Blogpost#1 - Some thoughts on the myth of nasty cleverness in academia

The article, Academic assholes and thecircle of niceness, provokes an idea to reinforce my personal image in classroom or at the situation I am giving feedbacks on the assignments or creative works to my students in ESL teaching and learning context.

I could not agree more with the proposition that “asshole behavior is contagious”, as I has been more or less impacted by the authority built up majorly by nasty cleverness of the some but not to much teachers I encountered when I was receiving K1-12 education-of-equivalence in my origin country. The not-that-constructive feedbacks and not-that-positive comments from my teachers have made me severely considering am I suitable to attend a school (It might also because I have been a why-person-type student and has challenged a lot the limit of the scale of knowledge and acknowledgement of my teachers and this make my teachers think that I am not respecting them. As in the schooling context there, classrooms are teacher-centered and teachers have, to some extent, absolute authority in and outside classrooms. ) . Much of the feedbacks I have received from my teachers implicitly influence me in my choice upon whether showing a everything-is-ok face or a sore and stone-like face with nastiness when commenting the effort of students.  What is the most important that, just like some academics’ unawareness of being “rude, dismissive, passive aggressive or even outright hostile”, I did not notice I was suffering from bitchy resting face, a kind of disorder, until I began to take selfies, a lot.

Fortunately, studying in Hong Kong and here at uOttawa directly inspire me to reconsider my persistence of being a strict and serious teacher, to examine some myths in education, such as myths in literacy (e.g., by becoming literate, one is more likely to be happy and informed, find a decent job with considerable income) and myths in the nasty cleverness in academia (e.g., the more asshole the person is, the more high-level and meaningful the opinions s/he express is), and the myth of the relationship between the level of a person’s cleverness and smartness and the level of meaningfulness embodied in his/her perspectives: if a person is clever or smart, what s/he say is also of cleverness/smartness and usefulness.

PS: There’s a video about the disorder, bitchy resting face, that could be of help in thinking critically when one can help making judgments on others' facial expressions. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v98CPXNiSk