My feminist journey started before I was old enough to remember anything. My father’s mother caught my mother sorting apples into two piles. One pile consisted of beautiful, big, perfect apples and the other contained small, shriveled, spotty ones.

“Why are you sorting them?” my grandmother asked.

“The good ones are for your son and baby Clarissa,” my mother explained. “And I’ll just take this other pile.”

“No,” my grandmother said. “Just no. This is about the worst thing you can do for yourself, my son, and baby Clarissa.”

Then she slid the beautiful pile towards my mother.

“You eat these,” she said. “And let me never hear this self-sacrificial crap from you again. Your biggest duty is to take care of yourself.”

Several days later, the two women were walking down the street when they saw a long line of women queuing in the scorching sun.

“This is the place where they sometimes sell peaches!” my mother exclaimed. “Let’s join the line!”

“Are you suggesting we stand here in the sun just to buy something?” my grandmother asked in an appalled voice.

“Well, it will only be about 2-2,5 hours.”

“No,” my grandmother said. “We will not stand here with all these weird women, baking ourselves in the sun for hours. Instead, we will walk over to the marketplace and in ten minutes have all the peaches we want.”

“But the peaches at the marketplace cost 10 times more!”

“And how much does our health and our comfort cost?” my grandmother retorted. “What did I tell you about sacrificing yourself?”

This was when my fate as a woman who would never consider sacrificing herself was sealed. Unfortunately, the majority of other grandmothers forgot to hold similar conversations with their daughters. The generations of women who came of age in the twenties and the forties, who survived the Civil War, the World War, Stalin, starvation and genocide, who destroyed traditional gender roles and never looked back, forgot to mention to their daughters that strength and resilience had to be accompanied with self-respect.

As a result, they brought up a generation of women who thought that since they were strong, it was only logical for them to sacrifice themselves for their weak and helpless children and men.

[To be continued. . .]

Question on the final exam:

Today, Latin American countries suffer from high degrees of poverty, instability, violence, and racism. Draw on the knowledge of history you have gained from this course and on the readings we have done to discuss the reasons behind this.

Answer:

The problem with Latin American countries is that instead of working hard and improving their lives they just sit there feeling like victims and blaming everybody else for their problems. They just need to get themselves together and stop being violent and racist to each other.

For the last five years, we’ve had a beautiful, fulfilling relationship. You tended to all of my needs, and I couldn’t begin to imagine ever wanting anybody else by my side. You were with me in good times and in bad. Oh, the many happy hours we spent together in bed! Oh, the many beautiful meals we shared! Oh, the joy and the tears you brought to my life!

Recently, however, you just stopped giving me as much as I need. You had so many issues that we stopped spending enough time together and eventually, almost against my will, I noticed somebody else. Somebody who could give me a lot more than you were willing to any longer. So I strayed and now I’m with somebody else. I still come back to you every once in a while, but it’s mostly out of a sense of guilt and nostalgia.

Of course, the moment you get your shit together and become as reliable and giving as you used to be, I will gladly dump your rival and come back to you, my dear Kindle Fire.

I still believe that the Kindle is the best invention of the decade. However, Amazon really dropped the ball with Kindle Fire. It has a very bad, unreliable charging port that goes out of commission very fast. Even after Kindle Fire 2 and Kindle Fire HD were released, this issue was not fixed. I have read hundreds of reviews, and crowds of people are experiencing the same issue with the charging port as I do. The battery is also pretty much the worst on the market, unlike the phenomenal Kindle 2 battery.

Things got to the point where I had to engage in the nightly ritual of trying to get the Kindle Fire to begin charging. I even had a name for the ritual.

“I need 20 minutes to go have sex with the Kindle,” I would explain to N. Initially I used a stronger expression to name this process but N. is disturbed by profanity.

I can’t begin to tell you how annoying it is to have this great technology right there in front of you that you can’t use because you dread the process of charging it.

So I finally gave in to my cravings for a more reliable gadget to handle my apps and crossed over to the dark side. And in the world of electronics, the dark side is, of course, Apple.

I now have an iPod Touch 5. Of course, I’ll never love it as much as I love my wounded Kindle Fire, but it’s pink and that’s a very redeeming quality.

A rugged middle-aged gentleman turns to me and says abruptly, “I’m from Arkansas!”

“Good!” I respond, not sure what is expected of me.

