Don't Sue Your Students! Survive Ivy League Teaching or Move On!

This is my response to story of coo-coo Professor Priya Venkatesan who threatened to sue her students over harassment when she tried to teach!


All I want to say - without in any way supporting the profoundly bizarre and odd act of attempting to sue your students for being their silly, young selves - is that, if you have never been a woman of color attempting to teach in the humanities (or any other discipline for that matter) in one of these Ivy League institutions, then its going to be extremely difficult bordering on impossible for you to understand what it is like in these environments, and why this poor woman may have snapped like she did. Let me explain:

There is an inherent competitive hostility (even with/against a student's professor/instructor) because it is The Ivys. Then add in the "naturally" socialized prejudices/biases and argumentative predilections of young people who are in fact untutored and unschooled but believe themselves already perfectly brilliant - after all they were valedictorian of their school or whatever - and you have a recipe for some often very difficult classroom moments as an instructor/professor of color. And being a woman can often make things ten times worse! Heck, in discussing teaching pedagogy, we have to make sure we cover the chapter titled:

"How to deal with an extremely stubborn and hostile student who is targeting you for harassment - probably/possibly due to race or gender - in a neutral and diplomatic fashion"

And this is even if you are teaching something very rote and basic and widely accepted. In the past with difficult students, teaching simple reading/writing techniques, I have had to literally blanket the table/desk at the front of the classroom in paper/texts from other, respected, published, usually White sources that echo whatever I've been trying to teach, just to get students to lay off! Even now I can hear myself saying, "Look, Plato started doing this first, not me, and that's why the university feels it is important for you to learn." Sigh. It can drive one insane.

That said, I have pity on her, although I think she only made things worse with all this lawsuit business. She just should have written it off as a bad semester and moved on! You can't win every group over every term.

Objectionable Prescriptives for Women's Viewing Behavior...

Response to Edelstein's review of BrideWars over at NPR:

Dear Edelstein,

As a female-of color-English Ph.D. student with very broad interests and sensibilities, I am having trouble figuring out in what way your 'review' of this film is most offensive! Is it:

1)In its essentializing of the female experience - as if there is some exclusively female frailty that is inherent and prohibitive of certain behavior. In other words, you seem to believe that if men find it funny women can't as well because...?

2)In your presumption that to be Female is to only find specific (what, "ladylike"?) forms of humor funny or acceptable. The scene at the bridal shop became more funny for me than for my husband because he doesn't know the value/cost of bridal gowns (I do) nor the strain women regularly are under Not to allow any untoward smells to escape their person- let alone a food poisoning explosions. For the women of our group, this made the scene a cathartic rush revealing that we too are human... and in pain over that gorgeous ruined gown!

3)Your reduction of Melissa McCarthy's wonderful and emotionally complex performance to one of playing off of her Girth! There was more nuance and grace to her portrayal than you give her credit for, and your review smacks of your inability to see beyond her weight.

Part II:

I'm sorry, but I must make one more comment or suggestion about what makes this review problematic - as 'Analytical Ph.D. Student' I cannot fail to give "suggested reading" if I take issue with an argument.

It seems that at best, this Review would be better described as an ill-intentioned and oddly toned Referendum on what women are or are not permitted to find humorous, or what experiences women are or are not entitled to have/claim as part of their functioning as human beings in an American cultural setting!

I suggest you watch the South Park episode on queefing. (Though unladylike I suppose, there is no other more appropriate and simple word to choose.) I thought they did a great job at highlighting that women have a sense of humor as well that can intersect with bodily (mal)functions.

Women have bodies too, and in some ways are more of our bodies than men are by virtue of our frequent object status. (See fast food places giving girls dolls and boys trucks in kid's meals.)

There is a prim propriety thrust upon women which I am happy to see these hysterical, bright women shake off the yoke of in this film! Please stop trying to tie them back down with antiquated, prescriptive genre titles.

Why Are We So Slow As A Country??

If you haven't seen this amazing comic-commentary pseudo-commercial from Will Ferrell friends speaking out against Big Health Care Companies making billions off of keeping Americans sick, then go see it now!!

When will we realize its crazy that we are the only westernized wealthy country who doesn't care about the health of our citizenry? No wonder we're the fattest country in the world, the insurance companies need us to be!

