Today all of the postgraduates had work due (and I am the Cerberus, or perhaps more accurately Rhadamanthys, of this whole structure). I received several frantic calls and e-mails starting from about 8:30 am, from students who had hit some sort of wall, intellectual or physical – one battling with an incoherent conclusion, another with a migraine that kept her from finishing. I did my supportive bit – typically for me, pushing them to do whatever they could, then relenting when it seemed that they really needed a break. Bad cop and good cop in one person....
What is tricky about these matters is that I myself am so extremely poor at handling this exact problem: meeting deadlines, finishing writings, disciplining myself to work frequently on a long-term project, deciding that the current version is good enough for a given situation. I know that I am repeating many things said to me by my teachers and advisors over the past, uh – well, since we probably need to go back at least to high school on this, the past thirty-five years or so. And I know that these mysterious proverbs, these emblematic Redewendungen of intellectual production, are accurate and helpful – but I must admit that I do not generally manage to follow them myself.
Which, I suppose, indicates that this is exactly the right job for me now: to revise my own habits and my interpretations of past experiences in the light of what I now have to spend time saying to younger writers....
... or perhaps teaching was your penance for being poor at doing such things (at least, that is what I told myself when I taught). Which means you can celebrate your spoken Hail Marys, and live grateful that you are no longer the migraine-afflicted student...
Posted by: brothas0ul | January 21, 2008 at 01:39 PM