Magister`s Rant
Dec
5
Written by:
12/5/2011 12:35 PM
(The following rant represents the personal views of the Magister only and not necessarily those of the members of this Order)
If you are one of the three people following this, or if you happen to know me, you probably know or surmised that I am a college teacher by profession. As a result, I’m always interested in seeing what students are saying about me behind my back on those “rate your teacher tell on you dot bullshit” sites.
The reason for this interest is first based on my firm belief in the Toltec wisdom of Don Miguel Ruiz in “The Four Agreements.” Specifically, I refer to the second of the four agreements, which is “Don’t Take Anything Personally”. The wisdom behind this agreement is profound, yet the concept is simple. Whenever someone says something about you, in fact, they are really expressing their own concept of reality. People that accept anothers poisonous view of reality as their own are prone to living in that other person’s reality, rather than in their own reality. The more they do this, the weaker they become.
For example…someone tells you that “you are stupid.” This is perhaps their perception of you and if you let that bother you, then frankly they are correct. You are stupid. Rather than accept their reality or perception of you, you may reaffirm that you are not stupid which reinforces your own reality and essentially turns the tables on them. By not allowing their little insult to bother you in any way, you are by default, not stupid. They then become stupid by believing that you are stupid. (Whew!)
That is the second reason for my interest. These cowardly negative comments (I say cowardly because I have yet to have one of these students tell me face-to-face what they may really think of me) confirm for me just how incredibly hypocritical some of these stupid people are. In fact, I just had a student shake my hand at the end of the semester, tell me how much they enjoyed my class and how much they learned from me while at the same time lodging a complaint with the school’s chair indicating that I was a bad teacher. I guess maybe he thought I didn’t know about the complaint…how retarded is that? About cowardly…another guy was going around telling everyone that I was a Witch and that I ate babies. He shook my hand too, asking if he could keep in touch. Finally, I noticed that someone had posted to one of those sites that everyone should be very careful about what they say about me, because I practice “Black Magic”. But that’s another rant!
It has been pointed out that by ranting on this subject…I too am being hypocritical. If I didn’t care what students said about me behind my back, I wouldn’t be giving it this much thought or ink. It is a danger inherent in ranting I guess. Whenever Rick Mercer says “I don’t care” in his rant – I too wonder if that is true, since he is ranting on the subject he claims to not care about. Since hypocrisy and stupidity seem to be closely linked, I guess I am stupid after-all.