So I've been thinking about a post way way back (and I can't find find it now) from one of the Misery Family on how s/he has lost weight (yay! Good work!) and thus, gained control of his/her life (no, honey, you've lost weight, and that's known in the universe outside of Lap-Band commercials as "handling something that bothered you.") The poster then went on to project his/her worry: having conquered their own problems with their weight, surely there must be us miserable fat professors out there being ridiculed by those mean freshmen.
I thought about that, because I am a chubster. Now, I'm a damn cute and expensively dressed chubster and always have been, but the comment made me stop and think. In general, I've never worried about my students mocking me because I am fat. Now, I'm SURE they do mock me because I am fat.
But I don't fret that they mock my weight because I know damn well that if it's not my weight, it'll be something else. I'm pretty sure they have little respect for just about any of us--and students are such a big group that even if you manage to be the telegenic "cool" proffie I am sure many of you are, there will be a group of students who will mock you for being just that.
Don't be so sure you're in with the kiddies because you've dealt with your own problems with how you look. They can and will find another reasons to laugh at you. Some of my students know they have more in their savings accounts than I make in a year. Others don't understand what somebody as OLD as YOU--at 30 OMG!!!--could understand about the world they know EVERYTHING about. Your hair? Dorky. The way you dress? Hideous. The jokes you think are funny? They may think you are funny and with it, but they think are you are funny and with it....for an old guy. You in their view exist at the center of a bunch of caveats, all of which end "for an old person" and "for a person who couldn't cut in the real world and is now stuck teaching." Or something. There is always something.
They are young. They have yet to learn that glory is elusive, justice is imaginary, beauty is fleeting, and that they will not get what they think they deserve out of life (and yet, they still will, 20 years later, be profoundly grateful for what they have, if they are fortunate.) Some of this disrespect is normal.
But some is not.
The dark side of student mockery became apparent with Tyler Clementi, the student at Rutgers who killed himself recently over a sex video that was posted on the internet. For me--and many people in my generation--that kind of shit STOPPED after high school. It took everything I had to survive high school. What a ghastly place. You couldn't pay me to do it again; there isn't enough money in China's GDP.
And now, it seems, the extended childhood that wealth and helicopter parenting have wrought means that adolescence--a profoundly shitty part of life for many of us--will be extended more and more into college life. And that means more of the bullying and cliques and crap behavior. Hazing has been around since time began, I suspect, but hazing strikes me as different than what happened with Mr. Clementi. It's one thing to haze somebody who is joining your group: it's another to victimize somebody vulnerable simply because you can. The former has been part of college for some time; the latter strikes me as high school games extended into college.
I didn't live in the dorm very long--I got kicked out because I couldn't pay for it (amazing how in loco parentis college requirements that students must live in the dorms stops if the money doesn't materialize with enough alacrity). So maybe I'm wrong, but for me, going to a great, big, massive, anonymous state college gave me freedom from the cliques and shitheads of high school. I knew to stay the hell away from fraternities because (with apologies to all you were nice guys who belonged to nice frats), those people struck me as same popular-boy wanktards who were mean to me in high school. And, unlike high school, at college I could avoid them. Ditto with sorority life, again with my apologies to the many of you I am sure were part of sororities and wonderful people: the sorority sisters around me were the popular princess girls who had money to burn on club memberships (when I sure as hell didn't). I didn't hate them as I hated them in high school...because I could avoid them and their status hierarchies and be myself.
Granted, in undergrad I tried on identities like I now try on clothing, but I got to do so with a group of well-selected friends and without the constant jeers and surveillance of people who would humiliate you for their own entertainment.
I hope that I am wrong, and Tyler Clementi is an isolated case, and that other young men and women when they enter college are not trading one hell for another. But I am not sure.
Being gay myself, I cried when I first heard about Tyler. I'm still profoundly distressed, and glad I was not in the U of S for my undergrad.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was dorming at Northeastern Ghetto Tech I never saw this kind of gaybaiting, or racebaiting, or sleazy sexism. Instead most of the building was focused on getting hammered from Friday night to early Sunday morning, then sleeping it off until Monday. They drank until they blacked out, smashed the hanging exit signs, and collapsed in the hallways or their beds. We were lucky nobody drowned in their own vomit. Meanwhile I was working two jobs and I wanted to skin the lot of them alive.
