Preparing to Teach in a Pandemic

I’m preparing my classes for the fall. I made a promise to myself, ten years ago that guides my teaching: “I will work as hard as you do in this class.”

“If you wrote the paper in 20 minutes before class, I will spend no more than 20 minutes grading it.”

“If you want an A, we will work together until you get an A. If you don’t want to work that hard, we can settle, together, on a B or C.”

Some students are used to “easy As” in communication and humanities classes. They get frustrated in my classes because an A isn’t difficult, but it is work.

For the students who want it, though, I will move the moon.

If you want to use your writing in my class as a grad school sample, I am in.

If you want to read the other 200 pages of that book I assigned ten pages from, I am in.

If you want me to read the chapbook you are working on, I will -- so long as you finish the regular assignments I need you to do.

This is why I win advising awards but never teaching awards. “I will work as hard as you do in this class.”

...

I made this promise as a correction. Teachers get evaluated on bubble sheets. Raises, and our job security, depend on these evaluations. If a student fills in the oval circles on the eval that says that they didn’t learn, the institution wants me to believe that I am responsible for that failure.

But I’m not, at least not solely. Your learning is not within my boundaries. I can’t make you learn.

But I can create the environment and the support system in which you flourish toward the learning you commit to.

It’s like I was teaching for ten years before I learned that Adrienne Rich’s assertion (that students need to claim their education) also had implications for my responsibilities in the classroom.

(On Rich, digestible form: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/21/claiming-an-education-adrienne-rich-1977-commencement/). (On Rich, full text: http://www.yorku.ca/cvandaal/files/ClaimingAnEducation.pdf)

If a student claims their education, I will work as hard as they do.

When Help is Help: Aristotle, your Flourishing, and my Flourishing

I have spent a few days looking inside my "shadow."  Now, I want to look at the light side, using Aristotle.

...

I rarely use Aristotle.  His xenophobia is unattractive, and his sexism is disgusting.  But his discussion of friendship...

"A friend, then, is one who wishes and does good things to a friend, for the friend’s sake" (Annas, “Self-Love in Aristotle,” Southern Journal of Philosophy)

If you and I are friends, it is because I see your flourishing as my happiness, and you see my flourishing as your happiness.

I want to explain my teaching, my civic life, and my friendships in this light.

...

Teaching

I call myself a professor of rhetoric because I need a tribe, but I don't teach "a subject."

• I teach students to identify problems and solutions.  
• I teach students to communicate solutions to others.  
• I ask students to reflect on who-they-become as problem-solvers.

I don't care which problems they pursue, only that they pursue the ones that matter to them.  My advisees work in search engine optimization, in indigenous studies, in public relations, in law, in teaching, in veterinary medicine, as a life doula.  My happiness is my students' pursuit of their own flourishing.

...

Civic Life

I write for newspapers and social media.  My writing has been called "invitational," and I treasure that.

Authentic speech is hard; it makes speaker and listener uncomfortable.  But if people are afraid to speak, we will never find ways to work together.  My writing invites people to share their authentic selves.  My happiness is others' flourishing as they speak comfortably in our shared public sphere.

...

Friendships

I want my friends to flourish, walking alongside them as they pursue happiness.    

• That might mean working to remove barriers to flourishing (I am great with creative problem solving).  
• That might mean encouraging flourishing (I am a great cheerleader because all of my friends are awesome).  

My happiness is rooted in my friends' pursuit of their own flourishing.

The Aristotelian definition of friendship goes further.  I become a different person, a better person, for a friendship.  Friends don't harden who they are -- they cultivate each other in unexpected ways. 

When I am at my best, I am this kind of friend, son, partner, colleague, seeking the transformation that friendship will bring to us both.
  

***

If you've read these posts, shared your own reflections, or suggested a book, you have cultivated me this week.  I have a reading list, including Mark Epstein's The Trauma of Everyday Life.  One person messaged the ways that Your Story Is Your Power: Free Your Feminine Voice, by Elle Luna and Susie Herrick, helped them think about what has been on my plate -- an unexpected gift of friendship.

I can rest now.  :)

When Helping isn't Helping, Me or You, Continued

Trigger warning for curse words as I make points of emphasis.

Today, I resigned from leadership roles in my faculty union.  I just can't, right now.  These reflections have been part of why.  I volunteered "to be helpful," and I am rethinking why I do that.

A lifelong survival strategy has been "making myself helpful."  I talked, two days ago, about the caregiver role asked of me as a child.  I think of it this way.  My mother was brave enough to put her own safety first, to divorce her abusive husband.  As punishment, some family "disowned" her.  To follow her own needs (for safety, for happiness) meant ostracism.

I wasn't going to let my grandparents do that to me.  So I became good at mowing lawns, at shoveling, at helping grandpa jack up the sagging southwest foundation of the home every year (with a literal jack under the corner of the house).  There's a metaphor for you.

