In case anyone needs my help to prove we are working, I have been up since five. I graded for Spanish and updated websites from six to ten this morning, after which I taught various Spanish courses for three hours.
Then I ate lunch, wickedly spending $8, and went to the bookstore to finally buy the books for my film course, wickedly spending $134. After that I graded for Portuguese, and now I am about to start in on an afternoon of Portuguese classes.
Teaching methods are entirely different in Portuguese than in Spanish. Students who take Spanish have about a fifth grade level education, do not know how to find the index in a book, and so on, whereas students who choose Portuguese are self starters. They have an intuitive grasp of how to be in college, a better ear than I do, and a talent for syntax.
Therefore it is possible to have a modern class in Portuguese. But in Spanish much class time is devoted, in English, to explaining how to do really basic things — not with Spanish in particular but with and in college in general.
German classes are more like Portuguese classes because of the personalities who choose them. I have heard that things in French language classes are as bad as in Spanish ones, but that the French faculty is “in denial.”
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Overwork seems to be good for your bloggage. Fascinating what you are saying here.
It is that I am so steamed at Didion for linking to me the day I decided to have fun with her correction: no, I have to say I am working and suffering.
I had to deal with so many people like that in graduate school it wasn’t funny. And then they kept on suffering, and going on at me about how the reason their suffering was so acute was that they had more important lives and more delicate feelings, and so on, or their universities were more important, and so on, or they were gay, or had children, or didn’t and were doing in vitro, or something or other, or cheating on their husband, or had some other compulsion and they were suffering, but it was cool hip and minority so we all had to stand in awe of what was in fact immaturity, entitlement and other silliness.
So she got me in touch with about 25 years of anger and I am not putting up with any more foolishness, from anyone. Show me a girl who is jealous of the “golden boys” and needs sympathy, and I will show you someone who only wishes she had more people to step on.
You can see that not getting to enjoy myself in my own right because the mistress is suffering in her ladylike manner and I must see myself as second to that is my main psychoanalytic issue and that I am fighting mad and willing to be totally unfair, if that means I can slough off some of my ancient burden and claim my life as my own.
I know what you mean. I’ve been working for exactly 12 hours today (with breaks for blogging and eating). And there is still a stack of papers to grade. Septembers are very tough.
I’m now desperate to know who this Didion person is who unleashed the fury to our collective joy. 🙂
I figured out the Didion mystery. I must be really tired or something. What’s with me today??
I don’t know that Didion (and Servetus) deserve it but they got on my last nerve.
*
OK so I taught until 4, had meeting until 4:30, then did administrative work and work on grant until 9, so that’s my report on the day.
Let’s see: worked 6-1 straight, then 2-9 straight, 7 + 7, 14 hours, that was long and it was all fairly low level.
Simone de Beauvoir once said (it will take me too long to find where, and in French; I remember it from my early teens, before I studied French), “Happiness doesn’t make others’ unhappiness any worse; it even helps you to help them.” Someone should have quoted that to your grad school acquaintances.
I mean, it’s French, it must be good!
Yes, I know the Beauvoir quotation too and like it too. I should quote it at Didion, to whom I am overreacting and making into a symbol of all this (and it’s awful of me, I don’t even care.
It’s of course more than graduate school, it’s various other sufferers and ideologies of suffering I have had to deal with, too.
I’m not very familiar with Didion’s blog but I know two other female academic bloggers who are very famous, have fantastic tenured positions and keep assuming this fake aggrieved persona which is very annoying. I’m not naming them because they always descend on people and start pecking their livers out whenever one mentions them. I see them as very representative of this annoying phenomenon you describe in these recent posts.
I know who you’re probably talking about, like one anyway, can’t stand the fatuous other.
In their defense(s) Didion and Servetus were both gaslit and then not tenured by their related departments at the same big university, one that is famous for being hard to work for (although I’d go any day). They’re smart and didn’t deserve the treatment, I’m sure, and I think that having left they’re at the VAP stage post not making tenure, although Didion’s book also won a prize. I know it’s hard – in fact, I more than many know exactly what that is like – but I refuse to join the aggrievedness, it’s just too debilitating.
It’s not even the suffering part that bothers me as much, it’s the idea that they know more than anyone, and that furthermore we must say they’re right because in addition to being naturally right they are also suffering. Insufferable.
This is a painful issue for me on a very personal level because I lost a friendship with a person I care about a lot over something like this. She was very very mistreated in academia and had to leave it. I was as supportive as I could be for years but her resentment did not abate. One would think that 5 years and a great very well-paying job outside of academia would be enough to mitigate the suffering but that didn’t happen.
I realized that she never wanted to hear about my articles getting published, just about the rejections. I’d start saying,
“So get this, I was dressing to go to work this morning. . .”
And she’d immediately interrupt to say, “I have no idea how you manage to force yourself to go to this horrible university every morning!”
So I caught myself in endless attempts to self-censor myself and only tell her bad news about my work. I even exaggerated some small issues to make them sound like serious problems. And that’s no way to live. So, of course, I drew away and now we are barely in touch.
Sorry for a long comment. Since we are getting psychoanalytical here, I needed to unburden. 🙂
I have had this experience with more than one person and it is painful every time, it does not get better … although I do get increasingly sanguine.
I am very tempted to forward her your posts to see if they produce some positive effect.
She isn’t very much into reading in English, though. And I don’t want to look didactic and condescending.
I’d say, wait until she attacks with negativity again.Then forward the posts saying, “here is my attitude / this is what works for me.” They probably will not help her because what is fueling her is negativity. But, they may help shield you.
I have turned utterly pitiless, as you can see.