A group of academics is training to be lead marshals in tomorrow’s graduation ceremony. John the marketing specialist explains what the procedure is (did you know this is what marketing specialists did in universities? I didn’t either.)
The procedure is long and complicated.
“Will I have to talk to anybody during the ceremony?” an academic from the School of Engineering asks in a haunted voice.
“What do you mean?” the marketing specialist asks.
“As long as I don’t have to talk to anybody, I can do it,” the academic explains.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“Oh well, then I’m fine,” the academic beams.
You have to be one of us to realize how often we ask ourselves this very question.
Clarissa's Blog 
But as a teacher / lecturer a professor must speak to students a lot: at lectures, in his office, etc. In addition, one must talk with colleagues. Is talking in other contexts so fundamentally different? One doesn’t speak with colleagues only about work, right?
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It’s just that one can resign oneself to speaking in certain contexts. But having an additional one imposed on you gets too much. Especially wen you find yourself in a completely new capacity.
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Resign to speaking? Don’t you usually love speaking in certain contexts, like to students?
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Yes, I can be a huge chatterbox. But:
1. I either speak to the very few people on the planet that I actively like’
2. Or, I speak in hierarchical contexts where I have a very defined (and, ideally, dominating) role.
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off-topic:
http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2013/04/florida_teen_girl_charged_with.php?page=2
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“Mommy, Jesse and I were conducting a little chemistry experiment at school yesterday and there was a tiny little explosion.”
“Is the principal asking me to come to school to talk about this? ”
“Oh no. There is no more school and no more principal, Mommy.”
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This being said, a Drano-and-aluminium foil mix explodes only slightly harder than a Coke-and-Mentos combination. The way that looks, the only reason not to hold the bottle in mittened hands as it goes off is the loud boom – it doesn’t even give out any toxic gases. In a perfect world, the kid would have blown that up in the nearby park, but by the way you describe America, I wonder if there even exists a nearby park to blow stuff up into. This incident should have earned the girl a stern talking to and possibly a short suspension, but not being expelled from school, let alone tried as an adult for bringing a weapon to school. This is absurd, and the authorities involved fail basic logic. All explosions go boom, some explosions are dangerous, therefore all things that go boom are dangerous enough to ruin someone’s future over.
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I think the school is simply afraid of other parents bulldozing it over if this kid isn’t expelled. If the girl isn’t expelled, I’m afraid she’ll remain the only student in the school. Who would keep taking their children to a place where she goes?
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Ah right, I had forgotten this is the country where people go pick up their kids from the school bus stop 100ft from their front door. Pretty much the only way that mix could’ve been dangerous was if someone tried to stick their hand in it while it was boiling up or tried to set it on fire, but let the parents hear the magic word “explosion” and they’ll go haywire. Seriously, the way everybody talks about this, I thought at first she had cooked nitroglycerin in the school yard using a Jules Verne book as a guide or something.
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In the meanwhile, kids who feel like shooting up an entire school manage to do so easily. There is no principle to this particular madness.
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I’m a wannabe-teacher and I like to talk to students and to people that I like, but I don’t like to talk to people in general because this sucks ass.
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I think you should definitely be a teacher.
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There’s still a lot to do for this…even though I wouldn’t want to be an university teacher.
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Interesting. I know from experience that I used to be a really shy person and took me a long while to really get comfortable and break out of my shell when it comes to having a good conversation with people. Fortunately, I’m able to do it effortlessly without people realizing that I was diagnosed with anything and on the phone too.
As an Aspie yourself, do you also have trouble with body language in any way?
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I can communicate with anybody and charm anybody if I want. 🙂 The problem is, I almost never feel like it. 🙂
I can’t decipher people’s body language at all. I need to be told things very directly. I SO hate these stupid non-verbal clues and stuff. Why not just say things directly?
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This is why I like blogging. Everything is 100% verbal.
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I have the same “problem”.
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// I SO hate these stupid non-verbal clues and stuff. Why not just say things directly?
Most of information is often non verbal. This way f.e. people see whether they are lied to or not, what is the real intent behind the words.
Have you ever tried to approach this aspect of life scientifically? If you don’t do it naturally, you could learn (at least, some of) it in an organized fashion. As part of one’s self-development process. If you learned many other things, why not this extremely important one?
I saw “The Pocket Guide To Man Watching” by Desmond Morris. This book is old, but it has many photos and explains some of body language and the reasons behind it. Surely, there are better books, but I don’t know them.
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“This way f.e. people see whether they are lied to or not, what is the real intent behind the words.”
– My approach is: whatever people say is the truth. This is why I never doubt what the students tell me about being late, absent, or handing in essays late. And this generates a lot of respect among us.
” If you learned many other things, why not this extremely important one?”
