RC: Actually I think student evaluations, and the emphasis on affection and admiration for teachers are the plague of our education system. Less love would mean more respect and professionalism, ultimately leading to teaching becoming regarded as a profession instead of an underpaid form of ritual self-sacrifice and surrogate psychotherapy. However, students are not clamoring to pay for my healthcare, so I'm probably tragically mistaken.
Amy King: This profession is historically feminized Bc its about the work of nurturing, care & growth as components of learning. The feminine is denigrated & so it's not as valuable as the masculine abilty to take lives. It's about creating life. Excising the feminine aspects of the emotional, love particularly, as weak & distracting is not the means to respect I desire.
Me: At the beginning of the semester, I do everything I can to show I want an open atmosphere of sharing, that I value emotional content--which is concrete, vs intellectual abstract--and that I care about my students past the classroom. What I get: a classroom of students who come together to care about writing and each other. I've seen the level of writing go past Freshman Composition, as well as students asking questions, getting involved in whatever we do that day. It is retention to the extreme. It is being like those mentors who raised me to the level of writing excellence, and raised me out of the depression I was in. If you get students away from the intellect, they have the chance to find an emotional-intellectual longing for language.
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