The Obedience Problem

Today is National Teacher Appreciation Day!

I have never failed at anything as badly as I did teaching. Never fear: I still learned something. I learned NEVER to try to be a teacher again. All your students are safe from me. Whew!

Did you know that Hitler was an ENFP? This makes complete sense to many of my former students.

Maybe I'm rewriting my narrative, but I think I learned obedience from ballet lessons. In ballet, success is based on your ability to quickly memorize and follow verbal directions, and to look exactly like the other students - to imitate their angles and motions, and to keep perfectly timed. You have to be completely absorbed in the present - your mind cannot wander.

Doing as I was told taught me to work. I even learned how to enjoy a challenge. This is the key: ENFPs don't normally do anything they don't enjoy. Not for any kind of reward. The only quality necessary to succeed at school up through your bachelor's degree is the ability to understand and follow directions. That includes the willingness to follow directions.

Following directions isn't enough outside of specific contexts. Graduate school values completely other things, which I did NOT master (because I still don't know what they all are). So I had all the struggles in my Master's program and during coursework in my PhD program that most ENFPs succumb to during their undergrad years.

The only way I have escaped Impostor Syndrome is to stop pretending that I'm any good at this. It leaves me pleasantly baffled when things (rarely) go well.

So I'm sitting in my prospectus meeting and they're all talking about how my primary texts were all chosen because "Nancy liked them" (It's a legitimate starting point, but it has to be justified, eventually.) and I almost laughed out loud. I have worked my way up to an indifference towards Rousseau. I really don't like didactic children's literature (Little Women made me want to punch something), or poststructuralists.

If I were choosing texts that I wanted to write about, I would have chosen "The Enchanted Pig," The Neverending Story, and I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett. Maybe a Brecht play, and the first paragraph of Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake.

I chose my primary texts because they were suggested to me, and I am obedient. Fortunately, I also know how to enjoy work. My instinct is to listen and obey when I should be using "the hermeneutics of suspicion" as Paul Ricoeur calls it - the critical approach that questions everything, and plays "gotcha!" with texts.

I have long since passed, but never outgrown, the time when obedience is enough.

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