Vignettes of a supervisor

Here are a few memorable moments from this week's round of supervisions. My students' work was mostly characterized by incredibly thoughtful discussions, the self-confidence to talk through tough ideas, shockingly bad written grammar, and a mixture of I'm-too-cool-for-medieval-Europe and this-is-fascinating attitudes. Whatever happened, each hour I spent with each pair of students flew by and launched me on a Teacher's High that sustained me through the next supervision...

-Wide and funny variety of beautiful prose and incomplete sentences, inclusion of language from “just sort of like” to “materialistic philosophy”

-Where are the people?! Students write essays like their science lab reports- without subjects for the verbs! Think "5 grams was measured into the test tube," "the cells were cultured at 100 degrees", etc. Passive voice? WTF. When students did write with subjects, these were rarely HUMAN subjects: “The Black Death caused new ways of thinking about disease,” “medicine didn’t know how to address diseases from the New World”, “New methods in anatomical dissection changed how medicine was studied”… you’d think that Black Death and medicine and dissection methods were in charge! It’s so interesting how the students don’t see the people behind the scientific concepts - duh, because they’re not taught that way in science classes. As one student pointed out, the inventors of new ideas in science are mentioned in science lectures – once – and then the focus is on the ideas themselves and the person who suggested them is forgotten.

-These students are deeply committed to the idea of science as progress and the ancients as unforgivably ignorant because they didn't believe what we believe now... "Harvey discovered that the blood circulates in the body; unfortunately, he thought this was due to the motion of vital forces. What a moron." (last sentence added for dramatic effect... :) )

-They listen to me SO CLOSELY. Yikes! Don't they know I don't write or grade their exam?!

-I brought a copy of a big-deal medical text (Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body, 1543) for the students to see the amazing drawings of dissected bodies. I flipped the several-hundred-page book open randomly... straight to a full-page drawing of a penis. The students got red-faced and giggled, and I authoritatively said something about gender in early modern Europe and they shut up and took notes. When the supervision ended and the students left, I had to lean against the wall and laugh...

-As I was covering undergrad essays in purple-inked comments and writing a methodological critique for my own supervisor (teacher-student split vision!!) in the grad students’ shared office, someone else was PRINTING OUT HER FINISHED PHD THESIS. LIKE ALL 300 PAGES OF IT. LIKE SHE BROUGHT IN AN ENTIRE NEW REAM OF PAPER. And politely asked us if anyone needed the printer for the next hour or so… Wow! What a moment of representation of the entire student succession – from crappy but high-effort undergrad essays to a clueless but dedicated PhD student to the finished thesis of an almost-Doctor.

Wishing you moments of enlightenment and embarrassment!!