literature
Via Open Culture, a YouTube channel showcasing short animated films of US Poet Laureate and CUNY Faculty Member Billy Collins‘ poems. Gotta love YouTube. Here’s a taste:
While imbibing Lorna Hutson’s introduction to Ben Jonson’s collected plays, I was intrigued by this passage about the thematic and stylistic differences between Shakespeare and Jonson:
“In fact, Jonson has a complex sense of human psychology, but his interest as a dramatist lies more in the psychology of habitual behavior than behavior in the transitional moments of life crisis for which Shakespeare’s plays are often metaphors. He is also interested in the way that human desires, anxieties and creative energies are affected by the material conditions of their communication.”
Jonson’s interest in these material conditions birthed some good stuff, like Epicoene, a play in which the character “Morose” develops a nervous reaction to the noise and congestion of London; he double-lines his walls, insulates his windows, seeks a silent wife, and even plans a silent wedding. While reading Morose’s comic antics, I was reminded of a recent posting on the blog Burnt Out Adjunct, who writes about the ‘Research = Google’ phenomenon that’s pitting frustrated professors against usually-clueless students in universities across the country. (World?) Maybe it’s all in a name, but suddenly, the familiar plight of poor Burnt Out seemed to strangely echo the desperate shutting-out attempts of Morose.
“Contemporary students come to college with a different set of expectations than they did even ten years ago,” Burnt Out notes. “These students are not agog at the level and breadth of information available to them. Rather, they expect to be able to, within a few key strokes, to gain access to whatever information they seek.” Cut to cranky professors trying to hold their research high ground, sputtering “but…but…” while the well-meaning libraries scramble to catalog information in new and easier and more searchable ways that do everything but deliver e-journals to students with a side of fries and a coke.
Perhaps for many of us though—especially those of us still in the slow drip of a doctoral program—both sides of the battlefield make sense. Sure, we grew up with Atari and eventually graduated to SuperNintendo, but many of us went to school before there was a computer in every classroom, and attended undergrad right around the time that card catalogs were transforming into still-lifes in the hallowed halls of our libraries. We know what Burnt Out knows—that “the Net does not cast the skein that one might assume.” And so while I’ve plenty of times found myself “just checking” the exact date of which Dumas was which on Wikipedia, I’m still made uncomfortable by a student relying on it as one of their sources for a speech or paper. (And it’s very easy to somehow dump on Wikipedia first; wisegeek.com and answers.com seem to be just as popular these days, and there are of course plenty others.) If only it were as simple as the use of pure plagiarism sites like dreamessays.com, but those kinds of offenses are the most easily detected and argued against.
Earning his moniker, Burnt Out ends his posting on a negative note: “So, committees will form, grants will be given and studies will recommend that individual professors seek to imbue a research skill-set into their objectives. And without a standard (either a collective standard (MLA) or an organizational approach (ie Google)), the Natives and the Profs will continue to lament just how odd, lazy, out-of-touch, etc. the other is.” I’m not ready to feel quite so despairing—perhaps because I think that imbuing a research skill-set can go a long way, depending on its implementation— but also because I’m somewhat wary that a collective standard issued by MLA will really connect to the heart of the problem (especially given the reality of the student population found at so many large universities, which seems to prohibit a one-size-fits-all approach from the get-go). And also because I wonder what the point of frowning in the face of the coming tide will really accomplish.
It raises an interesting question, to be sure: what part of the problem is just plain ol’ insistence on things being as we were taught? And how can we embrace the challenge of defending why an article on Walt Disney from the Journal of Popular Culture is preferred (and required) over one from Wikipedia? How do we rise to the task of communicating these reasons to our students in innovative and effective ways, rather than just putting a big “X” through wisegeek.com in their Bibliography? After all, as much as Morose tries escaping the noise, he’s the one who ends up looking like an absurd old man and unsympathetic spoiler—easily polarizing characterizations that risk getting in the way of communication most of all.
