Cs AND THE ARBITRARINESS OF FORMS

While re-reading Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s excellent Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, I came across this humourous (and true!) passage:

When the cubes of ice intended for a refreshing lemonade (or a more severe potable against academic malaise) melt while we are explaining to a student who has telephoned that his or her "C" is only a letter, a convenient form explaining nothing deeply relevant about his or her psyche, we grasp a notion of the arbitrariness of form.

If there is a solution to this problem, I'd love to know it. On a slightly more substantial note (though not much of one), Baker's book is excellent not only because of the quality of his argument, but also because it is filled with passages like the above that demonstrate his lightness of touch even with his most complex material (this passage appears in the midst of his definition of the strategy of "mastery of form"--exemplified by Booker T. Washington's mastery of the minstrel mask, enabling him to sound "back and black" to whites). The combined effect is to tun what could be a slog into a rather enjoyable read that balances impressive readings of texts with some heavy duty theorizing without sacrificing the author's character and personality. 

 

SOME FOLLOWUP THOUGHTS ON STUDENT EVALUATIONS

A followup on my post about student evals from the other day, inspired by some insightful points a friend emailed. Two comments that she made really struck me as suggesting the relationship between my issues with student evals and my questions/concerns about the place of the academy in society in a slightly larger sense. The first was her point--which I fully agree with--that as instructors at universities "our job should be teaching the committed." The second is her ultimate conclusion, and is related to the first: "So, the key question here and for higher-ed institutions is: What is more important, learning something or liking the class?" My only response to this is "Yes." I think the academic setting has been backed up into a corner in which learning something and liking a class are presented as distinct choices--you can have enjoyment or you can have learning--even as their pairing in this presentation inevitably suggests that liking the class is the preferred outcome (and, therefore, the appropriate measuring stick for the quality of instruction) within the context of the culture at large.

In its ideal form, teaching the committed means that learning and enjoyment/entertainment are neither inextricably linked nor forced into some kind of hierarchy. Learning can be enjoyment/entertainment, but it can also be something that exists outside of enjoyment/entertainment as another sphere of experience that is accepted as necessary on its own terms. At the very least, a course, its outcomes, and the quality of instruction to reach those outcomes can be separated out (where/when appropriate) from the enjoyment/entertainment factor when it comes to evaluation. I might not enjoy or be entertained by a class on injuries and illnesses (I'm squeamish that way), but setting my enjoyment aside, I could evaluate whether or not the instructor used methods that helped me to develop skills, apply concepts, or whatever the course outcomes suggested I should be able to do/comprehend by its completion. Now, I might enjoy certain pedagogical methods more than others--and here, student commentary can be particularly valuable when he/she articulates which methods were enjoyable, why they were enjoyable, and (this is the crucial part) how that enjoyment helped him/her to meet the course outcomes more effectively than he/she otherwise would have been able to do--and that can help to nuance my evaluation, but it shouldn't be the sole basis of that evaluation.

One of the issues, though, is that the committed--in the ideal sense outlined above--are rare. It's much more common to come across the student who remains convinced that this course/subject/four year trek through higher education generally is useless, a joke, something to be endured on the road to a career. One of the strongest moments of cognitive dissonance I've experienced as a teacher came last Fall. During a unit of my composition class in which we examined arguments on the value (or lack thereof) of higher education and the liberal arts from a variety of perspectives, my students maintained that the system would protect and care for them even as the articles we read--both for and against higher ed and the liberal arts--repeated over and over again that the system was profoundly uncaring and students should identify the most appropriate ways to prepare for this reality. In this climate, learning and a commitment to education as a valuable aspect of life outside of preparation for a career doesn't seem to offer much (though, as I'll try to explain below, the reverse is true). I don't think this is just me being an elitist, privileged white male with a graduate degree when I suggest that more access to and emphasis on learning and the tools it offers is the solution here, though, not less.

This is all still a little underdeveloped, but I want to return to a point I made in the original post about needing to clarify, for example, a question about the instructor's ability to stimulate a student's thoughts by identifying the form of that stimulation and the instructor's ability as compared to what. Here, "liking the class" again requires these kinds of qualifiers, particularly among a generation of students who are, in Mark Fisher's words, "'too wired to concentrate,'" and for whom "to be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification" (24). He goes on to link this to life under capitalism and the very specific kinds of mental processes it requires of its subjects: 

If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism--a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture. . . . Teenagers process capital's image-dense data very effectively without any need to read--slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane. (25)

There are real consequences to this for higher education, obviously, and they manifest themselves (at least in part) in the tensions facing teachers that I tried to outline in my original post. Against the constant cries of right-wingers and "liberal communists" about higher education's disengagement with the realities of contemporary life, Fisher suggests it serves as:

the engine room of the reproduction of social reality, directly confronting the inconsistencies of the capitalist social field. Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians. Teachers want to help students to pass the exams; they want us to be authority figures who tell them what to do. Teachers being interpellated by students as authority figures exacerbates the "boredom" problem, since isn't anything that comes from the place of authority a priori boring? (26)

The two poles outlined, facilitator-entertainer and disciplinarian-authoritarian, are dead on in the education climate surrounding student evaluations as currently formatted. During class time, the teacher is expected to substitute for the entertainment offered by the now inaccessible "entertainment-control circuits" at the same time that he/she is expected to handhold. One of the more striking aspects of the latter category--and one that I meant to mention in my original post and forgot--is students' inability to see evaluation of their performance on an assignment as anything other than a personal commentary, an evaluation of their very subjectivity. That is, no point about a rough patch in an argument or a well-turned phrase can be seen as anything other than an insult or a compliment on the student as a subject because the disciplinarian-authoritarian is seen as evaluating the student him/herself, rather than the work as it relates to assignment guidelines/course outcomes. Students will turn in drafts to me and say "Please don't judge me. I had to rush to finish this, and I know it needs a lot of work," as if a poor piece of writing would lead me to believe that the student is a "bad" person. I might be frustrated if a student who has turned in high quality work throughout the semester suddenly submits a piece of writing well below his/her previous level, but I'm more likely to ask the student how I can help clarify the assignment or to discuss areas for/methods of revision with him/her than I am to leap to some judgement about his/her character. That reaction doesn't fit into the above roles, though, and parses with difficulty, if at all.