"Helping" my grandparents was about loving them (public face), but also about manipulating them into meeting my security needs (shadow).  I belong here.  You won't let me go (subtext, like you did mom) because you need me.

...

Fast forward 30 years.  I'm a vibrant, diversely engaging intellectual (public face).  And yet:

• I'm on 25% of all MA committees in my department, even as I am 7% of the graduate faculty.  I belong here.  You won't let me go because you need me.  
• I direct a half dozen independent studies each year.  I belong here.  You won't let me go because you need me.   
• I coordinate internships.  I belong here.  You won't let me go because you need me.  

"Helping" students is about loving the relationship that can come from mentoring (public face).  It's also about manipulating the institution into meeting my security needs (shadow).

...

"I belong here.  You won't let me go because you need me" has ripple effects in personal life.  

A divorced man dates single moms.  Single moms have lots of ways to be helped.  One sweetheart, heated in her language when she was angry, said to me once:  "You have me at a disadvantage.  I can't argue with you, without risking losing your help." 

I spent time wondering "How can it be a bad thing that I am driving her child to dance class?  I like the child.  I want her to rest after work."  That was me, looking onto my public face and saying "I'm a helping person." Looking onto the shadow, though:  I was trying to force her to meet my security need by making myself helpful.  I belong here.  You won't let me go because you need me.     

... 

I genuinely love(d) my great-grandparents, my then-girlfriend, and (most of) my students.  The public face of these good works is real.

But as I established yesterday, each of these good works includes a desire to control the way other people feel about me, to fill some need in me.

This blogging is about recognizing the tension between the conscious intent (in the light) and the unconscious motivations (in the shadow).  Recognizing the ways these two forces work against each other, and the ways they wreck things, is Enantiodromia, the process I think I am working through as I write this.

...

So, time to step back, to stop deploying "helpfulness" as a way to try to control the responses of others, including at work.  This means resigning from a task I took on "to be helpful" that brings me no joy.  I'm sorry, UEA.

When Helping isn't Helping

Trigger warning for cursing as I reach uncomfortable insights.

So a friend and colleague (who has been reading this blog for years) suggested that, in the last post, I was talking not just about "not-asking for help"...

...but also, in a way, seeing "help" as a moment for forcefulness.

He is sewing things together fast.  From his provocative statement, I can sew some things together, too.

...

My great-grandfather, atop the toilet.  I wasn't helping.  I told myself I was, but I was the only person in that bathroom who felt like I was helping.  

I was exercising force in pulling him up.  I exhorted, "Come on, Papa," as if telling him to come on would make him stand any more easily.  Pulling and exhorting -- attempting to control.   

I do that.  Fuck.  I mowed the lawn for a friend a few weeks ago. I angrily waved her to the side, so that she would not be hit by debris from the blower.  I told myself that my angry expression was okay, because it was hot and I was tired.

I wanted her not to get hit.  But I also wanted to control where she was standing while I mowed.  Both sentences are true.

I was exercising force as part of "helping."  If I could have mowed the lawn without angrily waving her aside, she would have been happier, and I would have been happier.  (And thank you, to her, for noting that at the time.  I'm sorry I am only seeing this pattern now, today.)

When I think I am helping, my shadow, the shadow of force and control in my life, comes out.

...

It's true.  I wrote about it here, in Blue Avocado.  The only time I have ever struck a tabletop in anger, it was because I was "doing the right thing" -- helping the employees of a nonprofit secure health care.  I hammered that tabletop.  I wish I hadn't.  But it was okay, because I was "helping."

It's true when I argue.  There is sometimes a moment, when I am arguing with someone, that I see "their mistake."  I move from being an open listener, the part of me that I want to believe is my core, and I become a forceful arguer, intent on "helping" them through their mistake, to the "right decision."  (Or, perhaps, I am helping our audience avoid their mistake.)

This is why some students love me and some absolutely cannot stand me.  The ones who experience the listener, they flourish.  The ones who experience the arguer, they do not.  

(An example:  when a student says something about how the gender pay gap is a myth -- I move from "open listener" to "let me lay some data on ya, kid."  Students hate that David, exercising argument as force and control.  I see it in my evals.) 

Grocery shopping for my most recent, now ex, sweetheart.  "I'll just buy this generic food, because she and I need to stretch the dollar.  If I pay for it, generic can be okay.  She's saving money because I am paying;  I am saving money because I am buying Krusty O's."

Was that helping?  Or was that just ignoring her preferences, another exercise of force and control, justified because "I am helping."

...

I am repeatedly called the most useful man on my university's campus.  And it is true, I like to be helpful.  I have a strong moral compass that calls upon me to intervene and an intense empathy for those unfamiliar with systems.  These are the parts of me I embrace. 

