February 2007 Archives

After class a student came up and hung around till the others had left.  I thought maybe she wanted to explain why she hadn’t turned in paper 2 yet, but she said she had been home that weekend and she had terrible fights with her younger brother, and wondered if maybe she had anger management problems.

Well, I asked, what made her pissed off, and she said, well, he was in middle school, but two years behind, and was going through the adolescent thing while being two years older than most of his peers and all he did was lie around in his room and watch TV and didn’t want to go to school and didn’t want to go out of the house.  And he had written some letter or said something that indicated he was depressed and thinking about suicide.

So her brother just pissed her off was all; though maybe she was pissed off because she wanted to help him but was in a conflict because she felt she had really dumped a lot on him while he and she were growing up and maybe she felt guilty about how he was turning out and so was pissed off every time she took a look at him. 

So we talked maybe twenty minutes.  Who knows what’s going on?  The father is a terrific guy, the student says, but has not been so success and has had drinking problems.  No mother is mentioned.

She is Chinese, and I have noted from pervious experience that in minority families, especially if they are relatively new to the US, the eldest daughter, especially if she knows English well, becomes the de facto mother of the siblings and sometimes for that matter of the parents.  I don’t know it that’s what’s up exactly, but she is the eldest child. So I do tell her that she is not responsible for her brother’s behavior, and also there is probably next to nothing she can do to change it.

The best thing would be maybe just to talk with him and sit down and non-judgmentally just listen to him.  Sometimes, I said, a person can really be helped by feeling that somebody somewhere is just trying to understand him or her and nothing else.  The problem there is that she can hardly talk to him without getting pissed and that’s not going to help him feel understood.  So I say, OK, then you first have to understand why he pisses you off so and go from there.  First, take responsibility for what you can take responsibility for and that’s yourself.

I suggest maybe she go talk to somebody outside the situation in the counseling center, so she can talk to her brother without blowing her stack.

That’s how I left it mostly.  I don’t know if I helped.  I should practice what I preach.  I don’t know that I listened enough.

I got an email from a student saying her paper would be late because she had spent the weekend in the hospital with Serotonin Syndrome.  Well, that’s a syndrome I had not heard of, thought I should have.  It’s when you get too much serotonin in your system and it’s not a good thing, leading to spasms, twitches, coma, and possible death.

Things sure have changed.  Twenty years ago I don’t think most people knew what the hell serotonin was or is; now we have serotonin syndrome and students who get it because they are on antidepressants.  It’s a form of poisoning actually and seems most frequent among young people who take antidepressants and then take ecstasy.

My student hadn’t taken ecstasy though.  She is on wellbutrin and lexapro, and her doctor had upped the lexapro with bad results.  So she spent the weekend in the hospital and could hardly remember any of it.  Just a blank.

So I said she could take more time to do the paper. We talked about it for ten minutes or so pretty comfortably because I am on antidepressants myself and she knew that.  And I asked her if my teaching seemed OK, because I am in the throes of a depression for diverse reasons, and have really had to drag my butt to class.  I teach from myself and don’t run a robot routine, so if I can’t get my energy there in the room I just don’t feel as if I am doing my job.  But she said I was doing OK.

I think a number of my students in this particular class have had bouts with depression.  I assigned an article on it because we were doing a little reading unit on the mind/body problem, and I was surprised at how many students—maybe a third—wrote mostly about the depression article.

Maybe this is all wrong.  Maybe we are taking drugs for what’s no more than normal human misery.  Of course, one might need a drug for that when one lives in a society that seems to deny the idea that there is such a thing as normal human misery.  I think normal human misery should be an accepted aspect of human life, not to be taken lightly or messed with.

 So teaching isn’t what it once was for me.  Things have changed.  I have changed.  The students have changed.  Though normal human misery persists.

Well, I have not been able to keep up with my classes as I had hoped.  Life got in the way.

Yesterday was rough draft day.  It rained.  Natch.  And attendance was not so hot.

But I did something I had done before.  I had them blog the first page of their rough drafts.  Then I culled them, and pulled out three for each class and rewrote the first paragraphs.

Then in class I pulled up the rewrites over the web and we discussed them.

I know it’s too easy to hurt feelings doing something like this.  But I pitched it a bit differently because I meant it.  We were not, I said, engaged in correcting grammar or punctuation or anything like that.  I didn’t think what I had written was better than what they had written; rather I had been trying by my rewrite to dig out what I thought to be the core of their meaning.  And that possibly—and they should say so—I had missed the core of what they had intended.

In any case, I think it went well.  I was able to demonstrate my real interest in what they are trying to say and I seemed to do so in a way that didn’t hurt feels too much.

Here’s one student paragraph:

From the moment we enter into this world until the time we leave it, the term “obey” is engraved in our minds. We are taught to obey our authority figures, laws, and so on. Yet, it seems ridiculous that one must comply, without question, to whatever someone of power instructs. Should we not formulate our own beliefs and act upon our own thoughts? Do we not have a say in what we do or do not do? According to Fromm, “Obedience to a person, institution, or power (heteronomous obedience) is submission; it implies the abdication of my autonomy and the acceptance of a foreign will or judgment in place of my own. Obedience to my own reason or conviction (autonomous obedience) is not an act of submission but one of affirmation. My conviction and my judgment, if authentically mine, are part of me. If I follow them rather than the judgment of others, I am being myself.” Sadly, though, many of us do not defy authority. May be it I because we are too scared? Maybe it is because we do not trust our own opinions, or possibly that we do not want to be alone in our beliefs, so we sit and wait, allowing for injustice to occur around us.

And here’s how I rewrote it:

Eric Fromm argues that we are all taught to obey. In fact, he says obediance is seen as a virtue. People are good people if they obey. But Fromm says we may pay a heavy price if all we do is obey. He writes, "My conviction and my judgment, if authentically mine, are part of me. If I follow them rather than the judgment of others, I am being myself." If we follow our own beliefs and judgements we are being ourselves. But if we only obey, if we submit to the judgement of others, we stop being ourselves. Losing the sense of who we are as individual people, is a heavy price to pay. But we do it every day.