22 posts tagged “life + text”

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"Do your duty to our school!"

In August, I have to take my comprehensive exam for my MA. I'll grapple with the list of 136 literary and theoretical texts my faculty has assigned, and write two short essays in response to two questions that arise from that list. I will also write one short essay of my own design, based on 10-15 texts I feel I can own thoroughly. I will write this essay about Rukeyser and the total response mode of reading as a framework for teaching/studenting in such a way as to make beneficial use of personal response in interpreting text, specifically in the college-level literature course. I will hopefully also address the importance of student writing and teaching writing in this context.

I make this choice because it is what I care about, because it arises from my moral imperative. I believe that this is what my field can offer students that is of use in their lived experience, both personally and at the level of making positive collective change. I make it for my friends and loveds, with whom I have collaborated to survive difficulty and to emerge into a new range of agency for good. For friends who also survived and grew, and for those who did not.

As you may have guessed by my overwrought tone, if you read this with any frequency, I have spent the last week re-reading the Harry Potter books again, and have just finished the final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Here is one of the epigraphs:

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.
                                           --William Penn, More Fruits of Solitude

I always do my best work when I am invested in helping others do theirs; that is just a simple fact of how my motivation apparatus works. So I will succeed in passing this damned exam by helping every single one of my classmates pass it too. And I will succeed in passing it, too, because in doing so and writing what I believe to be true for an audience of people who are ultimately teachers, who will be continuing to teach more students, I am able to feel like I honor my hearts who have gotten me this far:

SLP
PTM
X
AMSW
GE
BC
DAY
ME
and
Michael Kelly
and
Emily Brooke Harmon,
both of whom I miss every day

2 comments Tags: harry potter, gratitude, bodhicitta, deathly hallows, life + text, teaching/studenting, ma exam …

"Shenpa : Sheer Delight : Prajna"

Pema says that, on the CD set I listen to all the time. It's a series of teachings called Learning to Stay. In brief, her focus is on illuminating the phenomenon of shenpa--the ephemeral quality of hookedness that tends to send us running away from presence. For example:

I've been working on this research project for my 18th-Century Brit Fiction course for a few months now. Research projects are hard work, and I tend to bitch and whine about all my horrible suffering when I'm working on one, especially in this space. But the real truth is that research projects are really fun--I get to dig into all sorts of interesting texts and theory, mix 'em up with the lived-world scenarios that matter to me, and arrive at new insights and apprehensions. Along the way, I get to use writing to think it all through, and then I get to share that writing/thinking with at least one other person. This is not the kind of sweet opportunity that regular life offers, usually. As a full-time waitress, I rarely got the chance to think deeply, with great focus, about something that really interested me, with other people who also really cared about it, who brought their talents and seriousness to their work and my own.

This term, I happen to have gotten a professor who has not been a particularly sensitive or supportive team player in my process. In fact, I have been describing her teaching practice as 'cuntiferous' quite a bit, at pretty high volumes. The volume and intensity with which I have responded to her arises from this shenpa business. Her gestures of response have pushed on buttons that I am ego-invested in. In essence, she has hurt my feelings, and I have a really hard time not rising into a lot of avoidance behavior (read: rage, nasty comments, etc.) when I get my feelings hurt, especially when my feelings are getting hurt about something I'm sensitive about. So the shenpa is the ego-investment, the quality that somehow hooks me into a reactive experience of unpleasantness or discomfort.

Pema teaches that shenpa is value-neutral. It is unpleasant, but it isn't bad, per se. In fact, she teaches that shenpa can be read as an opportunity to develop mindfulness, insight, and warm regard for both oneself and whoever it is that's offered the opportunity in the first place. This is how I understand her interpretation of the concept of prajna--the experience of compassion-based wisdom that can arise simultaneously with shenpa. She points out that when a person's behavior elicits shenpa in me, it is often the case that that person is hooked into his/her own shenpa in the first place. She suggests that it is possible, when shenpa arises, to experience prajna about it at the same time--to feel warm and kind toward my own shenpa and the other person's. Hence, she cites her teacher who tells her, "when shenpa arises, sheer delight."

I listen to these CDs in the car, and they help. They help me get some quiet and mindfulness before I teach, they help me gentle down on myself when I'm ramping up stress, and they help me work on what Jimmy Carter famously referred to as sinning in my heart. Calling my professor a cuntiferous whore, and really going into that utterance with whole heart, is shenpa unrecognized, is sinning against someone else in my heart.

