Almost done

Well, I'm done with my grading. I have some research-work to do today (as soon as Colleague manages to get in here). It's been a pretty good week.

*I finished a Major Project I've been working on for over 2 1/2 years

*I have my summer presentation (at Large National Meetings) pretty well planned out and most of the data analyzed (these meetings are in July so I still have a little time).

*I'm done (for a little while) with the daily round of teaching, grading, and prep (as much as I LIKE teaching it's nice to have a break from it now and then).

*I had a student stop by yesterday to check on his grade. This is someone on scholarship who needs to maintain a 3.0. He had struggled a bit in my class and was just below the C/B border going in to the final. Fortunately, he did very well on the final and got an 81% for the class as a whole - a B.

The look of happiness and relief on his face when I let him know he had earned a B was priceless.

*I had another student come and thank me because he "learned so much" in my class. Yeah, we have a small cadre of students who always bitch about classes being "too much work" but we also have a (probably larger, but probably also not as vocal) group that sees the high standards in my department as a challenge to be met rather than an obstacle to their ease.

The student who came and thanked me was the same one who complained that the courses in his major (not my department) were too easy and that people taking them often seemed to be content to get by doing the barest of bare minimums. So I don't think he was sucking up (doubly so because the grades were already posted and because he's graduating this spring).

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Actually, I think that's a big part of happiness - seeing difficulty (in whatever form) as a challenge to be met rather than as an obstacle to one's ease. Perhaps it's because we're basically adapted to be problem-solving beings (I've heard it said that anxiety is the natural state of the human race: if you think about it, Zog the Caveman, who was always hyper-alert, looking for sabre-toothed tigers and such, survived along with his family, whereas Oog the Caveman who just wanted to lie around and look at the pretty clouds, would be more likely to get eaten).

Shannon C. commented on this recently.

I know I'm happiest when I have some kind of challenge to face - some kind of thing that I can either "beat" or that I can let "beat" me. I think perhaps too MUCH ease is what ails us sometimes. When you're not dealing with some kind of difficulty, you FIND a difficulty, or so I think.

Look at some of the silly crap we argue over in the developed world. Now think of an African subsistence-farmer. Or a yak herder in Kyrgyzstan. Or someone who makes a living in the jungles of Malaysia by hunting and gathering.

Do you think they worry about the same stuff?

Probably not. Their main worry is getting enough food, avoiding injury or disease, finding shelter.

I think of the old (and likely apocryphal) story about the Women's Conference where women from the U.S. and Canada were talking about the "major problem" of "non-gender inclusive language." And a representative from either India or one of the African nations stood up, and spoke eloquently about the high rate of infant mortality in her nation, and about how kids were going blind from malnutrition, and how women still regularly died in childbirth.

The point being: we're too prone to see what's wrong in our own lives, rather than thinking about the things that COULD be wrong, but are not. We're too prone to see whatever (mostly minor, at least in the developed world) problems we face and treat them as major obstacles. (I get so tired - SO TIRED - of seeing people essentially throw a tantrum over something that will not matter two weeks from now. Or something they could fix with effort equal to what they have put into the tantrum).

Look, there ARE big problems in life. Cancer is one (and that's going to be my FFOT for this week: once again, I know a couple people who are being affected by cancer). But for most of us - we have so much, we have so few problems, we should be even HAPPIER than the kings of old (because, after all, even KINGS in the olden days didn't have flush toilets and hot showers and the option to buy strawberries out of season).