I do not like WordPress. I cannot load photos and have them appear on my main blog. I hate that! In addition, I can not put details that I used to have at Spaces on this site!…. So I give up. You can find me at Blogspot with a new blog….
http://vt-oldie5.blogspot.com/
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Okay so I outlined some of the problems our department was facing with our new D*an. A quick synapses of the key events… about three weeks before the term was over, our new d*an removed two faculty from studio classes for winter term… after they defended their students work in critiques… He wants to put his imprint on our program.
So my turn from him to come to critique my students work came last week on Thursday. I was scared to death that I would make the same mistake my colleagues had made and defend my students. So I set up the class to have a gallery setting. All the students had displayed their work in the empty building that they had designed and people could wander from presentation to presentation and talk to the student (rather than a formal presentation where the student present to the whole group and everyone hears the comments). In addition, I had prepped my students that they may encounter criticism and told them how to respond. If they had a well thought out reason for their work to share that with the people doing the critique or just say “I did not know that, thank you.” This arrangement allowed me to not have to listen to every comment that was made and allowed me to walk away to finish up meeting with other students.
My students did phenomenally well. Their work was good and they presented it with confidence.
But… When I got home I fixed myself a stiff drink and drew a hot bath… But I was so wrought up, I got in the tub and I bawled in the bathtub for a half an hour. Babbling how much I love my students and how great they did.
I graded Friday, Saturday and finished up on Sunday (highly unusual for me to be finishing up so late). I was so emotionally exhausted, I have been napping and sleeping and trying to take care of myself.
I have to admit that I am looking for jobs in other locals. I have seldom in my sixty years been under so much stress and it was not even directed at me!!! And what is amazing is our programs were judged to be #2 for undergrad and #4 for grad in the United States. So other knowledgeable people think we are doing a good job with our students. Hmmm
I think I should change my closing to “and so it goes”… but Love and kisses, Marilyn
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and doing all the myriad of things to close out the term. This place is like no other in end of term stuff to do. Love and kisses, Marilyn
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This is the last day of classes. I will finish up my grading on Friday and Saturday. I am really, really tired. My students have worked their nail to the quick… I hope that it all comes together for them. Love and kisses, Marilyn
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Oh so busy. I will write more when school is out. Love and kisses, Marilyn
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This is our last week of class until January. I feel as if my students have been doing well. This will be the time to tell.
I spent the weekend reflecting on school and my friendship with Matt. I relaxed took naps, read, took walks and made cookies to recharge my depleted batteries. I feel much more grounded and at peace with myself and hopefully can face anything that comes my way this week. Time will tell.
I hope that you have a wonderful day. Love and kisses, Marilyn
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It has been a hard couple of weeks. I have spent this weekend conserving my energy, recharging my batteries by doing things that I love (baking cookies, reading, blogging) and carefully re-bridging my relationship with Matt.
My over reaction to Matt’s criticism is indicative of the stress I am under. I now know that it is financial stress as well as work stress. I do think that recognizing that will help me to deal with them more directly and better.
I have stopped giving Matt advice on his girlfriend and do not even know what is happening with them. That alone feels much better. He as asked me for advice with school and his client, I have let him talk and make up his own mind about what to do. That also feels better.
I talked to my students at school. Hopefully to prepare them for the criticism they will get. I will try to keep my mouth shut and let them speak for themselves, they need to learn how to do that. So I have set things up at school for success as best I can and now I need to let go.
Part of me hopes my house sells, part of me would just like to stay here. I am really liking my house right now enjoying the space. Yesterday, I found a town home that I can move into should my house sell. It is about five minutes longer drive to work, but gets me into the country right away five minutes from work and is closer to the beach by 30 minutes from here. I think I will enjoy living there just as well as living here and be out of the terrible traffic.
I hope that your week has been good. Love and kisses, Marilyn
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You might want to read the one before this first… it has been a heck of a couple of weeks…
It is funny how in life we face some many challenges. As we move from one phase to another, hopefully we learn and change and hopefully to let go of the trash we collected over the years. I have worked hard to enhance… I don’t know what to call it… the core values… a positive sense of self… an understanding of my innate value as a human being.
My experiences at Virginia Tech were so positive, I think because I got away from a husband who reinforced my parent’s negative story of me… They alway accented how I did not measure up… focusing on the negatives and under playing the positive… unless the positives happened to benefit them.
Even though I have shed many of my negative voices, (and worked very hard to do that). Every once in a while forces come together that make me question my value. This last few weeks have been one of those times. And interestingly it is a multi pronged attack. I held up under a lot of pressure without losing my integrity. But I fear this week will put me over the edge, because our de*n is going to come to the final presentation of my class. He has gone to every class to see what the students are doing and unfortunately criticized the student work. This mode of using criticism as a learning tool is very prevalent in architecture and in some interior design programs, but at this school the students are used to hearing what they did well, as well as, what they did wrong. If the faculty attempted to defend what the students had done, they were moved out of studio classes and into lecture classes for next term. According to some of the faculty, he is treating these students as if they worked at his firm.
