This fall, I taught a literature course for the first time, and at Queens College, where I’d never worked before. The class was scheduled at 3 in the afternoon on a Friday, and during this time the Queens campus seemed pretty deserted. I dragged my wheely bag around empty floors and stairwells, from my office, to tech services, to the building where I taught. One faculty member observed my class, and the meeting with her that followed was a bright, warm spot of collegiality, advice, and encouragement in an otherwise pretty isolated semester. Then, Weir’s email arrived, and I had that great moment that comes from sharing experiences in a particular profession: “That exact thing happened to me!” Weir mentions students’ tendency to open papers with broad general statements. I had just spent a day with student papers that began with some variation of “Since the dawn of time, humans have thought about the important topic of identity….” I had also spent the day writing in the margins of my students’ papers comments like, “Interesting claim, can you support and develop this with an example, or cite a source?” Weir addresses these issues in this informal email in a way I found very helpful.

Last year, Talia wrote an excellent post about how to get adjuncts (who are isolated from professionalization events because they are already “stretched thin” timewise), to participate in pedagogy workshops. She came up with three great tips for how to reach out and engage adjuncts. Below, I offer Weir’s email as an example of the sort of spirit of collegiality and engaged, attuned teaching that did not wait for a Wiki or a workshop, but just reached out—both to colleagues with whom I can assume he already has a rapport, and to strangers and fellow teachers like me.

Weir wrote:

“…..I wanted to share a “teaching moment,” if I may, and forgive me for jamming up your email at this point in the semester, when everyone has too much to read.So my undergrad students and I (ENG 395W) where talking about the first paragraph of the first drafts of their research papers -”research-,” “term-,” “analytical-,” whatever you call those papers.

And my students are of course in love with generality and with big sweeping introductory moments.  Not in a hostile way: They are convinced of the importance of big contextualizing opening remarks,and why not?  But it leads to first sentences like: “David Foster Wallace develops literature in an artistic way.”  They do think that a general introductory move is important and necessary and basically required.

And so we were trying to figure out how to write an opening sentence that was both specific and catchy, that hauled you into the essay, set a tone, and also got right down to business – just as one example of an opening-sentence-strategy.  And don’t ask me how we ended up talking about marijuana.  Um, I don’t remember?  But suddenly we were discussing all the ways in which folks get busted for carrying a tiny amount of pot on their persons; and one of my students said, “Cops like to make arrests right at the end of their shifts, because it forces them into overtime and extra pay”; and one of my students said, ”Drug busts for a small amount of marijuana are really popular because the NYPD can use those arrests to pump up statistics about how they’re
keeping down crime in NYC”; and there were like 5 students in the room who had information to add, and they mentioned various articles they had read on this topic in other classes and/or on their own.  They cited their sources, in other words.  And everyone in the room, all 17 students, were suddenly talking, with way more interest and excitement than they had shown in our discussion of, well, anything else all
semester.

And it so happens that I’ve been reading Judith Halberstam’s *The Queer Art of Failure* (Duke U Press, 2011), wherein, among other things, Halberstam has stuff to say about pedagogy and the academy, including her assertion – a propos of Jacques Ranciere’s *The Ignorant Schoolmaster* and Laurent Cantet’s 2008 documentary *The Class*(*Entre Les Murs*) – that “learning is a two-way street and you cannot teach without a dialogic relation to the learner.”

“Okay,” I thought, “here’s our dialogic relation,” and I drew my students’ attention to how instantly and fully they got engaged in a conversation in which each student entered into the argument with a specific example: Cops make drug arrests at 5 PM; the NYPD uses drug busts to brag about crime control; etc.  And I reminded them that they had cited their sources.  And I asked them if they imagined that they might begin a paper about David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” by pointing immediately to a piece of evidence, a moment from the text, an event, a compelling linguistic turn, a critical intervention made by a scholar or critic or writer, etc. Rather than, you know, ”Western Literature has long struggled with the problem of language.”

And I think they got that.

All of which is to say that I have found that the only pedagogical tool I have is ignorance and unknowing, which I perform for my students whenever possible (usually out of necessity!), and that mostly this strategy fails, but sometimes it gives students room to veer away from the topic and demonstrate their expertise in some other area of discourse.  And once in a while, I am able to point out to them that they already know how to do what we are struggling to figure out how to do.”

Shoting star and other dollar origami by Corey Comenitz http://www.corigami.com/Gallery_3.html

I’m following John and David’s posts, both of which I think responded insightfully and eloquently to aspects of Grant McCraken’s presentation that I was too flustered by to take on myself. My immediate thought, following McCraken’s argument that anthropology should be a tool for companies, analyzing culture in order to help companies capture potential consumers, was that the motives of academics and business people are different. The task of academics is to question social structures—like the relationship between culture and the marketplace—in terms of how they affect human flourishing. And, the task of business people is to grow business. Either their job is not to care how their business affects human flourishing (writ large, not just the shareholders and consumers), or to assume that the growth of business is an inherent and general good.

But, is this a fair assumption or a prejudice? As soon as I had articulated this thought to myself, as a possible response to McCraken, I realized it sounded like a prejudice. This led me to think about the tropes that commonly circulate among academics, and to think of the generalizations made on both sides of the business/academic divide.

RSA videos have been circulating recently among my friends (and fellow academics). The first one that circulated among my (academic) friends was Slavoj Zizek’s “First tragedy, then farce.” The next was the David Harvey’s “Crises of Capitalism,” also posted on cac.ophony. One thing that struck me about them both is the catastrophic view of capitalism. Harvey ends his argument by saying that capitalism will only continue to become more extreme, that it is a phenomenon that far exceeds the range of our current political discourse, even our current political framework. Zizek suggests (with tiny caveats, it’s just a suggestion!) that charity merely mitigates the “zero point” of the increase in human suffering inherent to capitalism.

This is an old idea, made glamorous by a celebrity and by technology. Yet Zizek acts, though he cites Oscar Wilde, as if this were an original insight. I do think Marx’s ideas are still very relevant and useful today, but I’m frustrated that Marx still seems like a daring and challenging reference, and an endpoint. When his ideas are re-voiced outside of academic context, they seem to me to be more invoked and applied than built upon.

What I’d like to see turned into an RSA is perhaps Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, in which he studies the oppressions of several different political and economic forms, in different historical periods, and measures them against revolutions and the forms of governance and economics that replaced the old. No clear winners. I’d like to see some of George Yúdice’s ideas in an RSA. For example, he argues in The Expediency of Culture, that capitalism in its current phase is capturing more of human life, turning more and more of culture into a commodity. At the same time, he says, commodification has been cultured. The marketplace is more and more in the hands of more and more people. This takes us to last year’s keynote speaker, Clay Shirkey, who described Amazon as a kind of partial democratization of the marketplace. Or is it the commodification of democracy? Yúdice sees the capacity for the distribution of political agency, for more inclusive and effective solidarities, in this phase of the relationship between capital and culture.

