Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Monday, July 23, 2012
Friends Over 40
I
have 251 friends, on Facebook. Besides my sisters and sisters-in-law, whom
I see, at best, once a year, there are maybe ten Facebook friends I see once a
year, usually at a conference, and at most four or five I see with any
regularity in Chicago. Outside Facebook, I have very few local friends.
I am not alone. A recent New York Times article on "Friends of a Certain Age" identified friendship as an issue for many people over 30, or, in my case, chasing 50: "No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B.F.F.’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends) — for now."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/fashion/the-challenge-of-making-friends-as-an-adult.html?pagewanted=all
According to the NYT, the difficulty with friends is that we do not have the proximity or time to form friendships, not in the way we did in college; many of us have partners and therefore have to look for two-fers, with a good fit for both partners; we have kids who take our time and complicate friendship -- both because we can't get away as often as we used to for drinks, dinner, movies and because when we try to befriend other people with kids, the two-fer of relationships compounds into the three or four or five-fer -- do my kids want to play with yours?
I can measure my diminishing friendships by the stillness of my home phone. Used to be, my husband and I would come home from a workday or a Saturday out shopping and have five or six messages from friends, checking in, inviting us out. Now, nothing. Most calls and messages we do get are robo calls, fundraising and surveys. This is partly because we communicate with friends via email, Facebook and texting. But it isn't just that. It is that we have fewer friends, or fewer friends that we see with any regularity. We have friends we can call if we have a party or we can invite for dinner. But often those invitations take three months -- no kidding -- to organize. Sometimes we get together with friends who have kids, and sometimes we manage to see our single friends outside the home. Every once in a while, we have dinner with another couple. But I have not had lunch or a drink with a female friend in ages.
I'd love to blame my friends, but I know that I have become harder to hang with, too. My husband and I have one night a week when we have a date and pay a sitter so we can go out. We jealously guard that night as couple time and only sometimes decide that seeing friends is sitter-worthy. I have one or two female friends who call me to chat -- they are both single and childless, and one is unemployed -- and I find myself rushing them off the phone. Is it that I really have less time to talk than my mother -- coffee cup in hand, cigarettes burning -- or do I just have less patience? I knit but cannot imagine joining a knitting circle. I exercise but can't imagine playing on a team or having a running buddy.
I make playdates for my kids -- a bizarre formal ritual of setting kids up in an era when they cannot run down the street to see their pals. I suppose I could have playdates, too. Apparently there are friendship sites like those used for dating. I imagine myself hunting for a friend there. What would I seek? "Friend, willing to be my BFF, but please do not call me, do not expect me to have lunch because I don't have time, and don't expect a girls night out because I don't want to take time away from my family. Maybe you can meet me at the gym."
I am not alone. A recent New York Times article on "Friends of a Certain Age" identified friendship as an issue for many people over 30, or, in my case, chasing 50: "No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B.F.F.’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends) — for now."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/fashion/the-challenge-of-making-friends-as-an-adult.html?pagewanted=all
According to the NYT, the difficulty with friends is that we do not have the proximity or time to form friendships, not in the way we did in college; many of us have partners and therefore have to look for two-fers, with a good fit for both partners; we have kids who take our time and complicate friendship -- both because we can't get away as often as we used to for drinks, dinner, movies and because when we try to befriend other people with kids, the two-fer of relationships compounds into the three or four or five-fer -- do my kids want to play with yours?
I can measure my diminishing friendships by the stillness of my home phone. Used to be, my husband and I would come home from a workday or a Saturday out shopping and have five or six messages from friends, checking in, inviting us out. Now, nothing. Most calls and messages we do get are robo calls, fundraising and surveys. This is partly because we communicate with friends via email, Facebook and texting. But it isn't just that. It is that we have fewer friends, or fewer friends that we see with any regularity. We have friends we can call if we have a party or we can invite for dinner. But often those invitations take three months -- no kidding -- to organize. Sometimes we get together with friends who have kids, and sometimes we manage to see our single friends outside the home. Every once in a while, we have dinner with another couple. But I have not had lunch or a drink with a female friend in ages.
