History Re-Tweets Itself

December 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

 

 

This semester, my students and I have been struck by a series of uncanny synchronicities between the course material we are covering and national events.  First, the Penn State/Sandusky/Paterno scandal and ensuing student riot climaxed the night before we watched a documentary about James Meredith and the violent resistance he met as the first black student at the University of Mississippi.  Watching reactionary students overturning cars and attacking journalists in the Deep South of 1962, because they resented any “outside threat” to their beloved institution, was particularly chilling in light of the previous evening’s images of Penn State students rampaging in misguided defense of their hero.  Similarly, units on the People’s Park occupation of 1969 in Berkeley, California, resonated neatly with the Zuccotti Park occupation and subsequent eviction.  Finally, our coverage of Berkeley’s 1964 Free Speech Movement, which is portrayed with clarity and emotion in the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties (now streaming on Netflix!), in the context of the wider campus uprisings of the Vietnam War era, coincided (somewhat sickeningly) with the recent incidents of protest and police violence in our very own Newman Vertical Campus at Baruch.  In all of these cases, discussions of the similarities between eras of past upheaval and the current sociopolitical landscape were unavoidable, and helped reinforce, for me, a couple key points about teaching in the 21st century.

I think every teacher wants their students to connect the subject they are studying to their everyday lives, to see its relevance and to integrate its teachings into their lived experience.  As social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter continue to expand in popularity, particularly among college students, it makes sense to employ these tools as a way of connecting students more directly to their course material.  Tom Harbison and I have been experimenting with this a bit, creating a shared course wiki that allows students to collaborate in creating a database of historical knowledge.  One aspect that’s been fascinating to watch develop is the visual aesthetic of each wiki page, and how students find unique ways to communicate often profound historical observations. One recent, brilliant example (above) shows how students juxtaposed two images of Rosa Parks to create a striking tableau of change over time.

At their root, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking utilities all seem to nurture a particular human desire to narrativize our experience of reality, to take the primary sources of our shared history and arrange them into an understandable story.  This impulse can be useful, and is indeed ubiquitous in pedagogy, because it allows for the communication of complex concepts by embedding them in easily digestible narrative morsels.  Of course, making a “story” out of everything has its dangers, as well: imagine whole generations of students getting all of their information about World War II from Saving Private Ryan (shudder).

Speaking of the Second World War, a recent New York Times piece describes a project called “Real Time World War II,” in which an Oxford University history graduate, Alwyn Collinson, is recreating, hour by hour, the events of the war, beginning in 1939, via an astoundingly detailed (and increasingly popular) Twitter feed.  Collinson’s project appeals to me because it satisfies the “you are there” excitement of storytelling while simultaneously demonstrating the necessity of thorough research.  Also, it’s a lot of fun (not to mention incredibly spooky) to witness the march to world war in the postmodern vernacular of Twitter.  A Yale professor quoted in the Times article states, “People in the past weren’t living in the past, they were living in their own present. . .These kinds of tweets restore to the past the authentically confusing character of the present.”  For me, Collinson’s experiment offers one example of how to use the raw tools of social networking to stimulate a more imaginative connection to course material, and serves as a reminder that, as technologically-enhanced human communication continues its expansion, so does the need to adapt our learning strategies to fit a rapidly shifting set of historical circumstances.

Filed Under: Social Media, teaching

Terence McKenna, Kinetic Typography, and the Evolution of Consciousness

May 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Apart from being an adequate summation of the thoughts and feelings that churned through my head while watching Grant McCracken‘s presentation at the Schwartz Communication Institute’s Annual Symposium on Friday, the above video provides a potent condensation of the philosophical contributions of a complex and fascinating American cultural figure, Terence McKenna.

