Interpreting By Hand

December 13, 2010 By 2 Comments

Whether we subscribe to a specific learning style inventory or theory of multiple intelligences, almost any educator would admit that different students respond well to different kinds of lessons and assignments. Over a few semesters of teaching interdisciplinary humanities courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), I’ve tried to accommodate FIT students’ overwhelmingly visual styles of learning (an intellectual orientation, I should add, that I don’t particularly share).

Recently, for a major assignment, I asked my students to create illustrations for either the novel City Crimes (1849) by George Thompson or the short story “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844) by Edgar Allan Poe. Then, I asked them to explain their artistic choices in a brief essay and present the illustrations to the class.

I felt a little apprehensive about devising such an assignment, because I feared we were sacrificing some course objectives (improving students’ critical reading and writing, for example) in favor of more richly reaching others (such as interpreting literary texts with innovation and creativity). But here’s what surprised me about my students’ responses to this assignment: the creative component actually improved students’ critical and analytical skills. Never before had the students referred so directly to different passages of the texts and offered such bold and risky interpretations of some themes.

Some students have been kind enough to give me permission to share their work on our blog. Here are a few:

Tara’s “Ragged Mountains”

It’s no surprise that Tara, an illustration major, excelled in this assignment; students gasped in astonishment as she unveiled her artwork. (More of Tara’s work can be seen on her website.)

Tara told the class she chose unrealistic colors for the scene above in order to reflect the effects of the morphine the protagonist, Bedloe, had just taken.

Tara explained that when Bedloe sees a hyena, rebelling Bengalis, and an Indian cityscape in the mountains of Virginia, it feels strange and disorienting, but also seems real to him. That’s why she made the figures detailed but distant from Bedloe (represented in silhouette because of his underdetermined character).

Olga’s City Crimes

After apologizing that she is decidedly not an illustration major—an apology that seemed beside the point, after seeing her masterful illustrations—Olga explained that she chose black and white in order to reflect the novel’s bifurcation between dark and light, good and evil; the color red represents “blood of course” (it is an extremely violent novel), as well as the vivid consequences of the characters’ actions.

Of the illustration below, she wrote, “By showing the two ghosts on both sides of her bed, I wanted to portray that she is being haunted by her demons. They eventually catch up to her and make her commit suicide out of fear of shame and capture.”

Rose’s City Crimes

Rose, the only student to use cut-and-paste collage on paper, explained, “I used newspaper for the tree because I thought from this point on, everything was ‘sudden news.’ It is supposed to represent all of the little secrets that grow.”

In the collage above, Rose used a piece of a New York City subway map to reflect the novel’s urban setting, and explained that “the characters in this picture are not facing each other because their love is a sin.”

So Hee’s “Ragged Mountains”

So Hee wanted to emphasize the protagonist’s “loss of free will,” and she found some ingenious ways to represent that graphically. In the illustration above, she explained, “he is under hypnotism by Dr. Templeton, so you can find Dr. Templeton watching over Bedloe on the top left corner, observing what’s happening to him.” She added, “As he descends to the city, he uncontrollably flows with the crowd to where they lead him, not being able to even think for himself.”

I was most excited to see the illustration assignment empowered some students to challenge my interpretations of the course texts. So Hee, for example, first reminded the class what I had taught them: that the story links British imperialism to American expansionism. But, she said, she saw it differently: “England’s occupation and imperialism in India correlate with Dr. Templeton’s authority over Mr. Bedloe’s body and mental state,” she wrote.

All in all, I am very pleased with this assignment. Next time around, though, I will make some changes. Now that I see how connected illustration can be with interpretation, I will make this a more structured and paced assignment with guided planning and drafting, the way I would with a writing assignment. In the future, I would also like to incorporate an illustration assignment like this one into a longer-term collaborative project, like an online illustrated edition of a text.

Filed Under: Pedagogy

Dying on Facebook

November 22, 2010 By 2 Comments

1994 Vietnam Veterans Memorial commemorative U.S. silver dollar proof, detail
Creative Commons License photo credit: kevindooley

“Last week, his cousin announced on his Facebook wall that he was missing and asked everybody to contact her if we’d seen him,” my friend told me. “The next day she wrote that they’d found him, dead. Just like that.” We’re finally getting used to learning about our friends’ and acquaintances’ lives through Facebook. Will we ever become accustomed to learning about their deaths that way?

