testosterone
I taught today. First time this semester. I'm back to the intro labs, since they are less prep work and less grading than the other teaching assignments available. I got two labs back to back and I'm very pleased about that. I even managed to not have them in the morning. Extra pleased.
But life has a funny way of fucking with you sometimes.
My second lab has a rather large number of men. In fact, it has 17 men. There are only 21 students in the lab. There were 22, but one of them realized about 20 minutes in that she was in the wrong lab. Leaving me with a lab that is 80% guys. And not just any guys. It looks like I am teaching a fucking rugby team or something.
update 6:26 PM
I realize that it is very unPC of me to express any consternation based on the gender breakdown of my students. Although do keep in mind that nearly every frigging example we are given to use with the students lists gender as a variable. How's that for teaching people not to discriminate? Anyhow, relative to this here situation, I recognize fully that my concern is something I need to try to leave out of the classroom. Therefore this semester presents me with an opportunity to challenge my teaching skills, since in my outside life I have problems with big groups of guys. Big problems. I've left restaurants before because a group of noisy young-ish or at least youthful acting men have arrived. It seems my brain is completely unable to tune them out, and tuning them in often makes me feel inexplicably jumpy, angry, and distracted. A loud shout at a TV or a uproar of male laughter is more than I can bear sometimes. It is not consciously mediated, although I do get into all sorts of reasoning about the reaction after it has begun. And so me with that in a roomful of men exactly at the age where being boysterous is so very prized. That is what I mean about life fucking with me, and navigating that will be my challenge for the semester.
3 comments:
As a teacher, 6th graders granted. I know what a pain in the butt a GROUP of boys can be~ They act as if they have lost their minds!!
I wish you luck, and even in middle school they still break grades, test scores and such into gender pools.
E gads, 6th grade boys. I recall quite clearly how wretched my own 6th grade experience with 6th grade boys was. 5th and 6th grades were perhaps some of the most miserable years of my life, in no small part because of being surrounded by 10 and 11 year old boys nearly daily. I wonder if this was just an artifact of my region, but I recall that as the age of the "your mother" jokes. I mean it was a nearly CONSTANT barrage among them of "Corey's mother this" and "Brian's mother that". They learned each other's mother's first names and would shout them out at random times. That happen much where you are?
I hear you on the groups-of-men thing. I got in an argument once with an older male colleague about racial/gender stereotyping. Within the context of the discussion, I had told him that I would be much more frightened passing a group of white men on the street than a group of black men. He didn't believe me; he assumed that because I'm a white woman, I must be more afraid of black men. But, being a narcissistic white man himself, he had no conscious understanding of the aura of entitlement that surrounds groups of white men and causes them to lose all sense of humor when they get reproached by a woman for heckling her.
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