In order to actually be able to turn speeches like McCraken’s into opportunities for mutually constructive criticism and dialogue, I think we might need to agree that we come to the table with a different set of prejudices about terms like the marketplace, capitalism, business, and academia. And would it be possible to have a conversation about who and how business and academia see themselves as serving to advance human flourishing?

A student recently described English professors to me: “You know, they speak perfectly, and slowly but not too slowly, louder than regular but not too loud.” I began to think about teachers’ presentation and what this says about the way we view our roles and establish (or don’t establish) authority. In “Elements of the Academic Essay,” Gordon Harvey (a director of Harvard’s writing programs), defines stance as “the implied position of you the writer to the readers and subject” of your essay. I use Harvey’s list of thirteen concisely described elements when I teach writing, and this week I’ve went back to his definition of stance as I grappled with my annoyance at David Brooks—someone who has been give a lot of authority and space in national dialogue. I’ve looked to “stance” for a way to analyze a speaker’s presentation style—vocal cadence and gestures—as well as their written style. In this so-called, self-called moderate’s style, you can witness the performance of rationality.

Though reasonableness or rationality has long been considered the sine qua non of ethical and political communication by scholars who write on republicanism and democracy, Iris Marion Young and Martha Minow claim that the criteria by which the reasonableness of speech is judged is not based on any culture-transcending ethical objectivity, but is actually tied to dominant culture of white, upper class, male, Western identity. This may explain why public speaking guides tell you to avoid distracting mannerisms, such as playing with your hair, but not adjusting your glasses.

David Brooks has been ably mocked by bloggers for the way he frames national debate. He has an entry in the dickipedia, McSweeny’s published a nice parody of Brooks’ favorite rhetorical tactic of broadly categorizing all of the U.S. population into two groups, and then nicknaming them with a homespun stereotype (for example, some people are Applebee’s people.)  But lately I’ve watched him with the sound off, and this allowed me to focus on his gestures and his facial expressions, and to see how his stance in terms of presentation style more clearly. In videos, you can see Brooks gesture right, gesture left, then wave both his hands at his sides. In this interpretive dance of David Brooks, you can see him valiantly keeping himself straight and centered while the remarkable strong winds of the straw men of his own making batter him from both sides. This stance claims a lot of authority, while also projecting humbleness: this is what I find so annoying. It is a rhetorical power move, claiming the central, rational position, and it is part of what allows Brooks to write on everything from Socrates to the health care plan to what motivates people.

"Figure 4: The Ass Kissing Strategy"

Mark Gaipa created cartoon depictions of various ways authors position themselves in relation to the authors they cite (in “Breaking Into the Conversation: How Students Can Acquire Authority in their Writing.”) In one cartoon, a tiny “David” stick figure goes up against an imposing author “Goliath.” Making your own drawings, as we did in Sean O’Toole’s WAC workshop last year, are helpful way of getting perspective on one’s stance. I’d like to see a series of cartoons of the different ways teachers position themselves in relation to their students, their subject, and the rest of the world, and how we construct and lever authority.

Ciny Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978

I had been waiting a very long time for the elevator on the seventh floor of the vertical campus, leaning against the wall, listlessly refusing to take the stairs when I noticed that right next to my shoulder was a Cindy Sherman print. Sherman, one of the few living artists whose work I could recognize is maybe most known for photographing herself in “Untitled Film Stills,” in which she appears as an actress in her own imagining of a 1970s movie. I associate Sherman with expensive art books and magazines, Vogue magazine, and museums and galleries.

After noticing this print under the florescent lights by the elevator and those grey and white signs on each floor of Baruch that list departments and room numbers, I began to wonder about what other works of art might be hiding in plain sight, and found the Mishkin Gallery website listing an Alexander Calder (Mishkin collection) and a Joan Miro (alumni collection). Dr. Sandra Kraskin, curator of the collection, told me that much of it was sent to auction in 2009. The Miro “was in the president’s private office.”

I looked closer at some colorful prints on the sixth floor hallway outside classrooms, but I couldn’t find out the name of the artist because there was no label. Kraskin told me that there was no money available for them. Which kind of offsets the argument that public art educates and enriches us all, or maybe just reflects a general ambivalent nature of art as part the state budget, and as a donation from wealthy alumni. The “Percent for Art” program, administered by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and begun by Edward Koch in 1982, “requires that one percent of certain city funded construction projects be used for art commissions and acquisitions. Over the past twenty-five years, more than 26 million has been spent for art.” This is not a very significant amount in relation to the 2011-2012 state budget. The rest has been donated, much of it by alumni: both a gift and a tax deduction.

Dr. Kraskin said, “Most great universities have art collections, we feel our university should have same benefits that Harvard has.” There are works by Elizabeth Murray and Lynda Benglis in the vc campus: Kraskin explained Murray’s exceptional recognition (she had a show at both Moma and the Whitney), and also described Benglis’s metal wall relief sculpture as significant.

I grew up near the Brown University campus, and the sight of undergrads lounging in the sun on a Henry Moore sculpture in the spring was emblematic of the college experience for me: your job as a college student is to place yourself in the midst of great works and get comfortable there. I like the idea of this message conveyed to students through what surrounds them in their daily trek to and from class. The shows at the Mishkin gallery are targeted to students, and teachers build them into their curriculum. But I wonder how much the “Percent for Art,” and individual donations entail this goal, relative to investment or tax break, how much of the art chosen for significance has significance within the art world versus to the people who pass by it. Artists Komar and Melamid’s research on art and popular taste showed that if left to polls, most countries would surround themselves with landscapes that include trees and water. I’m curious about how other people who pass these works of art as part of their work are or aren’t affected by it. When I don’t like a piece of art, I measure it against a working escalator, laptops for students, my own salary. When I do, I find I don’t draw these kinds of equivalencies. The current exhibition at Mishkin, of paintings of mountains by Hai Tao, creates its own few rooms of quiet delicacy, mystery and solace, which maybe somehow does respond to broken escalators, students who try to write papers without MSWord because they can’t yet afford the 300 dollar subsidized price from Baruch, and other daily stresses.