One of the greatest plagues of the educational blogosphere is the whole idea of labeling generations of learners in these pre-fabricated categories of millennials, digital natives, immigrants, NetGens, or what have you. Now I have no more evidence that these terms are harmful, as the innumerable people who insist on using them have that they are remotely useful. That said, if you are in education and you spend a lion’s share of your time thinking about teaching, learning and scholarship, than what use would it be to frame a whole generation of people under a banner that simply reinforces the obvious: computers are ubiquitous in the wealthy, Western world for distributing information, and we have to wrestle with that if we are serious about education. That’s it in a nut shell, we can theorize the import of this cognitive process over that, and imagine how the brain is being “re-wired” as we frame the various populations out their as experimental subjects, or we can actually engage the process through the tools that are available.
I often find the educational theories to be less than compelling, and I tend to fall back on either one of two things: “literature” and movies (I put literature in quotes here because there is no real term for literature to describe a wide range of tastes as there is for film with a less loaded term like movies). Those things drive me, and while theory can be fun, it is often a way of helping me get excited about things I already love, like literature and movies. So, I have been pretty blown away by a blog I have been reading lately (more on that later), and it got me thinking about a lot of these issues, more specifically, it got me thinking about Jon Udell’s post “The once and future university.” I actually find myself coming back to this post regularly when thinking about these issues, particularly because it examines the space of a college education as a kind of unique experience “outside of the flow of normal time.” The other quote I remember from the post actually comes from Rick Perlstein’s NYT Magazine article “What’s the matter with college?” Following is the quote I am referring to:
You used to have to go to college to discover your first independent film, read your first forbidden book, find freaks like yourself who shared, say, a passion for Lenny Bruce. Now for even the most provincial students, the Internet, a radically more democratic and diverse culture …. take care of the problem.
The idea that rung true for me here is that college is traditionally understood as a space outside of the “flow of normal time” because it allows you to be a freak and makes possible the conditions for the discovery and sharing of mind-bending, off-the-wall, and generally cool stuff. That is one of the best and hopeful definitions of what college might be, yet it begs the question whether it is limited to the physical space of a campus as it once was? If this experience is premised on a connection between people, ideas, and culture that frame a series of personal relations around meanings and ideas, we are beginning to see other ways, in their infancy mind you, in which this connections can be re-imagined and re-mapped. Yet, what is essential is the ability to foster and sustain an open and tolerant marketplace for ideas that might encourage others to passionately dig into things alongside others who provide camaraderie, guidance, feedback, and enthusiasm. Moreover, a willing and intrepid interdisciplinary engagement with one’s culture in all its liberal art facets, which includes politics, sociology, economics, science, literature, film, philosophy, religion, art, drama, etc.
Yet, there is a fine line here to walk when talking about college, learning, and some kind of cultural rite of passage. I discovered this for myself while an undergraduate, for while I enjoyed taking a 20th century British literature survey course, I found it infuriating when my professor stood up in front of 300 people and suggested that reading T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” made us all somehow different, an act that would make the transition back into the world “you all left behind” difficult. Such a relationship to experiences and learning seemed, at least for me, to dangerously flirt with the idea of culture and passion as an intellectual rite of privilege, difference, and ultimately power. Once you walk down that road, where does it end? Does the fact I took a seminar on Joyce's Ulysses make me anything other than a masochist steeped in ironic modernist propaganda of art as salvation and artist as deity (a modern malady only cured by a Samuel Beckett sponsored rehab)? While I think literature and movies are great and all, I hate that they are often leveraged for some kind of invidious distinction, rather than a means to a transcendent (or just psychedelic) communion and commonality.
The passage by Perlstein captures this idea of passionate communion over ideas and unique cultural connections that arguably lie marginal to the canon, but this same energy is without question at the center of the greatest works in the Western Canon as well. James Agee nailed this in the introduction to his and Walker Evans’ masterpiece Let Us Now Praise famous Men when he insisted that what we so often praise and place on a pedestal in terms of art loses the impact it made when people first read, watched, or listened to it. The act of engaging in a work is an act of mental and bodily submission. He then calls for a re-reading of Shakespeare or a re-listening of Beethoven. If you want to re-acquaint yourself with these works and their revolutionary spirit you have to put Beethoven’s Seventh on the phonograph and “turn it up loud” and then “get down on the floor” and “jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking.”
You won’t hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music.
Without the book on hand, I quoted from here.