To ask students, then, to evaluate a class in such a way that enjoyment and entertainment are the only available categories for the students to use when evaluating any experience would seem to be a losing prospect, not only for teachers but for higher education as a whole. Here's where it all starts to get a bit murky, but stick with me and maybe I'll have something for you. In The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek claims that:

What we have today is not so much the politics of jouissance but, more precisely, the regulation (administration) of jouissance . . . the superego aspect of today's "nonrepressive" hedonism (the constant provocation to which we are exposed, enjoining us to go right to the end, and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance. . . . [A]lthough the immediate and explicit injunction calls for the rule of a pleasure principle that would maintain homeostasis, the actual functioning of the injunction explodes these constraints into a striving toward excess enjoyment. (310)

In the wake of the past half decade of financial crises, the dominant logic of late capitalism--Consume! Enjoy!--isn't "corrected" by austerity rhetoric and current financial situations so much as redirected by it: You've enjoyed in the wrong way; learn to enjoy denying yourself as part of the greater good and you can continue to enjoy. That there is a barrenness to accepting such a life seems to me obvious, and part of the increasing levels of discontent among youths especially might be attributed to a glimpse of the barrenness that they can look forward to. As Fisher points out, "There is a sense that 'something is missing'--but no appreciation that this mysterious missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle" (22). Thus, when in Valences of the Dialectic, Jameson argues that there is a fear "of repression: that socialism will involve renunciation, that the abstinence from commodities is only a figure for a more generalized Puritanism and a systemic willed frustration of desire," a situation that "allow[s] us to grasp, but only from the outside, how difficult it may be to relinquish [the] compensatory desires and intoxications we have developed in order to make the present livable," he articulates the social context in which the political work that teachers must undertake (of which addressing student evals is one part) emerges and the challenges it faces (384). In an increasingly damaged and unsustainable world: 

rationing of some sort is inevitable. The issue is whether it will be collectively managed, or whether it will be imposed by authoritarian means when it is already too late. Quite what forms this collective management should take is, again, an open question, one that can only be resolved practically and experimentally. (Fisher 80)

Jameson echoes this conclusion, arguing for "a collective decision and a collective will to live in a different way" (384), and the task that  Žižek proposed to Occupy Wall Street is strikingly similar: 

Fall in love with hard and patient work . . . [W]e are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions--questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want.

Here there is an echo of the problem to which David Foster Wallace's later work--especially "This is Water" and The Pale King--attempted to find an answer: how to will different desires and modes of thought into existence and what those new desires and modes might look like. As Jameson points out, paraphrasing Marx, capitalism is desire's "stimulant and an immense machine for producing new and unforseeable desires of all kind" (384). There are opportunities for exploiting this immense machine, though, especially if those unforseeable desires, such as the missing something discussed above, cannot be met by that same machine. Indeed, it becomes increasingly clear in the wake of movements toward austerity that it is only through positing alternatives (especially to austerity and its logic)--and then actively working to achieve those alternatives--that both new desires and the existing desires produced by capitalism can be identified and met.


If Fisher is correct in saying that higher education (and the education system more broadly) is "the engine room of the reproduction of social reality" and if that social reality, for students, consists of an "entertainment-control circuit" into which they are plugged in order to experience this obligatory jouissance--whose logic Žižek describes as "'You must, because you can!'"--student evals would seem to function as a way of turning the environment of higher educations into one more compatible with the texting, smartphone, social media, internet matrix. Here, student evals are a way of applying the social reality (re)produced by higher education to higher education itself: enjoyment replaces learning because learning, as a category of experience separate from enjoyment, doesn't fit into the obligatory jouissance that Žižek claims governs our current social reality. This is why, as currently formatted, those evals are a losing prospect--they undermine the ability of higher education to maintain goals that are not in direct service to capital's demands.

This is also why the task of remaking student evals and their function within higher education is a political issue. One of the reasons that this seems to me like a key area in which teachers can exercise a certain kind of power against the pressures of capital on higher education is because student evals have a definite form, one that is a reflection of the ideological assumptions that undergird the social reality that Fisher, Jameson, and  Žižek discuss above. Challenging this form and replacing it with a new, more effective form, then, requires an engagement with those ideological assumptions. Crucially, it is also an example of "the strategic withdrawal of forms of labor which will only be noticed by management . . . the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without" (Fisher 79-80). At the same time, producing this new form of student evals necessarily requires a re-articulation of how learning functions in the present moment not just as a way to reproduce current social reality, but to challenge and correct that social reality. It is a way to reinscribe higher education within a larger anticapitalist project, one that teaches students how to articulate and form new desires on their own terms, rather than settling for, as Jameson terms them, "compensatory desires" to make a poor situation livable.

MAKING A CASE AGAINST STUDENT EVALS

I received my student evaluations for the Spring semester on Wednesday. I've never been a huge fan of student evals--generally, when I get them, I tend simply to feel depressed for a few days. Much like the worst internet trolls, some students seem to take the anonymity of student evals as a challenge to craft as many wounding statements as possible, attacks that are often out of all proportion to the class and their engagement with it. I've had students question my intelligence, abilities, dedication, biases, and sexual orientation on evals, often under the guise of offering helpful or constructive feedback. What's more, these students' comments are clearly meant to be deliberately and flagrantly provocative, an attempt to somehow "get even" for their performance in class/their lack of interest/engagement with the subject. Without fail, there are students who complain about having to write in a composition class, of having to read new--and at times challenging--material in a literature class, of not being entertained every single second of the semester by my teaching. In some ways, the worst comments are the ones about being graded too harshly--as someone who is keenly aware of grade inflation (and who often feels caught in an impossible position between contributing to this inflation and sticking to certain standards/principles in a way that is unfair to students given the inflated grades they might otherwise receive), I often have to bury my face in my hands when I think about all the compromises I made while grading after reading those comments.

For many, the response to all this might be "Oh well. Grow some thicker skin and get over it." However, it's precisely this attitude that contributes to the reason that I don't find student evaluations helpful. There are times when students can offer valuable and constructive feedback--I've learned that there are situations in which I haven't made my own position relative to a reading clear and have been accused (unfairly) of bias and I've dropped or used more frequently some activities because of student feedback--but for the most part, student evaluations are not set up to benefit either the student or the teacher. In fact, I would go a step further and claim that student evals are, at their most fundamental level, anti-teacher. They are a prime example of neoliberal management practices and corporatization of education masquerading as "student-centred" learning. Ultimately, student evals (at least as they are currently set up--and this is across the various educational institutions in which I've taught or been a student) are less reflections of the effectiveness of various educational practices and strategies, and more customer satisfaction surveys. The evals encourage the worst kind of self-consciousness and surveillance on the part of teachers at the same time that they set up the university as a company whose product must meet the demands (grades) of the consumer (student) at all costs. What's more, the process of student evals fails to make clear to students the purpose behind the surveys, requiring teachers both to supply the context and to perform certain ideological manoeuvres.*

