Learning Journal

How best can one deal with the yellow sickness of prejudice as it bursts forth in class, pus from a still unlanced boil? And how best can you deal with the weariness of institutionalised life, as you are worn down by the repetition of the days and of the waiting of respite from them until you are ground into a flint which sparks hatred and harm?
These are the questions I ask today.
In one of my classes a student, who seems to be a perfectly pleasant young woman most of the time, somehow
brought up the issue of transsexuals, complaining about the existence of one in college. She described in some unhappy detail the clothes s/he wore and so forth, lamenting the tainting of the building with the genderbending vapours of this Frankenstein's Monster. Not in those words, of course, I am enjoying some artistic license. I and another student, in some liberal shockhorror, attempted to placate this conservative mindset with soothing nothing about the right of such people to exist. But - how can you really calm such thoughts? I am aware, as a psychologist, that opposition to the Other is built into our historically and socially constructed version of the self, as we find spaces to occupy on the vast plain of differentiation. Such prejudice exists no matter how much evidence to contradict the prejudice exists - even if the prejudiced person accepts this evidence on an intellectual level. This belief in the wrongness of some other person's life has a use value more important to the prejudiced person than its reality - it is a ticket into a certain set of cultural groups, that helps to define one's place in the world. This student complained about how this transsexual was distracting. And, of course, this is a very salient point to this student, as to her the transsexual IS distracting. But only because she incites herself to think so. I didn't want to embark on a massive lecture on prudishness, censorship, and alienating values. I didn't want the class to divide itself and become distrustful based on personal opinions about the right- or wrongness of changing gender. Perhaps I can find time to screen The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Not only is there this dislike between peers, there is sad evidence of dislike between teachers and their students. I often take lunch in the staffroom, surrounded by the accoutrements of the teacher's lifestyle - the photocopier meant for emergencies (when the one in repro breaks down), the fartingbubblingclanking old drinks machine, the kettle and microwave only for use by people who pay some money for the privilege, the TV without an aerial. This staffroom is populated by, obviously, staff. It would be a rich place for ethnographic research, as this group of staffpersons is most definitely in need of analysis. Commonly, talk is about painfully local football teams on league tables so low they are sponsored by businesses you haven't heard of (The Harold Porkies Pork-Based Pork-Style Pork-Remnant Pork Conference League, fifth division) or sadly swapped tales of respectless students. "I don't know why I bother," is sighed by the winner of this they-hate-me Top Trumps, and everyone sits back and broods over how they think they deserved the temporary martyr's crown of thorns. I munch on my exquisitely packed lunch - made by me! - and ruminate darkly. Or I read a book from the little teacher-donated library, which includes Sexual Energy, which isn't very good. Reich's orgone theory is more interesting.
After one particularly heated debate about the betterness of DVDs over VHS, there was another round of the-kids-hate-me. But it was not concluded in its usual pomp and circumstance. There was no concluding sigh, no trump topped. Instead, as I bought my customary 50p hot chocolate from the drinks machine - taking careful care to use exact change as it nevereverever gives any - something was said. Boy, was something said. A teacher said: "I'd like to develop a discipline machine. It would teach those students and their parents a lesson they would never forget. You would put a student inside it, and it would beat them within an inch of their lives."
There was, startlingly, agreement. Some chuckling. And little tears on my face, shining like the starshells of madness in this man's eyes.