Last week, a hearing was held on the Marriage Equality Act at the Rhode Island State House. Judiciary chair, Edith Ajello (my mom!) presided over testimony that lasted 8 ½ hours. She was told to keep it short, but decided to go long. People had waited for hours to speak, and she felt it would be unfair to send them home.

In watching the brief video above from the RI newspaper The Providence Journal’s website, I’m struck by one exchange. One man, holding a sign that reads “Marriage = 1 Man + 1 Woman” talks to the camera and explains that allowing marriage without reproduction is bad for humanity. A man to his left, with a pro-equality sign, says that he and his wife don’t have any children—should they not be married? A woman on his right says, “I already had my children, should I get divorced?” The three people are in the middle of a cheering, sign-holding crowd on the capitol steps, and none of them seem angry. While it is a confrontational exchange, the tone seems like one of almost neighborly disagreement: a disagreement they are eager to have.

J.S. Mill argued for free democratic expression by claiming that citizens benefit even from hearing the ideas of a madman, because this would both sharpen and widen collective judgment. And I think the decision to hold an 8 ½ hour hearing speaks to this democratic ideal. But I also think it framed the marriage equality debate in emotionally as well as intellectually democratic terms of neighborly love: the value of respecting and listening to people. In his Encyclical, Deus Caritas Es (“God is Love”), Pope Benedict XVI writes:

Let us first of all bring to mind the vast semantic range of the word “love”: we speak of love of country, love of one’s profession, love between friends, love of work, love between parents and children, love between family members, love of neighbour and love of God. Amid this multiplicity of meanings, however, one in particular stands out: love between man and woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness. This would seem to be the very epitome of love; all other kinds of love immediately seem to fade in comparison.

While he writes that “one in particular stands out” (man+woman), the whole Encyclical seems to dispute the primacy of romantic, sexual, “imposed” love by exploring the multivalent existences of love. He describes love between Saint Paul and God, Jesus and men, and as an ethical disposition one should have towards others. He seems, in my interpretation, to argue that it is a big mistake to focus on 1 man+ 1 woman as pivotal to our understanding of love. Pope Benedict instead continues Saint Augustine’s description of caritas, which binds community and also supports plurality.

“To the question “Who is my neighbor” [...] Augustine always replies “Every man” (Omnis homo). The answer is equivocal. It can literally mean everyone is next to me; I have no right to choose; I have no right to judge; all men are brothers.” (See Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott’s introduction to Arendt’s Love and Saint Augustine, 43).

In her exploration of a philosophical and ethical orientation towards others, particularly others who disagree with you, Hannah Arendt turned to Saint Augustine’s concept of caritas: basically, love of your neighbor as a person to whom you are bound to care for even when you disagree—even when you don’t like them.

This week, I worked with two teams of students in a Management and Society class who were assigned to debate the merits of corporate social responsibility. As students debated the issue, sometimes stretching to articulate a position they don’t actually hold, I thought the class had a kind of engagement that’s very different from what we usually see in political debate: actual interest in comprehending different sides of an issue. A student told me by having to debate, she felt like she really knew the issue from all the angles. In some moments of this work I’ve done with students, there’s been a sense of reward in this multidimensional understanding– a reward besides just the grade.

Brotherhood could be seen as the bind of a common project of global understanding–and the need and even care for those people whose views oppose yours. Seton Hall Communication Professor Jon Radwan understands Pope Benedict XVI’s “God is love” letter as concerned with an attitude towards communication–a self/other disposition. Though the debate about marriage equality has brought out a fair amount of rancor, I wonder if the emphasis on public debate and the inclusiveness those long hearings foster (six hours in Maryland), might allow for moments of caritas.  The buoyancy—mixed with the rancor—of the gathering in RI perhaps supported a debate that took place with warring attitudes, but perhaps also with brotherly ones.

photo credit: smemon87

After reading violent threats against Frances Fox Piven online, my first thought was “If books are so powerful, then why threaten with a gun—go and write your own book.”

Hannah Arendt, in On Violence, describes violence as indicating the lack of power. Power, she says, is the capacity to capture people’s hearts and minds, to change the way they think and act. In the late 1960s, she wrote against what she saw as leftist writing that glorified violence (she cited Fanon and Sartre). Power is what separates Karl Marx’s ideas, which galvanized, inspired, and engaged debate, from Joseph Stalin’s regime of suppression through threat and through actual violence. (See also page 2 in her article in The New York Review of Books). Fascist regimes, according to Arendt, are regimes without new ideas (see her review of The Black Book in Commentary, page 294).  What they have instead is a monopoly on the means of violence.

But, what is the written threat of violence? It is not the same. This week seemed like a good time to turn to Judith Butler’s scholarship on hate speech (Excitable Speech). I was surprised to find that Butler takes apart the distinction between physical violence and language, and two of the main terms she uses in this project are control and vulnerability. In society, people are vulnerable to and dependent upon language, and language is beyond our control. Therefore, hate speech is said be “like a slap in the face” because being called a demeaning name actually affects a person’s sense of their self and the way they appear to others.

Control—language is beyond the speaker’s control. Frances Fox Piven’s writing has been interpreted in ways she never intended, ways that seem irrational to her (and to me). Yet, Butler argues, engaging in language always means the speaker does not control the way her words will be interpreted. Others may not read the same material in the same context in which you wrote it. The speaker can suddenly find herself in a struggle she never intended to enter, one with terms and stakes she never predicted.

Even in the absence of real violence, does the written threat of violence prove Hannah Arendt’s point—does violence in language indicate a lack of power, and the lack of new ideas? If it does indicate a lack of power, how is one in the position of professor at City University, and other professors and authors, to respond? As Butler argued, it seems to me that suddenly authors are being unpredictably granted a power they have not themselves presumed to wield. Are they responsible to a power that anyone ascribes to them?

Graduate scholars are aware of how insular and hermetic our work and our communications can be. Now I’m wondering if scholars should be prepared to take their ideas out for a spin, outside the contexts of journals and conferences, to imagine interpretations from more diverse audiences and to defend and delineate their ideas. This hasn’t been part of my training—I’ve been trained to confront some scholarly authors with the oppositional arguments of other scholarly authors.  As a writing and public speaking teacher, I coach students to consider their intended audience, to write towards their common knowledge and interests. Now I’m wondering how much writers and speakers need to consider their ability to respond to unintended interpretations, unintended audiences. It’s a frightening challenge, but Fox Piven seems to be responding steadily in what I can only imagine has felt like a very shaky playing field.

