Local Gin and Class Evals: Finding Balance at the End of a Dismal Week

So last week turned out to be one of those abysmally bad weeks where nothing goes terribly, life-shatteringly wrong, but the little bad things pile up so that I'm left wondering: what the hell kind of karma glitch am I dealing with? I meditate; I donate what little life-savings I have to the ASPCA and NPR; I buy gifts from local craftswomen; I buy bulk from the co-op; most of my clothes come from goodwill; I recycle my wine bottles. Is it possible that karma made a mistake?

Here's what sent me over the edge. A student decided that instead of submitting the assigned final paper, she would submit a critique of the class that read, in actuality, like a personal attack. What made the personal attack even more tough to swallow--it being stuck in the back of my throat, just out of tongues reach, like one of those canada mints swallowed hole, only dissolving under the pressure of scalding water-- was that this student is a major in my field which emphasizes social justice and what we call intersectional analysis (that everyone has many identities operating at one time, so a woman is never just a "woman" but also affected by things like race, class, sexuality, citizenship, and ability) and a senior. In other words, she is a few short quarters away from graduating.

And her critique stung. She wrote that my class was not a "good" representation of "U.S. Women Writers" and that we only read "insane" women and "lesbians" and she asked rhetorically, "What can I relate to here? And should we be reading the women who have done the real work of feminism?" I was grading papers with a friend at the local coffee shop when I got to this student's paper and I felt like someone kicked the wind out of me. I was breathless as I took a sip from my luke warm coffee. I read it out loud to make sure I was understanding that, in fact, this student was not doing the assignment but issuing an attack. Then I started crying.

Over the course of the evening, as I skyped with Cat, I became enraged and focused on proving my student's critique was inaccurate. In a ten week class, we spent three weeks on Harriet Jacobs. We spent another week on Sandra Cisneros. We spent a week with Hattie Gossett's poetry. All of whom are not insane and not lesbians. In fact, we read only one book by a lesbian. And we read two books where the point was to critique diagnostic models of patriarchal power--i.e. question this idea of insanity that has been cast upon women for centuries. In ten weeks, we sampled 160 years of women's writing. But Cat didn't need to hear all this. Cat knows my syllabus. Cat knows that a student critiquing like this doesn't have a problem with the course or with me but with some deep-seated homophobia combined with some fear of mental illness, maybe.

I didn't respond to the student until I met with my supervisor, who advised that I give the student a chance to rewrite. While I was happy to grade the student according to the rubric and fail her, I also felt like not giving her a chance to rewrite would be vindictive. She took the offer. Her final paper is due in January. Since then, my online reviews have come back as a mixed bag of strong reactions: "Not an easy A but the best class I've taken in college" and "The reading was too dense. Watching "Girl, Interrupted" was a waste of time. She's an arbitrary grader." "She's a fair and challenging grader." It seemed like for every negative critique (and I take grading really seriously--providing a lot of comments and a detailed rubric, so I take being accused of being arbitrary very personally) there was an opposite.

This is a blog about finding balance in my 28th year. As such, I'm not sure what to do about such vastly different reviews of my course. I'm glad I'm affecting students strongly but, of course, I want students to leave with a more open mind; with a complicated understanding of identity and power. So when I was done reading my evals, i did the only thing I could think of doing: I poured myself a strong gin and tonic and collapsed helplessly, wondering if I'm really suited for the next thirty years.

The gin itself if local, made of corn. Five dollars more expensive than what we would normally buy.

As I sip, I remember the student who came up to me after that last day of class, three students clustered around him as I was packing up my bag, who said, "I'm not trying to brown nose or anything. I just want to say that you are a bad-ass teacher and I mean that in a good way." The other students nodded in agreement. I smiled, thinking, "Four out of thirty-four--that ain't bad." The gin tastes sweeter in my next sip. Must be the corn. Or the karma.