January 2007 Archives

Again from The Nation

In the 1950s, only 12 percent of teenagers between 12 and 14 agreed with the statement, "I am an important person." By the late 1980s, the number had reached an astounding 80 percent, an upward trajectory that shows no sign of reversing. Preliminary findings from a joint study conducted by Jean Twenge, Keith Campbell and three other researchers revealed that an average college student in 2006 scored higher than 65 percent of the students in 1987 on the standard Narcissism Personality Inventory test, which includes statements such as "I am a special person," "I find it easy to manipulate people" and "If I were on the Titanic, I would deserve to be on the first lifeboat." In her recent book Generation Me, Twenge applies that overarching label to everyone born between 1970 and 2000.

According to Twenge and her colleagues, the spike in narcissism is linked to an overall increase in individualism, which has been fostered by a number of factors, including greater geographical mobility, breakdown of traditional communities and, more important, "the self-focus that blossomed in the 1970s [and] became mundane and commonplace over the next two decades." In schools, at home and in popular culture, children over the past thirty-odd years have been inculcated with the same set of messages: You're special; love yourself; follow your dreams; you can be anything you want to be.

So are these the students I now teach?

I was putting some books of a bookshelf that sticks out in a little corridor and upon which I have stubbed my toe frequently, and I reach out and for no apparent reason pull a couple of books from the shelf.  One turned out to be: After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning.  I don’t remember the name of the other book.  But I opened After-Education and looking here and there read passages like the following:

Patient and analyst are faced with the problem of passing (from the wish to 'know thyself accept thyself, be thyself' to becoming the reality such words suggest. There is a gap between knowing about x and being x" (213). And in some sense education as a method should not and indeed cannot fill that gap. The field of education takes a different view: there shall be a meeting of theory and practice, and it shall be experienced as one learns to teach and as one teaches others. From an analytic vantage, the very conflict that inaugurates knowledge—that is, the difference of theory and practice--is foreclosed in the idealized cou­pling of theory and practice and the wish for a practice without conflict.

I wish more people thought about education in these sorts of ways.  Some very few do of course.  But I don’t run across them every day, and this sort of view of education would appear about the furthest thing imginable from the average college professors views on education, if he or she has in fact bothered to articulate any.

Because they have not bothered to articulate a view and because, in their devotion to a certain limited conception of reason, trying to convince the average professor that deeper things are going on in the classroom is nearly impossible.  I don’t even know where to start, and frankly I do wish these things could be written about with greater clarity than I find in the above passage.  Additionally, the author does not appear to be talking about education more generally but about the training and education that goes along with psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis is murky stuff.  Still I can’t quite grasp the connection between “education as a method should not and indeed cannot fill that gap” and “field of education takes a different view: there shall be a meeting of theory and practice, and it shall be experienced as one learns to teach and as one teaches others.”  I understand the first part as saying that education (as a method?) shouldn’t fill the gap.  The student should; he or she must fill it.  But I don’t see how one fills it with a “method.”  And how is education as a method different from “education as a field that takes a different view: “there shall be a meeting of theory and practice.”

Still I find this a bit helpful.  Lately I have experience my own educational efforts as hopeless; another way to put it might be: filled with conflict.  Perhaps I yearn for that “idealized” coupling of theory and practice.

A short article in Nation supports other reading I have been doing.

More and more evidence suggests that the eventual income level of a child is directly tied to the income level of the parents, and more and more this income level is determined by the ability of the child to get a college education.

Class mobility has declined significantly in the last 10 to 15 years.  Personally, I don't think social mobility ever went up in any significant degree from the 70s to the 80s. Experts would disagree with me.  But a lot of the people who did go to college in the 70s and 80s went to community colleges.  A good and democractic idea, with something like an 80% drop out rate.

It seems to me clear as I have contended and been ignored for contending college is a middle class indoctrination and boot camp.  And it's overall goal has nothing to do with what I call education but with the acquiring of units towards the acquistion of a certification for a degree to do a job any monkey, with or without a degree, could do.

Higher education as currently practiced serves only social, political and ecomomic needs and not educational ones at all.

This helps me to understand my students a bit.

They have never not thought about going to college.  They have always known they would go and always been told they would go.  And they go not, as kids once said, to be well rounded, but to get a job, and this attitude in turn has utterly warped any sort of educational agenda higher education might at one time have had.

Indulging my obsession with war movies, I rented Captain Conan, a French film set in WWI and developing, as it went along, a pretty good sense of the moral ambiguities of war.

