11 Mayýs 2021, Pazartesi
saat: 00:36
I am trying very hard to be compassionate and understanding, but after eight months of missed meetings, seminar absences, unanswered emails, conveniently timed emergencies, and a seemingly endless well of thinly plausible excuses (always followed by flowery and overwrought “thank you so much for your kindness and understanding” messages), it is VERY hard not to feel like a specific group of students tried to play me like a fiddle and got annoyed when they could not!! I know they genuinely had a tough year, but so have pretty much ALL of my kids, most of whom have similarly dealt with family crises, health scares, financial stress, and pandemic-induced mental health issues, and yet have managed to stay in communication and work with me to figure out contingency plans. It is very tempting to be grumpy and vent about how frustrating I am finding this whole experience, but I will just limit myself to saying: it is VERY frustrating!!! my least favorite experience as a professor is feeling manipulated or scammed, and while I am sure that every faculty/staff has dealt with some version of this, i often feel like this can be an incredibly gendered experience where students expect female professors to be more compassionate/motherly and then get angrier or more vicious when those "minority professors" enforce boundaries, because it violates those racial/gendered expectations. for what it’s worth I do not expect this particular event to affect me or my career, but it’s definitely giving me some light teaching-PTSD flashbacks to the really vicious and unpleasant remarks some students made to my department chair at a different institution, where they were furiously trashing me for the unforgivably heinous crime of: having expectations + enforcing logical consequences. but okay. I am going to try to set aside the emotional stuff now and instead ask myself:
WHAT CAN I LEARN FROM THIS?
It is hard to tell which parts of this are specific to the student and which parts are like, manifestations of other kinds of anxieties or whatever. it’s hard to know, like, does this have to do with conflicting communication styles or a lack of clarity around faculty expectations, or has this student learned how to play the game and has decided that they can blow off their obligations to our program with few consequences?
I think that next year, I want to really invest time and energy in very clearly laying out expectations and explaining exactly what i expect from students. and i think there is a way to do this that is not authoritarian “my way or the highway” in tone/style. because one of the core learning goals of this program is to teach students how to develop effective, ethical, mutually respectful collaborative relationships with the community members or groups they are working with. and part of mutual respect means honoring your commitments to others and clearly communicating if/when you can’t, and just in general, like, respecting people’s time and energy. in any kind of working relationship, there is a way for us to be generous with each other, to respectfully accommodate each other’s needs, and to offer each other grace, while still expecting that all parties involved will accept responsibility and be accountable for their choices. I need to extend compassion and grace to students, but I also am not doing my job if I am creating a world where students’ actions have zero consequences or repercussions, and where I make it seem like it’s okay to treat the people you work with (me and the other students) as if their time is not valuable, or as if they exist solely to accommodate your needs, your schedule, etc. so I think i just need to apply the general “demystify the unspoken structures / make explicit the implicit norms and expectations” principles I use in teaching to this kind of work, too. I’ve been thinking for a while about planning a lesson focusing on breakdowns in communication or failed community/researcher partnerships, which might give us an avenue into talking about our responsibilities to each other in collaborative working relationships. ...{TO THINK FURTHER!!}
I know I need to remember that my cranky brain gravitates towards the negative and is probably only noticing things that confirm my cranky beliefs... so I am going to have to really also train myself to look for and attend closely to instances that contradict my hypotheses... because I just don’t want to be a cranky person! I don’t want intellectual or spiritual crankiness to be part of my whole deal! so I gotta write through all the weird ambivalent cranky feelings so I can arrive at a sense of inner clarity and calm. sigh.
What doesn’t kill you makes you older.
