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