McKenna’s interests ranged from psychedelics and shamanism to technology and aliens.  Among the many insanely weird ideas he brought into the culture (through a series of books and recorded lectures, often passed between fellow travelers like Grateful Dead bootlegs), McKenna intuited, at a very early stage of its development, that the Internet would launch humanity into a new state of conscious evolution.  For example, in this “trialogue” with esoteric colleagues Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham, recorded in 1994, McKenna repeatedly predicted the rapid expansion of digital technology and insisted, to the skeptical voices of Sheldrake and Abraham, that “within a decade” the web would play a dominant role in all sectors of human social organization.  All three, however, agreed that human beings alive on the planet at this point in history have access to exponentially larger amounts of data than any previous.  As available digital information becomes literally infinite, acquiring knowledge will become a significantly different experience.  More than ever before, it will be important for people to consciously navigate these streams of data by editing out the extraneous and unnecessary, and developing the skills to more effectively locate (and internalize) the most useful bits. In other words, we are going to have to learn how to find the good stuff in ways we’ve never imagined.

The above video is an example of “kinetic typography,” a form of animated text that provides a visual accompaniment to spoken word.  The medium is perfect for condensing complex ideas and highlighting particular portions of larger speeches and lectures, mainly because it transcribes the actual words and makes the words themselves visually arresting.  I’m intrigued by the development of “pedagogical art forms” like kinetic typography that seek to reduce great ideas to their essence while maintaining the original intellectual rigor.  The RSA Animate series, featuring this popular entry from CUNY’s own David Harvey, similarly takes what might seem like “difficult” ideas and makes them come alive in a brilliant, easy-to-digest, entirely satisfying experience:

I’ve also shown this clip featuring Slavoj Zizek to my classes on a couple different occasions, and even though Zizek’s ideas can sometimes be hard to follow, by the time the clip is over, students have always been eager and able to conduct a serious discussion of the issues he raises:

I have no doubt that developments like kinetic typography will, in a relatively short amount of time, be built upon, changed, and probably discarded as technology and collective creativity combine to develop new forms of transmitting valuable information within an ever-increasing cacophony (no pun intended) of available data.  This process will likely constitute a sea change in the evolution of human consciousness.  As McKenna himself once declared, the terms of this transformation are clear:

“It’s as though we took the Platonic bon mot about how ‘if God did not exist, Man would invent him,’ and said ‘if the unconscious does not exist, humanity will invent it’ — in the form of these vast networks able to transfer and transform information. This is in fact what we are caught up in, is a transforming of information. We have not physically changed in the last 40,000 years; the human type was established at the end of the last glaciation. But change, which was previously operable in the biological realm, is now operable in the realm of culture.”

 

Filed Under: Culture, Internet

I can’t stand writing! Or can I?

April 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Photo credit: Life Magazine

Lauren’s recent post about the physical process of writing struck a particularly resonant chord with me.  As I enter the final chapter of my dissertation, I’ve been thinking a lot about my body’s response to sitting in front of a computer most of the day (and often, the night).  Beyond the typical discourse on ergonomics, I think I’ve been searching for a way to radically alter the way my body relates to my mind.  The idea of the standing desk has thus entered my consciousness of late.

Many writers and artists have preferred to stand while working.  Some of the most famous include Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Apocalypse Now film editor Walter Murch.  Even noted torture fetishist (and possible lizard person) Donald Rumsfeld swears by his standing desk, an endorsement that’s truly hard to beat.

As many friends, family members, and students of mine have noted, I tend to pace around quite a bit whenever I’m thinking hard about something.  Most of my best thoughts come when I’m in a standing position, whether it is taking a shower, walking around the city, or delivering late-night lectures on semiotics to my cats.  My cure for writer’s block has invariably been to get up out of my chair, and lately I’m intrigued by the idea of integrating the “standing/thinking” aspect of writing with the actual process of typing.

