Consequences of Misjudging a Life

Papers, books, hand tools, thumb tacks, screws, plant hankers, drinking classes, sewing notions, clothes, shoes and other stuff here and here and here, all over the house, in fact...There are times when the stuff around our small house gets so high and scattered that it drives me to actually do a bit of straightening up. Neatly stacked piles, my mother used to say, is the perfect definition of straightening up; and I was always-well, almost always-an obedient son. So, I made a bunch of neatly stacked piles out of the chaos last week. In gathering a bunch of papers together I came across a couple of them I remember composing in early 2007 (yes, they were hanging around that long!).

I had just come off another episode of sticking to my well honed teaching principles. The professional acumen developed over the preceding twenty-six years got me in trouble with several students who complained to some folks in administration who called me on the carpet for using the principles I favored. For behaving as a professional educator, for being so calmly articulate in the defense of my practice and for having the audacity of pointing to the defects in the pedagogy and course design they were demanding I use, I was refused further teaching at this college. This was not the first and if I were ever to continue in higher education I doubt it would be the last. So, I was thinking about forever leaving The Academy for something else. A career counselor I consulted suggested I write down what I considered the most congenial working conditions and what kind of life I thought I was leading and wanted to live as conversation starters leading to the types of employment I could expect would best work for me.

I placed the most congenial working conditions in seven points (which I will list without comment):

1. The work must intrinsically hold elevated levels of intellectual stimulation.
2. There must be high frequency of professional and social conversation.
3. The job should allow for creative communication through a single medium or through many media.
4. The position must have sufficient autonomy for me to do what I think is professionally correct.
5. The employer must highly value shared commitments where my commitment to the firm is shared equally with commitment to family and to community.
6. The employer must highly value reciprocal commitments where a firm reciprocates my commitment to its mission by its commitment to my professional development, advancement, compensation and longevity.
7. My job performance must be evaluated on how and what I am doing and the results produced rather than on mere compliance to a supervisor or a manager.

However, it is the life statement which is of far greater importance for it sums-up a dilemma enormously affecting my entire now forty-eight year adult existence.

I wrote:

“I've wanted to live a principled life. From a child's eye, I saw both my mother and my father as principled people. I have been formed and informed by my consistent perception of their principled actions founded in Forgiveness, Courage, Honesty, Integrity, Joyfulness, Compassion, Kindness, Commitment, Consideration, Creativity, Respect, Dignity, Enthusiasm, Morality, Justice, Fairness, Generosity, Gentleness, Patience, Graciousness, Helpfulness, Hopefulness, Humility , Idealism, Love, Purposefulness, Responsibility, Gratitude, Tolerance, Trust, Understanding, Wonder and Wisdom. As a consequence, I have developed a keen sense of right and wrong, of ways of being and ways of working best situated to help others help themselves. I have also cultivated insight into the fitness of structures within which people live, work, and play having the best opportunity to gain peace, love and understanding within themselves and with others and to acquire virtuous lives they themselves wish to cultivate and virtuous lives organizations say participation should develop.

And the reality of life since high school, some forty-one years [at the time of writing this statement] is that I have lived the principled life I wanted. However, keeping the faith of principle has put me at odds with 'the real world' where people, organizations and structures force decisions counter with the consequence that when given conventional parameters of living a successful live, I must say I am a definite failure.

Indeed, the parameters of life I've taken as the goals and measures of success, and, thus, of self-worth, are not those of a principled life but exclusively monetary/employment based, i.e., sustained professional employment and advancement with an upward slopping compensation and a substantial retirement nest egg. They have been given me by the communities within which I have lived, the society at large, and yes, my father-insisting out of deep love that I must be solidly on a permanent career path by age twenty-three else I will be a failure the rest of my life. But, with a deep rooted inability to reject or modify principle in favor of having to make a living subservient to wrong headed supervisors, adversely working organizations and destructive structures and with having the freedom to do so provided by a supportive family, I have a record of sporadic employment, barely any income and no contributions to a nest egg. In other words, by these standards, I am a failure as a human being and as long as I live failure will be a constant companion. No wonder I have always had a sense of being worthless!

