Monthly Archives: December 2006

Call for papers

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I’ve been asked to post the following:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS!

BEYOND MASCULINITY:
Essays by Queer Men on Gender and Politics
http://www.beyondmasculinity.com
———————————–
Gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer men’s gender identities often exist somewhere outside the traditional categories of “masculine” and “feminine.” Sissies, drag queens, and leather daddies alike play with gender in a way that cannot be accounted for in traditional understandings of maleness. This collection — part blog, part anthology, part audiobook — aims to shatter traditional understandings of maleness and point towards a new understanding of how queerness and gender intersect.

Visit Beyond Masculinity for more details!

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More on teaching and self-confidence

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I want to get back to the topic of teaching and self-confidence. In yesterday’s post, I cited an article that claimed that 94% of University of Nebraska faculty considered themselves to be “better than average” teachers when compared to their colleagues. If the word “average” is to have any meaning at all, somethin’ must be wrong with their self-assessment. Even if the best teachers in the world are all to be found in Lincoln, it’s still more or less impossible for 94% to be “above average.”

In the comments, Sally writes

That’s really interesting, because I have a friend who does teaching evaluations at her university, and she says that grad student teachers consistently underestimate how good they are. She says that grad students will claim to be utter disasters in the classroom, and then when she comes and observes their teaching, they’re perfectly fine, if not particularly exceptional. I wonder if something changes between the grad student and professor levels?

Well, I know something sure changed for me between the grad school and professorial levels! My first teaching experience happened in the spring quarter, 1991. I was TA-ing a Classics survey course at UCLA. Before meeting my first section, I went to the bathroom in Bunche Hall and threw up; I was overcome with terror. I was not-quite 24, and though I had years of background in drama and was the son of two college professors, I felt like an utter fraud who was about to be exposed. And in my first few quarters of TA-ing, I had some awful moments that left me despondent. I would not have ranked myself highly, back in the day. So yeah, one’s confidence grows with time.

I’d also say that the degree to which one worries about being liked diminishes with time, and that helps. When I was a TA — or even in my first few years here at the college — most of my students were only a few years younger than I. I saw them as slightly junior peers, and it’s generally the case that we are particularly anxious to win approval from our peers. Being liked, being perceived as competent, being thought interesting; all of these were wrapped up together. Today, I am still very much concerned with being competent, and I am hopeful that I am still found interesting — but the anxiety about winning approval has dropped. And I find that the less anxious I am about winning approval, the more likely I am to have self-confidence. Part of self-confidence, at least for me, is rooted in a sense of one’s own skills; it’s also rooted in a willingness to be unaffected by the capricious judgments of others.

I don’t believe good teachers are born that way. Good teaching is like any other skill — it’s something we learn, and something we get better at with practice. When we’re novices, our anxiety about our teaching serves an important function: it spurs us to improve. One hopes that that anxiety will diminish with time. In a few, unfortunate instances, it is replaced with apathy; more often than not, it is replaced by a quiet confidence in one’s own mastery of the material and of the classroom. And of course, in most cases, we are eager to continue to refine our craft. Mastery is not the same as perfection, and in my case (and I’d like to believe in the case of most of my colleagues), we’re aware that we’ve got room to improve.

In the Price article, one thing he wrote really hit home:

Some college teachers try to avoid a real analysis of their strengths and weaknesses—
and working on the weaknesses—by deciding that they play a particular
role within their department, and that only some dimensions of good teaching are
relevant to that role. A veteran professor might decide that because other faculty in
the department use cooperative learning techniques and provide a variety of pedagogical
activities for their students, it is in his students’ interest for him to teach a “good old-fashioned college course,” featuring nothing but heavy doses of lecture, textbook reading, and traditional exams. Alternatively, in a department full of such veteran professors, a freewheeling young assistant professor might decide that her primary role should be to “model critical thinking in the classroom” by doing little other than discussing controversial issues.

One problem here is that, as discussed above, college teachers often don’t have
a clear idea of what’s going on in their colleagues’ classrooms and therefore have little
basis (beyond their own preferences) for choosing their roles.

