Education

Widening not Narrowing the Path: More Promises of Blogging for Urban Education Policy

May 20, 2013 By Liza Leave a Comment

In my previous blog post, I noted that in the past few years, prominent K-12 education reform experts are increasingly using blogs to communicate their ideas. That is in addition to other avenues more typically utilized in academia (journals and books). I briefly profiled Bridging Differences, an education blog initiated by Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch which has evolved into a series of exchanged letters. I also visited Diane Ravitch’s new solo blog. I concluded by reflecting on the promises of blogs in bridging differences (especially in our very polarized education reform world) and in “writing to learn.”

For this post, I thought it would be interesting to peruse a few of the blogs representing much less global and “voiced” stakeholders in education policy debates: teachers and parents. As the blogosphere in urban education expands, an additional question I have is if and how local actors are taking advantage of the blog format. Excitingly, groundbreaking work on this question is taking place at the CUNY Graduate Center.

A colleague of mine in the Urban Education Ph.d program argues that online spaces, and blogs in particular, provide a new and critical venue by which to hear teachers’ voices, traditionally silenced by the policymaking process. She investigated daily classroom and school experiences via recent blogs written by NYC public school teachers. She thematically analyzed 14 public-facing anonymous blogs in years 2008-2012 to chronicle how teachers are living education policy. What’s even more fascinating was that she architected her own blog to do that thematic analysis; in other words, blogging served as both the content and as a methodological tool in her study. Dr. Kiersten Greene’s dissertation “Notes from the Blogging Field: Teacher Voice and the Policy-Practice Gap in Education” will be available online soon. For more information and to learn more about her blog about her own real experiences as a (now former) graduate student, teacher, and New Yorker, find her at opencuny.org/mediated.

Inspired by Greene’s work and given my own research interests in parents’ roles in decisions about schools, I briefly surveyed blogs focused on parents here in NYC and found the following six: http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/; http://www.parentvoicesny.org/; http://parentsacrossamerica.org/; http://www.nycparentsunion.org/; http://www.parentadvocates.org/; and http://edvoxny.wordpress.com/.

Each of these blogs features parents prominently or is written by parents themselves. They offer testimony and research on pressing policy issues such as school closings, standardized testing, and college readiness. They also provide information on how to get involved and be part of the conversation including signing petitions, joining rallies, and of course, attending events such as the upcoming mayoral candidate forums on public education. One observation I had in reading all six blogs is that the author’s identity is not immediately clear. With the tendency for more and more parties to speak on behalf of parents in the public school system, sites should make the answer to that question clear. I am also not sure how many parents are accessing these blogs. That’s research we need.

In addition to parents, community leaders, advocates, retired teachers, and students are also using blogs. Studies similar to Greene’s should help answer if and how diverse stakeholders are able to participate more fully in urban education reform conversations via blogs. This is all very new, and at the start of this communication path, we should also be asking how we can be sure to widen the conversation not narrow it.

Filed Under: Audience, Blogs and Blogging, Education, Teaching Tagged With: Education Policy

Does Our Education System Overemphasize Literature at the Expense of Writing?

May 7, 2013 By Craig 3 Comments

Let me start by saying that I’m posing this as a question based on my own experience. If there’s research that flies in the face of what I’m going to suggest, please post it in the comments.

Frequently I hear professors lament that students come to Baruch College with inadequate writing skills. This sentiment is not bound by discipline, as I’ve heard it from faculty members in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences as well as the Zicklin School of Business. The latter even felt compelled to create a pair of zero credit Business Communication courses that all MBA students are required to take. This is a Communication Across the Curriculum blog, so it seems as good a venue as any to consider what causes this issue.

The natural inclination is to blame it on Baruch’s high percentage of non-native English speakers. However, I’ve found that the bulk of students who were born and raised in the U.S. come into my classes without knowing the most basic rules of writing, like those found in Strunk & White’s Elements of Style.

Was I supposed to read this?

The first time I taught Journalistic Writing, I was shocked to receive the first set of papers and find that I had to go over some of the most commonsense stylistic rules with junior and senior journalism majors. These are students who, presumably, decided they liked writing enough to pursue it as a career — or at least enough to occupy 24 credits of their undergraduate education. But as I prepared my lesson on what I thought were the most basic concepts, I realized something embarrassing: I had never formally learned the lessons taught in Elements of Style.

Oh, I owned a copy. I had to buy it along with an AP Stylebook for one of the first journalism classes I took as an undergrad. But we never actually did anything with it because it was assigned as a tool to brush up on concepts we should have learned long before. So as I thumbed through the book and scribbled down Strunk & White’s rules to then teach hours later as though I were an expert, I felt like a hypocrite. I was about to go preach the importance of writing rules when I had earned my own journalism degree simply by using one I made up for myself: If it sounds right, it probably is right. That’s not very scientific.

