In order to be a successful teacher, you need to have a fairly strong narcissistic component. (This, of course, goes only for teachers who enjoy teaching and not for those who have to teach but don’t derive much pleasure from the activity.) However, there is an enormous difference between a normal teacher’s narcissistic component and narcissism as a pathology or a personality disorder.
So here is how you can easily check whether your narcissism is healthy:
Imagine a situation when you make a mistake in class, and a student corrects you. Do you feel:
A. pain, anger, fear
B. indifference
C. joy
Now imagine a situation when a student asks a question (e.g. “Professor, what is the Spanish for ostrich?”) and you don’t know the answer. Do you:
A. invent an answer (e.g. “Ostrich in Spanish is ostra.”)
B. pretend you didn’t hear the question
C. say, “I have absolutely no idea. Let’s Google it (look it up in a textbook, ask somebody, call a librarian, etc.) together.”
And here is the answer key:
A – you have a problem and need to start addressing your narcissistic wounds because if this condition is left untreated, you will cause damage to yourself and others.
C – you are a teacher. Everything is perfectly fine with you.
B – you are not a narcissist but neither are you a teacher. What are you doing in this profession?
Clarissa's Blog 
“Imagine a situation when you make a mistake in class, and a student corrects you. Do you feel”
Indifference if it’s trivial (like mistaking the day of the week or month or time all of which I do a lot) and joy if it’s more substantive.
“Now imagine a situation when a student asks a question and you don’t know the answer”
I have no problem with saying “I have no idea!” (I even kind of enjoy it at times) though in Poland teachers are supposed to be all-knowing. If it’s easy to find the answer in a hurry I might ask someone to look it up, or if not (the usual case in the not very technologically advanced rooms where I work) I might suggest how they can find the answer (if such occurs to me, which it doesn’t always).
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And here is your diagnosis: you are a good teacher. 🙂 🙂
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What if the teacher in the first scenario feels fear because he is afraid that the students will make complaints against him, and he will be bullied by his boss/colleagues or lose his job?
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Paranoid ideation is actually a big part of narcissistic personality disorder. 🙂
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I knew an Irish guy who had taught in a Volkschule in Germany. He once joked about his Irish accent in class and the next thing he knew several students complained to the managment that they were there to learn the Hochenglisch and not dialect…… Germans, they do beat all.
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@cliff
Maybe the Volksschule should have hired a British royalty, or the Queen, HRH herself. Other than that I can’t imagine anyone who speaks Hochenglisch.
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@clarissa
Yes, but it can also have a symptom of many other underlying psychological problems. I can hardly imagine that everybody who is afraid of failure is a narcissist. That would be many narcissists, maybe more than half of humankind, maybe more.
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Of course, fear of failure is absolutely normal. But imagine that you gently correct somebody in class, “It’s I have done not I have did” and the person looks like you spit in their face and later has a nervous breakdown telling you that you destroyed them with your hurtful comnent, weeping and yelling. That’s pathology.
Pathology begins when you see such trivial corrections as an assault on your very sense of being, on your entire persona.
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I definitely had paranoid ideation for a long time among Western types. And they always fulfilled my expectations. I had the same feeling for a long time in a non-Western teaching position, and gradually the students themselves weaned me out of it. They were just simply normal and not trying to prove any points to me about their fundamental superiority. So I guess I am cured.
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“I definitely had paranoid ideation for a long time among Western types. And they always fulfilled my expectations.”
– If you really really fear something, it will unavoidably happen. 🙂
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Yes, I am sure there was an element of self-fulfilling prophesy to my behavior, although with exactly the same fears but in a non-Western context, this didn’t happen. Therefore I also conclude that there is a strong component of reality that exists outside of my head.
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This is perfect.
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Paging Dr. Google, paging Dr. Google…..
If I don’t know something that I should know, and did know in the past, I am privately chagrined and then …. Page Dr. Google! Unless it involves an eponym, in which case I proclaim that I s*ck at eponyms, let’s Page Dr. Google. “Now is it a Munro or a Poitrier microabscess that is seen in psoriasis? It is the neutrophilic (type of cell inside, a more useful descriptor than some dead doctor’s name) abscess. Paging Dr. Google (or reaching for the dermatopathology textbook).
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Exactly, one can make a game out of it in class, and everybody will have fun and enjoy the activity.
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I dont have any problem being corrected on any point, so long as the dynamics are not sado-masochistic. If they are, I have every problem in the world with it. Actually, as I have mentioned before (and after this I will stop speaking on these subjects as it is truly time to move on) I was caught up in some really weird psychological dynamics which related to the Christian impetus to civilize the world. This is all so complicated to explain. I would have thought it would be obvious to everyone else, but looking back it seems one never really knows the dynamics one is caught up in until much later. The logic of colonial Christianity was never made explicit to me, but I internalized some of its implicit logic and had some of it imposed on me, even after I had only half-interalized the whole. And what the whole was embodied an implicit notion of hierarchy with the white adult male at the top followed by the white adult female followed by white children, followed by the black male, followed by the black women and their children. That much can be obvious, but what was not so clear to me was the manner in which this political scheme was internalized psychologically. It had to do with the ability to speak English.
Consequently when one wants to assert one’s place in the hierarchy, one points out that others cannot speak English as well as one can. Perhaps the white man is very poised and skilful but the white woman is a bit hysterical and the black man gets his English muddled up with his Shona and so on.
When I did get an education — a Bachelor of Arts — and then floundered as I experienced some workplace bullying (because I was from Africa), my father took the opportunity, at that time, to assert his position in the hierarchy by stating that I could not even speak English properly. He pulled rank, according to the colonial order, since as a white male his status ought to have been higher than mine, even though I was university educated and he was not.
Since that time I’ve always been alert to sado-masochistic dynamics of this sort, where people attempt a similar manouever on me. I find it very sad and I refuse to teach people who do this.
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