Dang, I’m definitely the “veteran professor teaching the good old-fashioned college course”, at least when it comes to my Western Civ survey courses. I’ve made the conscious decision to emphasize good lecturing over other forms of teaching, largely because I am firmly convinced that lecturing has been woefully underemphasized. To quote myself from nearly two years ago:

I am sick and tired of having folks with doctorates in education (Lord help us) tell me that “lecturing is an outdated teaching style.” Well, it’s still a damned effective teaching style if it’s done well. I put a lot of time and energy into crafting articulate, interesting, lectures, largely because I believe that for most students, it remains the most effective and memorable way to learn. I do invite discussion and debate in some of my classes, and I welcome questions — but I cling tenaciously to the old-school notion that my job is to be an interesting, compelling, and provocative deliverer of information. (And along the way, raise up young feminists and pro-feminists.)

So, is my self-confidence misplaced? I don’t think so. Could I be a better teacher? Sure, of course. Am I better than my colleagues? I have no idea, because I’ve only seen a handful of them teach, and most of those whom I have seen teach were junior faculty early on in the tenure process. But in the absence of evidence, I’m happily confident that the majority of my colleagues are wonderful teachers, and I am happy to be “average” in their company.

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Thursday Short Poem: Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar”

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This is the penultimate Thursday Short Poem of 2006, and it’s another famous one. Most American lit majors have to deal with it at one time or another. I’m including it because it’s an old favorite of mine; my mother, who introduced me to the poem, often talks about her “jar in Tennessee”. The jar is what imposes order and structure. It reminds me of my childhood attitude to nature; as a kid, I loved formal French gardens and topiaries that demonstrated a complete mastery of wildness. As a grown man, I like chaotic English gardens best. Anyhow, whether that makes sense of not, here’s the Wallace Stevens classic.

The Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

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Circumcision update

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In October, I posted about my own circumcision. I also wrote about the ongoing research into the link between circumcision and the reduced risk of HIV infection; at that time, studies were still in progress.

The New York Times reports today that the National Institutes of Health is convinced: circumcision works, and they are now formally recommending the procedure. This is powerful and important news.

Let’s get to snippin’.

The first of a two-part musing on teaching, self-awareness, and looks

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In return for my union dues, I get many benefits. I get, for example, the semi-annual publication of the NEA: Thought and Action. The current issue has an article by Paul C. Price (only available in PDF): Are You as Good a Teacher as You Think? It begins:

A survey of professors at the University of Nebraska a number of years ago showed that 94 percent of them thought they were better than average teachers at
their own institution. Assuming a reality that puts the true value at somewhere
near 50 percent, this survey suggests a rather stunning lack of self-insight among
the professoriate.

That opening made me chuckle. This phenomenon is not limited to the Cornhusker nation; anecdotally, I’m fairly certain that close to 94% of my colleagues at Pasadena City College would consider themselves to be “better than average.” Having participated in the evaluation process many times, and having read the “self-evaluations” that my colleagues are required to produce every few years, it seems that we too have a generous and optimistic sense of our own capabilities.

Of course, “ratemyprofessors” aside, students here at PCC seem to think most of us are above average too. On the old evaluation forms that we used back when I was tenure-track, students were asked if their teachers were “Outstanding/Excellent”, “Above Average”, or “Average.” College-wide, about 65% of the faculty were ranked “above average”, indicating that grade inflation seems to flow both ways!

When it comes to evaluating my own teaching, I think about it on several different levels. I would certainly say I’m an above average lecturer. I haven’t used notes in, oh, at least a decade. I can tell stories well, and structure a compelling narrative. If part of being a good teacher is being a good raconteur, then I’m certainly a talented teacher. But I know full well that I can still learn some new techniques, and that I have miles to go in terms of developing my patience.

But thinking about this abundant, no doubt deserved high self-esteem among the American professoriate, I find myself thinking about the only vaguely related question of how we evaluate our own attractiveness. I’m not just thinking about professors, of course, but of people in general. I remember, back in my freshman year of college, staying up late in a dorm room conversation — and being floored by one brave young woman, who insisted that each of us answer the question “Do you think you’re good looking? Why or why not?”

It was a tough question. But she asked it because she wanted to have a frank conversation in which we could all take the risk to be honest. We had been raised in an adolescent culture where self-praise invited a smack down; saying that you thought you were attractive was an open invitation to criticism, while claiming that you hated how you looked was seen as a none-too-subtle attempt at “fishing for compliments.” My friend in the dorm room challenged us to move past that dynamic, and, lubricated by beer and wine coolers and hash, we did so. There were perhaps eight of us in this triple room in Norton Hall, an equal number of boys and girls of varying degrees of socially acceptable attractiveness. And we listened respectfully and without judgment as each person shared how they “rated” themselves. It was revelatory.