While the goal of offering students the chance to speak to the quality of instruction they are receiving is laudable--this basic principle, at least, is student-centred--student evals (in their current format) do not ask students to evaluate the quality of instruction. Or rather, they do so while neither requiring that students understand what it is that they are evaluating nor monitoring the students' ability to perform this evaluation effectively (or at all).  Perhaps the biggest problem in this regard is the inability to separate the student's grade in the class from his/her evaluation of the class. That is, the evals are framed in such a way that the student's grade--both the grade he/she expects to receive in the class the grade he/she "deserves" in the class (which is almost always an A or A-, with some B+ and Bs across the class, but rarely any Cs, Ds, or Fs)--is the entry point into the survey. Having established what you "should" get in the class, what was the class like in getting you that grade? In many cases, whether an individual student received an A, B, or C is of little importance when evaluating the effectiveness of instruction. While it would be wonderful if every student in the class received an A, there is little chance of that happening (if nothing else, chance would get in the way--students get sick or distracted, they procrastinate and produce lower quality work than they are capable of producing, they develop skills at different rates, etc.). However, if an instructor does his/her best to provide students with the opportunity to succeed (read here as developing the skills that he/she is expected to gain from that class) and students are able to take advantage of those opportunities, the instruction has been effective, regardless of the outcome (in terms of grade) of the individual student.

Of course, much of this depends on student effort, as well, which student evals are unable to measure in any serious or effective way. Though there are questions that attempt to quantify the student's effort and engagement--the hours per week devoted to the class and the student's own evaluation of his/her effort in this class as compared to his/her other classes--this causes two related problems. First, these questions are rarely the catalyst for self-reflection (perhaps I found the instruction effective/ineffective because of my level of engagement with the material) and thus students who put forth minimal effort are likely to attribute this lack of engagement (rightly or wrongly) to the effectiveness of instruction (even when this is unfair to the teacher). Second, it encourages the myth that effort is the only quality on which students should be evaluated. I find the second problem particularly difficult to deal with in the classroom. While I appreciate that students can work very hard and still produce substandard material (especially in a composition course), I do not see the value in awarding grades to students for excellent effort that should reflect an evaluation of excellent quality work.** If the theory is that rewarding effort will encourage the student to continue to put forth similar effort, I would counter by saying that I think students should learn to develop intrinsic motivation out of a desire to gain the most from their education. When a majority of students tell me that when taking courses outside of their major they do not try (and have no motivation to try), I do not feel that rewarding effort in my classes (largely taken by non-majors) is a particularly productive method of reinforcing behaviour.

Taken together, these two factors (the emphasis on grades as the criterion on which evaluations should be based and the lack of accountability for students' efforts in the class/ability to evaluate instructional methods) contribute to the way that student evals (in their current format) are anti-teacher. As the job market in higher education continues to be quite competitive and as teaching portfolios (often requiring student evals) become another method of evaluating candidates, anonymous evaluations by students who are far from impartial gain importance. What's more, these evaluations are coming from a position in which entertainment--the nonstop stream of information from the iPhone/iPod/iPad/laptop matrix, the omnipresence of screens to navigate rather than text to read, the constant state of being "connected"--is given primacy not just over the system in which higher education operates, but in opposition to that system. When a student eval asks whether or not an instructor stimulated the student's thinking, it seems imperative to ask in what way is the student being asked to evaluate stimulation. In this environment, the teacher is hostage to the students' desires (desires that become validated in the form of the student eval) even when those desires work against instructional effectiveness.*** The teacher is required to be "on" at all times in a way that students are never (or rarely) required to be. One bad day in the classroom can impact scores on evals, though a semester of bad days in the classroom can still allow a student to get by with a passing grade (and then, in retribution for a poor grade, damage the student eval scores of the teacher). Thus, evals actually demote instructional effectiveness as the motivating factor for teachers and replace it with scoring well on the evals regardless of the instructional effectiveness displayed in so doing. 

You might think that the above is a response to a bad set of evals, pure spite and bitterness. In fact, my evals for this past semester are the best I've ever received. Of course, that I feel that my grading was, in many ways, far too lenient by the standards I would like to uphold and consequently my class grades were much higher than they have been in other semesters (and perhaps should have been this semester) is merely coincidental, I'm sure. What's most galling, though, is that only six students filled out evals. This is not for lack of publicity, either: every class from the moment the surveys went online to when they closed, I reminded students about them and asked that they fill them out, not just for my benefit, but for the school's benefit as well. If students aren't even going to bother filling them out, what use are they? Can one-third of one class really offer anything like useful feedback on my teaching (assuming those six students who filled out evals out are capable of separating their own individual performance [in terms of grade in the class] from the process of evaluating pedagogical strategies and decisions at work in our classroom throughout the semester to determine what was most and least effective and how the class could be improved)? Did any student benefit from the fact that, for the fifteen weeks I was their instructor, my preparations for his/her class were constrained (I might say deformed) by the question "How will this play on my student evals?" alongside more pedagogically useful questions like "What is the most effective way to present this material?" and "Given their success with [x] and struggles with [y], how can I best relate this material to what we've already covered?" 

There must be a better way. As a political act, teachers working together to reformat the idea and approach of student evals would go some way to helping combat the continued encroachment of capitalist realism and the ongoing corporatization of education.

*These manoeuvres are, essentially, legitimizing the surveillance procedures of neoliberalism and naturalizing their place in daily life through the process of distributing (or at least publicizing the availability of) the surveys in the first place. In this way, students are taught to expect similar kinds of surveillance in their own careers (as higher education becomes nothing more than a training ground for careers) and to begin to be aware of the kind of continual self-monitoring that a good neoliberal subject undertakes. Though many instructors have informal surveys that they ask students to fill out as a way of developing their own teaching, a process independent of student evals that stems from a true student-centred perspective, these are inevitably tied to and compromised by the formal student evals.  

**As I always try and explain it to students when this comes up, asking me to grade based on effort is essentially asking me to give bad grades to students who are naturally gifted writers and who do not have to put in as much effort to produce a piece of writing that meets the assignment criteria, while students who work hard but struggle to meet the assignment criteria would get higher grades. 

***In this sense, the actual university comes to seem like a certain kind of Big Other, the entity that provides the student evals with their legitimacy by using them as one of the bases by which jobs, promotions, appointments, awards, etc. are conferred. Though everyone might know that student evals are flawed, in the eyes of the Big Other, they remain valid and so retain their force.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON TEACHING PROMPTED BY READING JOURNALS

It's getting toward the end of the semester and I've just collected my students' reading journals in order to have a look at what they've been writing throughout the second half of the semester. They were supposed to make an entry into the journal every day they had a reading assignment (from a quick scan, it looks like less than half of them managed to do this), and their entry was to identify problems they were having, ideas they came up with while reading, general reactions to the text, etc. It's a fairly standard practice with some fairly standard goals: to ensure that they read, to help them think about material before coming into class so they have points to contribute to discussion, and to give them a chance to develop paper ideas/topics in an informal, low stakes way.