So why didn’t I ever get these lessons? Probably because my English classes in grades 7 through 12 were taught as literature classes with writing as a secondary focus, if that.

I understand the idea behind forming writing assignments around classic works of literature to kill two birds with one stone, but I always felt like I was graded much more on what themes and allusions I could pluck from a work and not on how well I could actually explain my reasoning. This totally ignores writing for daily life — the kind of writing that you’ll actually be judged upon outside of an academic sitting. Explain what your problem is. Explain why I need to know what you’re telling me. Convince me of something.

Clearly educators agree that this type of writing needs to be taught beyond elementary school, because we require college students to take composition classes. So why do students go from age 12 to 18 without having to do any of it? Instead, classes reward the use of big words and convoluted sentences, and reaching page minimums instead of working within page maximums.

It’s widely and rightly accepted now that you don’t teach writing by drilling students with grammar rules, and I’m not saying we should. I’m also not suggesting we scrap literature from the K-12 curriculum in favor of more practical forms of writing. But can’t we have both? Shouldn’t we have both?

Filed Under: Education, Journalism, literature, Pedagogy, Writing Instruction

Be Interested?

April 16, 2013 By Erica 3 Comments

A few weeks ago, at the SUNY Council on Writing Conference, I heard Richard E. Miller give a fascinating keynote called “Who’s this for?: Audience in the Classroom without Walls.” What I found most exciting about his remarks was his description of an assignment he gave a creative nonfiction class: Be Interested. My understanding of what this means is that Miller asked his students to “produce a research project that others would read willingly.” My first reaction was of the “I want to steal that assignment” variety. But as I thought more about the prompt, I began to wonder if a student would be as excited as I was. Miller mentioned that he had students who grappled with questions like “How do you become interested in anything?” and struggled with finding a way to experience curiosity in a moment when information is “superabundant.”

The more I toyed with this kind of assignment, the more I found myself wondering more about what I’d actually be asking students to do, what it actually means to genuinely be interested in something, and what that might look like in writing. A cursory glance at the OED shows that the word “interest” is defined using terms like “concern,” “curiosity,” and “sympathy.” But, interestingly, one definition also lists “to share in something.”

The idea of “sharing” seems central to composing, at least to me. But, often, I think it is this component–that of engaging and collaborating with an audience outside of the “teacher”–that I think might be lacking for many students (and here I’m thinking specifically of the freshmen I work with). To return to Miller’s prompt–I suppose the “assignment” is really to be interested and to be interesting. And, I also suppose that in an environment where students are perpetually in some kind of rubric quest, this probably feels very very scary.

But, on the flip side, this kind of opportunity is one that we should hope students encounter more and more. As Gardner Campbell points out:

We might begin with a curriculum that brings students into creative, challenging contact with the history and dreams of the digital age, perhaps in a first-year experience that asks them to reflect critically on their own digital lives as well as begin to shape and share their own digital creations, both intramurally and publicly. Research into the neurobiology of learning, building on decades of educational research, has shown that students learn deeply when they are asked to narrate their learning, curate their creations within the learning environment, and share what they have curated with a wide and, when appropriate, a public audience. As students understand that they are not simply completing an assignment at a professor’s behest, but in fact beginning their life’s work, they will necessarily become more engaged and produce more authentic work reflective of their own growing interests.

This excerpt is from part 4 of Gardner Campbell’s excellent series of posts on “The Road to Digital Citizenship,” this one subtitled, “Fluency, Curriculum, Development.” Campbell connects student investment in their own work with developing a pedagogy that allows for rigorous reflection on what it means to live a digital life. Campbell also makes the important connection between “sharing” and “publicness,” an important link where the truly interesting might occur through the kinds of conversation digital compositions enable.

Asking students to approach this kind of inquiry marks an important shift in the definition of what it means to write an “academic essay.” I wonder if what is actually happening is a return to Montaigne’s sense of the essay as a “series of attempts,” or Francis Bacon’s “dispersed meditations.” By encouraging students to “be interested” and “curate their creations,” the usual chore of the “paper” becomes more of an experiment in invention or “making.”

It is no coincidence that “Composition as Explanation,” Gertrude Stein’s sonic exploration of what it means to “create a composition,” employs the verb “to make” as one of its central repeated words. For example: “This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen.” This work is also the first time that Stein refers to her sense of a “continuous present” which was crucial to how she thought of her own process.

