Lessons for girls: trust your instincts

Historiann, Dr. Crazy, and Profacero have a series of excellent posts that Historiann has grouped under the title "Lessons for Girls."

I have one more: trust your instincts. By that, I mean judge people based on how they treat you, not based on hypothetical models of how people behave.

For example, as a feminist, I believe that women can and do help each other, can fight against injustices, can support each other against exploitation and harassment, and so on. But people are individuals, and individuals have their own flaws and their own agendas.

One example: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was teaching in a program that took feminism very seriously and wanted to do away with that nasty old hierarchy of having the program director look at teaching evaluations. No, the program director would instead call you in for a chat, woman to woman, in which you would have a frank and collaborative discussion about your teaching. You would share. There was no right or wrong. Collaboration was the way to go in all things. It was all so equal--in theory.

I was a little skeptical, but I thought I'd give it a try. When I went in to talk with Dr. Encouraging Nurturer, I explained a particular project that I'd had the students do--a project that worked very well and was supported by all kinds of recent research. I thought we'd talk about it, although I hadn't experienced Dr. Encouraging Nurturer as being particularly much of either.

Dr. Nurturer listened as I explained. "But didn't you lecture to them first?" she said. "Your way (of collaboration) lacks rigor."

Uh, no. I didn't lecture about it, because the experiential learning for that segment was more important. And no, it didn't lack rigor. I challenged Dr. Nurturer about this, and she dropped the issue.

But this confirmed what I already knew: all the rhetoric of pretending that there was no hierarchy did not mean that the hierarchy and its lines of power didn't exist. All the theory hadn't changed Dr. Nurturer's ideas of what constituted good teaching: her way of doing things (a 50-minute lecture).

And I was tenured, so I didn't go back. The next time the "invitation to chat collaboratively" was issued, I was somehow busy elsewhere, and the next time, and the next. But what if I hadn't been tenured? What about people who didn't have that level of power? And what if I had believed all the "collaborative" talk I was given instead of trusting my instincts about Dr. Nurturer based on my dealings with her?

Trust your instincts.