 Our “hero,” if he may be called that, Captain Conan, is from the petit bourgeois; he is aware of class but finds himself friends with an upper crust aristocrat type who teaches literature at the lycee.  At one point Conan asks his friend, if he is a pain in the butt as a teacher or if he is trying to understand.  The teacher says, understand what?  And Conan says, “The students.”  Yes, the teacher says, that’s what I am trying to do.  I am trying to understand the students.

 Funny to find an aspect of my theory of teaching in a French film about WWI.  But really that’s what it is about: trying to understand the student.  That might seem odd; shouldn’t one be teaching what one knows, literature or whatever.  No.  Education if it takes place at all arises from the attempt of the teacher to understand the students and through that to establish a relationship of understanding between his or her self and the students.

Right now when it comes to understanding my students, I have hit a wall.  I have no intuitive or unspoken sense of who they are anymore, why they are here, what they want, what might be important to them, or what they might see in their futures if anything.  It’s a pretty awful feeling actually.  Perhaps, I have simply gotten too old and can no longer find ranges of reference that might allow me to see my experience in their experience or their experience in my experience.

Or perhaps are values are just too vastly different.

I should never look at emails before going to bed.  Mostly I don't.  But last night--on top of the colon concern--I opened one from a student to find:

hey there i just want to inform you about what is goin on with me  right now. well my mom is very sick and they say she only has few more  days to live so im goin home for the weekend so spend time with her.  there is a chance i might not end up makin it back on tuesday so i was  going to see if there is anything i could do to make that up.

Well...sweet Jesus...what am I to say to that.  What again is the protocol.  God damn!  Your mother is dying and you are worried about my class!  Prioritize! Damn it. Or do you just want somebody to know and to say, I understand. 

I can't say much for my teaching Thursday being somewhat distracted by having received a call saying blood had been detected in my stool and I need to get one of those intense anal probes.  I don't know the protocol here.  What should I have done.  Needlesstosay, as they say, I was intensely distracted by the idea that I have bloody stool and the possibility of colon cancer.  Should I have mentioned that fact to my students as an explanation for my clearly tired and distracted state, as I discussed with them the film of the day detailing the development of the concept of race as a rationalization of a clear power imbalance. 

I just couldn't say anything about it.  Though I had in the earlier class as a way of asking them to reflect on the role of emotion to perform a micro analysis of their feelings from the moment they got out of bed till they got out the door--anyway they said they hadn't felt anything.  So I asked why they got up...what had motivated...I would have been happy with "habit."  But not even that was forthcoming  So I said, what about taking a dump.  I went on to say that I considered my daily dump one of the high points of my day and then went on to ask them if they paused after dumping to reflect or should I say examine their feces for a moment.

Oh, bitter irony!  To have been so laughingly engage in my bowels in the morning and by the afternoon fearing them as source of possible cancer and no laughing matter, at all fecally speaking.
 

In any case, I called the W2 class off after about an hour and 15.  I just couldn't go on sitting there thinking about my bowels and wanting to get home to see if I could contact the doctor's assistant to find out more about the condition of my condition. 

I had to go to a damn meeting this morning and when people asked how I was doing I told them I was feeling fucking shitty because blood had been detected in my stool and I was going to have to go into the doctor for one of those intense anal probes.  Talk about a conversation stopper!  But I would hope by now that people would know that when they ask me how I am I usually tell the truth and so they ask at their own risk. 

Well, that's not exactly true.  I don't usually tell the truth; given that usually the truth is crappy, telling it gets to be pretty tiring.  But I do tell the truth quite frequently if not usually.

Back from Soc 1 lecture: film on social construction of race.

Reviewed blog entries for Writing 1 on How Are You Feeling and On the Readings.

Wrote up some comments online for assigment 1 in W1 as follows:

Assignment 1

Some reflections on Assignment 1. I just finished reading over your blog entries in response to the readings on emotional intelligence and I think some of you may already have a good start on a paper. You would need to expand of course. One way to do this would be to point to the articles a bit more. Quote. And then be sure to respond to the quote. Tell the reader what you see in it. Don't assume the other readers see the same thing that you do.

Also when you quote somebody, you sound as if you are the authority. "So and so says." That sounds powerful already, as if you really know what so and so says. Also when you write so and so says you separate yourself from so and so (since you are the one quoting so and so) and that avoids the problem of your paper coming out sounding as if you are just repeating what you have read without your being aware that's what you are doing.