In my classes I often join my students during writing exercises, and I’ve found that writing while standing at a lectern constitutes a totally different and, for me, more engaged writing experience. I’m still trying to overcome the unconventional awkwardness of standing to write at home, and have yet to make the leap out of my chair to do most of my typing, but I hope to write most of my last chapters while at my new standing desk. I’ll keep everyone updated on the experiment.  For now, though, I’m afraid I need to take a walk.

 

Filed Under: Writing

The terrible secret of space

March 29, 2011 By 3 Comments

Soldiers and civilians mingle in a Vietnam War-era "GI coffeehouse." Photo credit: http://www.sirnosir.com

In this sometimes laughably cynical polemic, which employs far too many zombie metaphors for my tastes, German philosopher Alexander García Düttmann nevertheless makes a point that resonated with me after many years of teaching at Baruch:

Where [the university] survives, its life will be transformed radically: it will survive only as a simulacrum of life, a death worse than death, a life of zombies, with students no longer being students but clients and consumers, and with academics no longer being academics but replaceable entities in a service industry designed to satisfy the desires of clients and consumers who pay a high price for such satisfaction.

Again, while I think Düttmann’s hyperbole could be toned down, I share his concern about students and teachers increasingly assuming roles more appropriate to the marketplace than the academy.  Students that pay a ridiculous amount of money to attend classes at a university obviously should have some right to determine the quality of education they receive.  But if a university education evolves into just another consumer product, both students and teachers will have to dramatically shift their expectations of what constitutes teaching and learning.  I’ve witnessed this shift in my classroom on a few different occasions, when students have (sometimes, rather bluntly) addressed me as if I were an employer with whom they could negotiate terms (e.g. “I’m not going to be here for the last 3 weeks of class, but I’ll write an extra paper to make up for it”; or, a personal favorite, “I need to leave 20 minutes early every day.  Can you email me notes if I miss anything?”)  Several students have, on the first day of class, asked for my business card and “contact info.”

I’m not exactly sure how to combat the business-ification of my classroom, but since my dissertation is on the subject of coffeehouses, recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the conscious creation of space.  While most teachers engage, to some degree, in a kind of pedagogical feng shui, probably most commonly by arranging the desks in a circle, I’d like to suggest that more radical adjustments to the physical environment of the classroom might induce both students and teachers to take on more productive academic roles.  Students are very accustomed to a certain sensory experience in the classroom, and I wonder if those expectations can be intervened upon in the same way that artists subvert aesthetic conventions in order to create a space for interrogation.

For me, carefully selected music has been the primary method through which I try to create a more focused atmosphere.  By playing music at the beginning of class, the slowly lowering it until I begin speaking, I have been attempting to recreate a kind of cinematic experience, in which attention is engaged through sensory cues.  But music is only one tool in the arsenal.  Have you ever been to a meditation center, yoga studio, or church?  All of these spaces very consciously create an atmosphere conducive to the specific form of concentration they hope to experience.  More and more, I’m thinking about ways to create the same kind of reverent feeling in my classroom through my own intentional creation of space.

Are beanbag chairs and Led Zeppelin posters totally out of the question?

Filed Under: Higher Education, teaching

Building a Bridge…to Laugh City!

March 16, 2011 By 2 Comments

In the book-length interview transcript Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, late writer David Foster Wallace discusses the transformative experience of seeing David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in 1986:

…there was somethin’ about…it was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn’t exempt you from certain responsibilities.  But in fact it upped them.  I mean, I’d always used sort of dreamy stuff.  But I had never as a young writer realized that you still had an obligation to make a kind of narrative.  That really the goals of realism and the goals of surrealism are exactly the same.  And they’re indescribable.  But they’re two completely different highways that have the same destination.  And I’d never snapped to that before.  David Lynch, Blue Velvet, coming along when it did, I think saved me from droppin’ out of school.

Wallace also told his Blue Velvet story on Charlie Rose, where he expressed his admiration for Lynch’s ability to take the viewer to incredibly strange places by using the Trojan Horse of compelling narrative.

