Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Patience, or the lack thereof

I'm still patient with my students--very patient. I want them to succeed. And I do like my colleagues. Everyone else is getting a little more, er, directness, though.
  • The sorority pledges (I assume because no one else is that gussied up, usually, on our campus) walking five abreast on the sidewalk, teetering on heels, who initially didn't move an inch and expected me to step into the street? Dream on, ladies. Ditto for people texting.
  • The person who emailed to say "why don't you do X?" when I had explained, twice, why that didn't work? Ze got a return email with my previous answer, this time in bold. The end.  You don't listen to my messages or explanations, so guess how I'm going to respond to yours?
  • Would I mind not moving into my new and at that time empty office for a month or so, so another faculty member (male) could hang out and have meetings in it instead of in his own office? Would I mind? Like an idiot I said, "sure, whatever" but then got furious at myself, moved everything into the new office that day, and turned in my old key. Either my interior fuming or the stuff in the office must have gotten the message across, because I didn't hear any more about it.
  • You can shoot all the emails you want at me after 5 p.m. on Friday, if that's what your heart desires, but to me they're just silent snowflakes drifting down to settle into my inbox snowbank  until 7 a.m. on Monday.
I now see that this is sort of a companion piece to the previous post; thanks for helping me work this through. 

3 comments:

Janice said...

The more patience and support I reserve for my students, the less I have for the unkind ones who push inappropriately, I agree! I love your responses to the email insistence and the office stupidity!

undine said...

Janice, that's a great way to look at it. The office situation has a backstory about my not getting the admin offices (when male colleagues had them) to go with my admin positions in previous years, but this was just too much. My next step was going to be "why don't you give him YOUR office?" but fortunately it didn't get that far. To be fair, I don't think it was malicious, but boy howdy, was I ever angry.

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