I know this. I knew it Monday, when I got my proposal back from my professor, covered with nasty, unhelpful feedback. I knew it when I flew immediately from feeling really hurt to blathering about her being a cuntiferous whore for 8 hours. Indulging in 8 hours of hate is exhausting on a number of levels, so I started trying to get some prajna going on by the time I got home that night. Wasn't overhwelmingly successful--I did manage to unhook from the intensity of both the hurt feelings and the flight-rage, but didn't really make it to compassion. So I skipped her class Wednesday night, in order to at least avoid doing any more damage, or getting re-hooked.

This whole time, intellectually, I have had the framework of compassion--the intellectual apprehension of my professor's likely suffering that makes sense to have given rise to the unkindness she does as a teacher. I even got so far as to be able to see that it is a suffering I have spent a lot of time in myself--perfectionism, which in my experience arises from basic self-loathing, and the enrollment in the kind of snotty, quasi-abusive hierarchy thinking that forms the basis for so much academic culture. But I have just been having a really hard time getting the rest of compassion--the open, tender heart, the softness and warmth of experiencing the basic goodness of another sentient being, and honestly giving a shit about that sentient being's pain.

And so. This morning, I am taking it nice and easy before I get back into my work. I'm drinking my coffee, smelling the spring coming in through my window, digging the sheer niceness of SLP. I'm reading Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my every-summer books. It's a pretty shenpa-free situation, and it's pretty nice.

So then I turn to page 274, and discover the only annotation I made in this whole book through all the re-readings since I bought it in 2000 or 2001:

It made for a long, lonely life, this business of getting things right.


I love this book--it's a long, luxurious read through lush mountains and country fields, with plenty of 'slow-hand' sensuality, and just enough loss to give everything a keen edge. It's chock full of terribly smart sentences, but this is the only one I underlined. In fact, I underlined this one in ink.

Because that sentence has been so true for me, because "this business of getting things right" has hurt, hurt, hurt for me. That loneliness, that despair, that sorrow at just being such a suck-ass person who'll never be able to get things right enough to make up for all her flaws, never get things right enough to be ok, to be loved, to just get some fucking rest and have an easy laugh and whatnot. And that, I'm sure enough, is what my professor is suffering through, and that I can feel for her through, and genuinely desire not to add to that suffering by hating her in order to avoid letting my feelings hurt a little bit.

Yep.

Post a comment Tags: pema, teachings, prajna, bodhicitta, shenpa, life + text, outbreath, teaching/studenting …

Dreaming Gender: Children Can Be Cultural Translations

In the past few days, call it spring, I've been thinking about baby names. Jews name their kids after folks who have passed--we take the first letter of our dearly departed's name, and riff a new one on that initial. SLP's grandma Anita, a wonderful, lively, loving woman, passed away last year at Christmas. My grandma Sophie, a dynamic, powerful, brilliant woman, has been gone almost a decade now. So I'm kind of in love with Ari Shein LP. Shein was my grandma's maiden/middle name, and I love that when you say it out loud, it sounds like "shine," which is what this maybe-kid's dad does.


I was never a girl who wanted kids. Never, not when I was 8, not when I was 14, not when I was 18. It was never not liking kids, not liking hanging out with them, not being willing, happily, to care for them. I had just seen a family, first-hand, that was a most persuasive argument that actual family-having was an ill-fated enterprise. Also, I was never entirely sure I was a girl, per se. A tomboy from the moment I can remember, one way or the other, I always felt not-girl and not-boy--just bodhi, some sort of my-own-gender. 

That gender organization persists today. Over the years, I've gone through heavily boy-identified phases and a few girly years, but never stayed home in either. In recent years, especially in the new freedom post-divorce, I've come to experience myself as transgendered, for lack of a better term. I mean "for lack of a better term" pretty seriously. Attracted affectively and sexually to women and men, I am nonetheless essentially straight--my relationships with women have never materialized into a physical sexuality, for whatever reason, so all of my public romantic relationships have been with men, and both times I've married, I've married men. I don't feel any need to change the body I have for one more visibly or materially gendered 'male.' I very much dig my identification as a woman.