The most frequent comment I've seen so far in my students' reading journals--it's at the top of every entry, it seems, repeated like a mantra--is "This story was confusing." Sometimes there are slight variations--"This story makes no sense," "I'm so lost"--but mostly, the recurring theme is confusion. I was surprised that the frequency of these comments didn't drop as the semester went on; I'd structured the reading assignments to go from Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (the most difficult, in my mind) to John Cheever's "The Swimmer" (the easiest), with the idea that the frustration and difficulty they encountered in reading Kafka would spur them to develop (aided by class discussion and writing) the tools to read difficult material. Thus, by the time they came to the final reading assignment of the semester, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, which we just finished, any confusion or frustration they encountered would immediately suggest to them strategies for reading and engaging with the material that would quickly move them beyond confusion as their sole reaction to the text.

Unfortunately, their reading journals don't reflect this. Even when the students were able to quite effectively produce interpretations and begin to make claims out of their confusion, they still circled back to that as their dominant (to the point of exclusivity) reaction. That the development I anticipated hasn't taken place is obviously a point on which I need to think further--what more can I do to help them get over this hump and start developing their reading skills?--but also seems like it might be related to other larger cultural factors.

A few passages from Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? seem pertinent here:

Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many--and these are A-level students mind you--will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be "boring." What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate "New Flesh" that is "too wired to concentrate" and the confining, concentrated logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp--and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension--that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche. (23-24)

If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism--a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture. Similarly, what is called dyslexia may in many cases amount to a post-lexia. Teenagers process capital's image-dense data very effectively without any need to read--slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane. (25)

Teachers are now put under intolerable pressure to mediate between the post-literate subjectivity of the late capitalist consumer and the demands of the disciplinary regime (to pass examinations, etc). . . . Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians. Teachers want to help students to pass the exams; they want us to be authority figures who tell them what to do. Teachers being interpellated by students as authority figures exacerbates the "boredom" problem, since isn't anything that comes from the place of authority a priori boring? (25-26)

While I think Fisher's take on this is perhaps slightly exaggerated at this point--although perhaps in the UK system in which he works he is in fact totally on the mark--I do feel that the process of educating students and the relationship between students, teachers, and material is trending ever more in this direction. The "indigestibility" he discusses seems related to my students' confusion. They want story without the process, the content without the form, because the act of reading, of deciphering, of making the story appear in a difficult text--which is a necessary and inseparable part of the text--runs against the grain of their mode of consuming and interpreting data. Thus, even when my students succeed in overcoming this confusion, it is the confusion they have no choice but to focus on rather than what that confusion allows/offers them.

A possibly related--though at this point wholly unsubstantiated--speculation on my part is that the breakdown in the disciplinary regime that Fisher discusses, taken together with its usurpation by Deleuze's societies of control--has something to do with my students' confusion with the material they've been reading because the stories have tended to talk about time in a way that my students no longer experience/think about time. Disciplinary society's discrete units of time, in which events are asynchronous from each other (8:00-10:00 is a block of work; 10:00-10:15 is a break that allows for socialization; 10:15-12:00 is another block of work) without any sort of overlap or simultaneity, are part of what the stories we have been reading have been playing with: the boundaries between formerly asynchronous events are breached, time becomes fluid. "The Swimmer" relies on time passing in several ways at once: the passing of an afternoon is linked to the process of aging from virility into senescence and to the cycle of seasons. Pedro Páramo cuts between events happening years apart, with effects often discussed before causes are established, and confuses chronology even further through the presence of an active population of ghosts who continue to live in the town of Comala long after their deaths.

For my students, though, time is already fluid. The seventy five minutes that delineates our class time no longer designates a time solely dedicated to learning about writing and argumentation via literature; as long as students are connected, via their cell phones (as much as I try to ban them, inevitably at some point at least one will make an appearance), they can continually escape this attempt to create a discrete block of time. The same thing applies, as Fisher notes, to the presence of food in class--students will attempt to bring whole meals into class, once again resisting the attempt to separate periods for consuming food/media/entertainment from class time. Bringing materials from other classes (ones deemed more important than a class devoted to writing and literature) to work on during our class is another form of this. The "New Flesh" Fisher mentions, constantly "wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture," does not have the sense of time as a series of discrete events against which simultaneity can be a flashpoint. Thus, attempts by these texts to use and play with time in this way is confusing to students because it is alien to their sense of the world and to how time operates within it.

Alongside this phenomenon of confusion, though, lurks the ever-present spectre of "value." What value does my class have for a student? What are they getting out of it? I would venture a guess that our thoughts on this (mine and my students') are not the same. I was pointed to why do we have to learn recently. A quick scan of the entries reveals the usual suspects--literature, philosophy, history, geography--but also a surprising number of entries dedicated to the sciences and math. There seem to be two basic arguments that students are putting forth in the tweets collated on this site:

1) Why do I have to learn about [x] when there is [computer program/hardware device that approximates one aspect of that discipline]? Example: "What's the point of learning about maps and stuff when we have GPS and Navigation systems."

2) What's the point of learning about [x] when I'm not going to be [occupation that would make use of that subject] when I grow up? Example: "Why do we learn physics? I'm not going to be an electrician when I grow up anyway o_o"

This is obviously not a new development, though it does point to a disturbing commodification of education by evaluating the process and content along the lines one would use while shopping. Here, education becomes positioned as an unnecessary frippery/luxury item: why buy this when I don't need what it does? Of course, the fact that students often misunderstand or misinterpret the "what it does" part when it comes to education makes this mindset even more damaging. I sometimes think of a shopper dismissing a bucket of water as a luxury item while his/her home is on fire when I consider this, though the premise of this attitude toward education still seems wrong.

For one thing, this attitude is a fairly obvious (though silent) way in which austerity rhetoric creeps into arguments about the structure and purpose of higher education. Fredric Jameson is right to insist that we decouple personified metaphors about balancing budgets in households from issues like national budgets and debts, as here the "we're all in this together" and "we all need to tighten our belts" kind of sentiments become the logic of the students' critique of the value of their education. As an unnecessary luxury--in their eyes--in the current economic climate, philosophy (or literature, history, etc.) is something that students must tighten their belts against, rather than something that can offer an alternative to "the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture" and its attendant logic of students being reducible to their consumer habits and occupation. Also, the "common sense" retort to this that so often seems to be promoted--encourage the students to understand the value of a degree in philosophy, literature, etc. in terms of potential career opportunities--serves only to further solidify the logic of the students' critique, as it progresses from the assumption that this critique (and the ideology that encourages students to launch this critique) is correct.

