So I'm totally exhausted. Too exhausted to sit outside and grade. Too exhausted to even sit outside and have a cup of tea. Too exhausted to clean the apartment up. But I am going to put in a little bit of entry about today.

So I had a staff meeting today-I remember the first time I watched Silence of the Lambs. There is that section when Clarice is told that Hannibal drove Miggs to swallow his own tongue. I often wondered how that was possible. Now I know. You put eight professors who spend all year teaching argumentation and it takes about ten minutes before you clearly understand how a person can happily swallow his or her own tongue. So we are in there discussing the summer reading and now the meetings have become totally predictable-you have Casey (not a real name) who makes a couple of comments, some relevant, some not, but he feels the need to preface them with so many clarifiers and self effacing comments "Not to suggest that all of you haven't done a great deal already considering these elements, and by the way I really want to thank S- because I think it's clear that he has put in a great deal of work into these hand-outs, but what I think, and this is just personal experience here, and of course you all may have different experiences and I welcome the chance to hear about them..." by the time he actually get to a comment I'm too annoyed to actually notice if it relevant or not. (By the way, Casey is also the ultra annoying professor who now treats me like the great and powerful Oz. Ignore the girl behind the curtain.) There is M. who is generally cowed by whatever is said, even though she is technically in charge of the meeting. There is S who takes a half an hour to answer or address every issue because he always has to go by way of ancient Rome or Egypt to show off his superior (not to mine) knowledge of history. Of course S couldn't say enough good things about me today-praising my previous teaching techniques. In fact, he even modified the Pre-MAP format to conform to how I teach the class. (He really liked how I structured my class last year. I would hand out the assigned readings and then I would give them a sheet with 5 questions for critical thinking, which would be discussed in class, and five questions for critical writing. S- found some of my questions and decided he liked the questions and the structure so much he would make it part of the mandatory format for the course. Insert clink of champagne flute here.) Still praise aside, it would be nice if someone could actually make a short concise argument, especially since that is one of the virtues we are trying to instill in our students. (The do as I say not as I do factor of teaching.) Then there J. If I ever have to kill someone, I mean for unknown reasons some nefarious force says to me, "You have twelve hours to kill someone, GO" she is the one I will gun for. I have yet to encounter anything redeeming about her. She is the enfant terrible of the department, and what makes her particularly terrible is that she is not even a fabulous teacher. There are teachers I have heard of who are arguable demented, some have even phsyically or emotionally abused students.What makes the students and the universities tolerate such behavior is that these teachers are given moments of remarkable insight. Students even clamor for these teachers, which forces the university to some times tolerate increasing hostile, mal-adjusted, and even unsanitary professors far longer than they would be otherwise inclined. At least in those cases there is a trade off, terrible behavior is tolerated because of what the students reap from such an experience. Here the enfant terrible imagines herself to be at this heightened plane, but she isn't. She is merely a cry baby with no shame and no insight. She has learned, as certain babies learn from ultra passive parents, that if she simply throws a fit she will get her way. And so every meeting she throws a fit, and no one seems able to check her or stop her. Perhaps there is a fear of not looking professional, of not respecting her ideas, but she doesn't seem to mind totally ignoring the decisions that the rest of us make. What makes her objections in this meeting particularly painful (and I'm still bitter over her piss anting around about the mid term so much that we, the professors, did not get final approval of the questions-I did not see the final form of the questions until the day we gave them-that was her doing as well) is that she doesn't even spend time discussing the assigned readings. She "assigns" them, but does not discuss them so that she can spend the summer course talking about the readings she wants to discuss (as a result only her classes are not prepared when the readings come up in later classes-its like one section of a pre-requisite course treating the pre-requisite material as supplemental and so only the students of that section are totally unprepared for the next echelon of learning).And then she is there today objecting to the new summer readings because she feels that we as a department finally got a handle on the reading, finally had fallen intoa good pattern, and now the readings were all being changed. Well, heaven forbid she not teach different readings from the readings she didn't teach last summer. (Did that make any sense?) And the worst part is she flaunts that she doesn't teach them all over the office. She blatantly boasts about how she doesn't teach the assigned readings. And yet none of us brought that up in the meeting today. Maybe next time I will. After all if she isn't going to respect what the rest of us think and M isn't going to stand up for us then there has to be away to deal with it. We all snipe amongst each other, but one of us must stand up and try and change the system. And I may be that one. After all, I'm the one who teaches pre-MAP better than anyone else, if anyone gets to enfant terrible around here it should be me. Maybe I need to talk to M and some of the other staff about this situation too. If I can rally the troops and get J. to see her behavior will no longer prevail and that it is disrespectful to the rest of us who actually try to "play" by the rules, or at least have too much of a sense of dignity not to utterly embarass ourselves like that in front of people we don't even like.

Have I talked you out of pursuing a career in higher education yet? If just one of you says yes, I will feel I have done my job as an incredibly underpaid slave to an utterly useless profession.