Education writer Audrey Watters lists “The Maker Movement” as one of the “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012″ and describes the importance of this kind of pedagogical approach as, “we need more learning by making, through projects and inquiry and hands-on experimentation.” When we actually ask students to physically invent something, to take objects and turn them into something that did not exist ten minutes earlier, this is a very different kind of learning from writing a 3-5 page paper. It marks a return to the kind of “learning by doing” that John Dewey advocated for–“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” In other words, when we are engaged in the act of “making” or “doing,” that is when real learning occurs, and that is also when I think the sensation of “being interested” is rediscovered.

In many ways this post feels like its own experiment in what Stein might describe as “beginning again and again is a natural thing…”–I wanted to think about this idea of “being interested,” which consequently was so interesting to me that only now have I realized what the connection is to my own recent experiences in the classroom. Meechal recently wrote about one of my latest forays into technology in the classroom, one that I am still processing. When given the chance to use the MaKey MaKey with my 2 composition 2 sections (thanks to Mikhail & BLSCI), I jumped at the chance, trusting a gut feeling that “making” something physically might teach us something about what happens when we “make” academic essays.

In small groups, the students were given MaKey MaKeys, a number of different materials that conducted electricity, and access to a laptop and told to “make” and “invent.” As a teacher, what was interesting to me was to watch the groups’ progress–many began by seeming a little confused, admittedly not knowing what to “invent,” and feeling at a loss for ideas (or “interest”). But, I also got to watch each group work collaboratively and experientially and ultimate discover the spectrum of things they might do.

And, after the class session, students blogged about what they experienced through “making.” A few sample responses:

“If we just looked at the surface of today’s session, we would see that we were just playing around with the Makey Makey and doing things that are totally unrelated to our English class. However, if we think more deeply, we will see many similarities, especially with the process of writing. At first, we need some ideas to invent something amazing with Makey Makey; if not, we will just be playing and there will not be any creation. It is like writing our essays; we need a specific thesis to write a good essay based on the thesis.”
“Making something with the Makey Makeys very musch resembled the writing process. In class on Monday we were supposed to “outline” our plans and ideas for what we wanted to make today in class. An outline plays an important role in essay writing so that the writer has their thoughts and ideas organized and ready to be written down and explained. Each invention also required several “revisions” and “rewrites” in order for it to reach its “final draft” stage. I know that my group changed plans, inventions, and strategies a few times throughout the class period.”
“For a good portion of our time we were bouncing back and forth between these questions and sitting there thinking about what we should do. I felt frustrated at the fact that with all these tools we were just stuck, it was like our creativity was at a standstill. However after revisiting the objectives of using the Makey Makey and playing around with it, things made a turn for the better. With developing a greater understanding and applying that understanding to ideas we had, we were able to center on one idea and go with it…Relating to writing, when have that moment where you know the message you want to communicate and gather all your information; everything comes together and flows. Centralizing your idea and making attempts towards it can assist in your creativity. Whether is be the next groundbreaking IT program or your final paper, the initial beginning may prove to be the most difficult; but after you overcome that, you will have your masterpiece.”

Filed Under: Audience, EdTech, Education, Higher Education, Internet, Liberal Arts, Literacy, Media, Pedagogy, Process, Reading, Social Media, Social Networking, Style, Teaching, Technology, Writing, Writing Instruction

Nonverbal Communication

April 9, 2013 By Adriana Leave a Comment

Eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, body language – these are all nonverbal cues that we use to communicate, knowingly or not. Nonverbal communication comprises anything communicative other than words and it is an integral part of the overall act of communication. Recently, nonverbal communication has gained a good deal of attention in regard to communication in the workplace.

Professionalism and integrity are determined not only by professional skills and accomplishments but also to a large extent by the nonverbal signals that people send in their everyday communication with colleagues and superiors. However, unlike professional knowledge and skills that students learn in higher education and for which they take classes and get a diploma, nonverbal communication skills are in general not explicitly taught and stressed upon. Just like their very nature of being implicit and subtle, most nonverbal skills are learned implicitly and accumulated intuitively over time.

Given how important nonverbal communication is deemed to be in the workplace, shouldn’t it be more explicitly taught and integrated in higher education? For instance, in business school students learn how to give successful presentations and effectively communicate content. But do they learn enough skills on nonverbal presentation? It seems that this part is somewhat neglected, although in a very shy and innocent way. From a professor’s perspective, it is much easier to give specific feedback on more concrete issues like covered material in the presentation. However, giving feedback on nonverbal presentation skills is a rather grey area that professors might not feel very comfortable stepping into. How do you tell a student to gesticulate more effectively, or how not to pace in front of the screen? Importantly, how do you convince the student that this actually matters, a lot?

One very useful and helpful tool is videotaping, which students generally despise. But it seems that watching your nonverbal demeanor in a presentation and being able to analyze it might be the best and most effective way to improve nonverbal skills. Maybe making the analogy of public speakers or actors who constantly record and monitor their own performances as the best way to improve them might be a convincing line to take.