One final passage from Fisher on this topic:

It is worth stressing that none of the students I taught had any legal obligation to be at college. They could leave if they wanted to. But the lack of any meaningful employment opportunities, together with cynical encouragement from government means that college seems to be the easier, safer option. Deleuze says that Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation, the logic insists--get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you'd left school at sixteen. . . (26)

Combating this logic requires not a concession to its soundness, but rather a commitment to overturning the economic and social conditions that engender it. Taking the "indigestibility" of Nietzsche that Fisher mentions and using it as the counter to students' questions of "value," of "utility," as the way to engage students in a discussion of how the question they are asking/the critique they are attempting to voice is formed and whose interests that question/critique serves is important, but it's only one part of the fight. Based on the above, those who worry about the value of the humanities in the current age would do well to focus on student debt, on economic reform, on the struggles that movements like Occupy have brought to national attention, as that is the organizational battleground out of which the ideologies that must be opposed can be most effectively fought.  

RETROMANIA IN ACTION? FAVOURITE MOVIES, GREATEST MOVIES

A week on and people are still stopping me when they see me to say they enjoyed my talk. I guess it must have gone well.

An interesting moment today in class: while discussing evaluative criteria and the difference between personal and more universal criteria, I had my students list their favourite movies and why they liked them. Then, I asked them to come up with candidates for the greatest movie of all time. Looking at the list, I was amazed at the time period it covered. For all you could tell from my students' lists, movies came into being somewhere around 1994. One student offered Back to the Future (1985) as his favourite movie, but that was the only movie older than Happy Gilmore (1996) and Pulp Fiction (1994) on either list until I put on my own favourite movie, The Shining (1980), and suggested that we consider some movies from before the 1990s on our greatest movie of all time list. We eventually added Star Wars (1977) and Rocky (1976), both franchises that had installments come out in the 1990s or 2000s, with Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Rocky Balboa (2006) respectively. With some prompting, I managed to get someone to suggest The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Godfather (1972). Thinking back, I'm fairly certain the same thing happened last year when I did this activity--one student finally spoke up and said something about greatest movie of all time meaning "classics" like The Sound of Music, etc.

I'm tempted to chalk this up simply to their age--if my students turned 18 this year, they were born in 1993 (!!!). However, it seems like my peer group in school had a much broader sense of the past than this group. What they do seem to know--movies like Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, and Rocky, for example--are among the most frequent subjects of pastiche/parody in the culture (although a straight pastiche of any of those films would seem pretty dated at this point). Is that what makes them known for my students, I wonder? There is no embarrassment in discovering bits of culture this way--long before I'd ever seen Citizen Kane, I'd picked up the basics from the numerous parodies, homages, and appropriations of that film that showed up in the first few seasons of The Simpsons.

What strikes me as really odd, though, is the hard cut off somewhere in the 1980s for pop culture references that students make and/or appreciate in my experience (even the 1980s are pushing it--the number of students who have never seen Jurassic Park [1993] is mindblowing). Generally, my students seem to react to bits of culture that come from before the 1980s as being separate somehow, belonging to a group of cultural objects they neither consume nor judge, that have no impact on them at all, really (actually, anything from before their birth seems to flummox them--they are baffled by clips from early seasons of The Simpsons, in my experience). I'm not certain, but I'd bet that most of my students reject the idea of the greatest movie of all time coming from any period other than their own lifetime (some of their suggestions: Titanic [1997], Remember the Titans [2000], and Avatar [2009]). I wonder if it's just the result of living through a much more baby boomer saturated culture and a wave of 1970s revivalism that gives me that sense, though.

Is this some kind of response to postmodernism? Are my students--who have no knowledge of anything other than a postmodern culture (I'm not sure that I do, to be honest. I was born during high postmodernism and grew up with irony as the only appropriate response to any event)--unable to process cultural materials that are not themselves clearly postmodern? Do they require cultural materials that are not obviously postmodern to be (re)presented in pastiche in order to acknowledge them and to pass judgement on them?

These questions are probably just the result of extrapolating wildly from a very tiny dataset, but it would make sense in some ways. The endless return to the 1980s (and even the Back to the Future answer feels very "now" more than a recognition of the quality of a cultural object from the past--the kind of retro-future chic of that movie is a prominent [if not dominant] cultural discourse these days) doesn't appear to be slowing down even as the 1990s revivals ramp up to full speed. The time between emergence and revival of cultural materials is shrinking. Already my students seem to regard the time before widespread internet access (and high speed internet access, at that) as something of a fairy tale. How soon before they start to ignore it entirely?

This is not a plea for cultural conservatism or the preservation of the past or anything like that. I'm just curious about how my students actually perceive and experience the cultural landscape. If anything, I would be interested in my students focusing even more on the future and even less on the past--ideally, it would be the yet-to-come that grabs and fires their imagination. Maybe in such a situation, the past will become more available and the immediate past will become more forgettable. A new futuremania (futurama?) to cure retromania, and a futuremania free of irony, kitsch, and ultimately retro underpinnings. My students have a chance to write about just this topic for their next essay, so I will be anxiously awaiting their responses.

THE DANGERS OF BIKE SHORTS

One downside I've noticed to the return of school and the deluge of freshmen: many young men and women have decided that wearing their workout clothes as daily attire poses no problems whatsoever. With the amount of skin and spandex I'm seeing (particularly the amount of skin my female students are showing in my class), I'm uncomfortably reminded of this passage from "Getting Away From Pretty Much Being Away From it All":

"...there is, I'm afraid, a frank sexuality that begins to get uncomfortable. You can already see some of the sixteen-year-olds out under the basketball hoop doing little warm-up twirls and splits, and they're disturbing enough to make me wish there was a copy of the state's criminal statutes handy and prominent."

I must be getting older because a) my first thought is always to accost these young women with the question "Does your mother know you're dressed like that?" and b) all my students look so young to me that any display of sexuality on their parts does seem, well . . . uncomfortable. Like something I should not be privy to (or something I might be in trouble for being privy to). A friend mentioned that it's "Freshman Mating Season" at the school where she teaches, but my students, I'm convinced, are too young to have any part of that--even if they seem very desperately to want to have one.

I realize that this makes me sound totally uncool and kind of like an unenlightened misogynist who wants to dictate what is appropriate for females to wear and to control their sexuality, etc., etc. I've got no real response to any of those charges. I guess I just find it hard to teach when I'm wondering if I might get arrested for the amount of cleavage on display in the first row.

STUDENT SURVEYS AND COMMON ANSWERS

Well, school has started once again. The campus is humming and buzzing with activity now. It almost defies belief to remember how quiet it was on campus at the end of summer when you come face-to-face with the hordes of freshmen barreling down on you from one direction or another.

