Suffice it to say that the only currencies by which idea exchange could take place were always going to be trust and respect.
Without them, there was no class to be had.
There was no room for trust and respect because everyone directly involved in the bullying was too busy appropriating forms of behavior that only they deemed ethical. We often did so at the cost of the rest of the population’s conceptions, if not of an ethos.
In such an isolated environment — and by isolated, I mean socially constructed as such — the predominantly accepted social fantasy of a few undermined the reality that surrounded them by hijacking thought narratives prevalent and concurrent.
I aim to proceed with my conviction in the hypothesis; a way to test for Reality_A is to talk about how well it connects with all other realities. A philosophical rule of thumb, for me, is this:
The truth of Reality_A = (Reality_(N-1))/ (Reality_(N+1)); where Reality_A is relatively true the closer the quotient approaches 1. The total of realities is indiscernible due to its immensity. So, let’s attribute infinity to it symbolically, where Reality_(N+1) = ∞. N represents the number of truly shared realities that don’t conflict with Reality_A, whereas number 1 represents Reality_A quantitatively by assuming its basis in truth. As a rule, the greater the number of failed connections between all realities in relation to A, the more the proposition of its truth becomes less so.
Beyond what, at first, seems a shoddy mathematical attempt at explaining the truth of one reality is another parallel I would like to draw. Whereby treating students, teachers, and administrators of an institution in question as subordinate-, management-, and executive-level assets of an organization, respectively.
This exercise has three purposes: first, to be selfish in service of an argument I might be making in the future; secondly, identifying parallels between workplaces and classrooms is a constructive investigation for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons; and thirdly, any form of identifiable toxicity shared between workplaces and classrooms entails that it be classified and discouraged.
To do this, I am going to rely on my opinion. And with that, I leave you with the following disclaimer:
Any information mentioned in this or other pieces on classroom and workplace toxicity are purely products of my imagination. Momentary exceptions to this generalization apply when research publications are used in support of an argument particular to that moment, wherein citations for you to test the argument’s soundness will be provided. In closing this disclaimer, however, you need to understand that workplaces and classrooms will, at times, be used interchangeably in an effort to extract as many categorically shared toxic behaviors as possible.
One take on toxic work culture from a random site:
[It is] on one level [. . .] institutional-centric; policies and procedures are designed with the company, not its workforce, in mind. It means outdated work policies, for example, a requirement to work from the office, that is mistakenly thought to squeeze the most productivity from an employee. It means benefits and perks that are easy on the company budget, but tough on employees’ lives. It means regarding employees as objects that fulfill the company’s needs, not as people who have their own lives and families. (Built In; emphasis added)
And with that, I hope that the shared toxicity-related phenomena between professional and academic settings I’ve witnessed and will classify on this quest will be in service of what is ethical, for me and all other students and workers that experienced or continue to experience bullying.