As a teacher, I’ll admit that I like to take my students to incredibly strange places, pushing them to reach radical conclusions about the history we study.  Over the years, I’ve realized that this process often requires more that a spoonful of sugar.  Like any good storyteller, it’s important to hold the audience’s hand, seduce them, as you walk them along the path to the good stuff.  In other words, we need to think about developing an aesthetic element to the way we deliver material to our students.

For me, that aesthetic device is, more often than not, humor.  I think comedians offer the best example of how to effectively push audiences into unfamiliar rhetorical territory.  Lately, comic and writer Louis CK has been on a roll, making several appearances on late-night talk shows that have gone seriously viral.  In the two clips below, CK is able to bring up two different topics that rarely get any play in mainstream American media:  the imminent collapse of capitalism and the continued legacy of African slavery in the United States.  Both cases illustrate CK’s impressive ability to lead the audience along using all the narrative tools at his disposal: humor, self-deprecation, and of course, carefully selected words.

At a roundtable on public history at the Graduate Center last week, several of the historians present emphasized the necessity for an “aesthetic of history” that discovers new forms for communicating historical knowledge to an increasingly culturally-fragmented public.  As shows like the Daily Show and Colbert Report have demonstrated, it’s possible, even desirable, to engage humor and satire as delivery tools for conclusions that otherwise might not reach receptive ears.  Colbert’s legendary appearance at the 2006 White House Press Correspondents Dinner is perhaps the most sublime recent example of how to “build a bridge” to controversial material; even George W. Bush found himself laughing at jokes that, underneath the humor, essentially depicted him as a coward and murderer.

Humor is my go-to method of pushing students into new ways of thinking without losing them.  What’s yours?

Filed Under: Art, Education, Pedagogy

Saign flls aftr US wthdrwl OMFG

February 15, 2011 By 4 Comments

Valentine Greeting: Grandpa to Grandma
Creative Commons License photo credit: freeparking

I was doing research for my dissertation at the National Archives a few months ago when I came across a set of “communications files” for General William Westmoreland, a central military planner during the Vietnam War and later Army Chief of Staff.  The files contained all kinds of communications, mostly letters, spanning Westmoreland’s tenure as administrative head of the Army during the final years of U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia.

Unfortunately for my dissertation, I didn’t find anything in the file that directly helped my project.  However, one folder in particular caught my attention more for its form than its content. A collection of papers marked “Wire Transcripts, 1968-72″ contained all of Westmoreland’s communications via wire service, or telegram, and when I opened the folder I was immediately struck by the uncanny sense that I was looking at a Twitter feed.  The pithy, often awkwardly abbreviated transmissions closely resembled the loose, stream-of-consciousness format that Tweets, status updates, and text messages have made ubiquitous.  As I browsed through Westmoreland’s proto-tweets, the effect was like reading an internal history of the Vietnam War broken down to its linguistic essence, and I realized that the impulse to communicate in incredibly short textual bursts was not unique to the Internet Age.

As I approach teaching a history course on Vietnam this summer, I wonder if the tweet-format can have uses in the classroom. Since so many writing exercises attempt to teach students how to organize their thoughts into one powerful central thesis (often in the form of a a single sentence), the informal language of text messaging might provide a natural springboard to develop that process.  A good example of how loads of meaning can be packed into 140 characters is found in these “Twitter Discographies,” which break down entire musical careers into nearly mathematical, often brilliant, aesthetic summaries.  A personal favorite, Neil Young, looks like this:

Neil Young: 1 shak(e)y; 2+3 yin/yang of entire career; 4 the hit; 5-7, 14 fucked-up genius; 8-13,20-33 yin/yang variations; 15-19 the ditch.

While most students already have a great deal of practice composing text messages, how might they benefit from exploring this format in an academic setting?  Are there ways to engage the same critical faculties involved in writing a five-paragraph essay in, let’s say, an exercise that asks students to reduce the Tet Offensive to a series of tweets?