Listening Post: installation culled from real-time internet chat rooms, by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin

It has been hard not to take the announcement that many level two classes at Baruch will become jumbo-sized next year—increasing from 24 to 50 or 100 students—as a rejection of my work and values, as well as my colleagues’. The more experience I have, both as a student, teacher, and consultant, the more I see a need for what I’ve come to think of as “communicative reciprocity”—listening or reading and acknowledging the uniqueness of a student’s work, the back-and-forth that fosters authority based on critique and reflection.

I’m not saying lecture and jumbo classes might not be effective, even best, in some situations. Many professors have brought great talent, knowledge, creativity, and hard work to covering a large amount of information succinctly, coherently, and vividly. And of course, this is all contingent, you can have a demagogue in a small class. (A student told me she didn’t want to turn in a paper to her teacher that stated an opinion that disagreed with his.) But it seems nearly impossible in a class of 100 or even 50 to have the kind communicative reciprocity that recognizes a student’s developing opinion as valuable, responds with respect and consideration, and encourages more bravery, exploration, and complexity.

Often when I help students with drafts of essays, their first impulse is to mimic the teacher’s opinion and way of speaking, or to paraphrase research they’ve found online. I ask students to tell me their opinion, and then ask them to support it. When I tell them to write down what they’ve said, or when I write it down as they speak and hand it to them as a sketch for their rough drafts, students often seem surprised. To them, their own thoughts don’t seem appropriate in a class assignment.

One professor who teaches a communication intensive Theater 1041 class asks her students  to write a theater manifesto. I met with one of this professor’s students to work on her paper, and as she developed her opinions into ideas about what she thinks theater should and could be in terms of political and cultural relevance, she told me: “This is a whole different way of thinking. I never do this.” Here is a student telling me she’d never before been asked to reflect upon and develop her own observations and ideas in college before this assignment. So it isn’t a stretch to suggest it possible that a student could get a BA at Baruch without ever being asked to develop, support, and explain her opinions—about culture, politics, economics, and ethics.

In a class of 100, or 50, how will teachers foster this kind of reflection? How will teachers read and make significant comments on student writing, and get to know each student well enough to meet them where they are, in order to support and challenge them? Without a significant amount of practice in communicative reciprocity, I think that we set students up to be receivers of opinion as well as information. In the communication intensive classes we support at the Schwartz Institute, we work to help students develop and present their own perspectives in response to an assignment. And we try to support professors’ efforts to include more student writing and presentations in their classes. It’s fine that in many other classes students show their knowledge through more multiple choice and short-answer responses. But Baruch lauds itself for the diversity of its student population, and what does diversity matter if in most of their work the same answer is right for every student? What is the value of diversity if we don’t recognize the importance of developing an inclusive, reflective, authoritative political voice of one’s own?

A friend told me recently that it was a tradition for Jewish children introduced to religious study to be given honey, so they’d associate it with sweetness and joy.

I’m teaching a class on “The Advanced Research Essay,” which is really a workshop on how to write a thesis paper. I’m leading this workshop as I work on finishing my dissertation, and halfway through the semester my students and I are very much in the same boat.

They’ve finished their annotated bibliographies, they’ve worked hard to assimilate and categorize books and articles on their topics. Now they have to pull their heads out of the waters of research, and turn to their thesis—go from broad and inclusive to incisive and narrow focus. At this stage in my research, I became a bit obsessive-compulsive. Asked a simple question like “What are you studying?” I’d use a word like “empathy” and have to run through a trail of citations from Kant to Hannah Arendt. Grad school can do this to you, and as a fellow fellow and I said last week, second exams train you not to make succinct claims without following every word down the rabbit hole. I think this is partly what accounts for the logic of titles that Alessandro pointed out. The colon is like “towards”, (another class title and dissertation title favorite). Rather than making a statement, or asking a question, we say we’ll go in a direction, or go around. We’d never dream of, you know, declaring something. That would be so…pedantic. I’ve been trying to think of the most daring titles I admire. The Great Gatsby: it dares to say its protagonist is great, and also to tell you its subject is just a guy. And, The Human Condition. Not On the Human Condition, or Towards the Human Condition: fill in the blank. So, we’re not all Hannah Arendt and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I realized that during their annotated bibliographies, not only had my students lost a lot of hubris, but they’d also lost some of the idiosyncratic attachment and associative logic that brought them to their topics in the first place. So, I went back to The Craft of Research, by Booth, Colomb, and Williams, my grad school freshman text, and pulled out a fill-in-the-blank assignment:

1. Topic: I am studying _____.

2. Question: Because I want to find out ______.

3. Significance: To help readers ______.

Many of my students exhibited what I recognized as insecure-student syndrome, rattling off the now ingrained phrases and logic of their readings. We had to talk about real, idiosyncratic questions; and in getting to the impetus for their work, we sometimes realized the original question, or deep unease that made the private string of lights under this tent of citation, was too personal to talk about in class. That too was worth recognizing. “Death and literature” is indeed a naïve topic for a career, but maybe interests should be on a larger, less sophisticated scale than career strategies. If not, there are so many jobs which do not provoke the question “So what are you working on?”

Katy Perry, SNL

See how relieved she looks when she gets to stay in the middle-register, with the back-up vocalist and louder music behind her? What a relief, she’s home free. That’s entertainment! And also kind of sport.

As studio production gets more sophisticated, are singers having to work harder to recreate the recorded version live? In 1992, LL Cool J was maybe trying to put some heft to his lightweight, commercial image by performing a song from the slickly produced album “Walking with a Panther.” On MTV, he sang a stripped-down version of “Mama said knock you out,” with a band. It looked like a physically demanding performance—you could hear him working to finish phrases before he ran out of breath.

He was competing with heftier musicians like Dr. Dre, and much wittier, defter musicians like A Tribe Called Quest and Gang Starr, whose chorus—“Check the technique, see if you can follow it”—tagged its own sophistication as a dare. So it seems telling that we still come back to the performer’s body for authenticity—I’m surprised that SNL even stages un-auto-tuned songs. If physical training and technique is a hidden scaffolding behind pop music, then things like auto-tune might draw more value to the physical in terms of authenticity. It was fun to see then, like now with Katy Perry, that performers still use their voices and physicality to prove something.

Twice in the past week, a teacher has told me that they are teaching two classes of one section, and that the two classes respond completely differently to the same material. Shown the same video, one class is inspired and engaged, leading to animated class discussion. The other class is bored. This situation is a good litmus test for a teacher—you know the lack of response from your students isn’t a direct reflection on your work. But, what are you to do? Is it our job as teachers to inspire and engage? Of course, it is a two-way street, students have to come ready to extend their imaginations, not simply be catered to.