What I mean by 'transgendered,' then is something murkier, something certainly less exciting or glamorous or whatever. I mean that I own a sexuality that includes an equal measure of feminine and masculine tropes, along with the necessary accoutrement for some of the latter, that my intellectual organization is a really sweet blend of modes assigned usually to one or the other gender, that I feel much more comfortable with hairy legs and armpits than with shaved anything, that I love having shiny, clearcoated finger and toenails, that I dress like a 12 year-old boy almost all the time, but that I've got a nice collection of shiny, very-high black heels and thigh-highs that SLP and I indulge in whenever the fancy strikes us. Basically, what I think I mean is something very, very ordinary--that I'm just like everyone else.

I'm not sure if any of that makes sense, or if it sounds like I'm trying to coattail on the cache of this year's gender-identity-to-be-seen in. I hope it does and doesn't respectively. The point of it all at this moment, though, has to do with two birth processes I'm engaged in today, albeit at different phases in each. One, I'm captivated by the notion of dreaming a child of mine into existence, and two, I'm trying to write a paper about gender construction in 18th-century England.

Like I said before, I never wanted kids, even though I liked them very much, liked hanging out with them, teaching them, taking care of them, learning from them. It wasn't until I was in my late 20's and whatever that hormonal machine is that folks call the biological clock started an iv drip of procreative urge into my system. Even then, it was another good chunk of years until I actually began to feel a desire to have a kid, to parent, to family-make, that was distinct from a simple biological drive to reproduce my genetic code. 

As I finally emerged from my way extended adolescence into my burgeoning new adulthood, I finally began to have the imaginative capacity to see that I wasn't living under some sort of irrevocable curse that would make family-making equal misery for all. Meeting, falling for, and marrying SLP has done wonders for that imaginative capacity, and so I am really here, really actually developing that vision into something I can figure out how to practically build. 

At the same time, our family-planning financial math has yet to come out with the right numbers in the black column, and so that project is still a ways off, if it ever comes to pass in a traditional, biological way. I'm about to be 35, and while I know that people have kids well into their early forties now, I'm aware that our chances of having a kid written in our own DNA is getting less likely every couple months or so. That's fine with me. It would be super sweet to see what happens when you mix up BBLP with SLP, but it will also be ok, completely, totally ok, to find a child already born. And if we're wayyyyyyyyyyy to old to keep with an infant by the time we finally get it properly together, there is never a shortage of adolescents who need a place to live in our world. 

Basically, no pressure. I've got time to dream on this one.

I am, however, operating under some pressure on the other process--this paper for my 18th Century Brit Lit class. For one thing, the woman teaching it is just a raging bitch (you could honestly photocopy the first five pages of the proposal I turned into her, covered, covered, covered with negative, unkind, unproductive feedback, and hand it out to new teachers as a cheatsheet for every single thing you should  not do when responding to student writing). That right there makes it harder to write this paper. In order to let go of all the hurt feelings and anger I experienced in response, I've essentially disconnected from the essay itself. My heart ain't in the thing, you know?

At the point of submitting the proposal, though, I didn't have the heart connection really established yet, just the thrill of intellectual adventure. That, for me, is rarely enough to really generate a text--I have to have a sense of the stakes of my project to really get going. Call me a drama queen (I am), but I've gotta know that I'm thinking about something that matters in people's lives in some way in order to do good work.

But this is where the two birth processes come together. Dreaming a kid provides the stakes for the paper. Being an oddly-gendered person is a lot of fun--I really like all my parts and being them. Being an oddly-gendered kid was not always so fun, or rather, being perceived and responded to as an oddly-gendered kid was almost never fun. Had my oddly-genderedness turned out to be a more 'traditionally' transgendered identity, those perceptions and responses might well have extended to violence that might have prevented me from ever even getting to be old enough to have an unfortunately extended adolescence. While I think we are, thank god, in a moment when gender=reinvention is experiencing a bit of a renaissance, that renaissance is still contained in a lot of heteronormative institutional, spiritual and physical violence.

My essay focuses on a text written by the famous Henry Fielding in 1747--The Female Husband. What I'm essentially arguing is that while this text looks at first like a heteronormative proscription of gender behavior and sexual desire that subverts the hetero binary, at closer read, I can see instead the text operating as what Judith Butler refers to as a "cultural translation" (Undoing Gender 2002). As I understand Butler, a cultural translation is a dialogic exchange in which difference is not assimilated smoothly into a dominant narrative or discourse, but where difference is kept alive, open, rough-edged and undecided. 