And the shadow:  if I help you, you might like me.  Power and control.  

...

One last story.  My mother's car broke down in the Wisconsin Dells.  She wanted to leave it on the highway so that AAA would find it easily.  I wanted it off the road, in a lot, so we could be safe from cars buzzing down the highway.

Mom and I disagreed, so I told her to pop it in neutral so I could push it off the road.  (That sentence right there is the fucking problem.). She got in the car and popped it in neutral.  I started to push.  The car froze.  I wondered whether the whole engine had seized.  I pushed a bit more.  Still stuck.

My then-wife pointed out:  "She's stepping on the brakes."

And there is the metaphor of the day, for how David lets the belief that he is doing the right thing justify the exercise of force and control, and how fucked up that can be.

...

David, who self-identifies as gentle,

when he feels he is helping

the part of him that fears and rejects force, that can't work through the place of aggression and force in his life, heathfully, and so gets stuffed into the shadow...

it steps forward, using force to control others,

under cover of the justification of "I am helping you."

...

This is starting to hurt.

Bly on the Shadow and David on Swimming

A colleague in anthropology suggested that I read Bly on the shadow.  Here is a passage that resonates as well as introduces.

An invisible bag.

To be clear, my family was loving and affirming, and I'm not going to let these reflections become:  an opportunity to flog parents for my failings.

That said, I was a bookish Catholic boy with no mechanical aptitude.  I was encouraged to be a priest.  A movement toward that life, a minister and caregiver, is a movement that leaves some other inclinations in the shadow.

I also grew up with many older adults in my life, requiring caregiving (even as they also took care of me).  Great-grandma broke both her wrists falling down stairs and would never take those stairs again -- it became my job to do laundry, to fetch things from the root cellar.  She would not go on her knees again, for fear of falling, and so I would wash the floor (which in her mind had to be done on hand and knee).  

All of this is to say:  caregiver was the part of me that was kept in the light.  It is still a central part of who I am.

In the dark is something else.  I'm still finding the words for what is in my shadow -- not the opposite of caregiver, if that means giver-of-hurt, or care-refuser.

Something like not-care-asker?

Professional Example:  Last week, an administrative specialist emailed me to tell me that some of the work I was doing on an NEH grant, it was work I should not do.  It was her job to do tasks like "secure W9s from short-term contractors on the grant."  I was doing that labor to prevent that labor from bothering her.  Asking her to do it wouldn't have been me.  The part of my personality that asks for that kind of help, instead of giving it, lives in my shadow.

Another Professional Example:  Once, a student got increasingly angry with me over the course of a semester.  Each week, I talked with the student with my best "open hand of rhetoric."  Each week, the student became more belligerent.  My colleagues, finally, took me aside to say "hey, do you need help with this?"  I would never have asked.  

Personal Example:  Twice in my life, I have dated people with depression, a topic about which I have read mountains and about which I battered my therapist with questions for two years.  But I'll be honest:  I have never been good at coming to my partner and saying:  "I need help responding to the life we are sharing."  Always, I start with "I love you, you are beautiful, you are needed, you are treasured," but rarely "please help me be with you on this journey."

And it's easy to justify why.  You don't ask the person drowning to teach you to swim with them.  You want to be available, stable, steady as you throw them a lifeline and swim them in to shore.

Except it's not swimming.  A life with someone with depression is something created together.  You can't stand outside it and be helpful.  You need to be inside, with them -- while still being outside just far enough to see the truth:  they are beautiful, treasured, needed, loved. 

Another Personal Example:  There was a moment when my great-grandfather needed help standing from the toilet.  I grabbed his arms and pulled, not thinking through that pulling him forward was not pulling him up.  He asked me to stop.  I was 12, maybe 13.  I said "come on" and pulled again.  He ceased trying and called for other family members to help, and it was weeks before he asked me to help with that, again. 

I didn't ask him for help in being with him, helping him, in that moment.  He didn't know how to ask me to help better, only to ask for someone else to help.  Two stupid German men.  For as much as my politics, I think, are feminist, my individual choices still struggle to be more than what I was raised in.  

I'm going to cut myself some slack for being 12.

I'm not 12 anymore.  Sometimes, I still pull, thinking I am helping, without reaching out to communicate with the person about how I can be with them.

I need the part of me that can ask-for-help, not just give it, to come out of the shadow, into integration.

Reflection, Restarted: Shadow Work, an Initial Agenda

Shadow by Rook Floro (2012) https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Sculpture-Shadow/301256/1335939/view

I'm back on the path of reflection, recovering from a complicatedly broken heart and seeking a new wholeness.

Love, and the failure of love, forces us to recognize what was in our power to do better (but we did not), what was in our power to do better (but we could not, because we have our own internal struggles to grapple with that keep us from being present), and what was not in our power to do better (because, after all, a relationship is composed of two people). 

