LY #67 Building Morale

As you all (all 4 of you) know, I have a crush on my young colleague, the rawk gawd Sean Rule.

Sean being 80s, wearing my shades and jacket.

On Friday, he and the other member of F'n'A, our COCC band, shot a Christmas video up in the Fireside Room.  I got to be part of it.  I loaned him one of my fur jackets and a pair of sunglasses which he used in part of the video as a tribute to 80s metal band Poison.  Very little of that material turned up in the video.  I visited him today and he showed me what all was left out of the video -- some very funny stuff.  I hope he produced a director's cut.  Neither did he use the material that I shot...I may need to put some of it up on the web just to make it available. 

I also did some dancing in the video -- I'm the short woman with the bad hair wearing the black sweater with the Christmas trees.

All the lights made that old space look quite magical.  Today when I went up to collect my coat, the Fireside room looked completely un-magical once again.

As I talked with Sean about the wonderfulness of COCC I told him that 85% of my time here has been enjoyable.  I think that's pretty ef-ing amazing.  Well over 50% of my job has been enjoyable.  There have been the people I haven't gotten along with and then there's the whole grading thing -- that's the negative part of the job.  But mostly, I've enjoyed my time at the CoC on the Rock.

Sean is such a great asset to the institution with his positive attitude and boundless energy.  

Stay tuned for my own video about FnA.

LY #66 The Fashion System

As a theorist speaking with absolutely no data, I'm going to make this hypothesis that someone else can research. 

I think that the current horrible style of women my age and younger and older showing the roles of fat above and below their bras because they are wearing material that clings to their bodies is a result of the fashion trend of manufacturers saving money by making sizing small, medium, large, and extra large.  Clinging material will make an attempt to fit a body it doesn't want to whereas stiff material needs to be cut more closely to the actual form in order to fit correctly.  

I find a sleeker silhouette, one that is produced by stiffer fabric than jersey knit, is more comely to my eye than ripples and bumps in awkward places.

One more proof that it's time for me to get out of the classroom!  As a geezer, there are just so many contemporary styles I don't enjoy staring at.

LY #65 November 22, 1963

Where was I?  In Mrs. Whaley's fifth grade class at Daves Avenue School.

Mrs. Whaley told us that right before lunch she had something important to announce.  I had watched the news the night before with my Dad so I thought I knew what it was.  In the previous night's CBS News there had been a report on a White Supremacist group in the South.  Although the word "terrorism" wasn't used at the time, they were credited with bombings and were considered very dangerous.  So I went to the teacher, trying to guess what she was going to tell us.  "Is it something about the Water Mocassins."  I thought that was the name of the group.  She said no.  Then sometime either right before lunch or in the lunch line I heard that the president had been shot.

I ran across the street to our house and for the next few days we watched television.  I don't remember Jack Ruby shooting Oswald but I do remember watching the funeral on Sunday, especially the riderless horse with the empty stirrups.

Years later, in high school, I learned that I could make myself cry on command if I just remembered that day.

LY #64 Unexpected Reluctance to Be Assertive

For the past 20 years I've had a policy in all my syllabi that "Any grade is negotiable."  From the very first day of every class, I let students know that I prefer that they let me know when they think I have judged them unfairly.  In the public speaking classes I actually give 5 points extra credit to students who act as lawyers for their colleagues.  I explain that arguments for higher points must be based on the criteria of the assignment and not on claims of having a difficult life or claims of hard work.  I tell them that almost every student at a community college has a hard life (and sometimes tell them stories of past students).  And I also explain that hard work is not necessarily connected to successful performance.

But even though I discourage self-disclosure of struggle, I encourage them to make sure that they are receiving appropriate grades.

Well, this week I met resistance in an unexpected site.  A young man in the military, someone whom I assumed would have no problem arguing for a higher grade, did not rise to my suggestion that he challenge me in a particular area of the assignment.  I don't want to give the particulars at this time.  Let's just say that I made a judgement call about a performance and that there was one particular area in which the student could have challenged me.  I actually encouraged him to do so and even suggested that he get another student to act as his lawyer. 