I write about this because my feeling is that we live in a culture where we are expected and encouraged to “toot on our own horns” professionally. Whether or not we are actually over-flowing with self-confidence, the culture of resumes and college essays and self-evaluations invites us, indeed forces us, to insist on our own uniqueness, our own exceptionalism, our own “above-averageness.” But while trumpeting (and often exaggerating) our professional and academic qualifications is de rigueur, to talk frankly and honestly about how we see our looks is something very different. It’s a fascinating question to ask people, even now:

“When it comes to your physical attractiveness, how do you think you compare to your peer group?”

Of course, I don’t run around demanding answers to this awkward query. But as someone who has written endless self-evaluations focusing on my intellectual and pedagogical accomplishments and shortcomings, I’m intrigued by the disconnect between our contemporary willingness to celebrate our professional abilities while remaining mute about our own self-appraisal of our looks.

Thinking about my own life trajectory, I can say this much with confidence: As I age, my looks are fading. But as I age, I also grow spiritually and professionally. My ability in the classroom continues to grow. It grows not merely as a function of time, mind you; not all teachers automatically become better with experience. It grows — and there is still room for much more — because I am eager to find ways to be more effective, to be more relevant, to be more compassionate. I am happy to say that I see that same commitment in most of my colleagues.

I’ll post on this topic again soon. In my second post, I’ll muse on the question of whether or not a high degree of self-confidence does correlate well with teaching competence.

Top Posts in 2006: the top five

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I’m not entirely done with regular posts yet; I’ll be back to posting normally tomorrow.

Last Friday, I posted the first half of my “Top Ten in ’06″. Today, I offer the top half.

Were these the five best posts I wrote all year? I’m not sure, but they were picked because I’m proud of the writing or the insights within them; a couple were picked merely because they proved to be particularly popular or controversial. (I left out the OKOP, masturbation, and circumcision posts, though they attracted lots of attention.) Ranking them was not easy either, and if I were doing this in another month, I might well have a different order. But for now, these are my five favorites posts of 2006, in ascending order from fifth to first. (And why three of them ended up being from March, I have no idea. Perhaps my mind is more fertile at the onset of spring.)

5. Some Thoughts on Teaching and Student Crushes (March 24) Key excerpt:

There’s an old axiom in pop psychology: we don’t just get crushes on people whom we want, we get crushes on people whom we want to be like! Students don’t get crushes on me because they want to go to bed with me or be my girlfriend or boyfriend; they get crushes on me because I’ve got a quality that they want to bring out in themselves. They’re externalizing all of their hopes for themselves. And rather than encourage the crush to feed my ego, my job is to turn the focus back on to the student, encouraging him or her to take their new-found curiosity or enthusiasm or passion and use it, run with it, indulge it, let it take them places! That’s what student crushes mean to me.

4. Closing the Door: men, aging, younger women, and ego (October 26) Key excerpt:

I am absolutely convinced that many of my peers (and men older than myself) chase younger women for precisely this reason. It’s not that women our own age are less attractive, it’s that they lack the culturally-based power to reassure our fragile, aging egos that we are still “younger than our fathers”, still hot and hip and filled with potential. Inspiring romantic or erotic desire in women young enough to be our daughters becomes the most potent of all anti-aging remedies, particularly when we can display our much younger mates to our peers. By comparison, the famous little red sports car reveals only the size of our pocketbook; attracting a girl barely out of her teens reveals the enduring power of our youthful appeal. And for those men who are desperately afraid of losing out on possibilities, afraid of closing doors, afraid of the humble acceptance that things have changed forever — then there is nothing, nothing more compelling than significantly younger women.

3. Some lengthy thoughts on feminism, traditional families, contingent happiness and daring to disappoint (March 14) Key excerpt:

I can’t truly know what it’s like to be a first-generation female college student, carrying the hopes and dreams of my parents and my ancestors on my shoulders, on my heart –or on my hymen. Sure, I’m privileged in ways that I probably don’t even fully understand. But I do believe that at the heart of the feminist project is this: women ought to have the right to pursue happiness. That happiness will manifest differently in the lives of different women; some will find their most sublime joy in marriage and motherhood while others will find it in on an archaeological dig while others will find it in the arms of another woman. And if feminists can agree on one thing, it’s this: the collective sacrifices of your parents, ancestors, and culture do not trump your own personal right to be happy.