“I’ve been driving my car for 20 years in my own state and everything was fine. Then I come into this mess of a state and have my license taken away because I didn’t have a seat belt on. What do they care if I have my seat belt on? It’s mine to do what I want with it, right? And now I have to go to court to get the license back.”

“I wish you the best of luck,” I say.

The bus approaches the campus.

“So what’s this place here?” the man from Arkansas asks.

“It’s a university,” I explain.

The man looks puzzled.

“A what? Is that like a college or something?”

“Yes, it’s like a college,” the bus driver chimes in. “By the way, young lady, it seems to be taking you longer than you hoped, isn’t it?”

“Excuse me?” I ask.

“Well, I’ve been driving you to college for a few years now. When will you be graduating?”

“I’m not a student,” I say. “I’m a professor.”

“I did had a seat belt on,” the Arkansas man says after a pause. “It was one of those old ones that you have across the lap, so the police didn’t notice it.”

I found this great post about the questions one needs to ask before enrolling at a college. Some of them are really great while some made little sense to me.

Here are the questions I consider to be extremely important. People who fail to ask them before deciding on a college are irresponsible and unintelligent. I’ve seen folks who shelled out $250,000 for their kid to go to college without even realizing how highly probable it was that their child would never take a class with anybody who actually had a PhD. Be vigilant, people, and ask these crucial questions:

• What percentage of courses in the college (and in my discipline) are part-time?  Are they paid reasonably?  If I’m in a field that tends to traditionally employ a large number of part time professors (like art and music), what’s the turnover rate?  Will I get to study with whom I came here to study?
• How many of my part-time professors will also teach the exact same course in the community college on the other side of town?
• What’s the college’s opinion on MOOCs?
• Do you have a women’s center and is it supported by the college community?  Where is it?  Can you take us in there on the tour?  What formal support is there for LGBT students?
• When was the last time a professor walked off the job mid-semester?
• Do professors have to sign a statement of doctrine or church affiliation?
• If the college is religiously affiliated, how does one reconcile bigoted positions on race and sexuality in the classroom?  In student life?  In use of the campus chapel?
• Can the religious life/chaplain’s office give me a few references of students who self-identify in a similar way to me, to ask questions?
• When was the last time the campus was investigated by the AAUP?
• How often do students not graduate on time because of lack of enrollment for upper-level courses?
• Do full time professors or part time professors service the general education courses?  How many TAs will I have to be working with?
• What percentage of non-science students are education majors?  What percent of the faculty council are education professors?  
• Who was the last great speaker to come to campus for something?  Did students actually attend?
• How do professors’ salaries measure up against athletic staff salaries?  

Now for the questions I consider to be both useless and offensive. It is crucial to know the relevant information before paying the tuition fees. However, let’s remember that occupying the position of a customer who is always right with college professors is a very counter-productive strategy.

• Explain what happened the last three times an upset student complained to the department chair about a professor.

The internal workings of any department are none of your business. You need to be able to trust that these routine issues are handled in an appropriate manner. What I hear in this question is the voice of a helicoptering Daddy worried that bad, mean ogres will be nasty to his little baby. Grow up, Daddy, and let little Johnny learn to work within a hierarchy. That is a highly marketable skill.

• Do the professors actually live in the community?

What else do you need to know? Their favorite sexual position? It is none of your goddamn business where anybody lives or what they eat for breakfast. The idea that paying tuition entitles you to police people’s private lives is highly offensive.

• Take a look around the student parking lots during the semester and take a look around the faculty parking lots.  Which has more Lexuses and BMW’s?

I find the question and the mindset that inspired it to be incredibly vulgar. But I guess you need to go to college before you understand why such questions should not be asked.

• Is the library easy to use?  Are the librarians easy to work with?  Do your classes actually require you to walk into the library?

Also, how many of the profs actually require you to use type-writers? Come on, folks, dictating course requirements to professionals who design the courses is right there with inquiring into those professionals’ sex lives. What do you think your little Susie will be able to learn from somebody you teach her to see as less competent than her unqualified Mommy to design her own courses?

• May I sit in a writing composition course to observe?

No professor in their right mind will let you mess with the group dynamic in her course just to give you a chance to sit there and feel important. Do you also sit in on a chef preparing a meal, a doctor performing a procedure, a lawyer negotiating a settlement, a dress-maker sewing a dress, a dentist drilling a tooth before you choose to grace them with your custom?

