Subliminal messages
Last night I dreamt that I was driving along a highway in southern Ontario and I knew that I was about to drive into Lake Ontario but I didn’t panic because I knew my window was open and that all I had to do was wait for the water to start filling the car and open my door and swim to shore.
Unfortunately, when the time came to open my door, my hands couldn’t apply enough pressure to push the handle. None of the other windows were open, and since they’re electric windows, I was stuck. Just as I was considering whether or not I could kick the passenger window open, I woke up.
I don’t know if this means that I feel like I am drowning in work at the moment, or just that I have a hitherto unrecognized terror of anything to do with Ontario.
Mommy Dearest (Journal 3)
Hello, my name is Maggie and I am a working mother.
They say that admitting the problem is half-way to solving it.
There is an essay by Margaret Atwood called ‘If You Can’t Say Anything Nice, Don’t Say Anything at All.’ Much like Judith Warner and Anna Quindlen, Atwood’s point boils down to this: for some reason, regardless of generation and historical context, women are compelled to be Woman; i.e., we strive for some unattainable feminine ideal. Once upon a time, that meant always wearing gloves, sitting as elegantly as Jackie Kennedy, knowing how to cook the perfect pot roast, and always knowing where your vacuum bags were. Now, the perfect woman is independent, politically aware, and educated and ambitious – while still reading all those Cosmo articles about ‘what he really wants in bed.’
Stress, schmess
This is my life at the moment:
Morning – teach two-hour class on critical thinking, reading & writing…
drive through various conglomerations of construction vehicles and the resulting traffic mess to a completely different college…
afternoon – attend three-hour Developmental Psych classes…
drive back (now at rush hour)…
evening – teach two-hour class on issues of identity in Canadian women writers’ works (and the last two evenings, this class was devoted to individual conferences with the students to review their writing skills, which means that last night I got home just after 9 p.m., and the night before, just after 10).
In between all this, I am prepping classes, reading the psych texts, writing journals and other assignments, finishing leftover assignments from the Assessment course, and preparing my portfolio to mark the completion of the first third of the program.
This morning I woke up in a panic and had to ask Dr. T what day it was – I had a dream (which seemed interminable) that I had forgotten my Thursday evening class, and that it was actually Friday this morning. My panic was not abated by the helpful newsreader on the radio who apparently had the same nightmare and kept referring to the weekend as ‘tomorrow’.
Four more weeks, four more weeks, four more weeks…
Be True to Your School
Alexander Astin’s Theory of Involvement makes a lot of sense to me, not only in the context of recent class discussions, videos and readings, but also in terms of understanding my students and my own student experiences.
When I think back to my Cegep experience, I can see Astin’s theory in practice: my first attempt at Cegep ended in complete disaster, and not just academically. I finished my first semester in Pure & Applied Sciences at Champlain St-Lambert with five failed courses (including English), depression and an utter lack of motivation, a rejection of authority, and a rift with my parents that took many years to heal.
Three years later, when I started taking evening classes at Vanier, my motivation had returned. Success in those courses led me to enroll as a full-time day student. I joined the student newspaper – and school was suddenly the best place on earth. As a member of the newspaper group, I met many students in other clubs and associations, I dealt with our student politicians, I developed relationships with members of the administration, and I learned more information about my school than I knew existed.
Weather or not
At the risk of sounding uber-Canadian, let’s talk about the weather. It sucks.
It is currently 11 C. Eleven!! It’s June 11th, and it’s 11 C.
(as always, for the benefit of our American friends: 52 F)
Now, granted, it is morning, and the forecast is calling for a high of 19, which is not that far from the ‘normal’ of 22 C (66 F and 72 F, respectively). But add to the temperature woes the fact that it has been raining for, like, ever, and you get some idea of why, once again, all we can talk about around here is the weather.
The rest of the week looks better, with highs in the low 20s and ‘variable cloudiness’ instead of the ‘incessant, mind-numbing drizzle’ with which we’ve been faced the last few days. But with all due respect to the meteorological Cassandras, they’ve been wrong before. Like last week. And the week before.