My questions is–how to account for this disparity in student response? Should we change our tactics from one class to another? Is it, as other teachers I’ve spoken with have guessed, group dynamics? And how do you change the dynamics of a group, when you’re only one in 24?

The Journal of Public Deliberation (which posts of all its articles online for free) recently posted a special issue on higher education. An article on communication as a discipline in U.S. colleges, “Communication studies and Deliberative Democracy: Current Contributions and Future Possibilities,” by Martín Carcasson, Laura W. Black, and Elizabeth S. Sink, makes an argument common to many other authors in this issue, and one that is probably an inherent belief with scholars of the concept of deliberative democracy:

“It is clear that one of the major barriers to a more deliberative democracy is the lack of quality interaction, and thus understanding and mutual respect across perspectives” (2010: 13).

These authors focus their analysis on communication studies, as well as on other classes such as rhetoric, group communication, and interpersonal communication.

“Perhaps most emblematic of the connection between communication education and democracy are the public speaking courses required for thousands of students each semester. This course has an inherent to skills relevant to democracy, as students are typically asked to research public issues and persuade their fellow student-citizens of particular points of view” (7).

However, the authors remark, “unfortunately” these classes often focus more on “individual achievement, needs of marketplace, and professional presentation skills.”

They see these skills as suitable to an “adversarial” kind of democracy, rather than a deliberative one. I think adversarial democracy more aptly describes what we’ve got, actually. But the question of which values, what system of beliefs, undergirds the way we teach communication is one I was really happy to see grappled with, out in the (relative) open of a free, scholarly journal.

If there are communicative values behind what we teach when we teach Com 1010, they don’t seem to be foregrounded, made available for critique. When I was assigned two sections of this class as a new grad student, I partly compensated for my lack of teaching experience by approaching the class as if it was a thesis project. I grabbed on to a few oblique references to democracy and public speaking in The Art of Public Speaking textbook—democratic values like respect and inclusion. This ended up taking over my own research interest, and really influencing the way I taught the class.

I saw these norms in the way not only public speaking but also composition is taught: including and respecting the other side, representing others’ arguments with compassion as well as accuracy, crediting others’ work. But I wonder if this method of communicating will be fairly unique to college. As my students leave college and advance through adulthood, I imagine them sifting themselves into communities of cultural and political taste, and looking over to the other side from across a wider divide, often apoplectic. That’s been my experience. Political conversations in my observation mostly seem about heightening our own beliefs, more thoroughly dismissing the opposition. Where outside of class do we practice this method of empathy, reciprocity, and inquiry with those whose beliefs most distinctly contrast with our own?

“Deliberative scholars and practitioners” according to the article, “strive to create spaces where multiple voices can not only be heard, but truly listened to, even in communities that have marked power imbalances.”

“Yet despite the numerous links between the fields and exemplary democratic practice, teaching and scholarship too often remains indirect, dispersed, secondary, rather than at the forefront of disciplinary concerns” (1).

The article is a call for what Charles Taylor described as “liberalism as a fighting creed,” rather than a procedural fallback, and rather than a negative freedom to be left alone, to do your own thing. I really like this article, it’s comprehensive and clear, with a nice overview of communication studies in its various versions in higher ed. But I think rather than put this belief system at the forefront of concerns, it should also be discussed, made available for critique, rather than tucked into a textbook like The Art of Public Speaking, an assumed, unexamined, scattered belief system.

Bernard L. Schwartz spoke at the Schwartz Communications Institute symposium on April 30^th. “I’m a capitalist,” he said, and a “big D democrat.” Schwartz narrated the financial crisis from the perspective of his own political and moral values, that a company has a responsibility to its employers, shareholders, and the public at large. He spoke about capitalism as a system in which work supports safety and human flourishing. This, I thought like a person seeing something she’d only read about in books for the first time, is a capitalist social democrat. But I heard the story Schwartz told first, not the ideology, the way he told the story was my introduction to a particular perspective, formed by experience and knowledge that I myself do not have.

This semester, a professor whose class I’m supporting asked his students to give their opinion on whether or not technological development should be regulated, if it should be up to corporations and market demand, or if government should intervene. The students’ opinions, values, and beliefs varied widely. I found everyone’s perspective intriguing and compelling. As with Schwartz, hearing individuals speak about their economic values and opinions humanized what have predominantly been abstract or historical economic concepts to me. Cass Sunstein’s point that the proliferation of media is making it less likely for people with different political affiliations to talk to each other seemed right, as I realized how exceptional this situation was for me.

While each of the students seemed insightful, willing to probe and test their ideas against other opinions and contradicting evidence, entirely capable of reflective judgment about economics and ethics, it was very clear to me that this was the first time they’d been asked this question in their time at Baruch. I looked at the listing of courses, and found a course called “Ethics, Economics and the Business System,” in the Philosophy Department, a 3000 level class. I wanted to make it a general requirement.

On a recent Charlie Rose show about Goldman Sachs, Newsweek writer and Princeton journalism and writing professor Evan Thomas was asked if the recent scandal is going to keep “the best and brightest” students from the firm.

April 27, Charlie Rose.

Charlie Rose: Is Goldman Sachs a place that the brightest that the smartest people coming out of universities want to go to work, if they want to go to Wall Street, that’s where they want to go?

Evan Thomas: I teach at Princeton, believe me Princeton kids want to go to Goldman. Oh yes, overwhelmingly, even more now. The message that’s Goldman is bad news has not filtered down to the class at Princeton, lemme tell ya. At Princeton pretty much everybody wants to go to Goldman Sachs.

Charlie Rose: What does that say about the values of kids in college today? That’s a question for a whole other show.

Evan Thomas: But I’m telling you, the mystique of Wall Street has not died, even as Congress tries to destroy it. Kids still. You know why? Cause they think it’s a sure bet. They still think if you go to Goldman, Goldman is going to navigate these waters. I’m still going to have a house in Greenwich and a boat.

Charlie Rose: And a G5.

Evan Thomas and Charlie Rose laugh.

Gillian Tett: But they also join it thinking, I can do it for a couple of years, I’ll keep my soul, and then I can get out with the money. Now one of the reasons why these emails (from one of Golman’s traders) are so fascinating is they illustrate very graphically the kind of conflicts joining Goldman Sachs would actually face. He hasn’t been there that long, he can see the contradictions and the hypocrisy of what he’s doing, and yet he’s still playing the game.

I wonder how much opportunity Baruch students have to explore their own ethical perspective. I’m teaching a public speaking class this summer, and hoping to make it a personal essay assignment. I wonder how often it comes up for Baruch students, as they make their way to graduation, and if professors here would echo Evan Thomas’s “overwhelmingly, even more” characterization of Princeton. I was glad that, from my limited experience, I wouldn’t.

