#being a professor

[jeannereames]

Hello Dr. Reames, isn't really an "ask" but I just wanted to say, that you seem really cool, like you give serious "cool teacher" energy.

Thank you. 💗💗💗

Although you'd have to ask my students. I do have several "repeat offenders," who take a lot of my classes. But I dare say a number of those in my World History survey might beg to differ. *snort*

That said, I do try to be an engaging lecturer. And I've employed "Reacting to the Past" type projects (if not as elaborate) before that was a thing. But no professor will appeal to everyone. That's among the first things young(er) professors (must) learn. And let it go. Be yourself. :-)

(I find sites like "Rate My Professor" truly harmful. The only people who write those reviews either really like you or [more often] really hate you. They rarely seem to reflect the average student opinion.)

[southerneclair]

I yelled at my film class on Tuesday. Not once. Three times. Sleepers during the lecture. Normally I let it pass—we all get tired, life can be tough—but this was the head down, full-on disrespect type….and then to have others keep on with it after I gave the first public “Get it together” to a student? I was this close to walking out. No one wants to be treated like what they’re saying is that boring. And the fact is, I know I’m not THAT boring. I mean, at least I have the evals that say otherwise. I had to stand up for myself or leave.

When I walked into class again on Thursday—St. Patrick’s Day—I thought to myself, “I know what’s it’s like to sit in those chairs and be them. They don’t know what it’s like to stand up here and be me.” So I spent a few minutes at the start of class telling them how I got here—standing there in my “Cleveland Irish” t-shirt—so they know why I acted as I did, right or wrong as it was:

“I’m from the far east-side of Cleveland. Everyone in my town was pretty much poor. There was no rich section. Mostly fairly recent immigrant families from Europe, African Americans, and a whole lot of Irish people. People there will tell you to your face if you’re an idiot, and they will break your nose if you have done them wrong. Nobody expects anyone from there to become anything much. Most people work for local factories and chemical plants. At night, they drink. If the chemicals don’t kill them early, the drinking will. That’s how my dad died in his early fifties—from drinking—like his mother before him.

I’m the youngest in my very Irish family: my full name literally translates to mean “Irish girl.” Nobody expected much of me either. But I expected something of me. So I went to a college that was much better than my high school had prepared me for. It wasn’t easy in the least. I decided to be a professor, and worked my tail off to get fellowships to make that happen. But those fellowships required I move 2,000 miles away from the east side of Cleveland. The South wasn’t a bit like where I grew up, not even if I squinted, and I’m incredibly introverted. Leaving home was really tough. But, again, I expected more of myself. I became the first in my extended family to be called “doctor.” That’s one reason why I kept my maiden name when I married: so that the title would be attached to my family and where we’ve come from.

To even have a chance at becoming a professor required twelve years of college. There are about four tenure-track jobs a year in the nation in my field, and each of those will have about three hundred or more applicants. Twelve years of college for chances like that? [I turned around with my arms outstretched then.] I made it happen anyway. That’s who I am.

Once you get that job, there is no sitting around eating truffles. A professor’s job is divided into research, teaching, and service. I’ve spend seven years publishing, I’ve developed 18 new courses for the university, and I oversee 70 instructors across the state. I work nonstop. While you’re on spring break next week, I will be here working.

So when I give my brief half-hour lecture each week and I see people falling asleep during it, I think about what it took to get here, to be able to stand up here in front of you, about the thousands of dollars you pay to even have access to me, I think about all the people back home and all I’ve sacrificed…for you to fall asleep when I’m talking. Maybe you can understand now why in those moments the Cleveland Irish girl in me rises up and gets real pissed off.

Lordy, I have been where you are and I don’t want to go back. I know how tired you get. But put yourself in my shoes too. Remember what your grandmama taught you and treat me as you would want to be treated. If you were standing up here, if you had done what I had to do to get here, you’d want the respect of me at least keeping my damn eyes open for you.“

[2christel2-blog]

Cheating on Essays

So I’m in a mood right now. I just looked up several different ways to cheat on English essays to make sure I knew them all. Newsflash! Most professors keep up with this. Changing font size, margins, whiting out words, etc are standard things professors look at when grading. It’s easy to pick out words and phrases that students do not know or did not write. It’s better to try and fail than to spend money on an essay and definitely fail. Stop trying to get around the system. All it does is hurt you. Most institutions have the power to ruin your academic career if you cheat. So I went around to various Tumblrs today to look around at what people were saying to do in order to cheat. If any of my students did some of these things, I’d question their intelligence. Because it’s stupid, and I thought better of their abilities. 