Since the death of this man, whom I knew only very remotely, I’ve been drawn to his Facebook profile and wall. Friends and family have converted his wall into a sort of collective memorial, posting favorite photos and sharing memories. Regrets at having missed opportunities to spend time with him mingle with frustrations over his untimely death, condolences to his family, and a sprinkling of terse “R.I.P.’s.” I find myself deeply touched by the fond stories, funny photographs, and raw pain on the wall of this person I barely knew.

His cousin’s disorienting but necessary announcement makes starkly visible the line between how we talk about the living and how we speak of the dead. What’s so striking is the tonal difference between his status updates and others’ memorials of him. The “alive” portion of his wall is gorgeously quotidian: he reminds people to vote, repeats overheard conversations, recommends art exhibits and music videos. After his death, most friends’ wall memorials have been anything but commonplace. Everyone achingly strains to sum up his life and impact and goodness. Many, many posts begin with “words cannot describe…” and “I don’t know what to say.” All grope toward a summarizing, synthesizing effect.

In a way, the wall simply reifies what death does: death raises the stakes, rips us from the everyday, and makes it difficult to speak. Because death is or seems absolute, it compels us to make grandiose statements about our dead loved ones. But outside this relatively new world of online social networking, a person’s unremarkable, incremental self-representations are rarely juxtaposed so closely with others’ monumental eulogies.

Facebook instituted an official “deceased policy” in October 2009. Once Facebook is notified of a death, the company “memorializes” the deceased’s account, closing it to new friend requests, making contact information invisible, and inviting existing friends to post memories to the “memorialized” wall. But memorialization also deletes the person’s history of status updates, in order to “protect the deceased’s privacy.” Memorialization, then, effaces that unique juxtaposition between self-representation and eulogy, between cumulative everyday existence and grand but inadequate final remembrances.

Facebook and other social networking sites have no graceful path out of this and similar dilemmas. An unavoidable feature of death is that it collapses a person’s control over her own public identity; any mediation of that collapse by a company will necessarily feel disturbing.

For now, my acquaintance’s Facebook account hasn’t been “memorialized,” and I hope it never is, although Facebook is working on ways to detect member deaths automatically. If he had lived longer, undoubtedly he would have removed some or all of his youthful status updates, and possibly he would not have wanted electronic immortality for many of his fleeting thoughts. Still, it seems wrong to deprive his survivors of those few self-expressive moments that remain on his Facebook page.

Filed Under: Social Networking

Writing, Speaking, Discipline, and Guilt

October 27, 2010 By 1 Comment

True phone
Creative Commons License photo credit: Florian SEROUSSI

In developing a support system for the communication-intensive introductory Theatre Arts class, Hillary, Linell, and I envisioned offering many of the same services that we had offered to the Zicklin School of Business’s CICs—helping the students brainstorm and organize their presentations, reinforcing good public speaking and performance practices, and setting up rehearsal workshops. But despite the fact that Theatre profs assign plenty of oral presentation assignments, relatively few students showed up to work on them, preferring instead to come and revise written assignments in our open office hours.

Turns out, the teachers echoed this preference. Some instructors reported that they are satisfied with students’ presentations and performances, but that their students need more help with their writing.

Plus, as Suzanne has pointed out, we academics sometimes aren’t held to very high standards in our own spoken communication. This all made me wonder: are we holding student writing to higher standards than student speaking?

And such a simple question opens a series of others: Is it unfair to provoke our students’ anxiety with high-stakes presentation assignments, or is that just a part of life they have to learn to deal with? Is it simply the physical presence of the performer that makes us feel guilty about handing out low grades on presentations (and the physical distance of the writer that gives us a feeling of license to criticize student papers)? Since, anecdotally speaking, it appears business professors assign presentations as high-stakes, culminating assignments, and writing as shorter, lower-stakes assignments, is the privileging of writing over speaking discipline-specific? Do liberal arts professors sympathize more with the diffident good writers than with the charismatic good performers because that’s how they see their younger selves? Is that last question too autobiographically revealing?

Filed Under: Presentations, Writing Instruction

Does the University Labor System Undermine Faculty Development Initiatives?