I can tend to read too much into things, but this year I began to feel like the way some subway posters were defaced was asking for attention beyond the usual idle tearing or tagging. An ad for the movie “Leap Year,” suddenly seemed to actually look like the strangling weed the romantic comedy about a desperate single woman actually is. Someone had either tested under the top layer of the poster to see what was underneath, or had remembered the previous ad for a horror movie (“Wolfman”) in the same place. Someone sliced pieces of the first layer of the bright green “Leap Year” to show twisted dark vines beneath it. The heroine of the romantic comedy now looked threatened by the clutches of a monster, and it was the encircling grasp of another movie. Was it a feminist cut-up, or a coincidence? And was I over-interpreting? I took a picture, and showed it to a friend. He said, “Hm. Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”

Later, a sad face appeared inside the poster for the “Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood” show.

And, soon after that, a knife and the same tangled vines from “Wolfman” appeared between Jennifer Lopez and some actor guy in the ad for “Back Up Plan.”

My favorite one (sadly, I didn’t get a photo) was of two morning talk show hosts. After their hyper-groomed and hugely smiling faces had been up for a week or so, the subway razor artist peeled around their heads to reveal much bigger heads beneath them. Now it looked as if huge monster heads were surging out of the perfectly suited morning show host bodies.

Eventually, I put my question to Google and turned up a video and an article in the Greenpoint Gazette about an artist who goes by Poster Boy.

At the Schwartz Institute Symposium last week, keynote speaker Clay Shirky described how the internet allows people to critique and adapt systems and institutions. What had previously been one-way communication (television, print ads, etc) has become two-way and multiple-way (Amazon, Facebook). Sharkey succinctly and compelling theorized what he calls a revolution in communication behavior that comes from adapting to these new technologies. I’ve been thinking of how Shirky’s explanations of the effects and significance of new technologies could also be useful towards theorizing older technologies and behaviors. I’ve thought of public art that did a kind of political, public critique of being a 90’s phenomenon, but at that time it was associated with singular artists. I like not being able to tell when subway ad defacement is intentional, when it is the work of someone who considers himself an artist, and when it is more random. It makes me look at these images differently.

For other examples of subway art (and better photography) see this article in New York S8#%ty.

Michael Jolley’s post on ‘Testing As a Weapon” led me to a conversation with a high school teacher friend of mine who lives on the West Coast. Sooz began teaching English in a Chicago public high school right after she completed the Golden Apple Teacher Education program (similar to Teach for America). We hardly spoke her first year of teaching, which seemed to consist of working at the school, working at home, crying, and sleeping.  Students fought in the halls and in her classroom, and her principal was ridiculous. Proving the truth inside the teacher movie cliché, the heroine persevered, both students and teacher were changed, new perspectives were shared, and the future became more hopeful. When I began teaching as an adjunct at Baruch, she was well beyond the boot camp years of teaching, and the trial and error, conferences, reading, rigor and resourcefulness she’d put in often made her seem a decade ahead of me in wisdom and skill.

I began the ratio that continued for four years of my time as a doctoral student: much class and mentored time focused on specialized academic study, marginal time talking with friends and fellow adjuncts as I flailed around my first year as a teacher. Sooz was my main resource for teaching advice before becoming a fellow at Schwartz (where talking about our work is structured into frequent meetings).  And we’ve shared more of the same problems than I thought we would, since she was teaching high school and I was teaching college, especially in grammar and writing.

Recently, she told me opinion of “The Race to the Top” and standardized testing. I thought of the difference between her experience in one of the lowest rated Chicago public schools, compared to a high school in a pretty affluent area on the west coast. For the students in a bio-tech program, the innovations and approaches she’d developed in Chicago were ineffective and inappropriate. She adjusted, developed, got to know them, and they got to know her.

But she’s been laid off, due to rather drastic cuts. A teacher who regularly teaches AP classes will replace three other teachers in the English department. That means that one person will teach a greater ratio of AP to regular classes than the laid-off teachers did. How might that affect that department as a whole? How can we judge teachers when we don’t follow these shifting contexts? And, if Sooz goes to a completely different school, with a different culture of students, will that be taken into account?

An Atlantic Monthly article described Teach for America’s research on what makes a good teacher: it argues that the common traits of good teachers is that they consistently redesign their pedagogy. How do you test for this, when it seems like precisely the lack of a rigid system is the key to success?

Sooz is thinking of developing another assessment system, one that she designed and planned to implement next year as part of a continuation of her role as Professional Development Coordinator at her school. Fellow teachers would visit classrooms several times over the course of a year. It is a much more holistic approach than grades and testing, and it combines assessment with collaboration, skill and experience-sharing, which is something many teachers do in an ad hoc way already, too many without much institutional support.

photo credit: dcJohn

I think part of the problem is that it implies one-size-fits-all, when individual students are…individuals, and group dynamics vary from class to class. There are video clips in the article of teachers in class, with a narrator who explains their techniques. I watched all the ones on the Times website, and went to the Uncommon Schools site to watch more. They’re compelling and entertaining. And then, the wince factor arises with a description of how a teacher “draws kids’ attention to the normalcy of compliancy, everyone is doing it.” Lots of the ideas on the Uncommon Schools site seem useful and insightful, but I also know that if I tried to mimic what I’ve watched people do in videos, it would be ridiculous. There’s a smile between a teacher and a student in one clip that isn’t instructional so much as inspirational. It shows the kind of particular attention to a person’s distinct way of thinking and expressing themselves, that seems beyond these techniques and studies.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioLDgaA5Fqw[/youtube]

“I think that’s why after citing a lot of research on teaching, this article and a recent Atlantic article both claim that it is very hard to predict what traits make good teacher. The teacher is one part of a huge variable, and one person’s cheesy gesture is another’s brilliant interaction.

I’ve told my students that public speaking assignments should prepare them for the corporate world in terms of how to coherently present their work, and how to be poised, authoritative, and collegial doing it. I’d like to have more to say than this, but less to say than the broad justification of humanities that I’ve heard before (and largely believe). While I haven’t had any interest in the business world before, after teaching at Baruch for a few years, I’ve become more and more aware of how much I don’t know about it. I feel kind of hampered in my ability to figure out how what I am trying to offer (my own work research is in democracy and culture) might connect to their lives outside college. And hampered from connecting what I’m doing to what I guess makes up the majority of their classtime. I looked up ‘what can the humanities do for business’ and found a Stanford webpage from early this year, in which several people respond to Stanley Fish’s (he’s like academia’s Joe Liberman!). John Bender says, “Not too long ago, the New York Times reported interviews with a number of CEOs who connected their ability as managers to their long-term engagement with books of all kinds, including fiction and poetry.” Bryan Wolf responds that Fish is “trying to save the humanities from instrumentalization.” But I’m actually curious about what, in terms of business, that instrumentalization might be.

The Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity has hosted some interesting panels, one on corporate failures that may have led to the current crisis called, “Did we get what we deserve?” And another one I wish I’d seen that featured alumni Edward Zinbarg, who wrote a book called Faith, Morals, and Money. So, I vow in 2010 to go to this center’s events, and meanwhile I’m working on a list of my favorite novels and plays, and the different ways they address money. So far, I’ve got: Aristophanes, The Acharnians, which stars a merchant who argues against an idealistic warmonger; anything by Charles Dickens; Easter, a play about debt and Christianity by Strindberg; Jerry McGuire (money and success is love); and Slumdog Millionaire. The more I read, the more leftward I seem to drift. And, while I refuse to read anymore Ayn Rand, I’m interested in literature that views neoliberalism and capitalism critically as well as positively. So far, Jerry McGuire is all I can think of. I’d like to find some writing on connection between literature and economics. So far, all I can think of is the passage in Capital when Marx talks about the lace-maker’s death notice, and how much it reminded me of Dickens. I’d like to read some fiction over winter break, even though I should be working and working. And I would like a booklist of fiction on money.

Last summer a student in my public speaking class said that “Cloverfield” was ‘pretty good for an action movie.’ And then he said, ‘I mean it’s a disaster movie, which is a kind of action movie.’  I asked him to tell me what an action movie is as a form or genre, what its properties are. This led to a conversation in which we put the film into context, so rather than just sketch the plot, describe a spectacular scene or two, and name the actors, we talked about the form of a disaster film, its history, and the range of locations and themes it has traversed so far.

When I was an undergrad, my professor Heidi Krueger sent us to look at pointillism paintings at the Moma, then read Gertrude Stein’s attempts to translate pointillism into writing. Stein dispersed units of description throughout a paragraph the way Seurat’s paintings disperse dots of color throughout the frame. After years of reading transparently, without reflecting on the mechanism of the forms of writing, this exercise was a kind of “Matrix” moment for me. I began to see the way forms and genres impose structure, and I began to see representation as a kind of translation of experience or thought which is never complete or direct. In any translation there is adaptation, even distortion, and maybe even loss. I guess translation can be alienating, as well. And I wonder if this is what might be partly what is happening when I hear students mimic the style of the texts they’re assigned in class, or the style of their professor’s lecture.

At the Writing Across the Curriculum Conference last week, two fellows described teaching with different forms. In her class on personality psychology Valerie Futch highlights the way research questions and methodology determine results by assigning personality questionnaires to her students. Doug Singsen taught a class on comics in which he assigned his students to diagram a page, indicating different logics connecting one frame to another: character-to-character, aspect-to-aspect, etc. I was struck by the way both of them seemed to foreground the form, of comic or psychological study, and the way this foregrounding moved their students past a book-report kind of absorption and summarization, to an awareness of the way form works as a kind of structuring logic.

I’ve heard the phrase “writing is thinking” in my experiences with Writing Across the Curriculum, and after the last WAC colloquium I thought about other kinds of work that friends of mine have described: photography, contracting, pattern-making. If these are all forms of thinking, maybe we could say that writing is the academically consecrated form of thinking. Or, that writing is a representation of thinking, one that requires translation into a specific form.

I’ve noticed a tendency among students to parrot or mimic the style of the texts they use in class, and I wonder if this is because for them, unlike grad students and professors, writing is not thinking. Instead, expressing thinking through writing might for some students be an act of extreme translation, from the thinking they already do (in forms other than writing) into the form of writing. After all, academics write and read all the time, we think in it like fish in water. Writing and text is perhaps transparent to us, but more or less opaque others.

The conversation with my student about “Cloverfield” made me want to integrate other forms that we all encounter all the time into academic work, as a way to make the structure opaque to both student and teacher, and allow different levels of competence and levels of analysis into the classroom. I’d like to assign students to write “Cloverfield”  in the form of the first few pages of Pride and Prejudice; or draw the argument of an academic essay as a comic strip; or make a news report of a poem, explaining logical, structural mechanisms across different forms.

In my first year as a WAC fellow, I’ve learned about integrating journals and blogs into academic assignments, and this seems like a great way to connect writing to the thinking that students are already doing outside of college. (If we agree that people generally write emails, and read blogs).

Photo by Shannon Ebner.

I could think of them all these forms as representations of thinking. That’s the way that Derrida and post-structuralism has real world resonance for me. I wonder if by making several forms opaque, we might give students a sense of analytical and expressive competence, which could provide a kind of transition to academic writing. And I wonder if an alienation from popular forms like movies, songs, and news reports might work well with an alienation from academic forms like essays. So we could spread the alienation around, and categorize writing as another form of thinking among many. After all, we arrive at college already schooled in, even experts in, movies, songs, and news reports. And with Blogs@Baruch available here it is possible to integrate many forms into an assignment, or ongoing assignments in a class. (The Baruch blog projects I’ve peeked in on, from classes on food, Chaucer, journalism, etc. are compelling to me, and I imagine they would be to students too.) What if there was a class that didn’t focus on a specific content, but instead was about forms. Is there? I gathered from the WAC colloquium that teachers are assigning writing exercises that highlight the methods and styles of different disciplines, but I’m looking for ways that other teachers might be doing this kind of work. It is my current dream class, working title: “Forms, Forms, Forms!” or maybe, “Post-structuralism and You.”

A few weeks ago, I logged on to VOCAT for the first time, and as watched the video of a student’s rehearsal for their presentation, I was surprised to hear my own voice. I was sitting near the camera, and focused on the students as they went through their Powerpoint slides. Maybe because the camera was pointed towards them, at the time of the recording I was unaware that I was also recording myself.

And this made for a kind of unexpected self-assessment, along with the student assessment I was prepared to do. I’ve often wondered if my voice is too low, if I repeat myself too much, if what I’m saying makes any sense, if what I’m saying is more helpful than confusing to my students. And I realized, listening to myself talk to a student on the VOCAT video, that I’ve spent six years of graduate school trying to get better at absorbing what I read, and better at writing clearly. But I haven’t put any sustained or rigorous effort into getting better at speaking.