1747 is roughly the smack-dab-center of the period in which what we recognize as 'natural' sexual difference and its attendant social and value hierarchies was actually built. In a moment when British society was moving from a rigidly enforced class system which descended from Divine Right down the Great Chain of Being to the open, fluid system of class we're familiar with in our moment of capitalism, the development of a notion of the sexes as biologically ordained different provided a rationale by which all that flux could find some sort of anchor. If birth no longer equaled worth in the economic sphere, it could be made to do so in the 'domestic' sphere. Thus, a heteronormative, masculinist, gender binary became part of the skeleton that would order a capitalist economy in a bunch of interesting ways. 

The point here, the point that connects to me having a kid in the 21st century, the point that makes that 21st century new-human-being the stakes on which my argument rests, is that the heteronormative binary in all its manifestations and applications, is not natural; it is not the way it's always been; it is only a tradition. Historicizing the emergence of this heteronormativity undermines the kinds of arguments and ideology that result in the sometimes violent restrictions we impose on human beings now. Moreover, by showing that Fielding's text, whether or not he was consciously trying to proscribe gender/sexual variation, in fact is an example of Butler's cultural translation, where the heteronormative narrative is not dominant, where gender/sexual disruption is very much alive and rough-edged, demonstrates that there are very possible ways to allow for people to be such cultural translations.

And that is part of what I want to dream for this child I'm imagining--I want him/her to be able to grow up to be whatever interesting cultural translation of gender s/he turns out to be. Without censure, without imaginative limits, without the threat of violence.

The stakes.


Post a comment Tags: fun, gender, life + text, teaching/studenting

Report From My 24 Hours Off

I have been doing an excellent job of following my plan of last night today. Occasional wafts of anxiety arise about not working obsessively through the mean reds (how can it possibly have taken me all these years to realize what Holly Golightly was talking about?), but I've just followed the teachings (touch them and let them waft on), and all is pretty much well.

At the community college, I worked with the most lovely woman on her persuasive essay, which gave me excellent ideas for and confidence about the section of Argumentative Writing I'm teaching in a few weeks. For the rest of hte time, just sat around and chatted with two of my fave coworkers, S and B. Got some healthy lunch, and sat in the sun with other doll-ightful folks till class. Students were rowdy and dear and totally focused enough for the second-to-last day of the term, so we went outside for Reader Review, and a good time was had by all.

And now have been home for a while. Chit-chatted with SLP, and when he went off for poker with his boys, went back to my book. I read Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver every summer now, and that's what I've got my nose stuck in tonight. I've just come to page 48 (that's all I'm going to say, lest I give something away for anyone who hasn't read it yet), and am now prompted to say:

SLP is just the most remarkable, wonderful, kind, decent, honest, playful, hardworking, funny, loving, fanmotherfuckingtastic husband of all time, and I am a most blessed woman.

And it's been 70 degrees today.

:)

(All the long parenthetical bits go out to the lovely Navelgazer.)

2 comments Tags: gratitude, prajna, life + text, outbreath, bodhihome

Rukeyser Knows Best

I am tired, menstrual, and hugely not-writing the last two papers of my MA. I'm not completely wallowing in the great mudpuddle of cyclical depression, worry, despair, and self-recrimination yet, but I can feel myself slipping.

Here's a little Rukeyser poem I'm clinging to like a mudpuddle life-raft:


THE OVERTHROW OF ONE O'CLOCK AT NIGHT

is my concern. That's this moment,
when I lean on my elbows out the windowsill
and feel the city among its time-zones, among its seas,
among its late night news, the pouring in
of everything meeting, wars, dreams, winter night.
Light in snowdrifts causing the young girls
lying awake to fall in love tonight
alone in bed; or the little children
half world over tonight rained on by fire--that's us--
calling on somebody--that's us--to come
and help them.

Now I see at the boundary of darkness
extreme of moonlight.
Alone. All my hopes
scattered in people       quarter world away
half world away, out of all hearing.
Tell myself:
Trust in experience. And in the rhythms.
The deep rhythms of experience.

Indeed. If I can rely on anything, it is the rhythms of my cycle. I know them by heart--I should; I've been riding this roller coaster for 22 years now. What happens this week, what always happens this week, is that my mood goes deep and wide, with occasional wild ups and slightly less occasional serious dips. I certainly cry at nearly anything. I also get progressively tired, although I just realized, with help from a friend, that I get some interesting bursts of productive energy, earmarked exclusively for cleaning the house.