This is a book I have to return to because I think Agee’s notion of internalizing the work so that it doesn’t ever become and object of distinction to beat others with over the head is essential to an honest education. Rather, the moment provides an opening for rapture and revolution. For me, that is the idea of an education, a losing oneself within a thing and believing, if only for a time, and pushing it beyond a limit. How do we measure this? Does the fact that we have more information than ever at our fingertips change this? Are educational theories themselves always already poisoned by a systemic view of learning?
Probably, and that finally brings me to my small point. It isn’t only in the experience of putting your head to the loudspeaker that such moments occur, it’s in sharing the experience out and taking a risk on trying to relate, or even narrate, what you saw or heard or felt in your own imaginative way. And this is what I have been experiencing lately with Brad Efford’s Judges 5:17, a blogger who is consistently blowing my mind in some powerful ways. Now some might call him a netgener, or even a millennial, or a native, or some other offensive term that would only further distance the moment of communion that is ripe and ready. But all that nonsense is besides the point when you interact, spend time with, and forge a relationship beyond the meager boundaries of age, education, and degrees. A space that Perlstein hints at, and which exists as interstitial moments of sharing the freaky thoughts that thrill us, or the narratives that creatively dog us.
Brad Efford has been doing this with impressive regularity over the past months, and just this past week or two he has stepped it all up a notch. And while his blog intersects with classes and projects at UMW as needs be, it is the platform of a thinker who is sharing such experiences freely (by this time I have talked about him enough that I am bordering on just plain annoying, or maybe even cyber-stalking), but I find it important to my sense of this space as something more than a technologist. For an integral part of what we must be doing is pushing the boundaries of engaging, communicating and encouraging a networked approach to openly thinking and sharing ideas and interests. This is the crux of the changing role of instructional technologists, and we need to be focusing on this reality rather than the getting wholly sucked back into the technical tool talk. Why aren’t we forming communities around ideas and sharing out beyond the obligatory dead celebrity post or how we did, indeed, download Firefox 3 with 8 million other people. If the educational community honestly believes that these tools are revolutionary for the future of education (and folks recite this mantra all the time like its inevitable), then why do we blog so robotically? Where are the communal connections within the institutions? Where are the academic accretions into a stark and creativity raw community of peers who are thinking about an alternative form of expression? Why do we feel the need to report?
Reporting is not the experience that will transform this space, rather I think a fearless imagining will and Brad exemplifies this beautifully. Read his post on perspective and song which illustrates the point through an amazing examination of three versions of “O Death.” His sharing on the problem of music and concerts and his own way of dealing with it. Or his philosophical ruminations about the most hopeful and bizarrely amusing de-contextualized fragments of people the internet provides us with. Or yesterday’s post, a stunningly well written narrative that frames some fascinating questions age, authority, and power I have read in a while. In fact it is the unabated energy, faith, and willingness to share creatively in this last post that inspired me to think about all of this. And it is this kind of distributed possibility outside of any classroom, but very much germane to the classroom and the educational experience, that makes these spaces the one’s that interest me most these days
My strangely long, overly righteous, and problematic point is simply that “being there” in this space in terms of the latest tools or downloads is only part of what the experimentation is about. It overlaps at points, but the idea is to form meaningful relationships around a creative sense of sharing, a freezone of imagination that will push you to continue thinking and creating long after you return to the normal flow of your job. The communities surround us, I am proud part of several of them, and they are not limited to any one classroom, but have been known to emerge there on occasion. How do we move our communities out of the often limiting logic of educational theory and the latest tools in order to span the range of ideas that will demonstrate and exemplify the power of the distributed space for learning on a wide range of axes.
Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the first in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.
Golf can be a bit of a mystery to those who have never played. Mainly it probably appears (a) boring and (b) much easier than it really is. Writing can also look that way to the uninitiated, and in fact golf and writing have a lot in common.
