Clarissa's Blog

What is the battery percentage on your phone that makes you feel antsy and gets you to start looking for a charger?

I’m anxious and have a low tolerance for frustration, so I start feeling nervous when the battery gets to 69%.

When I was doing my Master’s, I had a very close friendship with another female student. We are both loud, flamboyant, ultra-feminist women and we are both on the heavy side. So one professor decided we were a lesbian couple. 

Once she overheard me and my friend talking about going out to meet guys and she was very disappointed.

“But I thought you were a gay couple!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been telling everyone at the department how cute it was that you are just like me and my partner when we were young! Please tell me you are gay.”

This was extremely uncomfortable and not because my friend and I have a problem with being considered gay. If it were another student who said it, we’d just laugh and move on. But the idea of a professor discussing her fantasies about our sex lives with colleagues was disturbing. And hey, we were adult women, we got over it. For a teenager who might just be figuring out their identity, finding out that your sexuality is a subject of gossip and conjecture among professors might be quite traumatic.

Gaydar is total junk. It doesn’t exist. You can’t possibly know. Often, people keep figuring this stuff out about themselves during their whole lives. Thinking that you are qualified to guess is presumptuous and can be very hurtful. My principle both in my private life and work is that if a person feels like sharing something with me, they will. Until they do so, I’m not wondering, guessing or assuming because it’s a ridiculous thing to do. 

This is priceless, folks:

“if you self-identify as trans, queer, a person of color, female, or as a member of any marginalized group you’re given priority on the list of people who want to speak – the stack. The most oppressed get to speak first.”

Not only am supposed to guess who is trans and gay – and trans and gay students must surely love having gaydar applied to them in the classroom – I must also assign rank in terms of oppression to them. Of course, there’s nothing at all objectionable in the idea that gay and trans people can be visually identified and \ or interested in declaring their sexual and gender identity to professors. 

And what if you make a mistake? What if there’s a guy who “looks gay” but isn’t? What if he’s bisexual? Or asexual? Or unsure? How do you decide whether a bisexual student is more or less oppressed than an asexual one? What if he doesn’t feel more oppressed? Obviously, you can’t ask students because feeling oppressed is not a good measure of anything (see Trump voters). 

Racial identity is tricky, too. Do you go “She looks swarthy. Is she not really white? But what if she’s Jewish? That would make her very unopressed in an academic context. But what if she’s Hispanic? But then again, she might be a Hispanic Jew”? That really sounds like something we all want our professors to do to us. 

What if students figure out what your system is for calling on them during class and feel mortified? What if they didn’t want to be ranked as oppressed? What if they feel that you are outing them to their classmates? What if they are not ready to come out? Isn’t that a bit more important than a percentage point on a participation grade? 

And finally, while you obsess over the sex lives and the racial identity of your students, trying to judge and categorize, when do you actually teach? 

We all hate it when students or colleagues treat us as a woman or a Latino or an immigrant or a lesbian first and professor second. Why should we do this to them? Why are they supposed to like it when we don’t?

More from the same source:

Rather than anxiously waving your hand around and wondering if you’ll be called on, if you would like to participate, signal to me in some way (a gesture, a dance move, a traditional hand-in-the-air, meaningful eye contact, etc.) and I will add you to the list.

Yeah, a dance move. Because all non-white students are into dancing. Maybe they can also bounce their basketballs because they must all be into athletics, too. 

There are personal, cultural, learning, and social reasons people don’t speak up in class.  Students of color and women of all races, introverts, the non-conventional thinkers, those from poor previous educational backgrounds, returning or “nontraditional students,” and those from cultures where speaking out is considered rude not participatory are all likely to be silent in a class where collaboration by difference is not structured as a principle of pedagogy and organization and design. 

This is absolutely not true. African American students, returning and mature students, and working class students are my best participators, both in Spanish and English. I think the quoted person speaks from stereotypes and not from any real experience. She decided these students must be silent, shy victims and is squeezing them into this role because it’s convenient and enjoyable. 

Students from disadvantaged backgrounds often have lacunae in their knowledge and need remediation. That’s a real problem. The ease and the joy with which they participate definitely isn’t. 

“Women of all races.” Really? You’ve had a black or a Hispanic woman in your class and she sat in the corner, completely quiet? And this kept happening for years? I’ve been teaching for a while but I can’t imagine this happening. Black or Hispanic women are a gift from God to every teacher because of how well they participate. What you need to be doing to force them into silence is a total mystery.

So what, Skype is dead? It’s all Google Hangouts now?

I did notice that Skype was barely functioning but I don’t use it often enough to care. How do people find out that it’s time to move on? 

After George W. Bush’s first term, Democrats decided to counter his militaristic rhetoric with with a candidate who was also militarized. John Kerry started his acceptance speech at the DNC with a military salute and “blah blah reporting for service.” In the end, it was his military record that was used to sink him. 

You never take the battle to the territory your opponent had chosen. Instead, you need to stake your own territory. A fight that is fought on somebody else’s terms is likely to be lost. 

This is why I hope that the Democrats will not repeat this mistake and won’t run an entertainment figure in 2020. Especially since they seem inclined to run a woman. A female clown will always lose to a male clown. 

Harassment is not when a guy makes a romantic advance. It’s when he hears a no and refuses to accept it. 

There’s nothing evil, immoral, or wrong about approaching a person and expressing admiration and / or interest. What is immoral and wrong is insisting after a person makes it clear she is not interested. 

It’s normal for people to want to meet other people, including for romantic purposes. It’s normal to find somebody attractive and want to express your admiration. What’s not normal is failing to understand and accept that the interest might not be mutual. It’s the ones who keep insisting, moaning, begging, and droning on like broken robots that I hate. 

The edited volume I wrote an article for over the summer fell through because most contributors still haven’t submitted their pieces and haven’t indicated when or if they will. The due date was August 1. I don’t mind it for myself because the article is good and I’ll simply send it out to a journal today. But I remembered the names of the organizers and the participants and guess how likely I am to collaborate with any of them in the future. 

I always plan to finish everything at least two weeks (and usually a month) before a deadline in case I have an emergency or a major obligation pops up. To fail to submit a piece I committed myself for and not even get in touch with the editors to explain what happened is behavior I will never comprehend. 

I wonder how these colleagues respond to students who do this kind of thing in class. 

When something shocking or super important happens to you that you want to share with people, do you

1. Grab your phone and begin dialing.

2. Send texts. 

3. Send emails. 

4. Post on Facebook.

5. Tweet. 

6. Open Snapchat (whatever that is).

7. Find people and tell them in person. 

8. Another option.

I’ll text and then post on the blog.