So I have been steeling myself for my students presentations. I met with my students yesterday and coached them on how to take criticism gracefully and to present their well thought out reasons for their designs in a professional manner. I am very proud of what they have done, but know that their work is not perfect… even in the field designers work is not perfect. As a matter of fact I tried to be perfect in the field for 25 years and was never able to have no errors in ordering furnishing…
Okay so that is one aspect. Another is that the new de*n also wants to change our program to reflect his background and the pres*dents vision of interior design. Thank the lord, our program was just ranked this week #2 and #4 in the country. What we are doing is 99% right. All we need to do is tweak some things, not revise the whole program. But my new attitude of not getting upset about things I cannot change is working, because I noted what was going on, but was not angry by it.
The third… one of my colleagues is going to teach the studio that I have taught eight times since arriving at this school. And about 25 times at three other universities. She wants to change what we are doing in the class. Instead of starting the conversation with Marilyn, you and Kathy have done a really good job with this class, but the students in this last term are not tying the information we are teaching together… BUT Instead she says, research says that students need more time to process information so we need to change this part of the class so that …. blah blah blah… Two things kill me about this conversation, I have felt since I got here that we have a tendency to throw too much information at students. So as an instructor, I have always tried to help them prioritize the information and internalize it by understanding why we do something… rather than memorizing something they don’t understand. Now someone has research backing up my beliefs. That is a good thing, I think.
Second, I was trying hard to not take this as an attack on how I did not know how to teach my class. It was wearing on me. We had three conversations and each one made me feel a little worse. Yesterday, finally this faculty person said she was not criticizing my teaching, but looking at how we need to adjust the program with the new situation. Why did she not start the conversation with that premise?
It has taken me week or two to process that the problem inherent in this situation… it is that in the last two years two of our best faculty (the ones who could beat into the sophomore students minds how to correctly produce construction documents, building assessments and other design aspects) have not been teaching the precursor classes to Studio III. So the students don’t have the an understanding of information they once had. In addition, we now have four faculty teaching each studio rather than the two we had before, so consistency of knowledge is going to be a new problem we have not deal with before. Kathy and I always worked closely together to make sure students were getting the same information in our class. With this change we will need to change how we teach where there are multiple sessions of each studio but they will only be offered in specific terms and taught by more faculty. I actually like the new set up because I was really tired of teaching the same class term after term.
In addition to my colleague clarifying that she was not criticizing how I was teaching the class. Our former dean came to me yesterday and said that I was of three code experts in the program. That really buoyed my feelings about myself that were pretty darn low.
The fourth aspect is my personal life. As you all know, I have put my house up on the market. I have worked my ass off trying to get it ready to sell at the best price possible. My friend Matt and I made an offer on land in Hilton Head in October… before I realized that my house was worth $20,000 less than I thought. I had expected to have a $30,000 down payment ready when I sold the house… and I could save, borrow the from my retirement and friends for the rest. But when the Realtor told me I would be lucky to get back $10,000 of my $50,000 down payment out of the house, I was upset… But since I was still finishing the clean up of the house, I really did not think about it until two weeks ago. This last few weeks I have been getting more and more frustrated as I am still shelling out money to get the house in shape. This among other things (previous post) has really put a strain on Matt and my friendship.
He figured out, with my help, how I could scrap the money together for the down payment. This includes money I have set aside for emergencies, $10,000 from my house, loans on my retirement accounts (which is fine), saving as much as I can (from now until next May), and getting a personal loan from a former client or two (that is where I cringe).
Since we set up that budget was established I had to spend quite bit to get the house ready to sell… I have saved not one penny in the last two months… this is driving me crazy… I still have at least one or two more months of expenses to pay off before I can start saving. Hmmmm
I do have to say that it is also a stretch for Matt to be able to finance his half of the duplex. For example, he is cashing in most of his stocks to finance his duplex. He also is using the money from the house he designed (and for which I helped get a large fee by teaching him how to write a contract, value your work, charge a fee). But is only short about $10,000 to 25,000 on the down payment for his part of the project. Where I am looking at a $45,000 to 60,000 gap, depending on whether we need 20% or 25% down payment for new construction.
It came to a head a week and a half ago… This new frugal life style has gotten to me more and more… because I have been feeding Matt almost every night for a year and a half and he doesn’t seem to have a clue that this is costing me money. It wasn’t a big problem when I had all the money I needed… but now “not so much”. I am proud of myself that I could share my feelings about all of this on our walk last Sunday. That is a vast improvement from my holding it all in…
This week I asked him to help with my finances, because I had paid too many bills and was short… He said yeah, had me over for dinner on Monday night, which was nice… but nothing happened… Do I have to ask twice? It was hard enough to ask the first time… I don’t think I can ask twice.