Both are solitary, addictive pursuits of an ultimately unreachable perfection. How, you ask, is golf solitary, what with all the crowds and the playing partners and the caddies in the pro game, let alone the beer-imbibing camaraderie-filled version more common to hackers like me? First because, even when you’re betting (thanks to a handy little invention called the handicap system) you’re always pretty much competing against yourself. Second, golf is intensely mental in its requirements – you have to try to remain calm and make measured decisions in the face of literally infinite small disasters and somehow shake off the feelings of deep depression and self-abuse that can accompany them: golf looks so doable and yet it’s so insanely difficult – again, like good writing (watch Tiger Woods: his menacing rage after a poor swing is always transformed in the space of half a minute into what I can only call a fierce serenity of absolutely purposeful concentration as he prepares for the next shot)
. For comparison, think about those blues you get when you receive back your dissertation draft all marked to hell by your advisor — it’s really hard to stop moping and continue sometimes.
The mental pressure in golf results in large part from the fact that one spends drastically more time thinking about hitting shots than actually executing them (as writing takes so much longer than reading). A swing takes about a second; it can take you ten minutes to find your wayward shot in the bushes, as cac.ophony blogmaster Luke Waltzer can tell you. And what does one ponder while walking from tee to ball or lining up a putt? Where are my feet? Is my posture right? Am I standing too close or too far from the ball? Should I try under or over those trees? Is my grip too tight or too loose? Am I keeping my left arm straight? Am I keeping my head down? (Yes, simply watching the ball proves to be very, very difficult.) Full swing? Half swing? Wind direction? Topography of the green? Location of water? (It pulls putts toward it if it’s sizable.) These are just a few questions that go into every shot.
The key of course, like with writing, which has its own army of minutia to consider in each sentence, is, through practice and patience, to make as much of this as possible automatic. If you never spend time either writing or reading, each comma and each “its” vs. “it’s” decision can be a tiresome burden. If you never spend time either writing or reading, then it can be hard to even know where you went wrong – just like in golf, merely figuring out what to work on to improve can be an extraordinarily daunting propect all its own.
This Thursday the United States Open begins at the beautiful Torrey Pines Golf Course in California, where almost every hole offers up a vista of the Pacific framed by those craggy little west coast tress that look so picturesque against an evening sunset. So we will take the opportunity this week to talk about where golf meets communication/writing. I encourage everyone to tune in to watch a bit of the action and then (consistent with public safety) to grab a club and try to hit a ball where you’re aiming – beware: it’s as easy to get hooked as it is to slice. (Also, everyone interested in pinnacles of human achievement should consider taking time just to witness Tiger – in golf he’s Bird or Jordan, he’s Gretsky, he’s Ted Williams or Dimagio, he’s Faulkner or Dickinson, he’s Rembrandt; he’s someone your grandkids will have heard about.)
Fore!
Nothing has brought pedagogical theory into greater disrepute than the belief that it is identified with handing out to teachers recipes and models to be followed in teaching .
- John Dewey, Democracy and Education
I’ve written about this before, but the concept of engaging students in conversations and engaging, as an educator, in conversational assessment, is something that I continue to investigate.
Of course, it is not easy to have meaningful and authentic conversations with students about a literary text that they’re reading. First of all, they know very well that I’m an expert - even if I don’t see myself as one. Therefore, they are absolutely convinced that they cannot contribute anything to the discussion that I don’t already know. No matter how much I try to show them that there are still many aspects of a given topic that I am not very familiar with, students persist in their belief that teachers are experts.
So, I often try to start conversations and create activities that are just as challenging for me as they are for them. This calls for quite a bit of creativity and forces me to abandon tried and tested lesson plans.
Last month, I decided to help my students engage with Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl as more than just a literary text. I wanted them to look at it as an experience, as life written down by someone their own age. They find it difficult not to treat the diary as just another "big book" that they study at school. I wanted them to think about Anne as a person and her diary as a personal record. I wanted them to have an opportunity to engage with the text and think about what Anne’s words and experiences meant to them. I wanted to create an avenue for a personal connection - not an easy task in a classroom setting where every text we study is likely to be perceived as a literary text first and a personal experience second. At the same time, I also wanted to engage myself as a participant. I wanted to model the kind of personal engagement I wanted my students to experience.
It occurred to me that one way of doing this would be to create a soundtrack for the diary. So, I spent some time browsing through the SeeqPod and SkreemR archives on the mixwit page . The next day, I walked into our classroom and explained to my students how I got the idea:
I always listen to music when I read. Last night I was listening to Mozart and re-reading parts of the diary for our discussion today. Suddenly, I realized that the piece I was listening to suited the passage I was reading perfectly. It felt almost like the best soundtrack for that specific passage. So, I decided to make a list of songs and classical pieces that, in my opinion, would work well as a soundtrack for Anne’s diary.