Reading: Remember, Savor, Repeat

Been away a while. Needed to not think about typing anything, even something as therapeutic as this blog. Time to be without technology... I wanted to read regular old books and watch Law and Order and relax. Of course I can't do that, I have to take a summer language class.  A dreadful invention meant to induce migraines. I need to read a Good Book and have to lingering worry about generals questions later on. 

Reading as therapy. Which reminded me of something.

Months ago, a professor in giving advice to a student applying to PhD programs near me advised her not to put something pedestrian in her application essay like she wants to go to grad school because she likes reading. And I've let that ruminate for a while now.... because you see, I put that I love reading in my essay.

Did this professor read my essay? Did others think me boring for the statement? Because I meant it in  no germane context.

I think we take reading for granted far too often forgetting the insanity of scribbled black marks becoming... Yes, becoming.

We forget how complex the manner of inscribing language which we think we know but which - like driving over certain speeds or the ocean after you've reached a certain distance from shore - is truly not within our control. We forget to consider that how we use what we say in specific ways to achieve certain ends, and how when written down in what is allegedly a stable form, there is still that false bottom hat where the rabbit is hiding. We forget that all too often what we throw out does not bounce the way we thought it would, and challenges our ability to clean up mess with more mess - far riskier lobs.  Language, reading, is playing tennis on the unpredictable clay courts of the French Open.  Reading is trusting that when the man in the trick jacket - the author in her desk chair - says he will Cut You In Half for the pleasure of the audience, and ultimately himself, that he is in fact quite skilled at his craft. You hope that you will end up dazzled, charmed, bewildered, but not truly physically injured - unable to put yourself back together again.

Reading is, we must consider reading as, an act of pure magic.

Or how often do we forget the quantum physics of reading, how on the subparagraph level, under careful observation, one sentence can cripple the experiment. How the frequency of reading can increase understanding or pervert the course of connection. In reading, what we write down, what other perceive, what time does to the slant of a phrase, to the inflection on a word, to the very internal stability and length of time that text will last, are all unstable elements warring with each other, with the page itself, in a fight for dominance. What learning and information do to how language flows through us, flows through our mouths, through the synaptic connections we barely understand, and into air that is different every single moment, and over the tricky substance of time's flow... these my friends, are what we consistently forget.

Reading as a fundamental state of altered consciousness.

So when I say that I love reading in my essay, I make no ho hum space filler. What I wanted, tried to convey was the deeply spiritual connection I have to the written word. How a good book is my temple and there is serenity, salvation within. How the right series of words, or the right individual word, can freeze me in time, literally contradict the laws of this universe, to allow me my own bubble of perfect understanding, a unity that is ephemeral but whose impact is my life. That so many books have healed me - usually baptisms by fire, truth is not sweet - and filled spaces I did not know were there until I lifted the book and felt at ease. 

Reading as the serene experience of glancing into a dark, still pond of water, of unknown depth, from the comfort of a sturdy boat, hand trailing the water, summer skies full of sun. The summer breeze is not strong enough to ruffle pages to distraction/frustration of course.

I do not besmirch the oral tradition from which I have most certainly sprung. But there is something to the creamy, slippery texture of the page, the minuscule dimples, the uneven quality of most paper.  The places where the printer's ink failed, left off half of a word, top or side, or maybe just the dot on an i, reminding you that each book is in fact individual, and must be made page by individual page - "one million in print" be damned!  

There is a sensation that sinks into a book you've had a long, long time, like it has absorbed some of you into the crinkled/wrinkled edges, brown from turning pages.  A profound connection in the tea stains, and corners worn soft - so often used to absentmindedly clean under fingernails.  Something within the gesture of filling hundreds of pages with the attempt to tell a story, share a bit of consciousness - however faulty the execution may/might end up - and in your own attempt, in reading, to understand that story and, by extension, the impulse to inscribe it in just this way. There is fascination in language/books' execution, ingestion, processing, integration...

These, yes these are the things which we must: remember, savor, repeat.

Minor Meditation: Emancipation

The problem with America's 1865 emancipation of the enslaved was that, African Americans were so busy envisioning a freedom like Whites had been parading around for centuries, denied any model of alternative liberty in a brown body as they were, that they could not conceptualize a space of freedom for those Whites without their having a place in it.

In other words, had they known better, they would have realized the American constitution held no hand of opportunity out to them – it could not even see them. The freedom they envied, depended upon their remaining enslaved.