Filed Under: Pedagogy, Twitter Tagged With: ,

Cozying up to big brother

December 7, 2010 By 1 Comment

Image credit: University of Pennsylvania Digital Library

The Wikileaks narrative continues to unfold, highlighting some of the major challenges humanity faces in the Age of Infinite Information.  The story entered the realm of academic freedom on November 30, when the Office of Career Services (OCS) at Columbia University issued an email to students at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), warning them against any online engagement with Julian Assange’s rogue media network.  The office was repeating the “suggestion” made by a SIPA alumni working at the U.S. State Department.  The email reads, in part:

The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.

After the email was picked up by several education-related blogs, who amplified the fear and outrage expressed by some SIPA students, SIPA’s Dean of Students, John Coatsworth, backtracked on the OCS recommendation, stating in another email:

Freedom of information and expression is a core value of our institution. Thus, SIPA’s position is that students have a right to discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens, and to do so without fear of adverse consequences. The WikiLeaks documents are accessible to SIPA students (and everyone else) from a wide variety of respected sources, as are multiple means of discussion and debate both in and outside of the classroom.

Should the U.S. Department of State issue any guidelines relating to the WikiLeaks documents for prospective employees, SIPA will make them available immediately.

Regardless of how you feel about Wikileaks, the incident at Columbia should distress anyone concerned with academic freedom in the United States.  In the excellent essay collection The Cold War and the University:  Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, academics from a wide range of disciplines describe how the federal government’s Cold War ethos infected universities across the country, as the state attempted (often successfully) to enlist college professors and administrators as loyal agents of the larger Cold War project.  While most histories describe how the applied sciences and “area studies” (such as SIPA) disciplines were powerfully shaped by government and military funding and oversight, the social sciences and humanities were seriously impacted as well. As professor of English Richard Ohmann documents, virtually every discipline at the postwar university was bent to the larger goals of the United States government, then aggressively pursuing its anti-communist “containment” policy, a project that led to the Vietnam War and dozens of other proxy wars over the course of nearly sixty years.  Throughout this imperial project, Ohmann points out, university departments were compelled to assist the government in these efforts:

Anthropology [was] mobilized for knowledge and control of subaltern peoples, and sometimes recruited into secret counterinsurgency efforts; linguistics backed in its years of major development by the military and various arms of the foreign service (not always with the intended results); political science funded in some places (including the American Political Science Association itself) by the CIA and other cold war sources; free-market and “developmental” economics the same; and in these last two fields the seductions of prestige and influence, of direct and indirect participation in the making of national policy.  The list could go on through less vital symbioses between the Cold War state and psychology, foreign-language instruction, even history, with its abundance of prominent OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA] alums, and doubtless other fields.

Ohmann and others highlight a danger that continues to haunt the academic scene, as witnessed by Columbia’s admittedly clumsy attempt to put a lid on student discussion of Wikileaks.  The new question, it seems, is whether this type of repression is even possible, as technological developments continue to explode the possibilities of information storage, transmission, and consumption. According to documents released in the latest Wikileaks dump, the government of China certainly believes so, asserting that the internet and other forms of digital communication are “fundamentally controllable.”

It is unclear whether the U.S. government believes that the democratic impulses made possible by the free flow of digital information can be harnessed by the traditional forces of state repression that were mobilized to chilling effect during the Cold War. SIPA’s close relationship to the State Department undoubtedly influenced its uncritical parroting of the government’s propaganda. By exploiting its own students’ fears about future employment in order to assist the state’s efforts to blunt the impact of the Wikileaks story, Columbia revealed that, even in the digital age, instances of university-assisted repression will continue to have an impact within institutions that have, for reasons both material and ideological, internalized the foreign policy assumptions of the state.

