{"id":8915,"date":"2022-03-08T12:22:24","date_gmt":"2022-03-08T12:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/?p=8915"},"modified":"2022-03-08T12:22:24","modified_gmt":"2022-03-08T12:22:24","slug":"jumping-to-conclusions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/blog\/2022\/03\/08\/jumping-to-conclusions\/","title":{"rendered":"Jumping to Conclusions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It was to be my last faculty retreat. At the time I did not know that. Nor did I know a pandemic was coming.\u00a0 All I knew was that the name on my place setting was wrong.\u00a0 I had been teaching there for fifteen years and they still misspelled my last name.\u00a0 God knows how they would have mangled my first name, Terence.\u00a0 I had also asked for the chicken. Nope. Fish and chips.\u00a0 Then it occurred to me I was becoming the manky foolishness I hated most about working in academia–Mr. Privilege.<\/p>\n

I am not talking about some woke, cul-de-sac version of myself.\u00a0 I am talking about academic privilege of the brand that can work itself into a full snit about “how, by God, I have toiled in the sub-basement of academe long enough to get my goddamn name spelled effing right on a place card”. I trotted out in my own mind the familiar schema of how I had trod the grapes of learning into wine and learned how names are important and how people get pissed off if they are treated as cavalierly as mine had just been.\u00a0 These greatest hits of grievance and affront brought to us by the apartheid of the university tenure system slowly boiling me into a something I barely recognized.<\/p>\n

A fuse blew. A big one. I took my pen with deliberation and proofread my own name in red ink.\u00a0 I\u00a0 promised myself that I was done or done as soon as I could get done.\u00a0 There was no replacing that fuse, the one whose breaking showed me how corrupt in my heart I had become. By the end of the school year I was done, retired from all future faculty retreats, retired from grievances about tenure, and retired from that continuing, long, slow boil of corruption. Retired from all of it.<\/p>\n

I ended up eating my fish and chips that day. Pretty tasty.\u00a0 I gathered wool in my own head that day and spun out new and better name tags and meals to be eaten in the future.\u00a0 I watched my colleagues with filters off. I did not hate any of them and I looked with fond pity on the trap they had all sprung on themselves, the one we all spring on ourselves. You know, the one where Pangloss insists we live in the best of all possible worlds when we know down deep that we can only\u00a0 tend our own garden, much less someone else’s.<\/p>\n

That scary place is where I live now.\u00a0 \u00a0I am wanting my dreams to be my own. I barely recognize them as we pass each other on the page.\u00a0 “Those are my own dreams,” I say in awe and proud recognition. I am their paparazzi. We laugh as I snap a selfie, us together, even as we both know we have no celebrity.\u00a0 My dreams give me a deranged grin. Dangerous. Very.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was to be my last faculty retreat. At the time I did not know that. Nor did I know a pandemic was coming.\u00a0 All I knew was that the name on my place setting was wrong.\u00a0 I had been teaching there for fifteen years and they still misspelled my last name.\u00a0 God knows how
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-tellio","post-8915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-clmooc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8915"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8917,"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8915\/revisions\/8917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}