2. Words are not fists: some thoughts on how men work to defuse feminist anger (May 25) Key excerpt:

Part of being a pro-feminist man, I’ve come to realize in recent years, is being willing to face the real anger of real women. Far too many men spend a great deal of time trying to talk women out of their anger, or by creating social pressures that remind women of the consequences of expressing that anger. Many men, frankly, are profoundly frightened by women who will directly challenge them. In a classroom, they don’t really fear being struck or hit. But by comparing a verbal attack on their own sexist attitudes towards physical violence, they hope to defuse the verbal expression of very real female pain and frustration. I know that it’s hard to be a young man in a feminist setting for the first time, and I know, (oh, how I know) how difficult it is to sit and listen to someone challenge you on your most basic beliefs about your identity, your sexuality, your behavior, and your beliefs about gender. It’s difficult to take the risk to speak up and push back a bit, and it’s scary to realize just how infuriating your views really are to other people, especially women.

1. “My life doesn’t just revolve around you”: a note of gratitude for a feminist mom (March 20) Key excerpt:

So my belief in the importance of women’s autonomy and personal freedom — even as wives and mothers — came to me early in life. A first-born son growing up in a household without a father (amateur psychologists, have at it!), I was very close to my mother. I still am. And my adult feminism is linked in no small way to the lessons she taught me. Motherhood, I learned, is a role — but it need not be an all-consuming identity. The fact that my mother had a life outside of her children gave me the confidence to live out my life without fear that I would destroy her if I made mistakes or deviated from a planned path. Her commitment to her own happiness allowed me to make a similar commitment to my own — and for that, I will forever be tremendously grateful.

“Fat studies”, cohabitation, and why Hugo likes gaining weight

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Apparently, some universities are considering offering a course in “fat studies.” When I taught my Humanities course on “Beauty, the Body, and the Western Tradition”, we spent a fair amount of time on the cultural history of fat. I recall some terrific, spirited discussions — and some painfully awkward moments.

In a vaguely related note, we learn that “cohabitation” is bad for women’s health:

Dietitians have found that women tend to gain weight once they move in with male partners. “Living with a male seemed to put pressure on females to consume more of the ‘unhealthy’ choices,” Amelia Lake, a research fellow at the Newcastle University Human Nutrition Research Center in Britain, wrote this year in the journal Complete Nutrition, “while females had a positive influence on the diets of the males.”

That’s intriguing. Culturally, we teach women to monitor the health of their male partners. Men are generally permitted, even encouraged, to be somewhat irresponsible about their diets. Attention to food preparation and to nutrition is traditionally considered a female concern. Spend time with many couples, and you will often hear stories of what the guy “used to eat” back in his “bachelor days.” One tangible way to measure a woman’s success at “domesticating” a husband or boyfriend is to transform, or at least improve, his eating habits.

There’s a bit of the old “myth of male weakness” at work here. Both men and women buy into the myth (which is why so many folks don’t think it’s a myth at all). Call it the “men are big babies who can’t take care of themselves properly” topos; men “buy it” because it allows us to be irresponsible, women “buy it” because it offers the opportunity to measure one’s feminine power. A woman who can cause a man to change his diet is a “proper woman”. The worse he ate before they got together, the more impressive her achievement becomes. Obviously, lots of folks don’t buy into this, but the Lake study suggests that some people still do — and that it has real consequences for women.

And thirdly, I’m putting on a bit of weight. I’m cutting my exercise and increasing my food intake as we draw closer to Christmas. The exercise decrease is slight, and largely due to increased academic and social obligations. The food intake comes along with it. But I don’t mind putting on a few pounds, largely because I can look forward to taking them off beginning in January.

I’ve learned that my diet and exercise pattern is seasonal; I’m rigorous for a few months, and then slack off a bit. My joints need time to recover, and my body needs to rest. I “soften up” and then “trim down” at different times of the year. The softening up time is obviously pleasurable, but so too is the trimming down. For someone who loves setting goals and meeting them, it’s fun to put on a bit of weight and then take it off again. It becomes a challenge. Mind you, I don’t put on and take off huge amounts of weight; yo-yo dieting is never healthy. But I honor a certain rhythm and seasonality to my eating and my exercise. Though I expect to be ripped once more by Easter, from now until Epiphany, I’ll be in a more languid and indulgent mode.

“Sometimes students need a Daddy”: a note on teaching abroad, and learning a good lesson about boundaries

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In last Wednesday’s post about the virtues of studying abroad, I mentioned my own experiences as a professor and co-director of Pasadena City College’s Florence semester program in the autumn of 2000. In passing, I noted that we had a serious incident take place in which one of our students was very nearly killed in a fall from a sixth-floor balcony. He remains a pariplegic six years later, and the litigation surrounding the tragedy was only recently resolved.