Teaching at 8 am is more of adventure this time than it was in Corvallis. Of course, there I lived about a ten minute walk from the building I taught in. Here, it's a half hour bus ride (assuming no traffic and few stops). My students are, predictably, sleepy and, equally predictably, tentative. Any statement I make seems to be greeted with outright terror by half of the class at this point. The first couple days are the worst, of course, but they don't know that fact yet. Starting with Friday's class, our first chance to really discuss a reading that isn't a fairly abstract introduction to the concept of "college writing,"* I think what I've set out for them to do over the next fifteen weeks will seem much less daunting. I've tried to a spend a great deal of time situating our entire class within the abstract concepts we've been discussing so far (which accounts for some of the terror: they're encountering the entire course as some type of monolithic mountain and they think I'm asking them to climb it in one fell swoop, rather than knowing that we might not get to that mountain at all this term and are instead going to spend a great deal of time practicing our techniques on relatively flat ground and small hills) under the assumption that an understanding of the larger structure of the course will make each individual day seem more useful and meaningful. If they can understand the end goal and what it entails, they'll probably be able to understand why we're doing the particular task we're focused on that class. I understand this is probably not the case, but I figured it was a worthwhile experiment.

A more interesting experiment, and one I might start conducting over the remaining semesters I'm teaching here, suggested itself to me after I received some of the first day surveys I handed out to my students. These are meant to supplement whatever introductions we do in class on the first day and to provide more in-depth data on their attitudes towards writing, their ability to self-assess and accurately diagnose what works and what doesn't in their writing, their level of comfort with the class, etc., etc. One of the questions--and the purpose of this question is simply to gain some information that will allow the student to stand out in my mind and make learning names a quicker and easier process (I've got about 2/3 of them down after two classes)--is "What is the most interesting thing about you?"**

This is a fairly bland question, I'll grant that, but it amazes me how little information it generates. I can understand that students may not be comfortable sharing personal information out loud in class on the first day, and I give them the option not to answer that question during their introduction if it will make them uncomfortable (I've noticed that a tendency to answer the question seems to correlate pretty well with the student's level of participation throughout the semester). I have assumed, though, and maybe this is where I'm going wrong, that students would feel far more comfortable answering the question in the "privacy" of the survey. I'm the only person who sees these surveys. I will never bring up any information a student shares with me on the survey with the class or with another student unless it is information that the student has already volunteered in class him or herself. Nevertheless, every semester I get answers of the "I like to run" or "I have a dog" variety. Sometimes students have information that could be interesting and useful, like the always popular "I like to travel," but unless they attach specifics to their fact--"I like to travel and have visited four continents," for example--it remains largely useless. These questions might have inspired Barthes to write Writing Degree Zero they're so flat and colourless and neutral. It's almost impossible for students to offer information that says less about themselves.

I was complaining about this fact today on Facebook and Twitter (tongue firmly in cheek; I was asked to do this same activity the other night and my mind went totally blank--although, this was partly due to the fact that I have few interests outside of my academic interests that I can state without the need to burden them with thousands of qualifiers and clarifications). I had a thought, though: are students reluctant to provide actual information, or are they incapable of providing the kind of information I'm seeking? If it's the former, does this reluctance have something to do with privacy concerns or their overall comfort level? Is it too difficult or uncomfortable or scary to share information about one's self with a person who is, essentially, a complete stranger and who one assumes will be judging one's self throughout the coming fifteen weeks? If it's the latter, is this inability the result of currently unrefined skills (i.e. students can't write about themselves because they don't yet understand how to write effectively)? Is it due to a misunderstanding (or incomprehension) of what the terms "interesting" or "unique" mean? Or, and this bridges the two sides, does this have something to do with a culture that tells young people that they are all unique in the same way? Is this related to the rise of social networking and lure of appealing to a group by demonstrating you think the same/feel the same/like the same/desire the same (conveniently symbolized and actualized at the same time by the Facebook "Like" button)?***

Another issue that emerged from the first batch of surveys I received today (I'll get the rest on Friday) has to do with students' expectations and attitudes toward writing. When I first started giving this survey (which was not that long ago), the majority of students' answers to "What is the best experience you've ever had with writing? The worst?" usually involved an anecdote about working hard on a project in high school (quite often a "senior research paper" or similar assignment) and receiving a high grade. Sometimes they would mention winning a contest or publication of some of their work. Their worst experiences also tended to relate to unpleasant high school projects, most of which had been left to the last minute and that the students felt reflected poorly on them.

While there's an obvious connection between good experience and rewards in those anecdotes, the anecdotes themselves have been simplifying over the past few semesters to become "I worked hard on a paper and got an A (or some equivalent, like 100%) on it." Today's batch of surveys featured the most blunt statement of this kind of attitude yet. To paraphrase: "The best experience was every time I got an A on an assignment. The worst was every time I didn't get an A." It is tremendously difficult to get students to see the value in work that they're doing in this class (and in other classes, I would imagine) when they tie success/good writing experience solely to the grade they receive. Similarly, it becomes even more difficult when they assume that effort (regardless of whether or not that effort is directed in fruitful ways or produces work of any quality) must always be rewarded with an A. Thus, for the student, effort is only rewarded if the piece of writing is successful, and a piece of writing is only successful it receives an A.

I disagree pretty fundamentally with both of those statements, largely because lots of writing that students put plenty of effort into is "unsuccessful" by this measure, but is "successful" in more important ways. I'm obviously not stating anything revolutionary here. Unfortunately, the above attitude seems to be becoming the hegemonic student orientation toward not just writing, but university (and education as a whole) in general. I'm not even lamenting for the decline in the "I love learning for the sake of learning" types--frankly, I think their numbers have probably always been drastically overstated. What I am lamenting is the decline in estimation of honing a craft among students, of putting into practice new skills, regardless of whether or not the end result is "exceptional" or "superior" or any of the other terms I (and others) use to describe A work. I'm not sure I even understand how to communicate this to students, though, without them thinking it's only a tired version of "hard work is its own reward" (which it is, but it's so much more than just that).

Anyway, some thoughts on teaching and students after a couple of days back at it. I have no answers to any of the questions I've asked, which I'm guessing is actually something of a good thing, for the most part. I imagine that it's beneficial to have these issues as live questions while I think about teaching and plan my lessons each day.

To lighten the mood some: keep watching this and this. They both just get funnier and funnier.


*As a term, "college writing" causes me no end of cognitive dissonance: to my mind, the term to describe our class should be "university writing," as, thanks to the differences between Canadian and American applications of the term, colleges and universities are quite different things. While there is nothing wrong with colleges in Canada--indeed, they are far better than universities for certain kinds of programs and disciplines--I have a certain residual snobbery attached to the connotations of the term because in high school designating a course as "college" signified that it was less difficult than those courses designated as "university." Perhaps an all around less problematic term would be "academic writing?"

