Burning the Midnight Oil

I won't promise to be creative and original on this blog -- I do that all day with teaching and research, so I feel comfortable about resorting to cliches and other crutches when writing this blog.  After all, I know I can't say anything revolutionary (nothing to match, much less, beat all the professional bloggers and veteran parents' insights), so I'll just be myself and say whatever comes to mind...

That caveat in place, I'm writing at 11:23pm on a Thursday night, nervous about my 95 students who are submitting their final papers by tomorrow at 5pm. In the previous stage of my life, I was the anxious student who had either procrastinated to the point that I was writing my first draft (freshman and sophomore years of college) or revising my n-th draft obsessively (junior and senior years of college). Now I'm still on edge, and I'm grading the darn papers.

The more important thing is that I'm still trying to keep up the blissful schedule of "working all the time" that most academics embrace. People think we have light, easy, flexible schedules when in fact, we are pulling long days and nights like our peers in other professions such as law, investment banking, and government. Our hours may not be fixed to office schedules but we do try to keep churning out quality work for as long as possible each day, so a 10 to 15-hour work period is not that unusual. And things get worse during crunch time (yes, we have crunch time too, not just certified public accountants during tax season or attorneys preparing for court).

So, well-meaning friends and colleagues have been asking me if I plan to "keep it up" once my bundle of joy arrives in July. They don't automatically assume that I'm going to drop everything (although the inquiry about whether my career will proceed post-baby has come up more than once) but the implication is clear that time will be the most constrained resource. Not good when your professional well-being is predicated on squeezing productivity out of every non-essential-for-other-functions hour. [True to stereotype, a lot of academics don't even take time for leisure travel -- attending a conference or doing research in a location other than one's own home base is already considered a luxurious trip -- some "faculty brats" grow up thinking that their vacations were earmarked periods for Mom and/or Dad making breakthroughs in archives]

Hmm, will I be waiting up to see if my students are writing to me late at night, panicking about their assignments? Will I be checking email every few hours to stave the tide of correspondence from colleagues and students, so that they all get a response from me in a timely manner? Will I be telling my daughter that "Ooh, we're so lucky, we're visiting X-country because Mommy needs to do research there" (in fact, she may be going on one or two such trips this very year)?  Perhaps, perhaps.

And if I'm up anyways at some ungodly hour for feeding, soothing, or whatever, I may turn a sideways glance to email to see how my non-blood-related (but nevertheless precious) "kids" are doing.   :)

Patience, Thy Name is Professor

...Or substitute "professor" with "teacher"

Long gone are the days when professors could be moody, make scathing remarks about immature and pathetic their students are, or cast indifferent looks at the adoring (or at least cowering) masses in front of them in the lecture halls.

Now, we are for all intents and purposes, service providers, dishing up knowledge to our students ("consumers," as they are sometimes called in administrative scenarios). We are supposed to be cheerful, altruistic, and ever-understanding of their physical, mental, and emotional needs.  Some students have cultivated serious habits of blaming all the problems in their academic lives on inadequate professors.

What they forget is that we're just as human as they are.

And it's hard being a role model (or a saint) every single day of one's life.

I've had students ask me if I ever leave the office (I want to answer, "No dear, I sleep in a coffin next to my desk"), why I don't answer emails at 3am (I may just be asleep -- at home, in a bed), why I expect them to be in class (why not?), and so on. 

As much as I would like to be accessible to my students and to exercise compassion during the most challenging moments in their lives, I wish that some of them would remember that we have hearts and minds too.  Until someone invents the Perfect Professor (a robot), teaching and learning are two sides of the same coin, and can only be productive with compromise and empathy.

Semi-Loco Parentis

Teaching at the university level is hardly different from doing so at the preschool through secondary phases of education. Many people assume that it's easier to teach undergraduates (graduates, yes, but that's material for another post) than three-year-olds or fifteen-year-olds. I concede that each grade requires specialized expertise, but in all, we share the profound burden of being "semi" in loco parentis, not with legal responsibility but the even greater moral challenges of helping them become better people while preserving their sanity (and ours).

