“I wish I could always have classes from you, because you are so much fun,” said my student. “It is not true that your classes are so demanding or difficult; you are merely intelligent and this challenges people.” She is in the minority.
I have been telling people for twenty years that I should not be a professor. It is not for the reasons others impute: that I am not grown up enough to be a professor, not research oriented enough, and not adaptable enough to live away from home. The actual reason I should not be a professor is that I am research oriented and I expect students to be intellectually oriented. It is really not acceptable.
Students who like me have been explaining to me for years that I am not like the rest of the faculty, more independent, less conventional, more courageous. These are liabilities and I know it, and the time I lose is not to “procrastination” — it is to managing the fear not of what might happen because of these liabilities but of what has happened more than once, and could happen again.
Advice to graduate students: Do not take a job, any job, and when some condescending faculty member derides you for not doing so, just be grateful you are not as lifeless as they.
The only way I have ever been able to consistently get good enough teaching evaluations is by not doing research and really concentrating on hand holding. Doing research during the academic year is very bad for teaching because it greases your mind and you roll along. And you use current research in class which “confuses” the students who are accustomed to reading textbooks that present older views.
Me cago en la leche. I am supposed to drop cultural studies from the culture class and teach it like a museum — show Spanish dancing and slides of monuments and so on — and I am supposed to agree that “Hispanics” are Spanish speaking Catholics who have deep family ties and are more moral than other people therefore.
→ La cólera que quiebra al hombre en niños: that to survive in the short term you must not be who you are; but if you retreat within yourself as I have done for many years so as to survive in the short term, you do not survive in the long term since you do not cultivate the person you are and are expected to be.
♦
→ How do you deal with emotional pain? In psychotherapy one was supposed to feel it as sharply as possible but this is not practical for me. I do find it useful to call it pain as opposed to something terrible I have done to someone (note this abuse technique: they cause you nearly unbearable pain but then tell you the person feeling it is them, and it is your fault).
→ I think I was right and that my attitude was the most grown up: you can put things in perspective, decide what is rational and real and realistic, and let pain pass like the weather. Again, I have been told this is abnormal and unhealthy but honestly I cannot agree, and I would like to recapture my older stance on this.
→ I am really traumatized by and about teaching early undergraduates. One must satisfy them (the most important of the customers) and the stale M.A. instructors (the most important of the supervisors) and these elements will not be satisfied. And as we know, research is terrifying because every minute spent on it is a minute not spent on teaching, and this will be used against one.
→ It will be helpful to recognize and remember that I am traumatized — I feel steadier right away recognizing that, and it is much easier to keep from dissociating or flashing back. I should remember that this terror is both based on real and ongoing events and irrational, and that irrational though I feel in this situation I am still, of all the actors involved, the most rational.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
This post is filled with pain, profacero, and I don’t know the answer to solving this. I’m sorry.
Couldn’t you still do one of those other things? Weren’t you planning to apply to law schools recently, for example?
Thank you for recognizing pain — it helps.
The answer is not to take certain things to heart.
There is no way to afford law school, I gave up on it finally a couple of years ago after running the figures again. I am deep into a research project.
The pain is about unresolved trauma from the past and about not even having the characteristics I would need to BEGIN earning the love of certain and making up to them all they suffered.
It is essentially ALL about my parents.
The post keeps changing as I see this more and more.
The key issue is that the pain from what they did so hampers me.
It makes me somewhat: avoidant, dissociative, fearful, withdrawn, and wrathful, all of which you can see in this post, and I have to manage these things.
I find it helpful to realize that life is not inherently meaningful. The pain, although real, is also not necessary. Or to put it a different way, there are other ways to carry the guilt and to compensate your parents for their anguish. One can do so by living life differently and giving a lot to others. I actually found that giving abundantly to those who needed it released my tension. Also it helps if one does not remain in an abusive situation, such as an oppressive workplace.
Other cultures do think about guilt and such quite differently from Western people. They don’t individualize it so much. It’s more of a collective issue.
I think we hold on to our pain because we want life to be meaningful in particular ways that it cannot be, because of the nature of life itself, which is a bit more like a vegetable than a human being.
Yes. This is a very interesting comment.
OK, yes. Pain is supposed to mean something in “Western” or I would have said 19th century style culture (ideology of progress, focus on individual, and all of that), or in Christian culture — it is supposed to do something for you. You are not to think of it as random, I suppose.
All of mine has to do with oppression and being told it is I whom am the oppressor. The key image: my mother is a small kitten I love and adore but whom I crush to death each day by growing. I keep telling people it is not I who am killing her and that I cannot help growing but they say I must grow and must not kill her. I know the two things go together so I try not to grow, or try to grow only in invisible ways.
Ah — and it is also: if I can feel enough pain and show it, I will at least not be killed.
Replace the pain with pleasure, or with a different sort of sacrifice. We are taught to keep ourselves contained, with a kind of selfish attitude, because that is what it means to be an “individual”. Break the spell by denying that you are narrowly contained within an individual shell. Give something you desire away to someone who really needs it. Go against the logic of what it means to be “individual” and the pain will disperse.
Wouldn’t your research-and-intellectual inclinations work fine as a professor in graduate school? My understanding was that graduate school is supposed to be all about learning to do and follow current research, and that everyone who is not interested in that has self-selected out.
Yes, but I finished graduate school long ago. I have found that in many institutions the things you learn in graduate school are precisely NOT valued.
@muster, agree on pleasure and less focus on individual — not on giving stuff away, part of my problem is not keeping enough for myself.
In my case pain is often masked anger. (I have already been lectured at about how anger is not real and is just a cover for fear, but I disagree.) I often experience (righteous) anger as pain/guilt — the model is, aggression against me is something I should not perceive, so I feel guilt for perceiving it and assume violence will ensue from my being perceived to perceive it, and I seem to think I can fend off lethal violence by feeling and showing pain soon.
It all goes really fast so what happens is, pain comes over me and then I have to unravel what happened. Relevant question to dispel pain is: what are you angry at (or, I suppose, fearful of in some cases).