Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Mar. 9th, 2022 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI’m not sure how to explain the vibe of Washington DC if you’ve never spent any significant amount of time there, but it’s an extremely wealthy and competitive city where cosmetic surgery is inexpensive and practically universal. And I don’t mean “universal” as “a white people / Jewish / Armenian thing”; I mean everyone gets it, generally when they’re young. Once you know what to look for, you can easily see it, but it’s not like it’s a secret. Most people are happy to talk about it.
Cosmetic surgery isn’t something that interests me. My soul is ugly, so my face doesn’t really matter.
Nevertheless, when I started giving lectures at media conventions, I realized that something had to be done. I wasn’t a DC insider by any means, so I had to get the names of doctors off the internet like a peasant.
At the first place I went to, the doctor explained that they specialized in treating severe medical cases that require skin grafting. Still, he studied my face for a good five minutes. It was intense. When he was done, he stepped back, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “You are beautiful and perfect.”
“Maybe no one has ever told you that,” he added, “so I thought it might help for you to hear it.”
Then he sighed and gave me a business card for a clinic in the northern Virginia suburbs that does the sort of work I was interested in, which was super helpful. I ended up spending the money on a suit instead of cosmetic surgery, but it was nice to know where I could go if I wanted to fix my face.
Anyway, this is the sort of feedback I want to be able to give my students. I want them to know they are beautiful and perfect, but I also want to give them concrete advice about how to take their work to the next level if that’s what they’re interested in.
Cosmetic surgery isn’t something that interests me. My soul is ugly, so my face doesn’t really matter.
Nevertheless, when I started giving lectures at media conventions, I realized that something had to be done. I wasn’t a DC insider by any means, so I had to get the names of doctors off the internet like a peasant.
At the first place I went to, the doctor explained that they specialized in treating severe medical cases that require skin grafting. Still, he studied my face for a good five minutes. It was intense. When he was done, he stepped back, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “You are beautiful and perfect.”
“Maybe no one has ever told you that,” he added, “so I thought it might help for you to hear it.”
Then he sighed and gave me a business card for a clinic in the northern Virginia suburbs that does the sort of work I was interested in, which was super helpful. I ended up spending the money on a suit instead of cosmetic surgery, but it was nice to know where I could go if I wanted to fix my face.
Anyway, this is the sort of feedback I want to be able to give my students. I want them to know they are beautiful and perfect, but I also want to give them concrete advice about how to take their work to the next level if that’s what they’re interested in.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-10 04:21 am (UTC)I think it's a good philosophy for teaching as well as medicine, though.
(I'm fascinated, in that I grew up in DC and didn't know this about cosmetic surgery? But maybe I ran with the wrong crowd.)
no subject
Date: 2022-03-10 12:49 pm (UTC)(except for the Ikea that overlooks the most gorgeous and fantasy-pastoral set of fields, which are straight out of Lord of the Rings and maintained by the Department of Agriculture apparently?)
but my students at GMU told me that it was a relatively normal suburb, with “normal” in this case meaning “moderately wealthy and international like all DC suburbs.”
I couldn’t say for certain, since I only lived in the area as an adult, but I got the feeling that DC proper has a different vibe than the suburbs, especially among the “young professional” crowd going to bars and boozy gallery openings and garden parties. Most of the people I mixed with were in their late twenties and early thirties, but I saw a fair number of high school kids at live shows, and a lot of them had The Nose and The Eyelids, so maybe cosmetic surgery is just more common now than it used to be.
I love DC a whole lot, but it’s also a relief not to have to live there anymore. Not like I could have afforded it for much longer anyway lmao.
Anyway, I'm starting to realize that maybe med school and residency break people in a way that makes them less compassionate. Grad school and the academic job market definitely break a lot of professors, and it's been a long process for me to deprogram myself from the cult while figuring out what a normal and decent set of best practices should be.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-10 11:50 pm (UTC)It's also possible, given I went to religious K-12 (two different branches of religion) that it was simply Not The Done Thing for my crowd and it would've been different had I gone to, say, Sidwell Friends. But I'd believe that DC itself has a different vibe than the suburbs; Chicago's like that.
I wonder if it's like, med school/residency or it's the same kind of thing you get in criminal and family law, which are the two branches where you really get more insight than anyone is probably equipped to handle into exactly how horrible people can be to each other.