Being female, younger (less than 20 years older than them), and short in stature (height does matter!), I encounter at least one student every semester who insists on criticizing and "re-educating" me. I am still not sure what motivates all of these individuals (all male, to date) to take on the mission of informing me that I am wrong and flawed, but I admire their attention to detail. Sometimes the criticisms occur in face-to-face conversations (ok, bearable and manageable), through email (where we can start really heated textual debates), and now to take the cake, verbal shaming on Facebook (wow, the bar goes up or down, depending on how you choose to think about it).

I wasn't too surprised that my current self-appointed tutor, Student A, has decided to vent his frustration and dislike of me on Facebook. Students do it all the time for all sorts of reasons. Student A may have even learned a lesson because despite getting some support for his vitriol, he has also encountered some pushback, others wondering why he wants to critique me for being a foreigner, for not understanding his language and culture, etc. Being born and growing up as an ethnic minority and then reprising the same role here, I'm used to all of these forms of disparagement, but I'm not 100% prepared to dismiss each and every case as it manifests.

I do wonder if I'm not being empathetic enough -- students may find me an easy target to disrespect (for my gender, my nationality, my ethnicity, my amount of professional experience), they may gain a tremendously fulfilling sense of empowerment by threatening me (despite my attempts to engage them in productive dialogue and to be considerate of their needs). Maybe they will develop into more mature versions of themselves through nit-picking, although I wish that they would cultivate self-confidence and a sense of purpose in other ways. And as my father always reminds me, their hatred is small potatoes as problems go.

But my general conclusion is that I don't understand what causes certain students to revile my teaching methods or to find fault with every little thing that I do. I know that not every teacher suits every student (and vice versa!) but I would prefer indifference to the passionate frenzy that drives them to hate me. I can learn from some of their discontents, and I have definitely tried to be objective about them, but I also wish that they will utilize their youthful energy in other ways that will be more constructive for their education.

All of this relates to parenting because I've heard that children can be the harshest critics of their parents, so I realize I have to brace myself for soul-crushing commentary from my daughter and her siblings, if they come into existence. When I am in (full) loco parentis, will I be able to handle it? That is the question.

Complexes

As evident from the blog title/theme, I teach and conduct research in an university. I started my career as a professional academic five years ago, so I am still a junior member of the trade, but as all of us go through arduous apprenticeships for at least five years (six and a half in my case) before we earn our certification (piled higher and deeper, or whatever you would like to call it), I have been "in the business" for over a decade.

So I feel (smugly) qualified to say that I corrupt (read: nurture) the minds of 17-40 year old persons every day, all the time. I have served as a mentor, substitute parent, elder sister, cheerleader, counselor, and in many other capacities. I am a historian but what I propagate about my discipline is far less significant than what I hope to achieve by guiding and encouraging people to learn all sorts of knowledge and to improve not only the intellectual but also physical and emotional dimensions of their lives.

But like many other professors (I use the term humbly, not to elevate myself as some superior being), I did not learn how to teach systematically, according to theories and frameworks. Unlike educators toiling in the kindergartens through secondary schools, I did not spend years of my life studying child psychology, pedagogical method, and other related subjects. By virtue of spreading knowledge as transmitted to me by my own instructors (with some of my own innovations as garnish), I have been endowed with the privilege of doing "cutting-edge" (as the university administrators would like to believe) research on teaching and learning -- but I never claim to be a "professional educator," but just a "professional researcher who teaches."

So, I have an enduring complex about becoming a parent. I helped my parents raise my younger sister who is seven years younger than me. I have been the mother of two cats for ten years. So perhaps because of the empirical evidence I have collected through those experiences, I am more apprehensive about embarking on the task of being one of two primary "parental units" for a person who will be my responsibility until she reaches legal and social maturity.

This blog will therefore be partly therapeutic, helping me working out a variety of issues, and partly philosophical, contemplating how I can adapt some of what I have learned from teaching to parenting -- two skills which are very different but which share some common aspects.

I hope that my daughter will be forgiving of the many mistakes that I will make, that she will recognize that while I am far from perfect, I am not vainly unaware of my shortcomings, and that she will be a happier child than I was able to be (for many reasons to be explained in future posts). 

Inspiration

Thanks to my mother-in-law for starting this blog by giving me this garment (not for me to wear, of course).
More to follow in future posts...