I'd love to blame my friends, but I know that I have become harder to hang with, too. My husband and I have one night a week when we have a date and pay a sitter so we can go out. We jealously guard that night as couple time and only sometimes decide that seeing friends is sitter-worthy. I have one or two female friends who call me to chat -- they are both single and childless, and one is unemployed -- and I find myself rushing them off the phone. Is it that I really have less time to talk than my mother -- coffee cup in hand, cigarettes burning -- or do I just have less patience? I knit but cannot imagine joining a knitting circle. I exercise but can't imagine playing on a team or having a running buddy.
I make playdates for my kids -- a bizarre formal ritual of setting kids up in an era when they cannot run down the street to see their pals. I suppose I could have playdates, too. Apparently there are friendship sites like those used for dating. I imagine myself hunting for a friend there. What would I seek? "Friend, willing to be my BFF, but please do not call me, do not expect me to have lunch because I don't have time, and don't expect a girls night out because I don't want to take time away from my family. Maybe you can meet me at the gym."
Monday, June 25, 2012
Brilliant Mistake
I started knitting years ago when my kids were little. It was a way to fill the time when I was spending so much time sitting in a room with kids watching Elmo, Kipper, Calliou, and J.J. The Jet Plane (I can still sing all the songs from all of these shows).
I am not a great knitter. As with cooking, I am a recipe girl. I have to write everything down and double check a lot. I can't breeze along, chatting and I don't understand enough to ever create my own pattern or modify one in any significant way. But I like to try new things, so have done cables, lace patterns, sleeves, and other things as I grew more confident.
Early on, I knitted a lot of clothes for the kids. Gorgeous cable hoodies, striped cardigans, a dress for my daughter, hats, scarves. But they grew out of them so fast. I kept giving them to nieces and nephews. I switched to making toys -- monsters of various sorts. But in the last few years, I lost my mojo. I knit a few baby blankets but they took forever. I would barely pick up the needles at all.
Recently, I got the urge to knit. I decided to knit something for myself. I had made a few sweaters for myself in the past but not for a while. I got a great pattern for a vest that could be knitted all in one piece. It felt good. I got my mojo back and was really enjoying knitting again. Before the vest was even done, I got materials to make scarves for the kids and another sweater for me, this time from an amazing book of Knit Kimonos. But as I was finishing the vest, I, oddly, ran out of yarn. Got more. Finished. Put it on and there was a huge ruffle on the butt. I didn't remember that being in the pattern. Realized that the reason I'd run out of yarn was that at a point when I was supposed to add two stitches at two places in a row, I'd instead added stitches the entire row between the two spots. And I had done this three times! Oops.
Rather than view this as failure, I have decide to consider it a brilliant mistake. My first modification to a pattern. I rather like the ruffle -- it is like a bustle. It gives the vest an oddly romantic profile. Or a peacock pride. I will just try to keep the ruffles off the kimonos.
I am not a great knitter. As with cooking, I am a recipe girl. I have to write everything down and double check a lot. I can't breeze along, chatting and I don't understand enough to ever create my own pattern or modify one in any significant way. But I like to try new things, so have done cables, lace patterns, sleeves, and other things as I grew more confident.
Early on, I knitted a lot of clothes for the kids. Gorgeous cable hoodies, striped cardigans, a dress for my daughter, hats, scarves. But they grew out of them so fast. I kept giving them to nieces and nephews. I switched to making toys -- monsters of various sorts. But in the last few years, I lost my mojo. I knit a few baby blankets but they took forever. I would barely pick up the needles at all.
Recently, I got the urge to knit. I decided to knit something for myself. I had made a few sweaters for myself in the past but not for a while. I got a great pattern for a vest that could be knitted all in one piece. It felt good. I got my mojo back and was really enjoying knitting again. Before the vest was even done, I got materials to make scarves for the kids and another sweater for me, this time from an amazing book of Knit Kimonos. But as I was finishing the vest, I, oddly, ran out of yarn. Got more. Finished. Put it on and there was a huge ruffle on the butt. I didn't remember that being in the pattern. Realized that the reason I'd run out of yarn was that at a point when I was supposed to add two stitches at two places in a row, I'd instead added stitches the entire row between the two spots. And I had done this three times! Oops.
Friday, June 15, 2012
Glad I'm Not Young Anymore
Yesterday, noticing that most of my summer Ts were worn out, stretched, or otherwise unspectacular, I tried to go shopping. I thought I'd go to some cheapo stores and just pick up a few summer tops to perk up the old wardrobe. So, when my husband came home to give me a break from kid care, instead of going somewhere to do work, I biked to a corner on Michigan Ave with Top Shop, H&M and the Water Tower Place.