For a variety of reasons (not the least of which is the continued possibility of litigation), I can’t discuss the fall and its aftermath in too much detail. I can say that the young man who fell so far and was hurt so badly was a bright, popular, athletic, hard-working student who had made many friends among his fellow Pasadenans in Florence. I can also say that the incident taught me a lot about college-age folks, and about the responsibility of someone who is leading a study abroad program.

With a few exceptions, most of our 45 students on the semester-long trip to Florence were of traditional age; almost all were between 18-21. They were all legal adults, if barely so. And before leaving on the trip, my co-director (a fellow PCC prof in the sciences) and I made it clear that we had no intention of acting as chaperones. If these students had been underage, we would have had a host of legal and moral responsibilities; given that they were old enough to sign contracts (and drink alcohol under Italian law), we figured that we were in no way in loco parentis. We saw our role as guides; we led tours of the city and gave lectures. We saw our role as friendly mentors, and were both more than willing to lend an ear to those who were homesick or quarreling with their roommates. But for the most part, we tried to treat our students as “junior scholars and peers”.

My co-director and I often went out to dinner with groups of students. We joined them for dancing. I formed a small running club, and we went running in and around the Cascine four or five mornings a week. A couple of students even came along when I got what turned out to be my last tattoo, from the renowned Giulio Tommaselli in the Via Della Mosca. (One gal even got her first ink there, so inspired was she.) In other words, I felt very much as if the students and I were good friends. I was 33 at the time, a dozen to fifteen years older, not yet old enough to be seen as a father figure. I thought of myself as a knowledgeable older brother, and it seemed a good arrangement.

And then came Rocky’s fall in mid-October. I was awakened by a phone call early on a Saturday morning from a frantic student; she was calling from the hospital where Rocky was in surgery and fighting for his life. I threw on some clothes, called a taxi, and was at the ER within twenty minutes.

And what I learned over the next few days changed my teaching forever. About eight students had been partying with Rocky at the time of his fall. When I reached the hospital, they were ashen, weeping, bewildered. And what struck me, in this moment of crisis, was that they all looked so very, very young. It was as if the shock and fear of the incident had caused them all to regress to early adolescence. They clung to me, clearly expecting that no matter what, I would do something to make things better.

I called my co-director, and she came to the hospital as fast as she could. I made the awful phone call home to California, waking the young man’s grandparents up from a sound sleep with the news that their grandson was fighting for his life. (The doctors gave him a 10% chance of survival). And once we knew that there was nothing more we could do for Rocky, we took the kids off for breakfast. They huddled together, weeping, but after protesting that they weren’t hungry, they all wolfed down huge amounts of food.

Over the next day, as word of the accident spread through our little community in Florence, the students gathered in apartments to pray and to talk and to wait for news. And again and again, I was struck by how small, fragile, and young they all seemed! I could feel that though they were only a dozen years my junior, they desperately needed me to be the competent, reliable grown-up. They needed a Daddy figure, most of them, because they needed to fall apart. And though they were brave and very good to each other, it was still evident to me that they weren’t all fully adult. They were in that strange transition time that is college, so full of maturity and sophistication on the one hand and so terribly fragile and uncertain on the other. Thousands of miles from home, away from their families, facing the possible death of a companion and a friend, that fragility became abundantly evident.

We made sure the kids ate. We gave them time to talk. We talked to their worried parents for them. We bought them coffee, and, I’m not ashamed to say, we bought them cigarettes. (For those who were already smokers, I figured now was the time to use abundant quantities of nicotine. I smoked more in the week after Rocky’s accident than in any other seven-day period in my life.) My co-director and I went from “older buddies” to “Mom and Dad” overnight.

Rocky’s family flew over. Rocky survived, and the student insurance company footed the astronomical bill for a private air ambulance to carry him and his family from Italy back to Los Angeles. We finished up the semester, and in the final few weeks we had in Florence, we got back to partying and dancing and going out together. But I was more careful to keep strict boundaries in place with my students. The gap between 33 and 18 was wider now, and the distinction between peer and professor was infinitely clearer to me. Frankly, one of the great silver linings of this tragedy was, I suppose, that it taught me not to confuse legal and physical adulthood with genuine maturity; it taught me to better honor my role as a mentor and a professor. And it taught me that in a time of crisis, I am well-suited to the role of Daddy, when I’m surrounded by folks who suddenly need a father figure on whom they can rely.