coldhearted scientist وداد

I clearly do not know myself at all. A student whose pedagogical project I am supervising says I have a strong interest in pedagogy. I have always denied this, originally out of the fear of being designated for a pink collar job, but I see his point. This is quite interesting. Perhaps I have not actually missed my calling.

The lesson from this student is to do as you see fit. If what you see fit to do is unusual, perhaps that is not because it is deficient, but because it is better.

I am always in a state of utter terror about teaching because I was taught early in life that to put any time or thought into it was mortally dangerous for one’s career. Next, I discovered that expected ways of teaching were something I had never learned, or even observed in my own life since they were outmoded in California before I even began elementary school. So I had to put serious effort into teaching, which was scary since I had been taught that if I did that I would end up unemployed. That effort, furthermore, had to be about learning to teach in the violent and counterproductive ways that were required. This was distasteful to say the very least.

My current student is trained as a pedagogical expert, however. He says I was right in the first place and that this is why he has me supervising his project. He himself may or may not be right but as I say, his point of view is interesting. His lesson, do as you see fit, is right, I am sure.

*

I have heard that advice – do as you see fit – from one other person in life and it shocked me. It took years to absorb because I was always taught that I was wrong by nature. I must to learn to perceive and accept that I was wrong and needed guidance. I could not possibly walk on my own and if I tried, I would be abandoned to an uncertain fate before I was old enough to earn my own living. I would be a child-corpse eaten by dogs in the gutter unless I would accept that I was even more powerless and less knowledgeable than I knew myself to be.

Slowly I came to understand what my friend meant, at least in a theoretical sense. I had always done as I saw fit in foreign countries, where I had no advisers and could not be seen by authorities here. That was why I am always able to get more done abroad. I understood finally that my friend was saying I should bring my foreign life home. I understood this but did not know how to do it in a practical sense. By saying I should teach as I see fit and stop looking over my shoulder about it, my student is showing me one way to put my friend’s advice in practice.

*

Why did I reject academics for so long, then? It wasn’t because of any part of the work. It was because I was told I must do myself and the work itself such violence if we were both to survive. I must write in a false voice if I were to publish and make tenure. I must evade teaching and if I did teach, I must do so in a retrograde way. And then we all know we must passively aggressively avoid service and administrative work, even if there is a glaring need for it, if we want to survive. Finally, one must live far away in a place one did not choose and would not, and not mind, because if one minds, one is not “serious.” And one will be rewarded with a ranch style house in the suburbs and a new car, both of which one should want. And with all of this I have not even begun to mention the meanness.

For me, the idea of school as a creative place in which one developed intellectually and helped others to do so was destroyed by the circumstances in which I undertook school after the age of thirty, and those circumstances were informed by all of the “mentoring” I was given. In all this time I have often thought I was not interested enough in my work and that is why I did not rise above circumstances. Now I have intimated the opposite – it is hard to have your strongest interests mistreated, and harder to be required to mistreat them yourself.

Most importantly, though, consider the negativity of the way in which I was aggressively mentored and how hobbling it was. One must murder oneself in research, teaching, service and administration if one was to survive any of the above, and one must demonstrate faith by doing these things in a rudderless place far from home. People kept telling me this was reasonable, and that I was unreasonable to find it untenable. But I see at last that I was perfectly right.

Axé.