Top Shop was depressing. The clothes were clearly all made of much younger gals than me. There were lots of belly shirts, see through blouses, super short minis, and cutout dresses. I felt myself dreading when my daughter reaches her teens and hoping fashion would change significantly by then. I thought how glad I was that when I was young, it was the era of punk and post punk, when you were not expected to be "sexy" in any conventional way and when combat boots and a vintage 50s dress with dyed asymmetrical hair were the height of cool. Our clothes were not so body conscious (in fact, some looked like trash bags) and there did not seem to be such a mandate to be "hot" as there is now. Funky, punky, aggressive, edgy and witty were more the adjectives we craved for our appearance.
H&M had clothes that looked like something I might wear -- basic striped Ts -- but when I tried them on, nothing fit. I realized, once again, that while I am not hugely overweight, my body is out of sync with clothing designed for younger bodies. I tried a few tops with what I imagined were waist ties, but the tie hit me at some bizarre point midway between what I think of as my waist (a space that has always been more imagined than real, as I never really indent at the middle) and what I would consider an empire waist, just below the hooters. All this did was thicken me. Then I tried a little summer dress. Again, the waist fell in some nowhere-land -- it must be my descending boobs -- and the length managed to chop my thighs in a way that made my legs look like massive tree trunks. (I am 5' 2", so I am not sure how these would fit on people of normal height.)
Moving to the Water Tower mall, I tried Banana Republic, my old standby. But even there, I failed. Instead of overly young, much of the clothing seemed too corporate. As a teacher, who mostly works at home or bikes to coffee shops and libraries to work in the summer, I do not need fancy silk blouses. And the more casual stuff they had was misshapen, too, but in different ways from H&M. Instead of clothes that seemed cut for tiny dolls, the clothes at banana seemed too big. The T-shirts were all long and baggy, cut to hit my thighs, even in the smallest size.
Some of this, I know, relates to how messed up our body images are. The youthful shops aim for the anorectic crowd who all want to be size 0. The older shops target obese Americans and alter all their sizing so that we do not know how fat we have gotten. (I have dropped multiple sizes since high school while weighing more now than then). So, a small is now built for someone who is not really small but smaller than the very fat person who used to shop in a specialty shop like Lane Bryant but now wears a medium in many stores.
I now understand how women of a certain age become frowzy. The temptation to start wearing Birkenstocks and granny dresses, or pull-up pants and Ts with funny cats on them starts to make sense when you see the alternatives. Better than trying to fit a youthful style, perhaps. For me, vintage is the answer. A few months back, I scored a gorgeous fifties floral dress, a sixties polka dot and a 70s Pucci, all in one day. All fit my body perfectly and did not make me feel like I was trying to compete with teenagers, but rather hoping to have cocktails with the grown ups, watch art films, or have meetings in skyscrapers. I'll continue to go backwards, not to some imagined youth in myself, but to an older style.
Top Shop was depressing. The clothes were clearly all made of much younger gals than me. There were lots of belly shirts, see through blouses, super short minis, and cutout dresses. I felt myself dreading when my daughter reaches her teens and hoping fashion would change significantly by then. I thought how glad I was that when I was young, it was the era of punk and post punk, when you were not expected to be "sexy" in any conventional way and when combat boots and a vintage 50s dress with dyed asymmetrical hair were the height of cool. Our clothes were not so body conscious (in fact, some looked like trash bags) and there did not seem to be such a mandate to be "hot" as there is now. Funky, punky, aggressive, edgy and witty were more the adjectives we craved for our appearance.
H&M had clothes that looked like something I might wear -- basic striped Ts -- but when I tried them on, nothing fit. I realized, once again, that while I am not hugely overweight, my body is out of sync with clothing designed for younger bodies. I tried a few tops with what I imagined were waist ties, but the tie hit me at some bizarre point midway between what I think of as my waist (a space that has always been more imagined than real, as I never really indent at the middle) and what I would consider an empire waist, just below the hooters. All this did was thicken me. Then I tried a little summer dress. Again, the waist fell in some nowhere-land -- it must be my descending boobs -- and the length managed to chop my thighs in a way that made my legs look like massive tree trunks. (I am 5' 2", so I am not sure how these would fit on people of normal height.)