October 7, 2010 By 10 Comments

During my first conversation with a faculty member I’m supporting this semester, I was served a heavy dose of honesty. I asked, “What topics would you be interested in seeing addressed at faculty roundtables or professional development meetings?”

“Honestly, none,” he responded. “I’m an adjunct here. I’ll think you’ll find this is true of nearly everyone who teaches this course: we’re all part-timers, we’re all stretched very thin, and few of us have extra time to do anything outside of class time. Sorry.”

At first I was flabbergasted—I hadn’t even pitched a single idea yet, but there I was being rejected outright! But I quickly realized that the instructor was simply being frank about the difficult situation into which we put adjunct faculty members when we ask them to spend any extra time on a job for which they’re already underpaid. I remembered my years as an adjunct. Because I was teaching at two campuses on top of full-time doctoral work, my commute times alone prevented me from being as active as I would have liked outside the classroom.

The barriers that prevent contingent faculty from becoming truly involved in the university community and investing time in pedagogical development certainly represent one of the many intangible disadvantages of the two-tiered faculty labor system.

While the ultimate solution to this problem can only be to overhaul or at least improve the system, we humble WAC/CAC facilitators must work within the system—and I insist that we can. Here’s how to get even the most overworked part-timers involved in faculty development:

1)   Pragmatism: Emphasize the genuine usefulness of a professional development initiative. Presume that faculty don’t want to come to meetings, and give them reasons to change their minds. Compare the attractiveness of these two titles for the same professional development meeting: “Grading Rubric Basics” and “Cut Grading Time in Half and Double Student Satisfaction.” I was actually invited to the first meeting when I taught at a non-CUNY school. I did not attend.

2)   Resume-building: Involve faculty in planning the meetings. The team supporting Great Works does an excellent job with this: Ask the faculty, ideally a mix of full- and part-time, not only to suggest topics for the meetings, but also to prepare the meetings’ content. This is more than mere ego-stroking; faculty can use this experience for the service section of their CVs. I, personally, would do much more than a 10-minute presentation at a faculty meeting in exchange for a line on my CV. Other faculty will be more likely to attend too, since someone they know will be speaking.

3)   Bribery: Of course budgets are more or less out of our hands, but part-time faculty should, clearly, be paid for the extra time they spend on their jobs. If you can get someone to pay contingent faculty for their time, do it. If not… spring for donuts? If you do the latter, you may see me sneak into your faculty meetings.

Miniature Food - Crazy Donuts Set B
Creative Commons License photo credit: PetitPlat by sk_

Filed Under: Baruch College, Faculty Development

A Lesson from the Stump: The Oversell

September 15, 2010 By 1 Comment

As the midterm election approaches, I’ve been wondering if campaign speeches can teach our students anything about effective oral communication. I’ve been searching for examples to show students of that elusive, indefinable quality: interestingness.

In ACC 4100, Baruch College’s communication-intensive capstone accounting course, students are sometimes faced with a great challenge: to deliver presentations about relatively dull topics in exciting, engaging ways. When students would rehearse their presentations for me last semester, I would often chide them, “You sound like you’re reading the phone book. I haven’t been this bored since the last time I accidentally watched a Kevin Costner movie.” Just kidding—most of my students are too young to know either Kevin Costner or phone books. I would, however, ask them, “What do you think you can do to catch and hold your audience’s attention?”

More often than not, they’d answer, “Nothing. The assignment was to describe the differences between two sets of accounting standards. It’s just inherently boring.”

Of course, I would beg to differ, and we’d discuss and practice techniques for engaging audiences: real-life examples, connections to current events, relevant hand gestures, sincere eye contact, modulating tone of voice. I’d conclude, “You have to sell the topic. If you sound bored, your audience will be bored. But if you speak with enthusiasm and conviction, you can make the audience enjoy any topic.”

I imagine that Phil Davidson, GOP primary candidate for county treasurer of Stark County, Ohio and recent viral video superstar, heard a similar pep talk when he was studying for the “Masters degree in Communication” that he so ironically mentions in his over-the-top stump speech. Unfortunately, in his retreat from “monotone,” he sprinted straight past “engaging” and into “loony.” This video is a cautionary tale: if you oversell the enthusiasm and conviction, your speech could start to resemble a WWF pro wrestler routine.

Filed Under: Oral Communication

Metacritical Cinema

June 3, 2010 By 5 Comments

endtroducing.
Creative Commons License photo credit: dearsomeone

To unwind after a long day of interpreting literature in my dissertation, I like to watch movies about other people performing interpretations.