In addition he said stuff like… Oh Megan (a student in my, Crystals and LaRaine’s class next term) thought that the selection process for the teams that you are LaRaine did last night was terrible… and Oh I forgot to pay my rent on time… that means I won’t able to put the overdue charge into my savings this month for my half of the project..
He has no clue about how much this is stressing me out. I did not see him or even talk to him for the rest of the week. Because I don’t know what he will say that will set me off. I had to borrow money from Sandi to buy coffee and bounced a check too… greehhhh
I did invite him for a walk on Friday and he came over for dinner last night. He is walking on eggshells, but we were able to communicate. I was able to ask him to not share Megan’s opinions about the class. We will only get together once a week for dinner now rather than an nightly event. I cannot afford to feed him anymore. But he did bring a bottle of wine and was overly gracious about almost everything.
Wow when I put all this down… I now understand why I am a “little stressed.” But I have been able to protect my integrity through all of this and not be kicking myself around for an unrealistic expectations of myself.
Hmmmmm I do think that I still want to do the house in HH… if I can figure out how to finance down payment for my house, that it will give me a much bigger financial gain in the long run than this house… and I will be able to afford it, if I can scrap the down payment up. If I get a decent offer I will accept it and move into an apartment and save for the future. I found a townhouse about 25 minutes from school yet closer to the beach that I can live in for half of my house payment.
Last night, I decided to tell Matt that he can build his house first and I will stay in an apartment until I can gather the down payment to build. I think that will solve the terrible pressure I was feeling. I may not be able to build for a couple of years… but that is okay by me right now… Amazing how I have figured out how to solve most of these things in the last two days… The two positive comments by my colleagues really helped me be able to do that.
In addition, I am really happy that I have been able to not get upset about all the weird stuff at school. My new attitude, about not worrying about what I cannot change has really made a difference in my happiness here.
Well I hope that things are going well for you. Thanks for listening… Love and kisses, Marilyn
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I wrote this last week…
My friend Matt and I had a disagreement this week and I went into hiding to work out what was wrong with our relationship… We have dinner together almost every night and go to the beach on the weekends and are buying land together to build a duplex. Our lives are very intertwined. I came out of the week with a not very nice picture of myself and his and my friendship. That is all it is a very good friendship….
In the last year and a half I started coaching him about how to run a business. He received a project to design a home for his best friend’s parents in Michigan. I helped him write a contract and developed strategies with him on how to run the project. After all I had my own design business for thirty years.
The problem started when he started dating a girl and would ask me questions about how to win her. I gave him tips, such as date locations… but it changed at some point I stepped over the line, and gave him advice about this relationship with her. I realize now should not have done this. In the beginning I felt helpful, by the end I felt like the Professor in My Fair Lady remaking him into my idea of a perfect man. Which of course was doing the exact opposite of what I was trying to do, which was to let him see how wonderful he is… and how anyone would want him.
I did not see him for a week and when we took a walk together I tried to explain what I was feeling… I asked him what I said that was wrong and that got his back up. I saw his girl friend that week and was surprised that she was not thing gorgeous woman that he said that she was. Over the last two months, he has said multiple times that she was out of his league. So anyway, he said that I started our conversation (when he had not asked what I thought) with “She is not as pretty as I expected.” That is very blunt and not necessary to say.
Then of course I dug my grave deeper by trying to explain… Hmmmm By the end of the night he made three jabs about me… and a fourth that took me right to my knees. And he said that I was ruining how he ate, because I eat so fast and he felt as if he were in competition with me for the food. That took on a life of its own because over the years I have had many people tell that me I eat too fast. I need to slow down and enjoy my food. One was nice enough to say she was worried I would choke on my food I inhaled it so fast. I don’t know why they feel necessary to ruin my meal by going on and on about it. I eat fast because of my childhood and Mike (my ex) and I ate at the same speed. What the heck difference does it make?
It is one of my biggest weaknesses and Matt knows it. What also hurt me so much is that I have been feeding him and supplying all the booze we have had with dinner for a year and a half. He gave me $100.00 for Christmas last year and has bought food for me about half of the time when we went out. But that does not make up for all that I fed and supplied for him to drink. I felt devastated and betrayed. This feeding him was not that much of a problem before we made an offer on the land… and I went from feeling I was wealthy for the first time in my life and now I am pinching every penny and still not able to save a dime and still feeding Matt. And this penny-pinching is because of the duplex, which I now really cannot afford because my house is not worth what I thought.
More later… I am processing…
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Our program was ranked #2 in the undergrad and #4 in the grad programs in the country. Each a every faculty person had a hand in having that happen.
One more week of school. Love and kisses, Marilyn
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