And then I showed them the soundtrack I had made and we listened to a couple of tracks. I saved my soundtrack using mixwit’s highly visual interface and then embedded it in my blog in the grade eight blogosphere:
(Click here if the above widget does not work)
(Click Then, I continued:
I want you to know that this took a long time and I found it very difficult to choose the songs. I kept searching the mixwit database for all kinds of songs that I thought would be perfect, but then I realized that the lyrics didn’t really work or that the song was actually very different from how I remembered it. In other words, I had to spend quite a bit of time not just coming up with possible song titles for this but also justifying my choices.
So, I would like you to do the same. Create a mixwit account and then search the database for tracks that, in your opinion, would be perfect for a soundtrack for The Diary of a Young Girl . There’s one catch, though: You have to be able to justify your decisions.
And then the conversations started. The one thing that made a huge impact was that I had challenged them to create something that I myself had already done. They could interact with my playlist and learn from the process I had engaged in prior to starting their own. They could critique my work and analyze it before embarking on their own journey of creating a soundtrack. In other words, I had entered the classroom and started the conversation as a participant. Creating my own mixwit tape placed me in the position of a learner. I eagerly shared with them my experiences of using mixwit and choosing the appropriate songs.
The point here is that what they were encouraged to do was not based on an abstract assignment description. I had entered the classroom with evidence of my own meaningful personal engagement with the diary, not just a typed handout explaining what they had to do.
This exercise led to a number of meaningful conversations with my students about Anne Frank, her writing, and our interpretations of her personality and her work. The fact that they all needed to justify their musical choices ensured that the conversations we had focused not just on the music but also, perhaps primarily, on the text. I had many one-on-one conversations with my students in which they talked about specific aspects of Anne’s personality and shared their knowledge of popular music with me. They read and listened to the lyrics carefully because they realized that the choices had to be justified and couldn’t be in any way offensive to the sanctity of the text written by a girl their age who perished in the Holocaust. This wasn’t just about listening to music, it was about making connections, and they all realized that, in order to make them, they had to become very familiar with both the songs and the text - I had encouraged them to become experts.
I was also pleased that this activity gave all of us an opportunity to engage with the diary in a new and unique way. The students still studied the text, they still had to think about Anne as a person and a writer, but they had to do it in a context that rarely enters our classrooms, one that certainly is never present when we discuss literary texts.
I learned that entering the community as a participant allowed me to have conversations with my students that they did not perceive as instructional. Yes, they were talking to Mr.Glogowski about their songs and their reasons for picking them, but it did not feel like school talk.
Here are some examples of what they created:
… and, of course, the best thing about this was that there was no rubric or evaluation sheet. Why? Because when you listen to student soundtracks for The Diary of a Young Girl and the music works, the music fits, you just know the students did a great job … and they do too - not because they received a rubric with a high mark, but because their work emerged from meaningful conversations with each other and the teacher.
When people ask me what I do, I often tell them that I work at a business school. Some of the more literary inclined people aren’t interested in my going into further detail, at least not until I tell them at every student at this business school is required to take a Great Works of Literature course. Baruch’s mission to instill ideas and culture and values into their students through literature is what, I think, makes Baruch unique among business schools. What is even more amazing is that this semester, Charles Simic is Baruch’s Harman Writer-in-Residence. I first read Simic’s poems when I was a junior in college. I loved his poems, his essays, his interviews. Later, when I went on to teach writing, I taught Simic. I still do. I am always in utter awe of him and his thinking about language, how it takes on another life that has something to do with this one. Writers-in-residence are usually found in MFA Creative Writing Programs or liberal arts undergraduate institutions. To have a Pulitzer prize winning poet who is also the Poet Laureate of the United States in residence at a CUNY business school is sure to baffle and confound. I can only think that such an occurrence must mean the planets and the stars and their positions right now are responsible, but I’m sure it must have something to do with someone at Baruch who believes that literature is what can change or shape the world and our ideas about our place in it.
