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The Diversity Pipeline


zelticgar

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1 hour ago, Lily Valley said:

I'm not saying it's your job to report stuff that you're not sure is a problem, but it IS your job to ignore your students bodies.

Exactly.  I really don't get your hostility here.  All I was saying is acknowledging a biological fact - I am attracted to some of my female students and need to make a conscious effort to put that out of my mind.  And that was (much) harder to do in Orlando due to the climate and the fact the city is disproportionately filled with attractive women.  In terms of "literal model," all I meant was that yes, a handful of those students literally were and are models to emphasize the point.  None of this changes the fact that I've spent my young career encouraging the best students - almost entirely women - and their level attractiveness has nothing to do with going out of my way to advance their aims.

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I think the point Lily is making is that, as a queer woman she understands finding female students physically attractive. But if you're consciously having to do things like avoiding looking at them, that's not good enough. You need to get your emotions on this under control, because attraction is something you can clamp down on. Your students deserve to be looked at and engaged with purely in the capacity of an educator with their students and engagement is enhanced by looking in the eyes etc.

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1 hour ago, Lily Valley said:

All of them deserve better than a wall-eyed stare.   They all deserve to get eye contact and engagement from their instructor.  I'm going to leave it there.

Oh, and as for this - it's a teaching method that has been suggested by multiple people whose job is to help young lecturers!  Research has shown it makes all students think you're attentive to themselves, as opposed to arbitrarily looking throughout the class while lecturing.

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1 minute ago, karaddin said:

But if you're consciously having to do things like avoiding looking at them, that's not good enough. You need to get your emotions on this under control, because attraction is something you can clamp down on. Your students deserve to be looked at and engaged with purely in the capacity of an educator with their students and engagement is enhanced by looking in the eyes etc.

Again, I don't need to consciously avoid looking at them.  I need to consciously avoid looking at parts of them in one-on-one conversations.  Is that perhaps less than male students I don't?  I suppose, but it's also human nature.  And any straight male that will tell you differently is either lying or incredibly more sexually satisfied than myself.  I concede the latter.

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See I knew you were going to go with that last bit. I can't speak for Lily's level of attraction to women, but I can promise you that I'm just as attracted to women as any straight man I know. Far more than most in fact. Far more than I was when I had testosterone coursing through my body too. I was never a "straight male", but I did operate on that hardware for a long time, and I can assure you that this difference doesn't exist, other than as a social construct. If I can snap myself together around girls that I'm not just physically attracted to, but actively crushing on, everyone can. Its simply a matter of having learnt to control yourself.

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2 minutes ago, karaddin said:

 If I can snap myself together around girls that I'm not just physically attracted to, but actively crushing on, everyone can. Its simply a matter of having learnt to control yourself.

Yep.  That's what I'm saying - is to control oneself.  Apparently it's not ok to acknowledge that it's necessary to control oneself in certain circumstances around here.  Noted.

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5 minutes ago, karaddin said:

See I knew you were going to go with that last bit. I can't speak for Lily's level of attraction to women, but I can promise you that I'm just as attracted to women as any straight man I know. Far more than most in fact. Far more than I was when I had testosterone coursing through my body too. I was never a "straight male", but I did operate on that hardware for a long time, and I can assure you that this difference doesn't exist, other than as a social construct. If I can snap myself together around girls that I'm not just physically attracted to, but actively crushing on, everyone can. Its simply a matter of having learnt to control yourself.

But he is controlling himself. He's just describing the effort it takes for him to do it. 

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...

You were the one that framed it as having to stare at the back of the class to not perve on your students. That is not controlling yourself, that is working around your inability to control yourself. Its absolutely better than not doing anything, but its not as good as it should be.

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3 minutes ago, karaddin said:

You were the one that framed it as having to stare at the back of the class to not perve on your students.

No.  That's an absolute misunderstanding of why I look at the back of the class.  Go back and read again.

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3 hours ago, dmc515 said:

Right, this is exactly what I was referring to with the Friends/Chandler reference.  Basically, I was trying to express (poorly) that it was particularly difficult in central Florida both due to the climate and the saturation of very attractive women in the area.  Also, I never had a problem while lecturing, but I tend to take the "just look at the back of the room" approach, which by all accounts has worked, and the back wall was always disappointingly flat.  With class discussions it's similar - there's always too much on my mind to even think about checking out.  The problem was in one-on-one meetings, in which at times I was talking to literal models in very little clothes and kept on thinking of Austin Powers' "Margaret Thatcher on a cold day" to maintain eye contact.

 

Not sure what you think I'm missing here. If you're referring to your follow up post - I was trying to explain what Lily may have meant by her post which preceded (and in fact prompted!) your follow up. An explanation for a comment can't use information that wasn't present at the time of the comment can it?

Now with that later post, sure I can see what you actually meant to be saying is that you're deliberately using a particular teaching style but in the context of when this post was made, it reads as though that is your mechanism for not perving.

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15 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Now with that later post, sure I can see what you actually meant to be saying is that you're deliberately using a particular teaching style but in the context of when this post was made, it reads as though that is your mechanism for not perving.

Fair enough, the original statement could easily be misinterpreted - mainly because I insisted on being a smartass with the flat comment.  My attempts at comedy always damn me.  Anyway, I would think it'd be clear with the later post you refer to - and at this point I'm responding to you, not Lily.  I really don't care who acknowledges it or not on this board, it's a well-founded method that has worked for me in terms of lecturing.

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I'm not a teacher and have no opinion on that, all I was doing was attempting to explain and then respond to the "straight man" thing. So I'll bow out now given no knowledge either way on teaching techniques.

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