We’ll see. In the meantime, the furnace came on last night, the cat is damp and miserable, and the house smells faintly of wet towels all the time (I hasten to clarify that this smell does not actually come from wet towels).
Timing is Everything
My first Developmental Psych journal entry, based in part on recent posts and comments:
After our first class, I became a little obsessed with the question “when did you become an adolescent.” I have been conducting an informal poll ever since. My sons, who are 8 and 6 years old, both said that they would be teenagers when they turned 13, because, as Colin said, “it’s thir-TEEN.” My husband and another male friend said they became adolescents when they started high school. I’m still debating whether I trace my adolescence back to the onset of menstruation or to my last year of elementary school. Perhaps our sense of one’s adolescent self is really a social construct. My mother and her sister both said that they never felt like they were teenagers. They grew up, the oldest two of six children, in Glasgow, with a lot of academic pressure – my mother started at Glasgow University at the age of 16. They both emigrated to Canada almost immediately upon graduation, and when I talked to them it seemed to me that they both felt that they had been thrown from childhood to adulthood with no real chance to adjust along the way.
Guest poster
In response to my earlier post, my good friend Chris sent me the following (and agreed to have it posted) – thanks Chris!
1964 � Born Lachine, Quebec. My family then promptly moved to Winnipeg for 4 years and we then returned to Pointe Claire in 1968 where I lived until 1985. I then lived in various places in NDG until moving to Ontario in 1989.
Perhaps it is a function of being male, but I think my perceptions revolve more around large institutional or peer-group transitions than �biological� maturity as you relate. I think I would actually break down the process into several stages which I would identify with building more and more independence, which perhaps is the critical element of �adulthood� for me.
Smells like teen spirit
Yesterday was the first class session of my next M.Ed. course. This one is Developmental Psychology: The Emerging Adult. Part of yesterday’s session was devoted to small group discussions in response to the following questions:
1. When did adolescence begin for you? Why did you choose this age?
2. When does adulthood begin? Why?
So I thought I’d ask you, my loyal readers, the same questions. Consider it informal research.
Keep in mind that what we’re looking for here are experiential answers, not technical, clinical or legal definitions. In other words, answer according to your personal experience – when did you become an adolescent, and what emotions/events/circumstances made you feel you were no longer a child? When did you feel you were really an adult, and why? As a follow-up, do you think your parents would have different answers about themselves?
Some of the discussions we had – in class and at the supper table last night – made it clear that answers may vary according to generation and location, so try to include some chronological and regional data in your answer.
For example:
I was born in the summer of 1969. I spent my so-called formative years in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, in West Bolton. I went to elementary school in Knowlton, and high school in Cowansville. For me, adolescence began in Grade 7. Initially, my gut reaction was to link the onset of adolescence with my first period, but I started late (13), and all of my friends already had theirs (I still remember one wise old 12-year-old telling me that I’d soon wish I had never started menstruating, after all). I felt like a teenager long before I “became a woman,” and a lot of the elements were in place in Grade 7. As a group, I think we felt significantly older than the rest of the elementary school we were still trapped in, and we started “going out” with boys (there was never any actual “out” to go to, of course, it was just our euphemism for “this is the guy I hold hands with at recess.”). Many of the girls had started their periods. The guys were suddenly conscious of their clothing. The girls were suddenly deeply embarrassed about breaking a sweat in gym class. The way my friends thought and felt about things mattered a lot more than the way my parents saw the world; for instance, in earlier years, when my parents chose to enrol me in an immersion program, it never occurred to me to object. In Grade 7, when my mother enrolled me in the high school immersion program for the following year, I wept for days. Immersion wasn’t like real high school! I would be an outcast. My mother was clearly determined to ruin my life. Sigh.
As for when adulthood starts, well, I’ll save that response for another entry. Now it’s your turn!
It’s only a model
Colin’s medieval castle project
Building materials include tiles from the dollar store, tomato boxes, a Jacob’s Creek wine box, a shoe box, moss from my mother’s garden, a paper-towel insert, and, since it’s a Canadian medieval castle, duct tape.