As for the learning environment, my 2 cents worth – in that sort of environment, it sounds like those students who are better at debating and sophistry, do well under pressure especially with the constructing of arguments, and have the loudest voices will do better in that environment.

In some ways it also sounds like the class could devolve into a critical thinking exercise, where students can instead point out the flaws in others’ arguments without having to make an argument themselves.

Good Luck Dorky – I still return to the harpyness thread about feminist learning practices in the classroom for some advice about structuring tutorials, maybe there’s something there that can be used?

If you could grade or critique the students’ performance so that rudeness and ad hominem attacks result in points deducted, that might be helpful. Couldn’t they compete at making the best arguments from lots of angles?

But, that’s not your question. I have never thought to square my competitiveness with feminism.

I have female traits expressed by my genitalia, and I have other traits expressed in my personality. That includes one some people want to say is masculine, and so therefore it’s good somehow. Plus, I’m in STEM. And, I dress androgynously most days.

Does that mean that on some subconscious level I have bought into a lot of crap from society: be more like a man, it’s better? Could be: I won’t so no. The problem with squaring this is that I have no real way to know.

I can’t live in a society-less vacuum, so it’s enough for me to say I’m competitive and feminist.

For what it’s worth, I feel like regardless of gender you owe it to your students to demonstrate that there are other models for learning and creating than competitive ones. I realize you’re in a delicate position as the female half of a female/male teaching team. But perhaps there’s a way to talk about these issues that doesn’t turn it into “collaborative women” vs. “competitive men”? Many well-known advocates of nonviolence were men, for example. Men can be collaborative and pacifist. Women can be competitive and violence. It’s not an innately gendered thing, although we are socialized to behave as if it is.

A class like that in college would have prompted me to drop, even if I would have learned a lot. I can’t deal with public cutthroat competitiveness ESPECIALLY when there is a male authority figure doing the cheerleading to be cutthroat.

I would actually be concerned enough about the language he is using to take it to a higher-up if it cannot be resolved between the two of you.

That being said, some students learn very well from competitions, though for me the joy is in competing against the material, not classmates. I have fond memories of my ninth grade geometry teacher inviting us, as a class, to conquer the material as if it were a rampaging dragon. Still, the classes where I can remember this working have been almost exclusively STEM (geometry, chemistry, endocrinology at a stretch) and I’ve never seen it used effectively in a humanities course.

I tend to be very competitive in my day to day life and I don’t see it as inherently macho (I get it from my mother;), though it’s certainly coded that way by society. I think that all students should get at least minor exposure to the competition model, if only because it gives girls permission to put themselves out there. There’s no reason for it to be wrapped in such over-the-top death-and-destruction rhetoric.

That said, I’m still pretty competitive.

I do not think that humiliating your enemies is the same thing as being competitive–even the fierce, vaguely unhealthy competitions I love. Having a humiliated enemy means that you fought against someone who was not an equal. If two people compete and are evenly matched, there will be no humiliation because there will not be a large difference in ability. If your competitor is humiliated because they’ve lost spectacularly to you, it just means you shouldn’t have been competing with them in the first place.

In my experience, competition is the worst way to learn. It’s the best way to play Taboo, but the worst way to learn. Because it makes the learning experience all about winning instead of learning, and it becomes overly strategic and/or the excitement of victory eclipses the new knowledge. Every kind of class I’ve ever taken that has had a competition that emphasized winning and losing over the kind of rhetorical sparring that a good discussion has, has been a total bust. But a good argument or intellectual sparring–that shit is golden. Argument for argument’s sake (in an academic setting) and for pursuing understanding is excellent, but argument to WIN is self-defeating (in my opinion).

However, none of the advantages of competition are helped by cruel rhetoric, shame, or humiliation. Telling people that it feels good to humiliate the enemy is a horrible lesson in empathy. Trying to *win* is fun and educational – even for those who ultimately don’t win. Trying to cause psychological harm should not be fun, nor does it teach anything worth learning.

In short, setting up competitions where one person or group tries to outperform another can be a powerful motivator, but “outperform” does not mean “act like an asshole.”

I don’t think competition is inherently masculine. I agree that it has some masculine associations in our culture: those associations are bad. Is the notion of “fair competition” gendered separately from competition itself? I’m not sure about that.