I don’t want to talk about the Orange Lord, but he recently described his time in office by saying “I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m president.” It’s amazing to me that he can take this attitude. By any reasonable standard, he has no experience, no work ethic, no training and no willingness to be trained for this job. Newspapers and magazines around the world have written about how unqualified he is and how poorly he’s doing his job. His poor job performance is literally international news, every day. But he thinks he’s doing well.
I’m not 100% sure how people have confidence in general, but I definitely don’t understand how one can receive constant and objective negative performance feedback and still think the problem is with everyone else.
In my usual mental narrative, I notice that my student just looked at her phone. She’s obviously not engaged, so she’s probably not learning anything in this class. Which must be because it’s a boring class. Because I’m an awful, boring teacher. I’m probably the worst teacher ever, and if my boss ever finds out how bad I am at my job, I’m going to get fired. I’ll probably get fired anyway, because I’m terrible at everything. (Not an exaggeration.) Even in the face of overwhelming positive performance feedback, I will hear only the negative, because, well, see previous re: terrible at everything. I’m pretty much always trying to drown out the persistent worry that everyone around me is just about to discover how useless I am.