Moving to the Water Tower mall, I tried Banana Republic, my old standby. But even there, I failed. Instead of overly young, much of the clothing seemed too corporate. As a teacher, who mostly works at home or bikes to coffee shops and libraries to work in the summer, I do not need fancy silk blouses. And the more casual stuff they had was misshapen, too, but in different ways from H&M. Instead of clothes that seemed cut for tiny dolls, the clothes at banana seemed too big. The T-shirts were all long and baggy, cut to hit my thighs, even in the smallest size.
Some of this, I know, relates to how messed up our body images are. The youthful shops aim for the anorectic crowd who all want to be size 0. The older shops target obese Americans and alter all their sizing so that we do not know how fat we have gotten. (I have dropped multiple sizes since high school while weighing more now than then). So, a small is now built for someone who is not really small but smaller than the very fat person who used to shop in a specialty shop like Lane Bryant but now wears a medium in many stores.
I now understand how women of a certain age become frowzy. The temptation to start wearing Birkenstocks and granny dresses, or pull-up pants and Ts with funny cats on them starts to make sense when you see the alternatives. Better than trying to fit a youthful style, perhaps. For me, vintage is the answer. A few months back, I scored a gorgeous fifties floral dress, a sixties polka dot and a 70s Pucci, all in one day. All fit my body perfectly and did not make me feel like I was trying to compete with teenagers, but rather hoping to have cocktails with the grown ups, watch art films, or have meetings in skyscrapers. I'll continue to go backwards, not to some imagined youth in myself, but to an older style.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Stay at Home Madwoman
If it has not been clear before, it is now. If I were a stay at home mom, I would go bananas. I honestly do not know how people do it. Every summer, there are stretches when I have a week or more with the kids, with no sitter or camp or anything. It always has some very nice time -- swimming, playing games, cooking, bowling. But I always blow my top, more than once.
Part of it is that I do not have the capacity to entertain them for hours on end. I would like to park them in front of a TV and ignore them all day. But, I try to avoid having them become such lazy slobs. I would like to open the door and say "go play and I'll see you at dinner time" but that doesn't happen anymore. So, while constantly trying to pry them away from ipods, TVs and other screens, I have to invent things to do (telling them to go read or play on their own works for a while but not all day).
This year, I have been setting up a lot of playdates, which helps keep the kids sane and gives them a little space from each other and from me. It has mostly been nice -- I even got my daughter and her friend a manicure! We have also baked, played board games, and gone for walks. But, then, because I am not the sitter, but the mom, part of me feels like I have to use this time, time when I cannot do my own work, to do practical stuff that I do not want to do when I am paying a sitter (and should be doing my own work). So, in the cracks between playdates and bowling and playing and swimming, I have done doctor's appointments, haircuts, lots of errands, and massive clean ups of the basement, bedrooms, closets. The kids are okay with the doctors and haircuts, even with the errands. But the clean ups are horrifying. These involve me taking all the stuff out of piles and boxes and cabinets and drawers and saying, "Can we get rid of this?" then fighting my kids' desire to save everything as a "treasure" or, as my 8 year old keeps saying, "something that has sentimental value." According to my kids, the following have sentimental value: broken toys, baby blocks, old chapstick, every drawing they ever made, every piece of plastic they ever got in a goody bag at a birthday party, every single stuffed animal that has ever crossed their paths. Sure, after wearing them down, we got rid of a lot. It took some wheedling. With books, I told them they could have the money we made selling the books to buy more books. With the rest, I just made clear that no toys can come in unless there is room for them. Still, it is a struggle. So, inevitably I find myself yelling nonsense, making empty threats, sounding like a crazy lady. I told my daughter that if she didn't change her ways she would end up on the reality show "Hoarders" and that she was grounded if she left even one stuffed animal on the floor out of a bin.
Who is this crazy lady? Why doe she care of her kids room is a mess? Why can't she adopt a good enough housekeeping motto and leave it at that? Why does she sound so much like her own mother?