– I don’t think it’s at all important. It doesn’t feel like I’m missing anything. If NT people want to play weird games, that’s their funeral. 🙂
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“I SO hate these stupid non-verbal clues and stuff. Why not just say things directly?”
Because using non-verbal cues (not clues) _is_ saying things directly for most people?
If you ever do want to improve your receptive paralinguistic skills (I know, fat chance) then a good (fun) way to start might be with learning some ASL. My experience with it turned from someone who had to be hit over the head with paralanguage to get it (not autistic, just kind of oblivious) to becoming far above average.
A strange thing is that it also helped with deciphering and recognizing patterns in intonation. And it’s a lot of fun? Does your university offer ASL? Just make sure it’s not some English-based system like SEE which won’t help at all.
Purely in terms of personal development ASL was easily the best foreign language investment I ever made.
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I’m not autistic but I don’t like a lot of flowing, emotional information. School teaching, where I have to decode a flood of such info all the time, would have been hell for me. The military, had I been suited, would have been heaven. There is no requirement to decode emotional information there, at all. My minimum requirement is for there to be a basic social structure in place that does not depend on my readings or misreadings of emotional information. That’s putting too much pressure on me. It feels like emotional blackmail as in “get the next packet of information wrong and you’re out of a job!” I do become more and more tense when that is what is demanded of me, and in states of tension, I’m actually less perceptive. I switch off when I go into survival mode and act only according to necessity and logic. I don’t read the subtle cues at all.
And that, my dear ladies and gentlemen, is why I am a feminist. It’s not — as my enemies would like to contrive it — because I “want to be a man”, but because I really, genuinely can’t read the emotional nuances unless in optimal conditions. I do have to be very relaxed and at ease. Being treated like this mode of interaction comes easily to me make me feel like a fraud. When someone says, “You should make more effort with person X” or “person Y” I feel like I have to draw together limited energy reserves to try to figure out what is being asked of me. Inevitably, the more I strain at the challenge, the more my energies are diverted to logic and survival. It’s like emotional hypothermia. Just as I’ve said on my videos, I’m very skilled at emotional repression for survival purposes. I remember the day we had planned to go out somewhere. it was 1976. Then the phone rang and a very serious voice asked to speak to my father. I put him on the phone — and he fainted. His brother had been killed in action. We still went out on that day and did what we had planned. Nobody spoke — but nobody cried, either. Nobody has ever shed a tear.
So that’s a basic survival thing for me. If something emotionally serious happens, I don’t feel it. At least for a long time, I don’t feel it. Then I have to go back much later, and pick up the pieces.
That’s why asking me to do “women’s work” is a nightmare. Or, I’m hired for a job and I think it’s not women’s work (emotional work), but it turns out to be be that. Then I have to leave, traumatized, because I switched off, fearing the situation, when I’m supposed to have emotionally interacted. I can’t emotionally interact, because the implicit threat, “Your job depends on this,” hangs over me, and so long as there is a threat to my survival, I do not feel emotion.
It’s an odd thing, but a cultural and adaptive tendency. People tend to make their own interpretations, which relate to what they can understand about contemporary society. One, as I have said, is they think I am “trying to be a man”.
I don’t feel helped by that. People’s perspectives are so limited and self-serving. Feminists, even, have not been helpful.
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“That’s why asking me to do “women’s work” is a nightmare. Or, I’m hired for a job and I think it’s not women’s work (emotional work), but it turns out to be be that. Then I have to leave, traumatized, because I switched off, fearing the situation, when I’m supposed to have emotionally interacted. I can’t emotionally interact, because the implicit threat, “Your job depends on this,” hangs over me, and so long as there is a threat to my survival, I do not feel emotion.”
– Hear, hear!!! I like to offer emotions of my own free will but I hate it when people try to extort them from me. I’d just rather continue being told that I’m a typical man.
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Body language for me isn’t difficult at all to tell. I can clearly tell when someone’s angry or happy or getting annoyed by their expressions and posture. There have been times where I haven’t been able to tell sarcasm apart from a serious comment at times, but this has been on the Internet.
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Just seen the article:
The Hong Kong researchers hope to crack the problem by comparing the genomes of super-high-IQ individuals with the genomes of people drawn from the general population. By studying the variation in the two groups, they hope to isolate some of the hereditary factors behind IQ.
Their conclusions could lay the groundwork for a genetic test to predict a person’s inherited cognitive ability. Such a tool could be useful, but it also might be divisive.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324162304578303992108696034.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read
What do you think will happen, if they succeed and fetuses would be able to be tested in the womb? Or even get the option to insert / change certain genes in artificial insemination?
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Intelligence is hard work. Genes can’t help one in any way. But I know that Americans love to believe that there can be a “pill” that will make them smart. 🙂
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Intelligence is basic inborn capability plus hard work. Not everybody can be a math scientist or a great painter, hard work or no.