But, I want to embrace the way I am, committing fully to a principled life, releasing the power to act accordingly without self-censure. To do so I need to somehow re-frame emotional anchors allowing me to switch from my community's imprint, the society's expectations and my father's demands to a self-acceptance, a self-love, of a who I am. Simultaneously, I need to develop and interiorize the goals and measures appropriate for my principled life. ”

Indeed, the crushing shame of worthlessness brought about by my own misjudging of my life through the years has resulted in a pattern of depression compelling me to withdraw within the four walls of whatever house I am in. More, I self-medicate with food over-eating so much that at one point decades ago I blew up to three hundred pounds. I once described the pattern as: feeling so worthless I hide in the house overeating, gaining a good deal of body weight which re-enforces being worthless...eventually after months have passed, I get up off the floor working through the self-hatred eating less and losing weight...after dropping a bunch of weight I feel capable enough to go out of the house...the more I go out, the more I am propelled to look for work, mostly teaching work...eventually I land an appointment...I do what I know to be professionally right, proper and necessary for the mental well being and the intellectual and the academic growth of the students I am given regardless of organizational imperatives, supervisory dictates or falling in line with what other teachers are doing...by standing on professional and personal principle I upset the expectations of a few students who complain to supervision...supervision is upset at me for being uncompliant with their wrongheaded methods and for upsetting the paying customers ...supervision, then, does not renew my appointment sending me out onto the street...I feel a failure, retreat to the four walls of whatever house I am in, self-medicate, gain weight, eat more, gain more, fell more useless...then months later I get off the floor working through the feelings of worthlessness, lose weight, feel capable enough to go out of the house, and so on.

When I wrote the life statement I had retreated into the house, began to overeat, started to gain back weight lost in the last round. However, writing the summary brought to the fore hazy thoughts on the matter I had been having. Indeed, writing it down clarified the dilemma under which I had been working all my adult life: a deep desire to live a principled life yet measuring life success and self-worth with grossly inappropriate criteria, ultimately misjudging my life entirely. Having gained the insight, I began to work through the bad feelings, ate less, went out of the house, engaged the community and gained teaching opportunities, which, I'm afraid ended the same as others. Unfortunately, I had yet to translate insight into a re-framed emotional predisposition, an altered psycho-dynamic, putting myself back into depressions with all its attending pathologies.

Intellectually I have placed my life in the proper perspective as a principled person. But, l continue to struggle greatly to re-set the emotional predispositions, my psycho-dynamic, to feel the power of a life so lived, to be not disturbed by irrelevant criteria of success, to fear no longer any judgment of others, or myself, of a failed life based on monetary/employment criteria. It has become quite obvious to me that this struggle will continue the rest of my life.

Here we go having come out of the dark tunnel again

Well, here we go again after nearly a year's absence.  I had a schedule of publishing twice a week thinking that would offer me a sufficient frequency to sustain a diet of blogging while allowing suitable reflective time for me to figure out what to say and how to say it.  Yes, twice a week did allow suitable reflective time, but the depression under which way too many things become impossible weighed too heavily on me for me to develop even the occasional diarist's habit.



And while I would like to thing that the unfortunate experience of my semester teaching at Fordham University was no big deal, I must acknowledge it plunged me into a psychological paralysis.  The fact that I was able to continue to listen to my favorite music radio station,  Fordham's public  radio WFUV-FM, largely ree from anger and self-loathing says a little something about the paralysis being not rock-bottom deep.  Still...It has seemed to me that other college professors get to have sufficient leeway in how they conduct their courses, but not me. 


I posted an open letter to my colleagues in the Media Ecology Association on the association's listserve on December 19, 2013 , being it was through connections there I landed the course at Fordham and to whom I thought to complain.  I enter it here to let others know.


