I recently finished my doctoral coursework and have entered this strange phase of life/graduate school which has lately reminded me of the Slough of Despond (holla at The Pilgrim’s Progress), if you replace “sin” with the professional/intellectual/financial burdens of being a grad student-professional.  That shit is weighing me down, big time. 

I am not yet ABD. I won’t take my comps ‘till April, so those currently rest heavily on my shoulders.  I also haven’t started my dissertation, and that gargantuan task (THE task) looms off in the distance, menacingly.  I am trying to work on my first article for publication, a critical step forward into the professional life I have chosen for myself.  I also have a major conference presentation coming up in March and need to begin figuring out what I intend to say during that fifteen minutes.  Hopefully I will come up with something that will not render me an embarrassment to myself or to the kind people who so graciously invited me to speak with them. But I worry about that.

In the meantime, I am currently teaching in a program that requires almost all of my energy, time and attention.  So that’s a conflict.  A big, giant, debilitating conflict.  And honestly, I spend a lot of my time feeling lost lately.  At the end of the day as I sit sprawled out on the x10 bus, crawling along the BQE at rush hour, I gaze off into the crowded landscape of the Brooklyn waterfront and my life seems as hopelessly jumbled as the structures that fight one another for those little bits of real estate. At those moments, my brain feels like a puddle of goo.  The book I am supposed to be reading for my comps sits unopened in my bag next to the lunch I didn’t get to eat and the mound of student papers I am taking home. 

How do I give everything the time it needs right now to get me through this period of my life? How do I write the article while responding to 50 student papers a night and read the 75 texts that comprise my comps list while also doing the endless tabulations to figure out exactly how much we can afford to spend at the grocery store this week so that we save enough for my Metrocard?

I know this isn’t a new story.  I hear it told all over the internet as I search for some type of support, some community.  But even that seems somewhat fleeting.  I know there are others going through this, but I don’t have time to talk to them in any meaningful way. Honestly, I don’t even want to most of the time.  Talking about it, commiserating over it, just makes it more real.

My own writing has become a burden to me.  I hate myself as a writer right now.  Even as I go around to talk with the students in my class about their own blocks, I feel hopelessly blocked myself.  Yesterday, in response to a chorus of “But I don’t know how to get started!” from my students, I suggested that they rearrange the order of their piece and set the introduction aside for a while.  “You don’t even know what you want to say yet!  Who says you have to write an introduction before you start figuring out what you want to say?  Just because it will eventually come first in your essay doesn’t mean it has to be the first thing your write, right?”  They looked visibly relieved with this news. 

I need to take my own advice and start thinking about my writing in different ways.  I know full well that the main issue I am having is lack of writing in general and that if I would just write more, period, that some of this would resolve itself.  But there is a resistance there.  I am being obstinate because I feel so overwhelmed and in a way, that really upsets me. 

It turns out that my decision to take the doctoral route had some psychological underpinnings (who knew?!) and now I must face them down.  This year will be about fighting it out, for real.  It already is about that.  And the thing I have to remember is that the only way I have ever fought through anything is to write my way through it.  I have piles of notebooks that speak to that.

I had an experience at work this week that got me thinking about how students are evaluated and judged by their instructors based on initial interactions.  First impressions are influential in all relationships and most certainly in teacher/student ones.  Over the course of a two-day orientation for a one-semester college transition course, I witnessed interactions between teachers and students and then had the opportunity to listen to teachers talk about their impressions of the students afterward. I was surprised by how quickly the teachers wanted to categorize students based on these initial, limited interactions and with very little additional information about the individuals they were judging.  The terminology they used to describe some of the students was rather pejorative, and they heaped lavish praise on others.  I have of course heard instructors judge students before and have engaged in making judgements about my own students, but what really struck me in this instance was how little the instructors actually had to go on.  These judgments were made during an orientation for a program of classes that haven’t yet begun and only a few hours into the orientation itself. 

My first chance to question these judgments was when one of the teachers identified two of the students to me as “troublemakers.” This caught my interest immediately, not only due to the seriousness of the charge but also because I had been with the same group all morning and I hadn’t noticed anyone doing anything that I would consider making trouble.  The things that came to mind, when the instructor used the word “troublemaker,” were argumentative or combative behavior, disrespect conveyed through speech or actions, or a general disregard for the well-being of others around them.  

When the alleged troublemaking students were revealed to me, I immediately reflected on my own impressions.  One of the students had struck me as very outgoing and affable.  It was true he had a lot to say— during the introduction portion of the orientation he had made several comments in response to what his classmates had to say, but none of these comments were overly disruptive, disrespectful or infringed on his classmates ability to communicate with the group.  In fact, his commentary served mainly to keep the room engaged in lively banter.  He got several laughs from the room with well-timed jokes, but they weren’t made at the expense of others;  rather, they kind of served to foster a connection between the speaker, himself, and the rest of the students in the room.  In other words, he was facilitating what can often be a somewhat awkward and intimidating experience: introductions.  And he was doing a pretty good job, too. 

In addition, he made connections throughout the proceedings with his classmates, tossing asides here and there to others who identified themselves in ways he felt connected to (another Philadelphia Eagles fan, for instance). I remember thinking that the exercise, an ice-breaker for these students to get to know one another on the first day, was actually working pretty well.  I think his participation was a big part of why I felt it was successful, though I only realized that upon reflecting on whether or not he was making trouble,  now that he had been marked in this way by my colleague.  In fact, the instructor who had initiated the ice-breaker was the one who was now identifying him as a troublemaker.  I couldn’t help but wonder why she chose to categorize the ways in which he stood out during that exercise as negative, rather than see them as positive, why she chose to view his collaboration with her as adversarial instead of helpful. It struck me as a mixed message and one rooted in an all-too-familiar scenario in which the teacher considers a successful classroom interaction as one in which they maintain full control.  In this view of the classroom, students who attempt to share that control are viewed as problematic.  However, at the same time, the program that these students and teachers, and myself, are a part of is based, in theory, on the idea of collaboration and creating an active learning environment in the classroom.  As teachers, we can’t have it both ways.  We either decenter the authority that traditionally defines a classroom or we don’t. We either encourage active learning or we stifle it.

On the flipside, this instructor was also highly impressed with some of the other students in the group.  When pressed, however, the instructor struggled to define the impressive characteristics of these “promising” students and eventually attributed it to a “feeling” she had about them.   Kind of like the feeling she had about the supposed troublemakers.

Again, I reflected on what might be coded into that feeling of hers.  The alleged troublemaker did not adhere to the traditional etiquette and hierarchy of the classroom.  It is obvious to me and, I suspect, to the other instructor as well that this student is not well-versed in the implicit code of behavior that defines a typical college classroom.  I think if we were to observe his interactions with his friends and family, we might find them somewhat similar to what he exhibited in the classroom during the introduction exercise. In other words, this student does not switch between a more formal classroom demeanor and the friendly, casual demeanor that he uses in familiar settings.  The students who were praised by this instructor did present a more formal classroom demeanor and they were rewarded for it.  They were marked as “promising” by an instructor because they know, to some degree, how to walk the walk of the college classroom. 

This is troubling to me, especially because we are talking about students who are in college transition program like this one.  One of the things this program is designed to do is to help students acquire a sense of how to walk the walk and talk the talk (which, when delivered without the opportunity for critical analysis, is problematic to me as well) of academic discourse.  To mark students as greater than or less than based on whether they can do out of the gate is to subscribe to those same old gatekeeping roles that reify racism and classism.