Overall, this list is very helpful but I find it curious how easily it slips from the “university should be a place of learning, not a place of making a quick buck” into the “professors should be my humble slaves because I have paid them” model.

P.S. I looked at the discussion following the linked post and discovered, to my intense disappointment, that it very soon became about the incredible hardship of asking questions because being an adult is intensely complicated. As a result of this approach, people end up getting into enormous debt in exchange for a piece of toilet paper sold them by some diploma mill. And all because they couldn’t get themselves together and ask a few questions.

The first generation of women who will stop saying to each other “the day of your wedding is the most important day of your life” and will start saying “the day you get tenure / publish a book / start your own business / become a CEO / make a million bucks is the most important day of your life”, will be the generation with the same number of male and female Full Professors.

The summer semester is ending and I have a mountain of grading to do. This is why it took me a while to figure out why a student kept mentioning mousseline in her essay on the development of the European fascism.

The student is a native speaker of French, by the way.

Recently, we were discussing confidence on this blog and people expressed a really bizarre idea that confidence is a result of continued success and not vice versa. This is part of the fatalist mentality that I dislike profoundly, so I want to share a little true story illustrating what confidence is like and how it works.

I can’t even explain why I decided that I needed to get a PhD in Hispanic Studies. I had no idea what “PhD” or “Hispanic Studies” really meant but I thought the whole thing sounded incredibly cool. Because of the conditions of my university admission I didn’t have the time to go the usual route of taking a year of elementary and then a year of intermediate courses in the Spanish language. I had exactly one semester to learn to speak Spanish well enough to be able to take graduate level courses in Spanish literature.

The academic advisor told me I was wasting my time and my plan was untenable. A professor in the field told me I should think about my future and not take such an enormous risk. The Chair of the department laughed until she snorted.

I decided they were all idiots, lied to the person who was supposed to administer the placement test to me, and enrolled in a Spanish Intermediate Intensive course without ever taking a single class in Spanish or hearing a word of the language spoken anywhere. Then it was the turn of the poor instructor in the course to roll his eyes and ask me if I was completely sure I wanted to do it. I decided he was an idiot and continued in the course. Not a shadow of doubt visited me as to whether all these people might be right.

We all know how the story ended. I did enroll in graduate-level courses after this one semester. In the first one of them I got an A- but it was all As after that. The effort it took still gives me a head-ache whenever I think of it but it all worked out.

So what were my antecedents in higher education and language learning before I proceeded to attack Spanish with all this confidence? They were pretty piss-poor, to be honest. By that time, I had already dropped out of two universities where I made professors hate me because of my constant absences, tardiness, and a very vocal contempt for “the useless Humanities.” The two profs I especially liked to torment with my loud, “Oh, this is SUCH a waste of time that will not help me make any money” were the professor of World Literature and the professor of Latin. No student ever tried doing this to me but if it happens, I won’t be able to complain.

As for languages, I had been learning French for about 12 years by the time I started taking Spanish. The results of that effort (which had lasted more than half of my entire life) were minimal. I couldn’t speak the language and I still don’t. I had also been studying German for 4 years, both with a private tutor and at the university. The results were non-existent. My very kind tutor started hinting that I was a plodder with no capacity for languages.

I did speak English, of course, but that was not a language I learned. It was a language I spoke since infancy because of the heroic effort my father made to give me this hugely marketable skill.

A while ago, there was this cartoon going around the academic blogosphere where a jaded aging professor was trying to talk a student out of going to grad school. To every one of the advisor’s arguments the student responded with a robotic, “I will become a professor and everything will be great.” The student in the cartoon will have a fantastic career and the resentful professor will go on deriving her only enjoyment out of apocalyptic reports on how everybody’s life is even worse than hers. She will convince herself that the only reason she has no confidence in herself is that objective circumstances prevented her from having any actual successes to boost that confidence.

Obviously, this photo exists only because of an incredible talent of a photographer who took it but what a beautiful piece it is:

Slate continues its assault on academia. I wonder who is paying.

The most important finding is that family formation negatively affects women’s, but not men’s, academic careers. For men, having children is a career advantage; for women, it is a career killer.

I’m due to give birth in under 3 months and I promise to inundate everybody with stories of how my career becomes blighted as a result. Of course, those stories will never happen, but I will do my utmost to squeeze every possible drop of self-victimization out of everything that takes place in my life from now on.

No, I don’t think I will because the woman I admire the most professionally has 4 kids and she raised two of them as a single mother.