After six years of hustling the adjunct system, I am finally a full time professor. It’s only a one year contract, but it is huge progress in moving towards my dreams.
The year is quickly drawing to a close, and I have spent much of it feeling inferior to my colleagues, frozen in anxiety that I am not a good teacher, not a good writer, a fraud. In January, I realized that I did not have to be a passive victim of this. If I feel like I’m not good enough – my vocabulary isn’t strong enough, my teaching isn’t innovative, my knowledge of theory and practice aren’t up to par – there is something I can do about it! I CAN LEARN. I can regularly add new words to my vocabulary, I can read journals and books on best practices; my education isn’t over just because I’m done with my schooling. Of course, it’s not like the day I graduated, I stopped trying to learn. I go to conferences regularly, but I find that unless they are in your discipline, they are much more theoretical than practical. So I have subscribed to a few journals, and rather than spend time on social media, I’m spending time on The Chronicle of Higher Learning and ProfHacker. Just making that small change has changed the way I view myself.
This leads me to beneaththedirt. I find myself frozen when it comes to writing for my peers. I’m so worried about looking dumb and inept, it’s become impossible to churn out material – even simple things like emails. And I realized – I don’t write anymore! I read A LOT of writing (bad writing) and I’m out of practice. The older I get, the more I appreciate the concept of practice. I can tell when I haven’t had to “small talk” in awhile because it becomes this foreboding, scary thing. It’s something you have to practice! Writing is the same. I have to practice. Just because I’m not in school, doesn’t mean I can’t churn out a few words to keep myself on top of my discipline. I guess I stopped worrying about writing because I don’t consider myself a writer – I consider myself a reader. I read things. Tons of things. That’s why I became an English major. I didn’t want to write the next great American novel – but I did want to read it and talk about it.
So I’m starting this up again. I don’t know who reads it and that’s not important. I want to take pride in my work and have a place for it to go, and it might as well be here.
On to The Handmaid’s Tale
So what better place to start than a book I read in graduate school and currently returned to for my school’s book club.
This book. Gahhhh.
I love to love it and love to hate it. Margaret Atwood is a genius, and I need to read more of her work. The writing is phenomenal. As an English professor who teaches a lot of grammar, I spent a good amount of time during this reading considering Atwood’s use of the semi-colon. She does not use it correctly, but I guess it could be similar to choosing to write in fragments. The semi-colon means full stop (though maybe lesser so than a period) and she uses it frequently where a grammar nazi would use a comma. I’m not sure that I have an answer to this, but it is interesting.
I finished the book of The Handmaid’s Tale and immediately watched the Hulu show. The first time I read this book, it sat on my chest like a rock for a month. I couldn’t get past the darkness of this patriarchal society. It felt real and scary. I particularly remember reading about how the coup happened – no one had money anymore, and everything was credit cards. The Sons of Abraham took control of the banks and removed money from all of the women’s cards. In a world where we rarely use cash money, this seems like something that could pretty easily happen.
I still felt cold reading this a second time. Perhaps not shocked and also not trying to figure out what was going on. One of the joys (or perhaps displeasures) of reading dystopian fiction is trying to figure out the world that you are in. What happened to bring the current world to this state? What are the new rules? But I didn’t have to do that this time.
The show…is fantastic. I watched the first episode and did not like it. By the fourth episode, I could see that what they were trying to do is different than the book. In a good way. In some ways, I wish it was called something different. Let it be its own thing. [spoilers ahead] Essentially, they take the epilogue of the book and speculate on a few different things. It’s ambiguous with what happens with Luke and Nick in the book. We don’t know. The show plays with that and gives them a story line. Since we know that eventually the regime falls, they also start to show what that might look like. The handmaids do have power – if the society is really only concerned with the procreation of future generations then the handmaids DO have the most power. They just have to figure out how to use it. Presumably, the second season will deal with that. I’m excited – the book and show end at the same point, so now anything can happen
beneaththedirt 