Couch 176: The happy cake couch

Hugs to you, Butterfly

Thank you

I don't agree that grad students are the best teachers either. I actually like teaching. My person did not like teaching and would have preferred to just do scholarship even though she was an excellent teacher. She worked very hard at teaching and I learned a lot about how to teach from watching her. But it was not her favorite part. She threatened to quit teaching every year to go become a gardener.
She was a terrible gardener but loved it.

About illness/death notices: When I was 16 and my father died, I was living in another country and my aunt who lived in the US had gotten a message to return a phone call, but seeing that it was from my side of the family (she was aunt by marriage), she did a major eye roll and waited three days to find out why she was being contacted. So then she got word to me and said sorry about the delay. hahaha So caring. Not.

Anyway, in a satisfying twist of fate, when she died her new husband's family did not think to let anyone on our side of the family know. A SIL discovered the obit online and left a thinly veiled snarky message to indicate there was a whole other side of the family left in the dark. Then she went on a mission to recover antiques belonging to our side of the family, and she got them by god.

My favorite teachers were adjunct faculty. I learned the most from them.

I am reminded now of Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate for two terms, who taught at a community college for a long time. I also had some great teachers at cc, too.

At my school, we get the most complaints about adjuncts (who are always attorneys and attorneys are usually not the best managers or teachers in certain ways). And adjuncts are the most complainy about students as well.

It may be the difference is in the discipline. Mine was communications and media.

The price of the antiques could only have gone up with the delay, I hope.

I have a good friend who escaped the soul sucking life as an academic in a large uni system and is now enjoying a stint at cc.

Yes. Problem is they have been shipwrecked with the SIL for years and may never make it into rightful ownership. I don't really care. It's amusing to me to see the changes of unrightful ownership from one hostile in law to another.

I think adjuncts who intend an academic career probably work very hard at their teaching, adjuncts who have jobs outside the university less so.

Adjuncts who are dependent on adjunct pay are the modern university’s version of medieval serfs.

The place I completed my grad education relied heavily on adjuncts to teach.

They were also consistently rated the best teachers by students and got teaching awards and whatnot.

Tenured and tenure-track faculty members, with a few exceptions, openly scorned teaching.

In my doctorate training, I was specifically told to not devote any time to teaching and do my best to just be funded by research money (which is what happened for the most part) and then told that on the job market, no one cares about teaching.

Imagine my surprise when I started looking at academic job ads and found that most places (except for a small number of schools) were very specific about wanting real teaching credentials and evaluations etc.

My field was the social sciences.

I like thinking about teachers (usually adjunct faculty) who were kind of magical in the way they brought out qualities that directly translated into success in the world--literally, just going over one piece of work and saying have you considered this or that? And I tried this or that, which they suggested, and bam...project went to market and found success.

This has been a good trip down memory lane for me. I feel inspired to get to work on something now.

Same here

Yes, this was a huge complaint by my friend who escaped. The university used adjuncts to save money.

A car insurance commercial smh

And she's on vacation...

ETA: oops i misread your question. i read it as what's the reason sorry. the relation? is that when i was feeling more than a little depressed for a few days there i knew i wasn't going to see her thursday to talk about it. but i suppose it's kind of resolved itself at the same time in finding something new to worry about. i don't know. just ignore me.

Art, is it possible that you're feeling better about some things in your life right now, so you're finding other things to worry about? I know that's how I am...

I enjoyed seeing the relationship unfold over the course of the show. In a way, I felt sorrier for Mary than for Edith because as the eldest she was more trapped in a particular social box, which Edith managed to avoid and have a more interesting story.

I liked Mary and Anna, too.

Two of my best teachers ever were at the community college I attended. Both said they’d been approached to teach at the university, but that they wanted to focus on teaching instead of research. I still remember things I learned from them, both what they taught and how.

I loved the clothes and the settings. Not just the fancy clothes, but also the servants clothes. And the animals. And then the animals and the fancy clothes! I was probably more concerned for Marys outfit than for the pigs that one scene!

Good point LT, I don't really recognize myself if I'm not worried about something. And yeah work is good get to work at home soon, stuff with t is good, I'm not worried about my class anymore, CODA meetings are good and have already been helpful, so not having anything that I was worried about was making me feel quite untethered or something and I was kinda spinning out. So I grabbed onto the oh I can worry about h and son driving a lot, now I feel normal again. Yeah this may be a good topic for Thursday with t.....

Lemoncake, I don't know if you have PTSD (though I seem to remember you get emotionally abused when you visit home), but have you ever tried something like prazosin for your racing heart? Prazosin is an alpha-1 blocker sometimes prescribed to people with PTSD that can help with their physical manifestations. If waking up with a racing heart is something that happens to you frequently, or waking up and vomiting due to psychological causes, you might want to consider if it is a manifestation of PTSD and if a med like prazosin could help. C had such issues, and it made things much more manageable. While it doesn't affect the mental feelings of anxiety the way a psychotropic might, you might find that you can manage the mental side when you are suffering the overwhelming physical manifestations. The only side effect that we experienced was a rather stuffy nose. The psychiatrist also cautioned about possible dizziness, but that wasn't a problem.

Just a thought.

My grandparents and aunt on my dad's side were/are professors. I don't know what my grandfather was like as a teacher. I don't remember him talking about it, and he had many other ventures during his lifetime. I know that my grandmother won an award. She taught many years. I get the impression that she was strict but fair, with high expectations of her students. As for my aunt, I do not think she likes teaching much, though she has tenure. I can kind of see it from her perspective. It can't be very exciting to teach students whom you feel aren't up to snuff. Plus, the university where she teaches doesn't really specialize much in her field. They don't have a doctoral program in her discipline, and the master's program is limited to specific concentrations within that discipline which don't include her specialization. So I expect she doesn't really get the opportunity to teach students who would be passionate about her classes. I think she's probably pretty strict and unforgiving as a professor based on her commentary, but she's a great aunt!

I don't know if any of my professors have been tenured. I know my two favorite weren't. I am not sure I am on board with the whole tenure system. I think there are significant problems with it, and I am glad I have no intention of pursuing a career in academia (although I would argue that the issues with the tenure system affect students, too).

Thanks for taking the time to post. My official diagnoses are BPD and clinical depression. I'm just a bit weary of starting new medications right now but was actually thinking of going back on them. I've been on trazadone and Zoloft previously- but I felt much more suicidal on the first and stopped the zoloft after maybe 2 weeks because I just felt very sick on it. For some of my bigger exams I've tended to always have panic attacks a week before, which is my normal. I could see a psychiatrist at my teaching hospital, but I don't want to be seen by someone who will most likely teach me.The other one I saw who was really nice was around 35 mins away by taxi but getting back was a problem.