I think it is because I am not a stay at home mom. I want a clean place because home is both where I work and relax and both are troubled by random toys, piles of comic books, socks, and other strange misplaced items. But, at the end of the day, I do not want it to be my job to clean that stuff up. (And I don't want it to be my husband's either.) I kind of resent it, like I am being forced into a role that I thought I had decided to escape. And I resent its inescapability. I know the kids don't care, but I know, or think, they need good habits for later in life. Even though I know that they, like most of us, will live like pigs for a while when they are older, then hopefully grow out of it and change their ways. I now have a greater sympathy for my own mom, who was also a working mom and who got no help at all at home (my father being much less helpful than my husband, who cooks and cleans a lot). And who yelled a lot.
Well, for now, it is tidy and, for now, I will try and be a nice mom. But I, and they, are counting the days until the sitter starts work.
Part of it is that I do not have the capacity to entertain them for hours on end. I would like to park them in front of a TV and ignore them all day. But, I try to avoid having them become such lazy slobs. I would like to open the door and say "go play and I'll see you at dinner time" but that doesn't happen anymore. So, while constantly trying to pry them away from ipods, TVs and other screens, I have to invent things to do (telling them to go read or play on their own works for a while but not all day).
This year, I have been setting up a lot of playdates, which helps keep the kids sane and gives them a little space from each other and from me. It has mostly been nice -- I even got my daughter and her friend a manicure! We have also baked, played board games, and gone for walks. But, then, because I am not the sitter, but the mom, part of me feels like I have to use this time, time when I cannot do my own work, to do practical stuff that I do not want to do when I am paying a sitter (and should be doing my own work). So, in the cracks between playdates and bowling and playing and swimming, I have done doctor's appointments, haircuts, lots of errands, and massive clean ups of the basement, bedrooms, closets. The kids are okay with the doctors and haircuts, even with the errands. But the clean ups are horrifying. These involve me taking all the stuff out of piles and boxes and cabinets and drawers and saying, "Can we get rid of this?" then fighting my kids' desire to save everything as a "treasure" or, as my 8 year old keeps saying, "something that has sentimental value." According to my kids, the following have sentimental value: broken toys, baby blocks, old chapstick, every drawing they ever made, every piece of plastic they ever got in a goody bag at a birthday party, every single stuffed animal that has ever crossed their paths. Sure, after wearing them down, we got rid of a lot. It took some wheedling. With books, I told them they could have the money we made selling the books to buy more books. With the rest, I just made clear that no toys can come in unless there is room for them. Still, it is a struggle. So, inevitably I find myself yelling nonsense, making empty threats, sounding like a crazy lady. I told my daughter that if she didn't change her ways she would end up on the reality show "Hoarders" and that she was grounded if she left even one stuffed animal on the floor out of a bin.
Who is this crazy lady? Why doe she care of her kids room is a mess? Why can't she adopt a good enough housekeeping motto and leave it at that? Why does she sound so much like her own mother?
I think it is because I am not a stay at home mom. I want a clean place because home is both where I work and relax and both are troubled by random toys, piles of comic books, socks, and other strange misplaced items. But, at the end of the day, I do not want it to be my job to clean that stuff up. (And I don't want it to be my husband's either.) I kind of resent it, like I am being forced into a role that I thought I had decided to escape. And I resent its inescapability. I know the kids don't care, but I know, or think, they need good habits for later in life. Even though I know that they, like most of us, will live like pigs for a while when they are older, then hopefully grow out of it and change their ways. I now have a greater sympathy for my own mom, who was also a working mom and who got no help at all at home (my father being much less helpful than my husband, who cooks and cleans a lot). And who yelled a lot.
Well, for now, it is tidy and, for now, I will try and be a nice mom. But I, and they, are counting the days until the sitter starts work.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
New Queer Histories
John Irving's new novel, IN ONE PERSON, is fascinating, for lots of reasons. Those who know Irving's previous work will be tempted to read the book biographically: it is written in the first person with an author as narrator; it is set in new England; it features wrestling, bears, of a sort, and lots and lots of transsexual and transgender characters. The narrator is bi, attracted to both men and women and, especially, or also, transvestites, transsexuals or pre-op transgender people. (there is a lot of talk in the novel itself about how the names for various types have changed over the years, so I am using all that are used in the novel.) Reading it, one wants to know, is this Irving's coming out? Is he the bi narrator? Does this explain the earlier books?