My cycle used to just make me insane and insane to be around, but, all praise to therapy and an over-thirty-changing-body, I ride it pretty well anymore, and even enjoy a lot of it--the slowing, the internal turn, the opportunity to be keenly present to experience. The unpleasant parts--being a huge bitch, etc.--I've gotten pretty good at just letting be, not feeding them, and also not fearing them. In essence, I've done this enough times to know the rhythms of my experience, and trust them to come and go.


Oh, but fuck it's a bitch this week. I'm feeling so much pressure to finish these papers, because they're the last two. And the professor who I was pretty sure was being a huge control-freak bitch about the one has indeed turned out to be a ragingly huge control-freak bitch, and that's making me even more loathe to do anything. And being loathe to do anything and having a wet-cotton, cycle-end brain is making it really hard to relax and believe I will actually come out of this and get them done in time.

But of course I will. I always do, and I'm not about to start not-doing now. So, I'll take me a deep breath and trust my damned rhythms.

Plan:

  1. Recognize that no amount of worrying or needing to work is going to help right now
  2. Give in to my body's demand that I just be fucking nice to it
  3. Let it fucking go
  4. Pack up my work and go home
  5. Eat something
  6. Help SLP with his paper
  7. Watch TV
  8. Fall asleep
  9. Sleep well
  10. Go to work tomorrow and do as little as possible, while maintaining as even a mood as possible
  11. Read/write tomorrow night, hopefully, because by then I should be experiencing the upsurge of serotonin or whatever that usually follows the first day of my cycle
  12. If not, do it anyway
  13. Chant "B's get degrees" over and over until April 28th

6 comments Tags: bleeding, prajna, shenpa, life + text, outbreath, rukeyser

Meme: Still Reading, After All These Years...

This here meme's a riff off the lovely Farfaraway and her delightful reading-memior post.

What're your top-five works of children's literature you still re-read at least once a year, now that you're grownup? (Or at least taller than you used to be, and pay taxes.)

  1. The Anne of Green Gables Series
  2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy
  3. The Ramona books
  4. The All of A Kind Family books
  5. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Will the Circle Be Unbroken
So I cheated, and listed about twenty books, instead of 5. So sue me. ;)

I tag y'all. Tag yerself, tag a friend, enjoy.

1 comment Tags: meme, riffing, life + text, outbreath

Vox Hunt: Let's Go!

Show us a photo of somewhere you want to go.

Oh, that's easy. "Not [to] a dry, bare, sandy hole, nor a damp, wet hole. But a hobbit-hole. And that [means] comfort."

The Shire
The Shire

Via


2 comments Tags: heart, glee, vox hunt, life + text, go place

Frost Belt Affective Disorder: A Riff on Random Musings' Musings...

Since reading Een's VoxMemoir post, I've been phasing through moments of warm reflection on the connections--intellectual, creative, and very, very dear all around--I've been making as a Vox reader. I say reader because, although I'm entirely delighted by the lovely writerly accommodations in the neighborhood, it's the opportunity to listen and respond that I've been really getting into lately.

I'm developing a real collection of people I like to think with here on Vox, and that's my all-time favorite kind of people.

I've just read Random Musings' post on "January in the frost belt." It's a jewel of a post--concise and tightly structured, but with great sense of spaciousness within. This formal aspect of the post sums up what she's expressed in language and imagery perfectly--"concise and tightly structured, but with great sense of spaciousness within" is pretty much what winter in Michigan feels like.

Sometimes that's the sun through a cluster of icicles when it's bitter cold, but shining so bright it dazzles and awes. Sometimes it's thick, low, gray clouds and tires endlessly rolling through slush. Something about winter up here, its incessant endurance, slows time and opens it up: sometimes into an inner warmth; sometimes to a great beauty. Sometimes, though, to a keen and unsettling sense of timelessness, of the eternal stoplessness/startlessness.

Seasonal Affective Disorder. Honestly, I don't know anyone up here who doesn't meet the DSM criteria for this one. I don't think this is as much a psycho-physical disorder, as it is a geographical disorder. When you live in a location where it's really, really fucking cold and dark and gray and windy and wet and cooooooooold a lot of the year, feeling depressed at least part of the time is just really, incredibly, mindbogglingly likely.

