No Pain...

No pain.

I'm taking a break from my mountain of grading. It's amazing how much faster you go through them when you've decided to accept that this is just grade generation. This is a nice change of attitude as it means I do not need to bother commenting my grades. I can simply assign them.

And this is why I say I need to get out of grad school before I become a complete asshole.

A___ and I were talking today about the term "No pain, no gain" as it is applied and realized in graduate education. I was asking for a term describing the philosophy of glamorizing the "hoop jumping", self eroding work-a-holic aspects of our program. Possibly most or at least many programs in fact. This is not merely my own jaundiced view (a commenter in fact refered to my writing as "jaundiced" not long ago - hence I feel justafied in calling myself "jaundiced". And coincidentally, my liver enzymes reflected that I was in fact jaundiced for a prolonged period in 2005. So there you go.)

No, this is not just me. One student, an older person who returned to school although she had a rewarding career already well underway because she couldn't live without the title "Dr." and needed the frequent cookies and pats on the head which are part and parcle of being a student, told me she didn't mind "the hoops". "I'm good at jumping!" she said as if this were an asset.

To me, hoops as in the term "jumping through hoops" implies a somewhat useless or extra-relevant but costly and/or difficult task. Why someone would feel such strong, expressive pride in their ability to do this is beyond me. Seriously. However, the older cookie and head patting student expressed an attitude which I see promoted by the faculty who do interact with grads and reflected back by the grads.

I overheard two younger grads from another related program talking about time. "Oh my god, I only worked like 30 hours this week...I am so lazy! I'm just like I know some weeks I work 60, but right now I did 30 and I feel like I worked so much. I used to do more. I'm getting lazy!" I piped up with the advice that some weeks you do 30, some you do 60 or more, and that in the end it all evens out. If you're getting your work done at 30, use that extra time to stay positive.

It was as if I were lecturing herring on the current choices for US presidential candidates. Honest. Not a negative response, just a blank one. Just bubbles and fins.

This attitude is promoted and rewarded by the faculty. A set of them have a habit of using the following terms to refer to ideal grad students: "zombies", "slaves", "miserable bastards", "miserable blighters", "sacks", "poor fools", "unhappy sods". These terms are said in contexts which convey some kind of appropriateness of the meaning, as if we all should be this way. As if the traits associated with these terms were good positive ones we should aspire to. We live at the poverty line, have substandard housing, and some of us have family or other extra-curricular commitments and demands on our time, money, and resources. When these things add up and a grad ends up hospitalized, ill, called away for a sick or dead relative, or simply seen dragging his or her carcass through the halls, those terms are applied. And strangely, well to me at least, many of the grads respond as if they have been comforted or reassured. I see nothing at all reassuring in knowing my faculty consider their students' misfortunes cute.

So A___ and I were talking about this today. My point was that we don't all have the luxury of circumstances, past or present, to do the hoops. Those of us in that position are trudging along doing what we can when we can. Insisting we use our "spare" resources for graceful hoop jumping is in effect insisting on pain. That glamorized pain is something which is seen as not real pain or suffering, just good character-building fun. The "poor blighter" faculty member once told me this shit "built character". I told him I had plenty of character already, thanks.

No pain, no gain has been misapplied to this endeavor and has come to be seen as meaning pain = gain, in a very real sense. The amount of pain you are willing to publicly subject yourself to (e.g. multiple all nighters, over-loads in teaching, on demand research product with no research/writing mentoring) is a measure of how well you are doing. It's small wonder I am finding the culture of academia problematic. If it is built on the assumption of chronic personal over-extention for the degree, how does someone whose emotional and physical resources are already largely spoken for manage to get by?

Nearly all of the people I've known in grad school with who have left or are leaving are all assault/abuse survivors. I wonder if that correlates with a low threshold and tolerance for seemingly gratiutous self inflicted pain?