"It happened yet again:  As usual, the instructional order, learning objectives, pedagogy and assessment of the course I was given to teach this concluding semester were premised on judgment developed from nearly forty years cultivating the deepest understanding of Human and Hard Tech Communication processes and affects on individuals, cultures and societies through time from both a “George Gerbner-U of Penn Annenberg-ICA” and a “Nystrom-Postman-Moran-NYU Media Ecology-MEA” perspective and of learning theory, pedagogy, practice and experience in Experiential Learning, Cooperative Learning, Socratic Method and Developmental Lesson Planning across levels of schooling from junior high to college, especially the collegiate. Well, as happens, the exercise of professional judgment upset a small number of young adults who had difficulty adjusting to my course construction and who complained up the chain of command to the effect that I was called on the carpet for exercising this acumen and required to implement a “course correction” in the methods and the substance of the course I was given to instruct.  

(This is a farewell message. For those who think it improper to be posted on the list, then, please, stop reading, now. All others I encourage to continue.)

David Linton, when working for him at Marymount Manhattan, said I possessed an articulate rebelliousness. While that, indeed, flattered my profound desire to see and to project myself aligned with the great Irish rebels and the equally great European and American tradition of free thinkers and non-conformists, the reality is that all I am about is putting in the service of good learning the pedagogical practices of Experiential Learning, Cooperative Learning, Socratic Method and Developmental Lesson Planning. More, I import the personal responsibility component from Democratic Education starting the movement in students away from the learned helplessness of the elementary-high school years to a self-actualization of the collegiate, from the infantilization of conventional primary and secondary teaching/learning toward the empowered adult of whole cognitive developed higher education. So, yes, David, I have ends in mind other than the specific content mastery of the course.

 

If there is anything authentically different from conventional exercise in these education strategies is that I employ them within the same course and, frequently, within the same class period giving students an array of means by which to acquire the content of the course and providing students an authentic responsibility to accept or reject the conditions of inclusion in each class and in the course along with the consequences of their decisions. I take as given that this is the first exposure to these methods and to these conditions for students and I fully recognize the adjustment difficulty visited upon them, especially on those holding expectations that they will be doing the same thing they have been doing from almost all of their schooling lives; thus, I incorporate personal support into each course prominently among which is individual one on one instructional/counseling sessions during and outside office hours.

 

David, this time around, I did not get the chance to be articulate. In fact, what was student complaint was given validation by all supervision without even a cursory chat with me to ascertain its authenticity. It is clear that there may be academic freedom for others but not for me. So, that’s it: stick a fork in me and pop me out of the oven, I’m done. I have always done the best for each young adult I was given the privilege of teaching, even those who complain. But, the conditions of employment whereby I am forbidden to use my professional judgment, and where I am being forced to employ pedagogical methods which even the schools in which I’ve taught hold workshops and seminars to get faculty to greatly move away from, have become intolerable. If being rebellious means I will not accept having to implement the least effective pedagogy just to stay employed as an adjunct, just to not upset, not to differently cognitively challenge, any student then, I am a rebel. Unfortunately, the consequence of being a rebel is to be marginalized and equally to marginalize oneself. So, on the margins of education I am to return. However, I can no longer afford to be there.

I am stepping away from the field of education completely as there truly is nowhere for me to be. I am also leaving the MEA, although I take with me the deepest knowing of how the world works. I want to thank all in the MEA who continue to believe I have an insightful thing or two to say and who in one way or another have acknowledged that over the years, especially those convention conveners who accepted my panels and those who graciously accepted inclusion. I wish everyone all the best. From now on if anyone wishes to reply to this or to keep in touch, please use ljfayhee@gmail.com.

As “an old friend use to say”, Good Night and Good Luck."

I'm still not done with education as the many successive blog posts here will attest.  But, unless something of a miracle happens I doubt very much that I will see the inside of a college teaching opportunity again.