But the book is interesting in other ways, too. It revisits the AIDS crisis and reminds us that the Reagan years were not the perfect years presidential candidates seem to imagine, but years of misery (Many of us never forgot that -- in addition to AIDS, I recall masses of homeless people, strongly charged racial issues, a bad economy and a culture of violence and indifference). In the context of conversations about gay teens and bullying, it posits a queer child who has the "wrong" crushes, one on his soon-to-be stepfather, one on an older woman who turns out to be a transsexual, and one on a fellow male student. It lays claim to the idea that being queer is inborn, literally, as the narrator has an absent but queer father. And characters who try to "nurture" queerness out of other characters are seen as idiotic and ineffectual. Against the model of the lonely child whose desires not only cannot be spoken, but make the child feel isolated, Irving creates a world in which there are multiple, helpful and understanding adults, and in which the narrator is far from the only queer in town. In addition to a cross dressing grandpa and the transsexual crush, among the adults, the narrator retroactively discovers that more than a few fellow students are gay, bi, transsexual or otherwise queered. Straight people exist in this world but feel like a minority. In fact, one character late in the novel complains to the narrator that his books make difference seem normal!
But the book is also somewhat misogynist. A transsexual is highly valued but only one woman with a vagina is valued. She functions more or less like the gay best friend has functioned in so many narratives -- as a safe place and best friend for the polymorphous narrator. Lesbians exist in the novel but they come across poorly - as man-hating, vicious, or embarrassingly womanist. It is a bit of a disappointment in a book that imagines a world of difference and demands tolerance on every page that people with penises are the best she-characters and women are somehow painted as the most negative forces. And not just women, but mothers -- in particular, two mothers are blamed for trying to deny their son's gayness. The "best" mother is one who leaves her husband because he can't accept his son's queerness, then kills herself when her son dies of AIDS. I'm not asking for a politically perfect fiction, but, in a fiction so attendant to gender stereotypes, I'd have expected a little more.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Evaluations
So, I just got what are described as Course Instructor Feedback forms, which are course evaluations. Of course, I never feel that the course is being evaluated. It is me. And my evaluations this time placed me in the very good but not quite excellent category -- a number that should satisfy but feels like failure.
This semester, I taught two theory classes. One in film theory and one in feminist and gender theory. These are always tough. Both are required courses for the major and both involve lots of dense and difficult reading, with lots of jargony language. I try to account for that as best I can, to unpack the readings and make them seem relevant to the students. Generally, there are a small number of students who love the courses -- the super smart kids, the ones who like the really tough stuff. And there are a few who hate it, and me. Often, these are kids who do not like or cannot handle super academic stuff (weird, right? at college? But the vast majority do not like theory, want film classes to be more or less film appreciation, or to teach them what they already believe.) Usually, the ones who hate it latch onto feminism as a way of saying what's wrong with me. "How was the teacher?" "She was a feminist." So, in a sixteen week class in which we discussed feminism one week and queer theory one other week, one of the film theory respondents said that I spent the whole semester doing feminism and that it was not a film theory class at all. I guess he forgot about Munsterberg, Benjamin, Metz, Altman, Kracauer, Bazin, Chion, Gorbman and all the others we read who had NOTHING to say about feminism or gender. Others will complain that I make them see old movies -- they want me to show what is in theaters, I guess, instead of things like THE PAWNBROKER, BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, FRANKENSTEIN, KLUTE, THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP (isn't that recent?), DR. HORRIBLE'S SING A LONG BLOG (again, isn't that kind of recent?), ALIEN (how bad is that?), LETTER TO THREE WIVES, SOME LIKE IT HOT, PILLOW TALK, or HAIRSPRAY (okay, that is three that are from this century) I am supposed to show, what, TWILIGHT? IRON MAN?
So, I know that evaluations will reflect this span and that in a difficult required course I am facing an uphill battle.
But what baffles me is the gap between my experience of the class and the final evaluation. In the gender theory class, especially, I felt like I was reading the wrong evaluation. This was a class with students who had chosen gender studies and therefore would not blame me for being a feminist. This was a survey in which the span of readings -- from Wollstonecraft to Halberstam -- was clearly mapped out. This was a class in which the kids came to class every day prepared and ready to speak. They had opinions about the readings and always seemed excited to talk about them. And they were able to talk about them on their final exam. We got into deep discussions daily and we also laughed and seemed to form a bond. It seemed like a love fest. But when I got the evaluations, there were clearly some people who felt differently.