Probably the most famous “interpretation scene” takes place in Hamlet.  Depending on how the king reacts to his play The Mousetrap, Hamlet believes he will be able to determine whether the king killed his father.  (This scene also delivers the memorable line, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”  It’s the queen’s evaluation of the play, and still useful today if you want to tell someone to shut up in the most pretentious manner possible.)

Hollywood has maintained a surprising interest in textual interpretation as a plot device.  In the spirit of Lavelle Porter’s list of interesting academic movies, just out in the GC Advocate, here are my favorite movies that contain a crucial metacritical scene.

The Conversation (1974) Fall in love with Gene Hackman all over again as his divided loyalties affect the way he interprets a recorded conversation.  Also, be prepared to hear the sentence, “He’d kill us if he had the chance,” many many times.

Rashomon (1950)  Four people give their testimonies of a rape and murder they all witnessed, but everyone’s story is completely different.  There is no “text” per se, but this is the consummate movie about the ways a person’s subject-position determines perception and representation.

A Letter to Three Wives (1949)  Just as they are leaving for a weekend trip, three gal pals get a letter from their fourth girlfriend, who announces she’s run away with one of their husbands—but she doesn’t say which one.  What a meanie!  Each wife spends the rest of the weekend (and movie) interpreting the letter as an indictment of her ostensibly happy but secretly troubled marriage.

In the Loop (2008)  An entire war depends on the interpretation and managed circulation of a report called “PWIP-PIP,” written by a lowly assistant played by the still adorable Anna Chlumsky.  A climactic scene involves a political team’s feverishly deleting footnotes and changing verb tenses… just like the exciting moments in my life!

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)  One of the most noir-y noir characters ever, Mike Hammer, (Ralph Meeker) has to interpret the poem “Remember” by Christina Rossetti in order to understand a mysterious message from a dead hitchhiker.  Detective stories, of course, are always about interpretation in some way—but not usually about poetry interpretation.

Others I’m forgetting?

Filed Under: Art

Dangerous(ly Misrepresented) Minds

May 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This American Life recently ran an interesting story about a memoir written by millionaire Steve Poizner.  The book recounts his volunteer half-year as a social studies teacher at Mount Pleasant High School in East San Jose, California.  Poizner’s portrait of a dilapidated, violent, underachieving school in a stinky, blighted low-income neighborhood stirred the indignation of members of the school community and district, who maintain that the school scores about average academically, has a low dropout rate, is not at all dangerous, and is located in a well-kept middle-class neighborhood.  In other words, Poizner lied, or to be more generous to him, made mistakes in his perceptions of the school.Class Dismissed
Creative Commons License photo credit: motionblur

Poizner’s motives for exaggerating Mount Pleasant’s struggles seem clear: he first ran for public office two months after leaving the school, and is currently a candidate for governor of California.  An excerpt from his memoir is posted on his campaign site.  But the story made me wonder: what biases and motives do we embed in our own representations of what happens in our classrooms?  Isn’t even the most humble, self-effacing teacher story from “the trenches” (as Poizner calls the high school classroom) a manipulation of power, since it only reveals the teacher’s angle?  When is it fair to turn our experiences in the classroom into a self-aggrandizing anecdote for a job interview, a cautionary tale for a blog post, or a punchline for our friends—and when is it a betrayal of our students’ confidence?

Filed Under: teaching, To Ponder

Academic-ish Magazines

April 8, 2010 By 1 Comment

Reading scholarly journals is more of an acquired taste than a cherished pastime. Even the most devoted student of her field, I assume, doesn’t curl up by the fire with the latest issue of Critical Inquiry or devour the pages of PMLA late into the night. Marvi well - ماروي جو کوھIn part, this is because the journal contributor’s purpose is not to rope in the semi-interested, semi-informed reader. Rather, she must demonstrate her erudition. She must meticulously, tediously lower a very tiny bucket down a very deep well of very specific knowledge, only to draw up a tiny new droplet and deliver it to an already flooded field. Of course such deliberate pacing and careful scholarship delight me when the article relates directly to my specific research interests. But when a journal article discusses something other than the five topics I know a lot about, I often wish the well were a bit shallower, the lowering a little quicker, and the bucket a great deal larger.