**They also had trouble providing an kind of useful information (in the sense of information that provides any insight into the student's character or motivations) with the question "What is, or what do you expect will be, your major and why are you interested in this field?" Though every student in my class has a declared major, only one could offer any sort of explanation for their interest in their chosen field. I'm not sure I could have articulated any kind of fluid or coherent narrative about my interest in English when I started my undergrad, but I think I could have done better than what my students offered.

***In deliberately crafting their responses to appeal to this communal uniqueness, perhaps the students engage in literary craftsmanship (as Barthes describes it here):

"if not the reconciliation of the writer to a universal condition, at least the conferment upon him of the responsibility for his form, the transmutation of the writing handed down to him by History into an art; in other words, into an obvious convention, a sincere pact which would enable man to adopt a position he was familiar with in a nature still made of ill-matched realities. The writer then gives to society a self-confessed art, whose rules are visible to all, and in exchange society is able to accept the writer."

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

. . . And that's the first and last reference to Eliot on this blog, I promise (if anyone finds another one, don't tell me. It'll crush me). Aren't you glad this means I won't ever make some horrible joke about April being the cruelest month?

It's been a rainy day here, though it hasn't ever really stormed hard enough to cause anyone to head for the hills or anything. Mostly, it's been drizzling on and off throughout the day. The weather and the light (it's been fairly bright in a gloomy sort of way) coupled with the giant tree outside the window I face as I work at my desk reminds me of Oregon (though it's the wrong kind of tree). Given that I've spent most of the day looking back through old assignments, lesson plans, and readings (I'm teaching some stuff this coming semester I haven't even read since the summer before I started teaching at OSU--I'd better brush up. . .), that's kind of appropriate. I've just about finished my syllabus and I've started reworking all my assignment sheets so that I can get into the office tomorrow and get all my photocopying done before the rush. It's hard to believe, but the semester starts one week from today (actually, it'll start one week from 8:00 this morning). On the one hand, I'll agree with everyone I've spoken to that this summer has flown by. On the other hand, last week and this coming week seem to be edging along so slowly. I'll be glad to get into a routine when classes start.

This coming semester will mark the start of my third year of teaching. I remember reading somewhere (an interview with someone? I honestly can't remember) that after three years the amount of learning that you do as a teacher tends to drop off dramatically (in the sense that more and more student responses to your teaching--what they like, what they don't like, what could be improved, what needs to change, what should stay the same, etc., etc.--tend to be repeats) and the general style of your teaching is fairly solidified by the end of that third year. It would be nice to think that this were the case (you mean after this year I'll stop feeling completely and hopelessly underprepared at all times and will start feeling like I know what I'm doing?), but I'm not convinced. In fact, I don't want to be convinced. I'd like to hope that I (and my students) don't have to settle into a rut from here on out to eternity (I guess it will change slightly when [if?] I start teaching courses that aren't freshman comp before reverting to monotony), mostly because I'm not convinced I'm a very good teacher yet, and I would really like to get a lot better before any rut-settling takes place.

I'll be teaching at eight in the morning this coming semester on MWF, and that means I'll be my students' first exposure to university. I'm kind of blown away by that idea: our class next Monday will literally be their first ever class in university. In some ways, I feel a lot of pressure to step up my teaching game in response to this fact. I've been going over and over what I want to say on the first day. I want to make sure that--in the words of (probably) my favourite piece of pedagogy I've ever read, Peter Elbow's "Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process"*--"the students [I] certify really understand or can do what [I] teach, to see that the grades and credits and degrees [I] give really have the meaning or currency they are supposed to have," but I wonder if I shouldn't spend just a little extra time and energy on the other side of the process, the contrary to that "guardian" stance: "to be [my students'] all[y] . . . as [I] instruct and share: to invite all students to enter in and join [me] as members of a learning community--even if they have difficulty. . . . to assume they are all capable of learning, to see things through their eyes, to help bring out their best rather than their worst when it comes to tests and grades." I don't think I've necessarily shirked this aspect in the past--or, at least, not intentionally--but I'd like to spend a whole lot more time this semester in that ally role, rather than that guardian role. I'd like to think that I'm confident enough as a teacher now that I don't need to be a hardass to prove a point or anything like that.

And (as I suddenly see sunshine outside my window), at the very least, I think I'll be more fun than Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle of Higher Education today: while I'm sympathetic to his claim that teaching the "classics" (but "whose classics?" is of course the inevitable question here--based on his list, pre-WWII and almost exclusively white. He might be shocked to learn that of the names he's listed, DuBois is the only one who holds any real appeal for me) is important regardless of their relevance, I can't agree with his suggestion that we shouldn't teach the "materials of mass culture" because they are "vulgar, transient, and thin" and "aren't worth the labor." I understand his point that the classics can be useful in helping to develop our students' critical thinking skills (a term I absolutely hate. I'm with Rob Jenkins: what you mean when you say critical thinking is, in fact, thinking), I mean, I teach "A Modest Proposal" and "Letter From Birmingham Jail" and all those kinds of things, and I also teach all the "nu-classics" of the modern composition classroom he decries: beer ads, music videos, television and movie clips, song lyrics. Hell, last year I taught part of Kanye West's Twitter stream. What drives me crazy is the opinion, one that the author of that article very clearly holds, that the two are mutually exclusive in terms of fostering critical approaches to texts and contemporary culture. That only through teaching "past high culture" can teachers "raise [their students'] critical thinking about contemporary mass culture."

There is an absolute wealth of great contemporary mass culture that trains its viewers/readers/listeners/participants to think critically about that mass culture. There's definite value in having students work their way through a difficult text in order to come to an awareness of a method of cultural critique (or simply to explore another viewpoint), but there's nothing that says "easy" texts like television shows can't do an equally effective job (other than that author's opinion that they can't because they're not as "rich" or "worthwhile" or "lasting" or whatever terms he wants to contrast with "thin, vulgar, and transient"). In fact, he stakes his claim around this idea of teaching classics regardless of their "relevance," but I think it's actually something of a red herring: I don't teach the materials of contemporary mass culture because I think they're so much more relevant than the classics, I teach them because I honestly think they're more effective at helping students to learn and develop certain skills.