And the research is done in China, not America. Not pills, but gene identification and manipulation.
If “Genes can’t help one in any way”, is the boy in the below comment simply lazy? And the same true for all people with bad grades?
Didn’t you yourself have a problem studying some language? German, iirc?
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About children, I wanted to ask you to write about your views on career choice.
F.e. recently I saw an Internet discussion about an educated middle class family, who adopted (*) a child and when he was older began investing in school and after school activities, but the boy wanted only to visit a local auto repair shop, not to study math or playing an instrument or anything else. The adopting parents were very worried about his future.
Wanted to ask your opinion about this all. I remember one discussion on your blog, in which you talked (with your sister) about desiring your children to be ambitious and middle class too, rather than choosing to be poor. So, what to do? If you are interested in the topic, a post would be welcome. 🙂
(*) I see adoption here playing a role only in increasing chances that the boy won’t have the intellectual capabilities as of the adopting parents. This is one of the reasons people want to give birth rather than adopt. I am sure that they would have behaved exactly the same had the boy been their biological son. But since IQ is hugely genetic, the chances of them giving birth to a similar son wouldn’t be too high.
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If one’s child fails at school, says s/he finds lessons boring and spends all free time with friends, computer games or Internet (and possibly a shop), shouldn’t parents do something rather than letting a child to “loose” material from low grades onward?
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“If one’s child fails at school, says s/he finds lessons boring and spends all free time with friends, computer games or Internet (and possibly a shop), shouldn’t parents do something rather than letting a child to “loose” material from low grades onward?”
– I think they should analyze their relationship (to each other, not the child), analyze the family environment, and consider why the home atmosphere is so intolerable to the kid. Maybe while the analysis takes place, the kid should go stay with grandparents or aunt/ uncle. But the last thing they should do is bug and persecute the child with tutors, etc. which will only aggravate the kid’s anxiety.
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Do you think that all children, who fail at school, do so because of bad parents? What about finding school too hard and “raising hands”?
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“Do you think that all children, who fail at school, do so because of bad parents?”
– I think that the outcome of parenting is indicative of the quality of said parenting, yes.
“What about finding school too hard and “raising hands”?”
– I don’t understand this question. What hands?
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“F.e. recently I saw an Internet discussion about an educated middle class family, who adopted (*) a child and when he was older began investing in school and after school activities, but the boy wanted only to visit a local auto repair shop, not to study math or playing an instrument or anything else. The adopting parents were very worried about his future.”
– These parents are snobs. A good auto mechanic makes more than most college profs. Wanting to be a mechanic is an honorable career choice and it in no way makes one “lazy.”
“If “Genes can’t help one in any way”, is the boy in the below comment simply lazy?”
– Laziness does not exist. Besides, I think people in auto repair shops work extremely hard. What makes you think their work is easier than playing an instrument or whatever? Do you have something personal against auto mechanics? 🙂
“Wanted to ask your opinion about this all. I remember one discussion on your blog, in which you talked (with your sister) about desiring your children to be ambitious and middle class too, rather than choosing to be poor.’
– OK, really putting words in my mouth. 🙂 🙂 🙂 I don’t want anybody to be middle class or not middle class. This is a meaningless term in the US where 90% of people believe they are middle class. What we were discussing is how children from rich families of very hard-working parents often lack any capacity or desire to achieve anything or often even get out of bed in the morning. I studied with rich and very rich people and I saw a direct correlation between the size of their trust fund and their incapacity to have a life. On the negative side, I still have no explanation for why this happens. On the positive side, however, I will never be rich enough for this to pose a problem for my son. 🙂 This only happens to people with really BIG money.
“But since IQ is hugely genetic, the chances of them giving birth to a similar son wouldn’t be too high.”
– IQ is a myth.
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// – I don’t understand this question. What hands?
It’s a Russian expression. A kid finds school too hard (I say genetics, you say – bad parents) and looses hope of success. Why apply yourself extra hard to get C, instead of D?
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Loses, not looses.
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The absolute majority of the most significant scholars in all fields come from piss-poor families of barely literate or plain illiterate folks. 🙂 Remember Lomonosov? In my field, every talented scholar who is a star in the field comes not from a family of intellectual geniuses but of people with very limited educations. My 1st thesis adviser is from the family of illiterate fishers. The 2nd is from the family of 7 siblings none of whom finished high school. Except she who became a world-famous scholar. Her only daughter, however, is a housewife. The Chair at my grad school is from a family of indigent farmers. The former Chair, also a farmer family, dire poverty, etc. I can go on forever with these examples.
Maybe there is a brilliant scholar or two who is a child of famous scholars, but those cases are very very rare. So here goes the genetic explanation. 🙂
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OK, I just remembered a colleague whose father is also a brilliant scholar. But her sister, however, is a very dim-witted creature. So again, genes don’t help.
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