Sadly, he said, "But you're the teacher."

I replied, "That doesn't make me infallible."

And he said, "But you're very good."

Now, you may ask, "Why didn't you just go ahead and change his grade if you thought it was debatable?"   Well, just because I can see both sides of an issue doesn't mean that I don't believe my point of view is correct.  I thought I was right but wanted to see if he believed in his own performance  enough to challenge and then change my perception.  (Perception is in part a matter of negotiation.)

He did not.

I wondered after talking with him if he was confusing the structure of the classroom with the structure of the military.  Perhaps I was not being culturally sensitive.  Maybe I should check in with him.

LY #63 Transgender Awareness

CommProf in drag

Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance at COCC, a part of the national Transgender Awareness Week.

 I thought this might be a good time to mention that I once considered gender reassignment surgery.

Picture me in the stacks at old library at Idaho State University, circa 1978, looking through books detailing how the surgery was performed and the statistics on success.  The data showed that at the time, female to male surgery was incredibly expensive and rarely completely effective.  Combine that with the (possibly inherent) prejudice for masculine height and I decided that it was better to live life as an androgynous female than as a short man.

1960s Barbie for sale on Etsy

Why did I want to be a man?  Well, it was less a matter of wanting to be a man than of not wanting to be female.  I'd never been particularly comfortable being a "girl."  From grade school on I had not dislike being put in that category.  In kindergarten, when the teachers tried to tell me that I had to play in the "girls" area where kids played house, I put up a fuss because I wanted to play in the boys area with the cars and big blocks.  (I don't know if my parents interfered in this particular fight, but I got my way and never set foot in the "girls" area again.)  In sixth grade I had enough of a vocabulary to self-identify as a "misogynist."   In seventh or eighth grade, there were various "tests" that kids gave each other to "prove" gender.  One of them was "How do you look at your fingernails?"  Girls were supposed to put their hands out, fingers spread, palms down, whereas boys supposedly  curled their fingers over an upward-facing palm.  I don't know how I originally performed the act but I started purposefully doing it like the boys.

Now, I did love my Barbie, but that was because she looked like Annette Funicello and I could imagine taking her to a dance in the amazing black and crystal ball gown my Mom sewed for her.   And, really, I cried way too often for a boy.  Even so, I thought it would be better to be a boy and be able to punch people when they were mean to one.

And, of course, it was clear to anybody with a brain that males had it "better," except for that whole draft thing.  They weren't judged as much on their appearance (so I thought) and they had more freedom of movement.

 Becoming a "member" of the queer community when I got to college eased some of the discomfort I felt being female.  Then, after about a year in my first job, I quit, went away and looked for work in the Bay Area, then returned home and fell into what I've called a "nervous breakdown" or a "major depressive event."  During the next two years when I had trouble being in the world I looked around for all the possible reasons.  It was during this time that I thought about gender reassignment surgery.

I haven't thought of it since.  I've grown used to this body and things have greatly improved since the sixties for people with without penes. 

I guess I share this because making the decision that one is not the gender one was born isn't as purely biological and unaffected by culture and history as some folks make it seem. Contrary to what the scientist Lady Gaga says, being born a particular way isn't the only thing that impacts one's gender identity or preferences.

LY #62 News Rituals of Alzheimer's

I could write about how chaotic my public speaking class felt tonight and wonder what I would have done with it when I was younger, but instead I want to mention the rituals of news.

It was at the U of U of course that I learned of the ritual function of television news, how it served to express the horror of the day only to end with a human interest story that told us that no matter how wack things seemed, the people in power had control and we shouldn't worry because somewhere something good was happening to or being done by someone.  (For more on television as myth and ritual take a look at this 1987 Communication Research Trends review article.) 