He goes on to suggest (in shockingly violent language that casts critical reading/viewing/listening skills and cultural literacy as analogous to a physical confrontation) that these mass culture materials are not effective because: "A few days with images taken from great photography and film will equip them to 'read' music videos much more effectively than will a few days with those videos themselves" and "The language of Romantic poetry exercises critical thinking about language better than does the language of billboard jingles." While both of the "high culture" elements he mentions here have value (and it's fun to expose students to those things, particularly if they've never had access [or even known they could have access] to those things before), he does nothing to actually establish that those claims are true, he simply holds it to be so. Indeed, he's as negative towards contemporary mass culture as Adorno at his worst, an elitist who does nothing to hide his elitism and is deaf to any other viewpoints because, bottom line, he holds contemporary mass culture to be incapable of producing anything that could be challenging, that could disrupt students' "saturation with media." While that's certainly true for aspects of contemporary mass culture, it's by no means true of it all (to offer an easy example [this is, like, low-hanging fruit here]: Arrested Development and the idea of intertextuality--I have seen in the past few months no fewer than four separate references to AD as the standard for an illustration of that concept; to offer another: The Daily Show/Colbert Report and their increasingly naked pedagogical/didactic approach to the consumption of media).

Students are saturated with the present and their own cultural moment, I'll agree with that, but that's no reason to turn away from teaching that material in favour of texts that one loudly and triumphantly proclaims to hold no relevance (is there anything that will drive students away from those classics faster?). Connect the two, the classic and the material of contemporary mass culture, and watch the lovely things that happen.

[EDIT: A former professor might have had the best response to the article: "Wow--who knew Matthew Arnold wrote for The Chronicle?"]

Anyway, enough of that for now. I'm betting chances are good that if you're reading this blog, you're probably fairly sympathetic to the quality and worthiness of contemporary mass culture. Speaking of which, one more worthy example of it before I go: in keeping with my Mogwai appreciation from last night, I thought I'd offer up this live version of "2 Rights Make 1 Wrong." I'd long heard about what a transcendent live act Mogwai are, but I mostly assumed it had to do with sheer volume and their approach to their louder songs. This version of "2 Rights," though, from their live album Special Moves, is as heart-stoppingly beautiful as the album version. I can only imagine what it's like to experience it in person.


*No link for you on that one, unfortunately. It's on JSTOR if you have access, in College English 45.4 (1983): 327-39. I should say, also, that I haven't read all that much pedagogy, if my choice of favourite insults your sensibilities.

BORGES' PHANTOM CLASSROOM

I volunteered for an event being held on campus today and, as I had been warned it might be quite dull, I took a book with me, Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. I find reading Borges to be a lot like working out after a period of not doing so: it takes time to limber up and for the first few pages or stories, like the first few minutes of a run, I struggle to find the rhythm that I'm used to. After awhile, though, I'm able to find my rhythm and start moving pretty solidly through the pages (usually just in time for Borges to turn my mind inside out). After the usual period of struggle today, I found myself enjoying the bizarre worlds Borges conjures up seemingly out of the leftover scraps of other stories. I spent most of the day reading through the book, when I wasn't directing high school and elementary school students to the classroom they needed to find.

One passage in “The Circular Ruins” made me sit up and take notice, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since. During the lunch break, I'd sat with a friend and some visiting high school teachers as we ate the pretty terrible pizza that was on offer. The high school teachers asked us about our own teaching and wondered if we might be able to recommend some books, stories, or poems that we wish all high school students had read before they entered out class and to suggest the most important writing skills students could bring with them to university. Needless to say, this was a fun discussion. What made it so pleasant was that the high school teachers treated my friend and I like real teachers. We were not just grad students teaching the classes that tenured faculty couldn't be bothered with, nor were we some kind of bumbling apprentice who would someday figure this teaching thing out. The high school teachers we sat with regarded my friend and I as peers and colleagues, people who could share knowledge about the business of teaching and who had expertise to impart w/r/t to the classroom and the curriculum. After returning to my post and picking up Borges, I came across a description of teaching that damn near nails what I think is so magical about the encounters you can have in the classroom:

The stranger dreamt that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater which in some way was the burned temple: clouds of silent students filled the gradins, the faces of the last ones hung many centuries away and at a cosmic height, but were entirely clear and precise. The man was lecturing to them on anatomy, cosmography, magic; the countenances listened with eagerness and strove to respond with understanding, as if they divined the importance of the examination which would redeem one of them from his state of vain appearance and interpolate him into the world of reality. The man, both in dreams and awake, considered his phantoms' replies, was not deceived by impostors, divined a growing intelligence in certain perplexities. He sought a soul which would merit participation in the universe.

Cosmography and magic (and any number of other subjects) are all part of what comes out of a literature class at its best, I think. I know there are classes that I've taken where I've come home so charged with ideas, so full of newness, so disturbed, that it's been impossible to stop thinking and has taken me hours to settle down enough to do any work or to go to sleep. In the proper setting, new worlds are birthed, new horizons of understanding glimpsed, new perspectives found, new arguments raised, and new questions asked. This event is one of the reasons I find teaching freshmen to be exhilarating: that moment when suddenly nothing is the same for them anymore, when they've come further than they ever have before and cannot help but think new thoughts and entertain new opinions. It doesn't happen with every student, unfortunately, but I see it happen with enough of them to keep me engaged and interested. I want to help them find those souls that merit participation in a universe that is more difficult to live in than the one they live in now because I think life in that universe is richer than the one they live in now and they deserve to live in a richer universe (provided they work to get there).

At the same time, though, I understand why many of them get frustrated and choose not to head for this new universe. Everything is more complex there: no one will make their decisions for them anymore, no one will tell them how to think or what opinion to hold. Even the things they thought they knew how to do become defamiliarized. Reading can make things more confusing; writing can lead to mazes of uncertainties and doubts. Of course, there are positives to go along with this: reading can open whole new areas of existence and writing can offer the thrill of working right at the very limit of one's knowledge. I know it's those two sensations I'm always looking for and trying to introduce my students to. I love that sense that every word I put down is a step into darkness, into a place I've never been and that I'm creating as I write, or that every page I turn somehow makes the world, brighter, louder, more vibrant, more complex, more ambiguous, and more mysterious.

I felt something was missing from my teaching over the last half of this past semester. Somehow, I tried too hard or pushed in the wrong directions or something, but the experience was less “cosmic” and more tedious, I think. The promise of the circular amphitheater in which the stranger lectures was just not there. Borges' character ultimately abandons his dream of the classroom. However, I'm not ready to abandon the parts of his dream that I share just yet. He considers it a failure, a hallucination that will fail to bring about a new soul he can bring into existence. I don't know that I disagree entirely; I do think, though, that it helps to create the dreams that can do it, if nothing else. It's been nice this past month to have a break from teaching, but I'm starting to get excited again for fall and to return to the classroom. I'll be teaching at 8:00 am on MWF, so I will be the first teacher my students have in their university careers. This is the first time I've had this opportunity, and I can't wait. Maybe I'll read them that Borges passage on the first day and tell them how much we have to look forward to together.