Accidental Ambivalence

Truth Project: Eight

Someone who made your life hell or treated you like shit.

Like most people studying education, my final semester of classes included a methods course specific to my area of teaching. I love school. I've always loved school; if I didn't love it, I couldn't have pursued a career in that world. This class was my least favorite in eighteen years of school. Which is awful, considering that you can argue that it was the most important class of my entire education.

I hated my professor. First, I felt like she was unqualified. She didn't yet have her doctorate, she'd only taught high school English for a handful of years before being hired by the university, and for all of her criticism of her students' planning and preparedness, it never seemed to me like she was appropriately prepared for our classes. Second, I found her annoying as a person. That's life; people are annoying, even people we have to deal with. She certainly wasn't the first annoying teacher I'd had; she wasn't even the most annoying teacher I'd had. Finally, I felt like she had an unexplained dislike for me, a personal one.

Respect is paramount in my personal world. I struggle to work with and for people whom I don't respect, and I most certainly did not respect this professor. The class was held once a week, for three hours each Monday night. I dreaded it. I despised it. I made myself sick over it.

During the course, we were also engaged in a practicum. The high school teacher I worked with knew my professor. She also hated my professor, which was extremely validating. I was dealing with it all, putting up and shutting up and biding my time. I went to class, did my assignments, worked on the extremely important portfolio that all education majors complete, worked with my cooperating teacher in my practicum. It was fine.

Then, the professor contacted my cooperating teacher and expressed her concern about my performance and planning. Without discussing it with me. My cooperating teacher was furious; she saw it as a personal slight. If she'd felt that my performance was lacking, she would have discussed it with both me and the professor. She assured me that I was doing fine. Still, I was hurt. My pride and my feelings. I was also angry; I channeled the hurt into the anger and subsequently spent the rest of the semester furious. Because when you lie about your emotions the way that I do, being angry is infinitely easier than being hurt.

I did confront the professor. Though I didn't respect her, I respectfully asked her to explain herself. If she sincerely questioned my abilities and my performance, she owed it to me to tell me. If no one ever provides constructive criticism when I'm not performing appropriately, I can't fix the problem. Her inability to explain herself added hatefulness to my fury. If she can't provide me with an evaluation of my supposedly inferior performance, how on earth am I supposed to respect her opinion?

Had it not been my last semester of classes - the semester before my student teaching - I would have dropped the course and changed majors. I am incredibly grateful that she was the last professor I encountered instead of one of the first, because I am meant to be a teacher.

I'm not shy about expressing my opinions. When I wrote my detailed and scathing evaluation at the end of the semester, I signed it. I wish it had made a difference. Unfortunately, she was around through my student teaching, evaluating my portfolio and assigning more work. I'm grateful for my student teaching supervisor, who seemed to sympathize with my personal distaste for the professor and was so understanding that she kept me motivated. That was, of course, after the professor "inadvertantly" left my name off the list of students who required a placement for student teaching and I was forced to beg and scramble for a placement. (Otherwise, I would have spent a semester sitting on my ass and not graduated on time. More fuel for the hatred fire, really.)

No one has ever made me feel so terrible about myself. No one has ever made me question myself so much, so negatively. She made me feel awful, worthless. And as much as I hate her still, I'm grateful to her in that twisted way that "bad" people often make us. I will never, ever make one of my students feel that way if I can help it. And I will never let someone else make me feel that way.

Labels: truth project

posted by nicalyse @ 1:42 AM