I remembered this interpretation of the function of news this weekend while listening to an NPR story about Alzheimer's.  Pansy and Winston Green, a couple NPR has been following, are dealing with Pansy's Alzheimer's diagnosis.  The story is rather dark, as the disease has been progressing and even though she keeps her spirits up and fierce, her husband looks ahead into the darkness that he will be dealing with far more consciously than she will.  The story featured recordings from a planning committee of their local Alzheimer's association.  We hear one member of the committee struggling to find words for what he wants to say.  NPRs transcript quotes Winston:

"There is still fear," he says. "Not so much denial, but fear. ... You're with people that are that much advanced, and you're thinking, oh my gosh, this could be our journey."

He sees the future in the present of the other people there.  He has an honest fear.  His wife, however, is more optimistic.  She may imagine that she will be able to keep the control that she thinks she has.  The challenge for the writer is to allow both the reality and the optimism into the wrap up of the story. The award-winning journalist Ina Jaffe (one of my favorite NPR personalities) can do that.  She ends the story with these two sentences:

"The Greenes have spent 57 years accepting each other for who they are. They have no plans to stop now."

A happy ending for a dark story.  This vision, of the couple still whole, of that wholeness having a possible future, is a repetition of the "human interest" ritual ending.  Love offers a salvation.  For the moment.  The turn toward hope is a customary ritualized performance for American human interest writers.  Still. 

LY #61 Meals with My Hiring Committee

Since I was ripping on the dudes who interviewed for Bouknight's position, I suppose I should tell a couple of stories about the day I interviewed.

Lunch was held in the meeting room upstairs just off the cafeteria in Grandview.  Anyone on campus who wanted to meet the interviewee was invited.  I didn't know who all of the folks I met was important so I pretty much smiled at everyone.  I remember that Mike Smith asked me if I could play softball.  I'd been playing softball in Utah so of course I said "yes," assuming that anything I said could be a point for or against me.  And then I dropped some lettuce on my lap. 

Hal Gillespie 1991

Later that day I went to dinner at McGraths with my hiring committee which included Hal Gillespie and Mary Monaghan, both felled by cancer in the early 90s.  The other member of the dinner party was John Purdy, a specialist in Native American Literature who went on to teach at Western Washington U.  As I look back on it, I realize that the black and white dress I wore at dinner, purchased at the Happy Dragon Thrift Shop in Los Gatos, was far too short to wear in that professional setting.  But at the time it was the only dark dress I owned.  I was very careful at dinner to drink one glass of wine rather than none or two -- the same amount of alcohol as the other folks at the table. 

As I noted in an earlier blog post, I looked lesbian in those days which might have been the reason that one member of the committee, the late Ms. Monaghan, asked me sotto voce an illegal question about whether or not I was married.  I was a bit flummoxed, but said "yes." 

The other moments I remember from that day don't include either my teaching sample or the actual formal interview.  I do remember that the first person I met officially was Gene Zinkgraf, "personnel director" at the time.  And my last interview of the afternoon, before dinner, was a meeting with dean Bart Queary. I asked if there was anything he could tell me about why I shouldn't take the job.  He told me that many people in Bend were too obsessed with exercise.  (I don't remember whether it was he or Hal Gillespie who used the term "body nazis" to describe the exercise obsessed folks of Central Oregon.)

Between my interview with Bart and dinner with the English department folks, I went back to the Riverside Inn where the college had put me up and called a friend to let him know that I'd given an awesome interview.*

But perhaps not.  It took over a week for COCC to get back to me, during which time I flew off to interview at Augustana in Rock Island.   When I got back I took the call from Ward Tonsfeldt who intimated that COCC was close to both going to semesters and becoming a four-year school. 



* This friend was probably the most important person in my life to me to me at that time, as my spouse and I were separated.  For the purposes of this blog, I will call this friend, about whom I'll be writing more Zephod, a moderately legal spelling of Zaphod, as in Zaphod Beeblebrox - "He's just a guy, y'know?"