If you don't quote, sometimes you come out sound like the ventriloquist's dummy. You are the dummy and the thing you read is talking through you.

So that's one way to expand...look at the readings a bit more.

Another way to expand: use examples. People are already doing this in the blogs. You are using yourself as examples or maybe somebody that you know. Somebody wrote about "clueless Harriet," the very school smart young woman, who lacked common sense. This entry might have been expanded by giving some examples of what it means to say Harriet is clueless or lacking in common sense.

As these remarks indicate, I would like you to quote at least once from part of the readings and to cite at least a couple of times. As I said academic writing is usually writing about other writing. So you will need to quote and cite and learn how to do that a little bit.

Remember, please, this paper is not a test of the reading. I do not want you to repeat material to show that you have read it or just to fill up the pages. I want you to pick the parts of the reading of most interest to you and to what you want to say and to "use" those readings to make your point.

You could write on a specific point or something more abstract. The readings for this first unit all deal with a kind of intellectual problem having to do with the role of emotion in psychological and social life. By picking these readings, I am making the argument that the emotions are too frequently ignored in our understanding of social and cultural activity. Descartes said, Cogito Ergo Sum (I think therefore I am), but I say and more and more people seem to be saying, Descartes was wrong. "I feel therefore I am." would be a better assertion.

Intimately related to this issue of the emotions is another. I am making the argument that there is no mind separate from brain. The emotions seemed to have evolved earlier than reason (that we usually associate with the mind), but the emotions are more primitive and more clearly related to the body. We feel emotions in our bodies in one way or another. Thus the brain and the body are intimately interwoven (and indeed are one) if we place emotions at the center of our understanding of the brain.

That's why I am having you read the spooky little story of poor Phineas Gage. This story and the analysis of it clearly demonstrate critical links between brain and body and personality. 

This quarter I teach Tuesday and Thursday.  I get to the Soc Lecture at 930 and I am on campus till five. 

Monday I get ready to teach on Tuesday and Wednesday I get ready to teach on Thursday.  On the weekends, I grade papers or start looking ahead in the syllabus.

About midquarter of any quarter, I start planning the next quarter.

This quarter I am on the committee looking at people applying for work in the Writing Program.  WE have about 40 people applying this year.  At one time we usually got over 200, no more.  It shrinks every year.

I hate going through those applications. I get a headache and start feeling heavy all over after about an hour of doing it.  I have to pace myself.  I went in this last weekend and spent a couple hours at it.

I spent too much time making up an attendance sheet that had a picture of each student on it for my W1.  I can't remember students' names anymore so last quarter I started taking pictures of students with my little digital and then making up an attendance sheet with a picture beside the name so maybe I would start remembering.  I guess it helped a little; but I still haven't figure out a fast way to get the pics from my digital and then size them and then put them on the attendance sheet without having to do way too much copy and paste.

So that was a pain.

Wrote up blog entries, posted them to all students via ulists and then made sure there were links to the blog on the calendars for W1 and W2. 

Also, this quarter or is it next--no I think it's this quarter--I will have to interview TAs; and I have to prepare two reports on colleagues whose employment will be reviewed this year.

Winter quarter has way too much of this stuff.

What is the difference between a teacher and a bureaucrat.  I am, at the moment, hard pressed to say. 

First 15 minutes: had them make up questions based on today's sociology lecture.  A little review.  They then stood and ask a question, and the person who answered the question asked the next.  They had pretty good questions, though I don't know how many knew the answers to how many of them.

 Finally had the internet up and running, and went to NYTimes site on working class issues.

Called "Class matters."  Worked through the interactive graphic that figures out class station based on Occupation, Education, Income, and Wealth.  I used the stuff from my own life by way of example.  I am in the upper 20 percent in everything, even wealth because of my retirement and the condo.  This is crazy of course; I am hardly wealthy.  This makes me think the middle class may be in some trouble, as it surely is.

Then went to another interactive graphic relating eventual income to education level.  The point being that income level is of course directly related to education level, and whether or not one is able to acquire education depends on class standing of family of origins.

Used myself as an example.  Showed them my blog and picture of me in SC as a child in front of house with no indoor plumbing.  Yes, moving up is possible in the USA; the question is whether it is now more or less possible.

Break:

Discussed their blog quotations from the Manifesto.  They picked pretty good ones.  The classics--all that is solid and whereever the bourgeoiose has got the upper hand it had torn asunder the motely feudal....etc.  One student mentioned her roommate whose father called her at 11 at night to ask her if she was studying.  At 11 at night, and when she said she wasn't, he said she should be and that she should spend all of the following day in the library.