[southerneclair]

Every late fall, I go to the same academic conference. There, a small group of people who are sexuality scholars and professors in the Deep South meet and talk about their research. It’s the same familiar faces each year—the man who teaches in Mississippi and studies gay Irish writers, the woman in Louisiana who studies queer playwrights, the woman in Georgia who specializes in Native American two-spirit writers, the woman from Texas who focuses on lesbian dystopian literature, and, of course, myself. Other people drift in and out, especially graduate students who need lines on their C.V.s (a nervous guy from Wisconsin this year, a desperate-looking man from Princeton last year), or colleagues and grad students from my own university. The core group, though, remains year after year.  

Though our research is the primary reason we go to the conference, we also go to talk about what it’s like to do what we do. Imagine teaching sexuality studies in the Deep South: it's not easy. None of us got our jobs because our institutions advertised for sexuality studies scholars—that doesn’t really happen. We are the only ones who understand what it means to teach what we do in the region where we do: the shapes it has to take, the types of sensitivities and dangers it involves, and the absurdities it can entail.

“My area now has the highest cases of chlamydia in the nation,” the drama scholar said. “Guess the state’s abstinence-only sex ed policy is finally fixing things, huh?,” I replied with raised eyebrows while sipping my Starbucks. “Ours is gonorrhea,” said the dystopian scholar, “which the state blames on, yes, not enough abstinence education.” I told them about Arkansas’s recent attempt to pass the Religion Freedom Restoration Act so businesses could refuse to serve gay people if they felt like it. The guy from Mississippi reminded us that Mississippi ranks number one in everything no one wants to rank number one in. Then we talked about how we’re shaping our courses to integrate awareness into the culture’s ways of seeing things, methods to include sexuality studies in general education courses, what the safe parameters of sexual freedom should be for the severely autistic, and on and on. 

So we meet once a year to reaffirm that we are not alone, that the research and teaching we do matter incredibly, and that are even better ways to do it.

Colleges and universities don’t really understand what we do at academic conferences, and they don’t understand research in fields like English. Therefore, every year they cut funding for us to attend conferences like this one. We have to beg to get funding to go, and they treat it suspiciously when they do fund us. They understand the sciences better, where there are labs and external grants and people in white coats. Yes, I do need to talk to the only other people who do what I do for us to effectively transform this region of the world. Because it matters that there are rampant STDs and ridiculously high rates of teen pregnancy and hate-based House Bills being passed. Because what we do matters.

[southerneclair]

Hemingway keeps popping up in front of me. I’m teaching him right now in one of my classes. Last week, I turned to a picture of Hemingway on the screen, pretended to pinch his cheeks, and said, “You are so cute. With your deep, lifelong fears of castration. Honey, why didn’t you know that no one could take away your masculinity? It lived within you like a peach pit no matter what. Or in your case, like a terrible fungus, because you were a jerk. You cute little worrywart. I wanna pinch your cheeks because you would have hated that so much.” A colleague tells me, “Be nicer to the deeply unhappy repressed gay man.” But I spend months with him every year, years of my life with him overall so far. I know him very well, I do. He is one of the writers I have studied the very most, that dear Hemmy.

The Smithsonian ran an article on Hemingway this month. I read it the other day: “You ever loved two women at the same time?,” Hemingway asked the narrator, who replied he hadn’t. “Lucky boy,” said Hemingway. And so he broke the heart of the mother of his child, because Hemingway never really thought through things and acted as if he wasn’t the one in control of his own mind. He’d say things like, “Hadley, I love you, I truly do—but this is a peculiar passion I have for her that I can’t explain,” not seeing the difference between feelings and actions, between a thought and a behavior. In short, Hemingway was an asshole. But in our retelling, we spin that into “love” or “passion” or “real masculinity.” Oh, Hemingway. Someone so stupid in actions can never keep someone so lovely.

A few days later, The New York Times published a piece about Hemingway being a pack rat, leaving a trail of papers like no other author. Angry letters to editors, so angry his pencil punches through the paper—he never sends them. Tender letters to wives, fragile pieces about missing home, machismo pieces about drinking. He is such a fascinating, fascinating man, I think, because he reveals so much about our cultural preoccupation with masculinity, about fidelity and passion, about our fragility and our egos, and our fears and geniuses colliding (sometimes brilliantly, sometimes disastrously). He’s like a microcosm of the United States.