But even more baffling is that in both classes the numbers did not match the comments. In the written portion, they said I was a great teacher, well organized, knowledgeable, accessible, that the class was well organized, that I explained things clearly, was accessible, etc. In gender, they loved that I had them blog and do a PR project. In film, they appreciated that I let them do a film instead of a paper for their final assignment.
Ad it isn't just me. A very good friend of mine has also faced this lately. I taught with her, have seen her in the classroom, admire her teaching tremendously and know that she really teaches her students well. But the evaluations never reflect that.
So, where was the failure? Part of me imagines that people who get the tip top marks on these things pander to students. But that is probably a cop out. Maybe I am the teacher they remember later? Maybe challenging students is undesirable in the current student as client climate? Maybe I just have a dissociative disorder and can't tell a good experience from a bad? Is this what it will feel like when my kids have to go to therapy to deal with whatever damage I have done to them, whatever troubles I am blamed for?
This semester, I taught two theory classes. One in film theory and one in feminist and gender theory. These are always tough. Both are required courses for the major and both involve lots of dense and difficult reading, with lots of jargony language. I try to account for that as best I can, to unpack the readings and make them seem relevant to the students. Generally, there are a small number of students who love the courses -- the super smart kids, the ones who like the really tough stuff. And there are a few who hate it, and me. Often, these are kids who do not like or cannot handle super academic stuff (weird, right? at college? But the vast majority do not like theory, want film classes to be more or less film appreciation, or to teach them what they already believe.) Usually, the ones who hate it latch onto feminism as a way of saying what's wrong with me. "How was the teacher?" "She was a feminist." So, in a sixteen week class in which we discussed feminism one week and queer theory one other week, one of the film theory respondents said that I spent the whole semester doing feminism and that it was not a film theory class at all. I guess he forgot about Munsterberg, Benjamin, Metz, Altman, Kracauer, Bazin, Chion, Gorbman and all the others we read who had NOTHING to say about feminism or gender. Others will complain that I make them see old movies -- they want me to show what is in theaters, I guess, instead of things like THE PAWNBROKER, BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, FRANKENSTEIN, KLUTE, THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP (isn't that recent?), DR. HORRIBLE'S SING A LONG BLOG (again, isn't that kind of recent?), ALIEN (how bad is that?), LETTER TO THREE WIVES, SOME LIKE IT HOT, PILLOW TALK, or HAIRSPRAY (okay, that is three that are from this century) I am supposed to show, what, TWILIGHT? IRON MAN?
So, I know that evaluations will reflect this span and that in a difficult required course I am facing an uphill battle.
But what baffles me is the gap between my experience of the class and the final evaluation. In the gender theory class, especially, I felt like I was reading the wrong evaluation. This was a class with students who had chosen gender studies and therefore would not blame me for being a feminist. This was a survey in which the span of readings -- from Wollstonecraft to Halberstam -- was clearly mapped out. This was a class in which the kids came to class every day prepared and ready to speak. They had opinions about the readings and always seemed excited to talk about them. And they were able to talk about them on their final exam. We got into deep discussions daily and we also laughed and seemed to form a bond. It seemed like a love fest. But when I got the evaluations, there were clearly some people who felt differently.
But even more baffling is that in both classes the numbers did not match the comments. In the written portion, they said I was a great teacher, well organized, knowledgeable, accessible, that the class was well organized, that I explained things clearly, was accessible, etc. In gender, they loved that I had them blog and do a PR project. In film, they appreciated that I let them do a film instead of a paper for their final assignment.
Ad it isn't just me. A very good friend of mine has also faced this lately. I taught with her, have seen her in the classroom, admire her teaching tremendously and know that she really teaches her students well. But the evaluations never reflect that.
So, where was the failure? Part of me imagines that people who get the tip top marks on these things pander to students. But that is probably a cop out. Maybe I am the teacher they remember later? Maybe challenging students is undesirable in the current student as client climate? Maybe I just have a dissociative disorder and can't tell a good experience from a bad? Is this what it will feel like when my kids have to go to therapy to deal with whatever damage I have done to them, whatever troubles I am blamed for?
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