That’s why I’ve come to love what I’ll call “academic-ish” periodicals. I subscribe to Cabinet, a quarterly arts and culture magazine full of gorgeous, colorful images and polished, thoughtful, jargon-free prose. The articles, which vary in length, feature the kind of geeky historical and literary subjects I want to know more about without being weighed down by extensive medicine chestcritical apparatuses. According to the magazine’s mission statement, Cabinet’s “hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal. Playful and serious, exuberant and committed, Cabinet‘s omnivorous appetite for understanding the world makes each of its issues a valuable sourcebook of ideas for a wide range of readers, from artists and designers to scientists and historians.” Agreed; I love its eclecticism and readability, for which it never seems to sacrifice depth.

I’ve also been regularly reading an online quarterly of what I can only term “scholarly journalism” called Common-Place. It features the research and ideas of historians, librarians, teachers, antiquarians, Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Third President 1801-1809)grad students, and other scholars of early U.S. culture; it also includes reviews, news, and first-person anecdotes. The tone is informed and serious but lively and engaging. In the magazine’s own words, it’s “a bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine.” As a student of early American literature, I find it wonderful—both light and dense, accessible and thought-provoking.

I came upon both of these alt-academic magazines via recommendations from like-minded friends, so I’m actively soliciting more suggestions from you, gentle reader.

Filed Under: Scholarship

Et Tu, Simpsons?

March 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The most persistent psychological barrier to working on my dissertation is not the intimidating size of the project, or insecurities about its intellectual worth, or a lack of time to devote to it.  It’s not even my cac.ophony.org deadline.  What keeps me away from the library is the constant barrage of warnings about the doom that awaits the humanities Ph.D.  Articles that beg undergrads not to pursue useless advanced degrees arrive regularly in my inbox, forwarded sympathetically from the secure, salaried desk jobs of my smug friends outside academia.  Why, I wonder, should I spend my day squeezing one or two footnotes out of hours of reading?

Discouraged, I retreat to the most reliably mindless escapism I know of, a deeply trusted ally in the war against productivity: syndicated sitcoms.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whBrTOzj0Kw[/youtube]

Marge, how could you?

Filed Under: To Ponder

Let’s Coin Some Words Together: An Oblogatory Post

December 18, 2009 By 3 Comments

Each year, the Oxford American Dictionary names a neologism the “word of the year,” and this year it’s “unfriend,” a verb that means “to remove a friend from a social networking site.”  Pretty underwhelming.  I think we can do better.

Last week, Hyewon and David each wrote a post that registered some anxiety about the academic job market.  They reminded me that I need to jazz up my CV if I want to be among the mere 50% of the English Ph.D.s who receive a tenured professorship.  Unfortunately, I have no authentic edge over my brilliant competitors, so I have to stretch.  How about a new CV section, one that no one else will have?  “Neologisms Coined; or, My Personal Impact on the American Lexicon.”  Arranged chronologically, it will elaborate all the word inventions and new usages I have helped pioneer.

Rough Draft

2000: “seinfeld” [verb]: to interpret a real-life occurrence through the lens of the sitcom Seinfeld.  Often pejorative, meaning to analyze complex situations reductively in order to conform them to the plot-lines of a sitcom.  E.g. “This is the kind of situation that simply cannot be seinfelded.”

2006: “prebound” [verb]: to actively seek a new partner while still in a relationship; to delay a breakup until a rebound relationship is within view.  E.g. “I think Jeffrey and Tara will break up as soon as one of them finds someone new.  They’re both obviously prebounding.”

2009: “oblogation” [noun]: the obligation to contribute to a blog, often attached to a job or a casual agreement.  E.g. “The workload is light, except for a twice-a-week oblogation.” Or “I was excited to contribute to Antonio’s blog at first, but it’s become a burdensome oblogation.”

Well, that ought to impress the hiring committees, right?  There’s more work to be done with this inadequate language of ours, though.  Here’s a list of phenomena that still need words: when you introduce yourself to someone you’ve already met several times; when you realize halfway through telling a long story that you’re being rather dull; the weird but delightful way people act on an unseasonably warm winter day; etc.  Any suggestions?  Any words you’ve coined or repurposed?

And, how about a word for a blog post that’s gone on too long?

Filed Under: Uncategorized
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