For me, the VOCAT incident, the unexpected switch of the assessment tool back on the assessor, made me realize how alone I have felt with this part of teaching. The first day of your adjunct job: the door shuts behind you, it is just you and students. A professor visits my class for one session during the semester, sometimes they don’t stay for the whole class. Their written assessment is usually generous and they’ve all talked with me after the class to offer encouragement and the wisdom of their experience. But, you know, the rest of the time, it is just you in there. Talking and talking. Wondering if the students are falling asleep because they’ve just eaten lunch, or is it the lulling drone of my voice? I know there are books and articles out there I could be reading on how to effectively engage a class. And I’ve sat in on other professor’s classes to see what I pick up from the way they engage a class. George Shulman at NYU Gallatin showed me how effective it is to value every student’s contribution, repeating it, rephrasing it, writing it on the board. Heidi Kruger at the New School held me spellbound with her intense, low whisper. Sekou Sundiata at the New School moved around the class like we were the orchestra and he was conducting us.

But, what works for me, and for my students, on this particular subject? I hadn’t really focused on that so much. Which is weird, given how, you know, important oral communication skills are in teaching.  Should the VOCAT assessment tool be turned on teachers? Well, I wouldn’t volunteer. But, when confronted with it, I thought it showed me some things that I should be aware of.

This brings me to the connection between writing and speaking. At the recent WAC conference, several people brought up the fact that writing often, in different forms, helps people become better writers. Speaking about writing also improves writing.  We talk about students ‘finding their own voice.’ One impediment to that might be that students are reading authors whose voices are quite different than their own. Often when I’m working with students on their presentation, I’ll ask them to summarize or draw a conclusion from their research. They articulate clear, original, logically organized claims aloud. But, when it comes to the formal work, they leave this out. Why? The answer I’ve heard more than once was, “But, that is just my opinion.”

What I want students to do, what I’ve heard other teachers say they want students to do, is enter a conversation with the authors they cite. What I’ve seen happen too often is a student articulating their own view, then summarizing an author’s view, using the author’s own style. How can we yoke them together?

One possible way might be to value thought when it is articulated aloud, not just in print. And one way to do this might be to film it, to actually turn the light and focus on recording speaking a thought, the way writing records a thought.

At the WAC meeting, Thomas Meechum and Karen Gregory’s documentary about the writing process in professor Michele Pacht’s class showed students responding to questions about their opinions about graffiti. I wondered if the heightened attention of the camera on the spoken thoughts helped the students to value their thoughts enough to commit them to print. I wonder if I should review the recording of my voice, talking to my students, as many times as I am reviewing the drafts of my dissertation proposal. I kind of think I should.

Last December, Baruch’s campus news posted an article proudly announcing that a professor at our college had made RateMyProfessors’ top ten hottest list. The website lists assessment categories, including the easiness of the class, the rater’s interest in the subject, and clarity. Hotness is given the caveat “just for fun.” A ‘rate my realtor’ website has relevant categories such as communication, market knowledge, and negotiating. A ‘rate my doctor’ website has categories for punctuality, friendliness, and helpfulness. Neither of these cites include hotness. Why would RateMyProfessor.com invite students to judge their teachers by appearance, even by sexual appeal?

Part of what RateMyProfessor.com offers is a chance to level the playing field. The power dynamic between students and teachers can sometimes seem so severe. I’ve had many conversations with fellow teachers about grade grubbing: emails and office visits with students who either plead, bully, or plead and bully at the same time. There is something raw and vulnerable to the badgering of course, and that is what makes the situation stressful and sometimes even wrenching. I sweat through these conversations when they were happening, and they turned my stomach later at night.

“I am not a B student” (or fill in whatever the disappointing grade is). I think this is the gut feeling behind a lot of grade issues even when it isn’t said. And this is what I mean by an uneven playing field between teachers and students. I’ve realized there is a crucial difference between the relationship of teacher and student to those between realtor and client, doctor and patient. A flakey realtor can definitely be annoying, could keep you from the perfect apartment. The effects of an incompetent doctor could have a major impact on your life. But grades affect people’s identity, their sense of who they are at a time when the clay is still wet. When majors are still not entirely decided, much less careers, a grade might seem like a public judgment, affecting your own, private sense of self. When I was in college, the A’s in English and B’s and C’s in math and science told me I was a certain kind of person, they also directed me towards one career and away from other. My students at Baruch have an even more pragmatic grasp of the way grades affect their sense of themselves and way the outside world sees them. They know what grade point average it takes to get into business school, or to get an interview at Ersnt & Young. They have a keen sense that a grade attaches to their fate.

Paolo Carpignano, in “The Shape of the Sphere: the Public Sphere and the Materiality of Communication,” defines the public sphere as any practice that mediates between the public and the private. I went back to the readings from his class at the New School recently, when some recent events made me think about students and their identities, and my own, and also the public/private practice of judging, rating, and grading—the way it effects our sense of ourselves and the way others see us.

In the past few years, I’ve reconnected with people through Facebook and a few have told me they’ve Googled me; to find out what I’ve been doing since high school, or since the last family wedding or funeral. And this summer after a cousin mentioned Googling me, I of course Googled myself. I have an unusual name, so any hit I get is pretty surely me. And there, the very first one, was RateMyProfessor. And the very first rating, above several with comments such as “nice” and a few “boring” and one or two more generous, was a very detailed and sexually explicit post. I guessed, after thinking about it a lot, that a C might feel like the same kind of humiliation, affecting the way you see yourself and the way other people see you. Reading the post made me think that my sense of vulnerability might be right in line with what my student had felt.

For weeks after that post I fantasized about wearing a bomb suit to class. I wanted to prevent students from judging my appearance at all: here is an area in which I am no less vulnerable to judgment than anyone, no matter my maturity or professional accomplishment. For awhile after I found that post, I measured a student’s likelihood to retaliate on RateMyProfessor while I turned in grades. I eventually pushed this to the side, but a sense of wariness remains. I wonder how many other teachers are affected by the site and how we might clear a space for it within the academy, to absorb and reflect with students over what it has to tell us.

There has been some stone throwing on both sides, since RateMyProfessor began to offer teachers the chance to respond. (You can see a striking example from a past cac.cophony post: http://cac.ophony.org/2008/02/21/when-professors-strike-back/). But this has been like a back-alley scuffle behind the lecture halls where we talk about things like the public sphere and the role of the Internet in the academy. Grading and RateMyProfessor.com seem like very public spheres that affect our identities, that mediate between the public and private. But the practices themselves, as Michael pointed out in a recent post, aren’t the source of much open, deliberate debate.

Paolo Carpginano, “The Shape of the Sphere: The Public Sphere and the Materiality of Communication,” Constellations 6, no. 2 (1999).