What is amazing to me, as I read this, even, today, is my comfort with the use of the word "power" above.  I have spent forty-seven years uncomfortable with "power."  (Some of that discomfort is explained here.). I'm long unaccustomed to the notion that I exert power, that I can use force.  When I have done so in the past, it is almost entirely in defense of others.

But I'm 47, I've had a banner year.  I was promoted to professor.  I won an advising award.  I won an NEH grant.  I'm a person who has and who can exert power.  I need to own that, in my professional life as well as my personal life.

At the same time, I think of myself as a "gentle" man.  What brings me here, over the next few weeks, has been a recognition that "the things I think I like about myself" as a person, a professional, a (feminist) man, have a flip side, a dark side, a shadow side.  To be "gentle" is to set up, for example, a complex of limits on my abilities, at the same time I experience the strength I feel in being gentle, already.  Maybe?  It's day one, I'm a few YouTube videos in.

I want to understand those shadow sides.  If you are interested in following me through some reflection that is only sidewise professionally pertinent (e.g. there won't be much talk about rhetoric here, but there will be talk about being a professor), join in.

...

What is the Shadow?

My starting point for thinking about the "shadow sides" of my self is a Jungian vocabulary.  And the quickest, most digestible summaries of this vocabulary are available on YouTube and Wikipedia.  I'll quote from Wikipedia below.

The Shadow is (1) an unconscious aspect of the personality which the conscious ego does not identify in itself. In short, the shadow is the unknown side.

So right off the back, I'm going to be looking for the parts of myself that I cannot see, that aren't fitting into the picture of myself that I have grown to embrace.  I reflect a lot, I look at myself and my world a lot, and yet there are things I cannot see.  This is scary and yet worthwhile, yeah?

Because one tends to reject or remain ignorant of the least desirable aspects of one's personality, the shadow is largely negative. There are, however, positive aspects that may also remain hidden in one's shadow (especially in people with low self-esteem, anxieties, and false beliefs).

Oh Christ, I am hopeful that this is oversimplified for the Wikipedia audience.  I'm not interested in a positive/negative valence or evaluation of my shadow.  

What are the Consequences of an Unaddressed Shadow?
There are two reasons I feel a need to work this through, today.  One is that the the Shadow disrupts my ability to achieve all that I could.

According to Jung, the shadow sometimes overwhelms a person's actions; for example, when the conscious mind is shocked, confused, or paralyzed by indecision. "A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps ... living below his own level."^[21] 

I have felt this.  I mean, I have a Catholic impulse to blame myself for everything, at least initially, so I am poised to see my shadow as a flaw, the reason I fall into my own traps.  

Jung describes its effectiveness in disrupting the self in terms of Enantiodromia:

Enantiodromia. Literally, "running counter to," referring to the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control. ("Definitions," ibid., par. 709)

So I feel like I am "in control" of my decisions, but I want to explore whether Enantiodromia may have had a place in undermining my ability to achieve my desires.

What are the Consequences of the Shadow in Relationships with Others?

This next bit is interesting.  It helps me see how some interpersonal interactions can be explained by the Shadow Self.  

According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to psychological projection, in which a perceived personal inferiority is recognized as a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. Jung writes that if these projections remain hidden, "the projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object—if it has one—or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power".^[5] These projections insulate and harm individuals by acting as a constantly thickening veil of illusion between the ego and the real world.

Too often, when I think about "projection," it settles down into a more complicated understanding of "I know you are, but what am I?"  That is, someone asserts something uncomfortable about me, about someone else, and I respond defensively by saying "sounds like you are projecting."

This take is more nuanced.  I like the observation that, when projection is engaged, "perceived personal inferiority is recognized as a perceived moral deficiency in someone else" -- It's not about whether a short man declares another man short -- it's about whether a man, uncomfortable in being short, tells another man that their height is a moral failing, a flaw.

I'm still struggling with how projections "insulate and harm individuals by acting as a constantly thickening veil of illusion between the ego and the real world" -- But I will hope to learn.

Finally, the unnerving part. 
Finally, the unnerving part.  This process does not end.

Jungians warn that "acknowledgement of the shadow must be a continuous process throughout one's life" and "the later stages of shadow integration" will continue to take place—the grim "process of washing one's dirty linen in private",^[36] of accepting one's shadow.

 This blog constitutes the public, not private, but I am hopeful to wash my laundry in a way useful to me as well as others.

What I want to explore first...
The first thing I want to explore are my self-image as someone who is "gentle."  That is who I am, who I have always believed myself to be.  What dimensions of exist within the shadow of that gentleness?  (The discussion of "power" above, and my fascination with Simone Weil's discussion of "force," fits in here.)