Filed Under: Higher Education, Politics

The life of the blind

November 9, 2010 By 3 Comments

out over the edge
Creative Commons License photo credit: HikingArtist.com

In the debate workshops I hold in support of management courses at Baruch, students practice articulating their positions on a wide variety of issues that generally revolve around the intersection of business and society.  A recent workshop focused on the merits of “Direct to Consumer” advertising of pharmaceutical products, a practice session that quickly spiraled into a much wider debate about the pharmaceutical industry in general.  Since I was playing devil’s advocate to the students representing Big Pharma, I essentially argued that, if money has infected all levels of medicine, from doctors to research scientists to the government that’s supposed to regulate them, then the consumer (or, “patient”) has literally no reliable source of medical information. American health care has been made into just another giant corporate industry.  If everyone in medicine has been bought, who can you trust?  I then reminded them of Dr. Jonas Salk, who, when asked if he owned the patent to the polio vaccine, famously replied “There is no patent.  Could you patent the sun?”

Later, on the train home, I realized that invoking Dr. Salk’s idealism most likely came off as incredibly corny to these business-minded Baruch students, who live in a world where the profit motive is applied to an ever-expanding number of things previously deemed too sacred to be corrupted by human greed.  The uncritical acceptance of this phenomenon is disturbing, to say the least. When I suggested that one of the team members could address ethical or moral issues, each team seemed to agree that morality was a side issue, something to be tacked onto the end of their presentations if they had time left over.  The students ended up covering a lot of ethical territory in their presentations anyway, but I still left the workshop with the sense that the next generation will happily go to work patenting the sun.

This semester, as I begin to more earnestly prepare myself to “go on the market,” I realize that my fears of a profit-driven health care system can be equally applied to another previously-sacred but increasingly-sold-out institution, higher education. A couple weeks ago, many of us had a cynical laugh at this viral video, which depicts an older professor giving a budding graduate student a brutal rundown of the horrors that await her in academia.  The student’s idealism is a subject of particular ridicule; her love of Dead Poets Society and desire to “live the life of the mind” come across as pathetic, clichéd attempts to sentimentalize an institutional experience that is more likely to constitute long hours of unrewarding labor, for a terrible salary.  The idealistic student should either drop their romantic illusions or get out of academia altogether.  In both scenarios, the idea of the “life of the mind” is left as a closed option, a laughable and childish delusion held by people that don’t understand the “realities” of higher education.

The conflict, for me, is that even though I laughed at the video, I really liked Dead Poets Society when I was young, and I’m betting that many of you did too.  I was the student who was entranced by the prospect of a “life of the mind.”  And though I’ve grown to accept the financial imperatives of living in twenty-first century America™, I still feel like those early idealistic motivations are primary in my inner life.  I’m as cynical as the next graduate student, believe me, but I also recognize that cynicism as a defense mechanism against the terrible feeling that graduate school is just a process by which I fashion myself into an educational product to be sold to the highest bidder (or any bidder, actually).

All of this makes me wonder, what is the point of our education?  We frequently lament that our undergraduate students view their educations as simply a means to an end, a way to “get a job.”  We fret that so few of them seem to want to “learn for learning’s sake,” instead concerning themselves with gaining “marketable skills.”  But isn’t this how so many of us have come to look at our graduate school educations, as little more than a path to the middle class?  I realize we all have loans to pay off, and I certainly enjoy my Blu-ray player, but I have the suspicion that, despite the mad rush of the market, most of us chose to pursue our degrees out of at least a small sliver of youthful idealism.  As that idealism, that feeling that the work we do actually matters and improves the world, is increasingly ridiculed and written out of our collective script, I can’t help feeling that the loss of the humanistic impulse in education is as scary and tragic as the “privatization” of human health care.  With those kinds of impulses and motivations fast disappearing, who is tending the light at the end of the tunnel?