ReplyDeleteI have been mean-spiritedly pleased that every single story about this has mentioned the full names of both tormentors. Let them find out how public shaming feels. I am ashamed of myself for feeling this way, but I still do.
ReplyDeleteI like the fact that they included pictures too. I hope they are ashamed and terrified, and that both spend some time in jail.
ReplyDeleteAfter that, civil lawsuit.
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ReplyDeleteBitchy, I'm glad to see your commentary today. Had you not shown up, I soon would have devoted a post to asking where you are.
ReplyDeleteYou are right about this--all of this. And I'm sure you are aware that this is a phenomenon that is being explored by the scientific and psychological communities. This article from the New York Times is just one of the many I've found recently about the topic: What Is It About 20-Somethings?
Thanks for drawing attention to this. I took a long, round-about route to full-time teaching myself. When I was in college over 20 years ago, I avoided the secondary school track because I didn't want to teach adolescents. The irony is obvious: now that I've finally settled on teaching college, extended adolescence has given me exactly what I tried to avoid once upon a time.
fyi.... The CMer attempting to lose weight and blog a tiny bit about it was Katie from Kalamazoo. When she imploded, she took her ball -- and her posts -- and went home.
ReplyDeleteI haven't been able to really think about this because I get too sad right out of the gate and move on to something else.
ReplyDeleteI stop singing in the car a few exits before I get off the highway toward campus because I'm terrified one of my students will be stuck in the next lane, filming me with a phone and posting it on the internet. And that's just fear of being made fun of for being a dork. I can't imagine what would make people be as mean as what happened at Rutgers.
So apparently my folks did me a huge favor by being raging alcoholics, because I developed that favorite coping mechanism of so many of us -- humor. I made fun of them and of myself before anyone else could do it. My brother and I have a hilarious routine about the evils of box wine. He recovered from [literally] being given two black eyes and getting stuffed in a locker, becoming one of the Popular Kids by selling porn and cigarettes to his peers at Super Nerdy Episcopal High School. I like to think that I've done for fat and ugly what Sara Silverman has done for bedwetting. (Okay, I'd rather be like David Sedaris, but I think I gotta take what I can get.)
ReplyDeleteI have never experienced the kind of bullying that Mr. Clementi experienced at Rutgers. I certainly got mocked about my sexuality in high school (K--- L---, I'm looking at you), but I was never videotaped and publicly exhibited having sex because I went to high school sometime in the late Neolithic. (I'm sure if they could have found a way, they would have...)
I don't hate easily. But I hate that this happened. For all of my bitching about them, no student deserves this.
Finally, I gotta add my plug for mental health services. I use them. They have, in the past, literally kept me from jumping off a (different) bridge. Suicide is the product of many complex factors. I suspect that someone out there has the psychic resiliency to deal with what Mr. Clementi confronted without taking their own lives. But I sure as hell understand why he did it.
NB: Hey Jim, don't worry, I was going jump during the summer so that I wouldn't inconvenience my colleagues, and I'd left syllabi for the courses I'd been assigned. No, seriously, I did. This later became a Sign Of How Serious I Was.
Spot on, Bitchy Bear. Thanks for all of this.
ReplyDeleteI remain really pleased that I teach students who don't, for the most part, come from privilege. They're spending too much time working two jobs and taking fifteen credits to be setting up nannycams and destroying people with the fruits of their espionage. But I was so, so brokenhearted about this, and you're right -- we need to be thinking about prevention and enforcing personal responsibility with the little savages who would do such things.
I just ended my lecture class with a short discussion about "If You See Something, Say Something." I posted the links to our college mental health services and to our "bias crime" services AND explained the ways in which other people could have helped Mr. Clementi. My students looked like they wanted to melt into their seats. Holy discomfort, Batman.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how else to manage this, other than to remind students of what THEY can do to help.