplish this. I therefore favor complete annihilation now. . . .
Do you see why I do not like to grade papers, and why I feel as though I had been beaten up after a few hours of doing it?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Don’t let all of this affect your sense of humor. Seeing the ludicrous side of things will get you through.
Does this help? Or do you think it’s an unfair potshot at poor Southern whites?
Oooh, we don’t have the bandwidth to watch videos in the office (where I am now) but I can’t wait to see this when I get home! Sense of humor, you are right, but one must also counterbalance with a whole lot of smart input and pleasure, and I do not have enough of these resources and/or do not take great enough advantage of them. Id est, I risk allowing myself to be victimized, and I should not.
A sense of humour can often go along very well with extreme accommodation to the system. Consider the nazis and their approach to life.
Yeah, if the poor worked, they would get a head. Me hungry for a head. Where I get head?!
Actually, this is a level of metaphysical thinking — simple formulas presumed to produce simple obvious results. And always a formula for success. For example, there are those who read Nietzsche as if he were adjuring them to adopt an approach of selfishness towards others in order to “be strong”. For a start, that is back to front. One is either strong or one isn’t, and if one is strong, then the kind of egotism one has is not necessarily narrowly selfish. Not at all. It remains complex, just as the human being herself remains complex.
These stupid metaphysicians, who want a recipe for everything… the only reason they choose to read Nietzsche instead of the Bible, is because the ‘commandments’ they read are easier for them than those of the Bible. After all, consumerism and selfishness are already intertwined ideologies. One doesn’t need to change too much from that which one already is.
Sense of humor – this is of course true but here I take Hattie to mean that a sense of humor can give you psychic power in Kafkaesque situations.
Formulas, metaphysical thinking – yes. These are some things they learned in nursery or elementary school and they have not matured intellectually or otherwise beyond that. They’re also reminiscent of Horatio Alger stories or something, late 19th century self help, bringing people into capitalism and consumerism.
Yes, one ought to smile and laugh more. Actually this was the principle on which my African culture was run. It’s a frontier way of coping — which can both fall into racism OR be easily misunderstood for racism. But still, above all, a way of coping.
My frontier relatives had amazing senses of humor. And yes indeed, one ought to smile and laugh more! This was in Reeducation a “coping mechanism” (coping was bad) and a form of “denial” (I disagree with that).
I think that if someone can really have a sense of humour about a situation, you can trust them. But what most people (who do not have a sense of humour) sense in those who do is that the humour is subversive. The one who smiles or laughs too much is just not taking the system seriously enough, as it ought to be taken. So, the force of discipline becomes not to smile, not to laugh, but to quietly get on with the job. The problem with reinforcing such an approach to life and work is that it can backfire against those who would reinforce it. If I am no longer shielded from my own alarm and horror by my capacity to laugh at things, then my alarm and horror become palpable to me – writ large.
Mild subversiveness diffused through the cathartic nature of humour becomes full on dissent.
So much for the rulers of this age and their lack of humour.
I have to laugh at the notion of a serious person trying to educate some of these people. It really is funny. When they would prefer naked mud wrestling with hogs or something equally entertaining.
Now I’ve seen the video. Funny but kind of a cheap shot, of course. Some of my students apparently do have more or less this attitude.
I grade with happy music or a bad movie on, large quantities of coffee (tho you could sub out smaller quantities of drink of choice), and my bestfriend (also an academic) on speed dial. I find it makes comments like the ones you mention wash down a little easier than otherwise.
Great ideas, profbwoman! I grade with coffee but I drink too much coffee generally. I should use green tea and put on Indian music, I think – raga, and call on Vishnu.
I need to remember to do the happy music thing: I used to grade in very pleasant circumstances, it was my policy, but here there are few such circumstances available and I hate to cart the papers everywhere so I end up in my office, where people hate noise. I may decide to grade on weekends in the Sound Cafe in New Orleans, period.
The bad movie idea is intriguing. Very. I hadn’t thought of it but it is very funny.
P.S. nobody commented here on the pandemic. Are we going to have a pandemic?
I bring my gym duffle with me at grading time and pack everything in there to carry down to the car. inevitably at least one of my grad students sees me teetering toward the end of the hall and offers to help carry the load – in exchange for which I buy them a coffee or a meal. Or I come on Saturdays with my dog, music, and DVDs in tow and crank it b/c nobody comes to PU on the weekends (even the food establishments on campus are closed up – so of course I bring my snack survival kit as well). I’m telling you, if you can turn grading into a social event of one, it goes faster and can even be amusing.