I was talking with one of my 1st-year peeps about "vibes" we'd gotten from a professor earlier that day, as we each individually ran into him in the hall. We thought he seemed cool, not happy to see us, something like that, and we each interpreted it the same way - that we hadn't done well on the paper we'd handed in the week before. It turns out he hadn't read the papers yet, so he was probably just feeling guilty about that... but it got us thinking about how as students we're constantly monitoring professors' body language, over-interpreting off-hand comments, analyzing their evaluations of us, and how it seems like they can get away with being completely oblivious to our thoughts and feelings.
But! Only four months separated my professor status from student status (less, if you count the time after the Spring semester ended when I was dealing with an Incomplete student - plus, every time I go back to the Burg students treat me like a prof) and I can clearly recall the feeling of being in front of the "blinking owls" (as Terry calls them). I remember how much I noticed the emotions playing across people's faces, the boredom, confusion, interest, laughter... and how attuned I was to that nonverbal feedback.
It's the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, really - profs wouldn't be profs without students (um, well, maybe at a research institute!). My therapist says academics have very fragile egos, I think for the MOST part it's true (not me!); validation from students can mean a whole lot. So can rejection. From the student perspective they seem so powerful - but one against 10-80, that's pretty scary odds from up front!
The Gift of Disruption
11 months ago
3 comments:
OR is the professorial behavior entirely separate, and potentially mutually exclusive, from a relationship with "the other" and purely as the therapist says (and I agree with her/him) derived from that fragile ego / insecurity thing. Certainly some people manage the professorial behavior at all times, in and out of the pedagogical environment.
What do you mean by "professional" behavior? Is this a general category that happens to include academics as professional intellectuals? Are you referring to the detachment bit?
Actually, I really do believe in intersubjectivity - the give-and-take that governs all our interactions - although it's true that people can detach and disassociate from others
Read it again, it's "professorial" not "professional".....
Academics are interesting as a high-context culture within a particularly low-context western paradigm. You could argue (and I'm not) that depending on the particular prof's relationship to the general social culture and their ability to adapt and become adept in social situations you can predict whether they will behave in more a disassociative (or Hegelian) manner to their students. But perhaps that's redundant.
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