I've always said that God doesn't send the weak to be born in Michigan. Winter up here can break even the most determinedly macho son of Dixie, and the keen edge of winter can even be sensed in the culture of the other seasons. But the emotional/spiritual strength this climate requires and develops offers rich rewards as well.

Up here where winter is long and gray, we have the opportunity to engage with the rough edges of the human life span. This opportunity is often not a pleasant experience to be sure, but the more we are able to meet it anyway, to sit with it and greet it with warm regard and lively interest, the more we just breathe into it--then--the longer our summer moments grow, and the deeper and richer our ability to stay present to that luxe warmth, that languid greengold...

15 comments Tags: blogging, riffing, spiritual practice, shenpa, life + text, bodyliving

QotD: Good Cheap Fun

So I'm actually too late on this one to properly post in response to the question, but I still wanna chime in.

What do I do for fun when I'm broke?

Well, pretty much everything, 'cause I'm pretty much always broke, so I try to make everything fun. That's the trick to being poor, in my experience. This, though, was fun without even trying:



10 comments Tags: tv, glee, life + text, outbreath

Ringing in the new syllabus

Sigh. I'm sitting at my keyboard, with my office-mate's semester overview staring up at me. She has every single day of her term planned, in a color-coded table. Along with the "Date" column, which I don't overly resent, she has "Prep," "Due," "In-Class," and "Homework." It's fucking color-coded, people. Sigh. Sigh. And sighhhhhhhhh again.

Until I downloaded her stuff, I was feeling pretty good about being able to get the term ready. I taught this course last year, after all, and it really went remarkably, amazingly well. Given that it's my second time around, it simply stands to reason that this term will go better than the last time, at least in some ways. I did get inordinately lucky in the great Yatzee Cup of Registration last year--the students I got were all just such terribly impressive, smart, caring folks, who were largely unafraid to take risks and act the fool. I'm not counting on a repeat of that luck, of course, but I am reasonably confident about the way I conceive the course and realize that in assignments. I'm also pretty sure that I'm going to be better at the mechanics of the course, given the almost two years of practice I've had teaching now, as well as better at innovating in response to things not going as planned.

But now I'm having a terrible time trying to push away the temptation to borrow my office-mate's learning organization and strengths as expectations for myself. I know it doesn't make sense--she and I are very different brains. She's exceptionally gifted at details and organization and structure; I'm exceptionally gifted at global thinking and the research process and intuitive, relational knowledge construction. She's also almost a decade younger than I am, and therefore a decade more awake, energized, and smart than me, which is good and fine and natural. Beyond all that, I'm very, very fond of her, and very devoted to seeing her blossom and grow. It's easy to recognize my lifelong tendency to self-doubt as it manifests as a competitive impulse here, and to tell it to get lost, at least on the intellectual level. But to actually resist the slide into fuck-it-turns-out-that-I-do-suck depression, well, that's another level of challenge altogether.

The thing is, I'm tired still. I certainly have slept a huge amount this break, and watched hours and hours of restoratively mind-resting television, but I could so use another two weeks of relaxation and rejuvenation. So when I confront the fact that school starts up again on fucking Monday, and the level of sharp I need to be in order to be ready on fucking Monday, an anchor of fear that I won't be able to pull it off drags on me, and my tired little heartmind sinks into a melancholy certainty that I'm just not good enough to make it in the grownup world of professional teaching.

Well, with all due respect and warm regard for my fears and sadnesses (and I really do mean that), I simply can't afford to keep sinking. I hereby choose a reality: I am a reasonably good teacher; with time and practice, I probably will become a very good teacher. The frame I've already got for this term is a really good frame. I am going to limit my objectives for making positive change to this frame, because it is already very good, and trying to massively overhaul it is both unnecessary and unlikely to produce positive results. I'm going to trust my experience, trust my heartmind and imagination, and trust my limits.

Why not, really? The worst thing that can happen is that the term will go awfully, but that's also the worst thing that can happen if I make myself crazy trying to work as though my brain were a not-as version of my office-mate's brain, as though in order to be good enough, I have to be just like her. The only difference is that I'll have made myself crazy, which sucks for me and everyone else who relates to me, and that it'll be even more likely that the term will go awfully.

Do think good thoughts for me and my poor students. :)

9 comments Tags: sigh, homework, scared, shenpa, life + text, teaching/studenting, riding breath, heartmind …