Patriarchal Trauma and the Virtuous Archetype of the Mansplained Public School Teacher
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I became an elementary school teacher to nurture "the vital spark that 'wants' to incarnate in the empirical personality" (Kalsched, 2013, p. 20).Eventually, I found that I could not prevent the system's perpetual imposition of trauma on children.Ultimately, I left my beloved profession because it became too painful to participate in the psychological annihilation of my students and of myself.This essay explores, from a Jungian perspective, the archetypal underbelly of the patriarchal public school system that inflicts trauma upon children and female teachers.With a master's degree in instruction and curriculum and advanced certification in early childhood cognitive and academic language development, I was what the federal government designated a "highly qualified" English Language Learners (ELL) teacher.To comply with No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal education reform act, a school district hired me to teach at an impoverished Title I school.I quickly realized that the adopted curriculum was educationally unsound for non-native English-speaking students, so I designed writing workshops to inspire and empower them to learn English as they developed sensory-based personal narratives.Surprisingly, colleagues devalued the projects I created and followed what I observed to be a meaningless, aggressively marketed, and expensive curriculum that obliterated children's experiences.Several times a day, I entered K-5 classrooms and witnessed traumatizing incidents leading to dissociation as ELL students were denied affection, affirmation, and recess because they could not complete dull worksheets in a language they did not know.In such painful moments, vital sparks are extinguished.Souls cannot dwell.Aspects of a personality can split off or disassociate to protect a person from the full impact of such frequent dehumanizing episodes.Parts of these painful experiences become inaccessible to consciousness, encoded in different parts of the brain."Afterward, we can't tell our story as a coherent narrative" (Kalsched, 2013, p. 23).From a Jungian perspective, trauma threatens to shatter "the psychosomatic unity of the personality to its very core" by overwhelming a person with "intolerable affects that are impossible to metabolize, much less understand or even think about" (Kalsched, 2013, p. 11).As Kalsched's (2013) vision of the psychological wounding of children was enacted, my students and I felt confusion, anger, and pain."Trauma constitutes an interruption of the normal processes through which an embodied, true self comes into being" (Kalsched, 2013, p. 19).I began writing a novel to address the cognitive dissonance I experienced when my attempts to advocate, educate, and care for vulnerable children were thwarted by
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".