Filed Under: Higher Education, Jobs, Politics

Teaching something no one understands

October 19, 2010 By 4 Comments

Last Friday evening I had the pleasure of attending a reading and Q & A with American poet Diane di Prima, best known for her association with the “Beat Generation” of writers from the 1950s and 1960s, but whose prolific poetic output spans over the past half century.  Di Prima is the current poet laureate of San Francisco, and her visit to New York corresponded with the release of a set of chapbooks by CUNY’s Lost and Found Poetics Group.

During the Q & A, the audience of Serious academics asked Serious questions of the poet, hoping, ostensibly, for Serious answers. But Di Prima is too much of a mystic poet to offer that kind of straightforward analytical dissection of her life and work. The sometimes comically awkward discussion nonetheless provided many thought-provoking exchanges, the most intriguing of which concerned di Prima’s ideas about the creative process.  The poet described how she often sleeps with a notebook at her side, waking many times through the night to record fragments of poems received to her through dreams. With her mind close to the mysterious well of creative imagination burbling in the subconscious, di Prima discovers a deeper, “truer” poetic voice.  Thus, rather than describe a specific set of methodologies for writing, di Prima characterized her creative process as a nearly religious experience.

While I can’t say that my dissertation is being spiritually dictated from the universal Godhead, I can identify with di Prima’s overall point about creative inspiration coming at odd, unpredictable moments that seem to have little to do with my actual conscious thoughts.  I’ve made some of my most significant “breakthroughs” (if they can be called that) about my dissertation while in the shower, on the subway, or lost in thought in the new snack aisle at Duane Reade.  And yes, I’ve even had revelations about how to finish a chapter (or start a new one) in my dreams.  You’re telling me you haven’t dreamed about your dissertation?

What I’m wondering is how to communicate this idea to students.  While we are often able to give our students many straightforward methods and specific techniques for developing their writing and oral communication skills, how do we teach them about the kind of creative inspiration di Prima describes?  If part of intellectual development is learning how to open your consciousness to “receive” ideas from hidden parts of the mind, how does that process get written into our pedagogical practices? Should writing classes include sessions on meditation, astral travel, and dream journals?  Am I turning into the high school teacher from Beavis and Butthead?

Filed Under: teaching, Writing Instruction

“Why should I take this stupid test anyway?”

September 28, 2010 By 5 Comments

01-29-08
Creative Commons License photo credit: Fort Worth Squatch

As October nears, it is time to start explicitly preparing CUNY students for the dreaded CUNY Proficiency Exam (CPE), offered twice a year and a required, if standardized, rite of passage for all students with 45 or more credits.  At the BLSCI, we present a series of CPE Workshops that aim to walk students through the sometimes-tricky but never-impossible set of instructions mailed to them at the beginning of the semester.

For most people, both professors and students alike, even the thought of a “standardized test” brings up horrible associations: class and cultural bias, indecipherable rubrics, and the Kafka-esque nightmare of filling in tiny bubbles with No. 2 pencils in hopes of pleasing a robot. In leading some of these CPE workshops, I thus often feel the need to overcome this negative energy, or at least to address it in some meaningful way.  The approach I’ve fallen into lately, which is quite uncharacteristic for me, is to become a kind of evangelist for the CPE’s overall value.  I spend some time explaining the very basic skills that the test asks students to demonstrate, and I attempt to convince them that these skills, while perhaps never to be applied in such a “standardized” way again , will nonetheless prove extremely useful to them for the rest of their lives, and are in fact necessary for them to succeed in the types of careers that they are ostensibly seeking.

It is unlikely that our students will be writing five paragraph essays after they get out of college.  However, the basic framework of those essays, in which claims are made and backed with specific evidence, is a technique that extends far beyond college essays, applicable as much in an argument with a friend as in a loan application.  As much as students desperately want the CPE to go away, the fact is they MUST pass the exam to continue at CUNY, and I have found that framing the test as an opportunity to hone an elementary but imperative set of skills helps some students see through the No.2 pencil haze to find some personal value in what can be an admittedly stomach-churning experience.

Filed Under: CUNY
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