I look up in my book-lined office—me, a tiny woman scholar with muscles at a university in the south, knowing I am someone Hemingway probably wouldn’t respect much—and I see his picture on my wall. He’s nobody, really, in the big scheme of things. Just a dude who wrote some interesting books. But I smile at him.

[southerneclair]

ON A DEFINITION OF BEAUTY:

Next week, my students have to write a definition of beauty. Now that I’m tenured, I’m more open with my assignment parameters. A short time ago I would have imposed a strict rigor upon this assignment: X number of sources of a specific caliber referenced in the definition. There’s a time and place for that still, but not for me in this class right now. My rigor as a scholar has been affirmed by plenty of experts already; I’ve no need to prove a thing. And the students’ own rigor will be tested in many places in many ways.

So I told them that if the traditional form of a definition felt too stifling, they could take a photograph. Maybe paint something. Write a poem. Knit a thing. Write a song. You know, it doesn’t really matter to me. It just has to matter to them.

Of course, I think about my own definition of beauty. I think about it every day. I change it every day. Sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in major shifts, sometimes I revert to previous definitions. I’m constantly revising my thoughts and do not know how to remain in a place of stasis. I promise you, I will never claim to know everything.

Today, my definition of beauty is thus: Being comfortable in your own skin. Sometimes you’re uncomfortable in your own skin because of a single person’s comment or action long ago. Sometimes it’s because of the millions of media/medical/artistic images you’re exposed to throughout your life that don’t match what your body looks like. To feel comfortable in your own skin again, sometimes all it takes is a single person’s comment. Sometimes it takes an army of people working to change how the media/medical/artistic worlds portray bodies.

For me, the first time I ever felt fully comfortable in my skin was when the picture below was taken. It was two days ago. I do not yet fully understand all of the “why,” but I do know my friend—my lifelong rock, my soul-happy friend, the one with clear cell carcinoma—was the one who pointed my happiness out to me. She said to me, “It’s all I have ever wanted for you: to be comfortable in your skin.” And there I sat at derby practice, sweaty and smelly as a gym sock, and finally comfortable with every aspect of my being. So, no, I didn’t get my definition of beauty from my fancy Ph.D. I got it from a best friend who watched me grow and change over a lifetime and accepted me as I was through every stage.

But I did not really feel comfortable in my own skin until two days ago—even though I have always been beautiful in a way only I, and no one else, could be.

Mine is one long story in the cacophony of stories—no more or less important, no better or worse—than any of the others in the clang.

[southerneclair]

I’ve been teaching my “Beauty in Film” course for a week and a half now. But I’m not sure the students are with me. We started with the key early scholars of beauty and the body in culture: Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly, and Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight. Quite typical stuff for this subject. I think they’re reading, but I don’t think they’re processing what they’re reading as meaningful to themselves. I’m trying to figure out why.

I keep watching their faces as I show them images of normative beauty from Pinterest, magazine ads, celebrity gossip sites, memes, and the like. Their faces are blank. They don’t look outraged. They don’t look upset. They don’t look happy either. Is that the student version of the side-eye? Are they saying in their heads, “Waaaaait a minute…this sounds suspiciously like feminism to me. I’m going to turn off my brain lest I catch it”? Or are their wheels not turning at all? Or are they just terrified of what I’m throwing at them, or of me, or of life in general?

I remember watching an earlier version of Killing Us Softly in a psychology course when I was a freshman in college. I had never considered that culture—via advertising in particular—manufactured and then preyed upon women’s insecurity, shame, and guilt about their bodies. It never entered my mind that being an impossibly thin sex object shouldn’t be every young woman’s goal: I assumed it a biological truth. Seeing that film changed my life and shifted what I thought about bodies thereafter.

Maybe they’re processing all this and aren’t ready to form thoughts about it yet. Maybe it’s all old news to their generation and their blank faces indicate, “Yeah. That’s true. So what?” Maybe they have completely adhered to the religion of health and any indication that a slightly larger body is okay (not to mention beautiful) registers as morally wrong to them. I do not know yet. So I will keep teaching them the texts of the field and showing them films on the subject and doing my job and hoping that they don’t slash me for doing so.

Teaching is never as easy as it appears. We try to be brave and enlightening and change their lives for the better, but most of the time we have no idea if it’s working.

[muthamango]

I have a feeling that I'm going to change my major to history or political science I want to be a professor and I realize that's gonna be a hell of a ride but I'm willing to take it.