I said that was an invasion of the student's privacy.

Talked about staying alive longer and the stresses and strains that puts on the family bonds, a stress and strain of money.

About how far food has to travel on average to get to your mouth.

About the creation of new appetiites using the mango as my example.

Are children now a days emotional investments.

Told them California should become its own country and that I was going to run for President of California with just two points in my platform:  Legalize all drugs and prostitution.  I would estalish real DRUG stores.  Then we would annex Oregon and join up with Mexico to produce the most powerful nation in the world.  

Concluded by asking that the start their papers with a blog entry on class and their relation to it.  They are confused by this or just aren't paying any attention yet. 

I believe the teachings of sociology are very hard teachings, hard lessons about limitations and how one is limited or defined at birth in fundamental ways.

I would anticipate that these lessons will produce resistance conscious and or unconsciousness to these lessons.  They teach contingency. 

This resistance may produce at an extreme a complete disengagement from the materials. Boredom.

I heard a student say after lecture today, this stuff is of absolutely on interest to me....absolutely of no interest: the world as city, the world as ghetto....    

First 45 minutes spent interrogating the readings

15 minutes plus looking at blog entries: how I feel

break

further discussion of blog entries

20 minutes:  start your rough draft for paper 1...

As they wrote: I typed out my version to see what ideas I might come up with as follows:

(later possibly)

They had read two short chapters from Goldman's Emotional Intelligence, popular a few years back.  My attempt to push students in a more "subjective" direction and to deal with in a round about way the ideology of enlightment individualism, automony and reason, so prevalent (still) at the universty.

Discussed the blog about drinking too much.  I asked why the student, as he wrote, felt sad after...he was not quite able to say.  Why not angry I asked; he was stumped.  Also discussed at length entry dealing with the death of a student on the soccer team and his girl friend, both killed in auto crash about Jan. 6.  One of the students had attended the funeral, a buhhdist one and had been offended by all the picture taking.  I suggest possible cultural conflict; need to look that up.  Student said he was ok with the grief, all over it; he and buddies had drunk 40's as a good bye toast.  Drinking forties means duck taping a forty ounce beer, I guess, to each hand and then you can't untape (to take a piss for example) uptil you have drunk it all up.  They did it partly because they had a fun memory of their dead colleague drinking 40s and barfing right into one of the 40 ounce cans.  I don't know if he had to drink that or not.

Drinking is part of the college experience;  I accept that. Part of a coming of age ritual, but I don't remember the whole thing being quite so ritualized...with all these drinking games.  We just drank and passed out.  And later we just smoked grass and drank a little wine to soothe the back of the throat.

They are going to put the start of their rough drafts up on the blog.  We will see what they come up with. 

Just back from sociology 2 lecture with which my writing 2 is linked.  I will go to lectures as long as I can stand it to get a feel for the class and what is being asked of students in my writing section.

Urbanization
Suburbanization
Re-Development
Gentrification
Gobal Cities: NY, London, .... over thirty cities world wide with over 8 million people by 2015.

Global City/Global ghetto 

Discussed history of Filmore District, Western Addition

Young black instructor mentioned Great Migration, referring only to blacks, and failing to mention also the huge number of poor whites that moved out of the South around WW2.  One of my favorite topics.

See my blog for January 2007.

Tried to explain W2 paper 1 assignment in more detail as follows:

Assignment 1

C.Wright Mills argues that "ordinary" people frequently do not and cannot see beyond their immediate milieu and for this reason, when that milieu is subject to change, cannot grasp the larger social and historical forces that condition and control their particular milieu, their personal and private world of joys and troubles. The value of the sociological imagination for Mills lies in its power to establish connection between the personal and private milieu and larger social historical and social forces. Just knowing these connections does not necessarily allow one to change one's immediate situation or the social forces that control it, but it does allow one better to understand, to feel less out of control, or trapped and may point to avenues of action that lead to change either personally or in the larger social sphere.

I am having you write on the issue of class for your first paper as a way of beginning to cultivate the socially imagination. You could think of your first paper as working to establish and how connections between your "biography" and "history" or between your immediate milieu and and the larger social forces that condition it.

In order to grasp the connection between the immediate and the more distant, Mills argues one must step back a little or detach one's self from the immediate. For example, I saw an advertisement on TV directed at parents and encouraging them to send their children to pre-school. It start by showing a student in college who felt he had been prepared to go to college by having had a good high school education; and then it showed a high school student who felt he had been prepared for high school by a good elementary school education, and then it showed an elementary school student who felt prepared to go elementary school by having gone--the punchline-- to Pre-school.

Regarded from the perspective of the immediate milieu, this advertisement effectively suggests to parents the critical importance of sending their children to pre-school so that they might one day succeed in life. If however we step back from the immediate and look at the ad. sociologically, we may see the ad as a bit of evidence suggesting the growing importance of a college education for worldly and secular success. And if this is in fact the case, we may ask can every person afford to send his or her child to pre-school, and if not what happens to the children unable to go to pre-school. Does this mean they are doomed to failure. Or we may ask, whatever happened to childhood. This ad suggests there is no childhood really, only stages of preparation for adulthood.

Regarded in this way the ad ceases to be an "accurate" assertion of the need for pre-school, but itself a social construct, itself representative of a social order that places a premium on the kind of education that leads to worldly or secular success (disregarding thereby spiritual development and personal growth), and that places education at the very center of any possibility for success. This has not always been the case, nor will it always be the case.

The idea of "class," may function then as an analytic tool or a way of making a connection between your immediate milieu and your larger social and historical situation. Looking at the your situation, as for example, an expression of class realities may help you better to understand the social and historical forces that shape your correct situation and the stresses and strains you may feel in that situation.

 For W1 I asked studetnts to blog how they felt at the time of writing.  Among others received:

Let’s just say I have had better weekends in my life. It was certainly not the worst but it took a lot out of me. I don’t consider myself an emotional person unless pushed to the breaking point. This weekend was a breaking point. My group of friends and I know how to have a good time and usually do every Friday and Saturday night. Mostly we play it safe and watch out for each other so that nothing bad happens. Before now we have had no real problems; this weekend however made us all learn a hard lesson. It started out like every other Saturday night pre-gaming and dancing in my friend’s room but it quickly turned for the worst. We left FT and started walking to a party on sabado, by the time we got there one of our friends was too drunk to respond to us and we were forced to take them to the emergency room. I was scary to see someone you care about in that situation. Everything is ok now, everyone is safe and healthy but that night gave me a big scare. I made me realize how out of control I really was in a situation I thought we all had control of. There were no tears or anything from me but it was hard to sit there and not know what was going on and see other friends break down completely. Being put in this situation defiantly made me open up and show how scared, worried and stressed I really was. In most sad or scary situations I usually have a strong hold on my emotions but this night I was unable to conceal my true feelings. In funny or happy situations I let down my guard completely and can have a good time; but for some reason when I have to deal with sadness it is much harder to let that emotion come out. I have to say most times I am not fully in touch with my emotions unless they are forced out of me, which I know is not a good thing but I don’t like to deal with anything sad and most times I feel if I can just keep my cool instead of letting out a depressing emotion things will end better. This weekend I was fully engulfed by my emotions and could not push them aside but usually I am more detached from emotions of sadness or stress. Overall, this weekend brought out the emotions that are usually dormant in hard situations, so at this current time I am very emotionally aware to the world around me.

I have wanted and continuously failed over the years to keep track in a day to day sort of way for a single quarter of teaching.  I start and then I poop out or forget to do it or say why bother.  I feel that happening right now...

I don't find the teaching of writing very instructive, or informative, or inspiring, or heart warming, or productive, or much of anything for that matter but a job.  One I have been doing for over 30 years.  Maybe that's the problem.  Over thirty years.

Somewhere along the line I could have used a break.  But there are no breaks for non-tenued teachers of writing.  None of those sabbiticals those professorial types get.  See, there I go again. Just thinking about my job irks the hell out of me.  I have the summers off of course; most people in the real world don't have whole summers off.  But of course I always teach summer school, so I shouldn't say I am off during the summer.  I am not off.

I could be off.  But I can always use the money.  Not that I am broke or anything or on the way to the poor house.  But there's always some use for it.  I make it and it gets used up some way or the other.

Righjt now I wonder if I have enough stuff to do for tomorrow's class.  I gave them some readings to do for both classes.  Of course, I have enough to do if they will read the material.  But most of them won't read the material and it's a bit hard to have a discussion or to make instructive points when they have not read the material. 

Right away I feel this little side blog is going to be a bust.  If all I can come up with, if all I can feel growing bigger and bigger is frustration.