Filed Under: Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Education, Higher Education, Non-verbal Communication

Fail

March 25, 2013 By Meechal 1 Comment

Failure is everywhere, we’re always talking about it, but we’re never willing to do it or encourage it.

Last week I ran a faculty development roundtable here at Baruch called “Invention in the Classroom.” Many interesting things came out of it, but one in particular has been sticking with me over the past couple days: the importance of failing, failing publicly and epically, including in the classroom.

After the roundtable, a few of us continued talking about failure, noting especially that our New York City public school students are brought up thinking that if they fail in an assignment or a test, they’re failing themselves, their parents, their teachers (whose careers are now increasingly linked to their students’ test scores), and their schools (which might even get shut down if they fail too epically, or even just a little). If our students are taught to always stick to the rules and never take a risk — to never fail — they are going to fail epically where it counts: in being inventive, inquisitive people.

At the college level, we often ask our students to “be creative” with an assignment. Here’s one example, from my course blog, of me asking that of mine:

Almost none of them chose to write these extra posts (which I consider my own failure — one which I am attempting to work through and respond to in future assignments). In general, our students prefer clear-cut assignments that tell them exactly what the professor wants. I don’t blame them. I wanted that A, too, and I wasn’t expecting that I would get it through a semester of botched experiments.

There are a lot of ways to bring failure, and with it, creativity into the classroom, and I’d love to invite a discussion about it in the comments or elsewhere. In fact, I’m already thinking about a faculty roundtable for next semester specifically about failure.

But in the meantime, I wanted to end this post with one idea about how to bring failure into the classroom.

Model failure yourself. Or, to put it another way, model risk taking. Erica Kaufman, the faculty member and Schwartz Communication Fellow who helped us lead the roundtable, told us about asking her students to use technologies in assignments that she herself hadn’t mastered. (One such experiment was written about in the Ticker last week.) It takes guts to go to a room full of students and say (and this is an imaginative recreation of what she might have said): “I don’t know everything about how to use the 3-D printer/video editing software/animation software that I’m asking you to use, and I’m not sure exactly what we’re going to get out of this assignment, but I have a gut instinct that creating something physical that relates to your research will be instructive, and will ultimately help you figure out your argument.” It also pays off. By creating assignments that ask her students to fail again and again, hit a wall, and then by helping them to gather strength, look around them, and move beyond their failure, and by modeling a willingness to fail herself, Erica gets her students to consistently produce work that is stunning, mature, risky, and thoughtful.You can see one of her course blogs here. (And search her other course blogs from there.) It’s worth looking at her assignments, and considering how much risk they require of her students. Look at the “Our Blog!” page on the course site and you’ll see some of the things they wrote and made. The payoff seems obvious.

Filed Under: Assessment, Education, Grading, Pedagogy, Teaching

Did You Do the Reading?

March 7, 2013 By Julia 1 Comment

If you’ve taught a College Now course, you know that inevitably, teaching in a program designed to give younger students a taste of college involves explicitly targeting a set of life skills in addition to course content. College Now is a program through which NYC public high school students can take certain CUNY courses for college credit. After class, I find myself helping students take the plunge into dialing the number of the tech help desk to troubleshoot a computer login problem, or walking students through the various ways they can find my email address if they’ve misplaced the course syllabus.

And although I generally teach the course the same way I do with undergrads, I do end up bulking up my systems of accountability and scaffolding of assignments. I require students to do a little more to respond to weekly readings, break larger assignments down into smaller steps, etc. These little changes have me thinking about how these kinds of accountability systems can be perceived as micromanaging or even condescending, but how if done effectively, they can vastly strengthen learning experiences in many educational contexts.

I’ve noticed I’m quick to assume that the idyllic Midwestern liberal arts college experience I had, in which most of my courses followed the model of “read something and come in and talk about it,” is the educational ideal. And while I took many wonderful classes, some course titles come to mind from which I remember literally nothing. As a teacher, I’m often mock (sort of) horrified when friends—people I view as successful, smart adults—dismissively reference all of the assigned readings they didn’t do in college. But then I remember those long-forgotten books for classes outside my own major that I acquired but rarely opened. What was in them?

In my last semester of graduate school coursework, I took a class outside of my discipline that turned out to have a tiny student enrollment. I felt out of my element and awkwardly in the spotlight. Rather than having to post a discussion question or the equivalent in response to each week’s reading, we were assigned to hand in a more thorough weekly summary/response in writing. This was more accountability than I was used to in graduate school, and it was uncomfortable at first. But oh how I read, wrote, spoke, and ultimately… remembered. The same goes for knowledge I acquired while studying for recent comprehensive exams. These structures of accountability unquestionably compelled me to learn more efficiently and effectively than I often have.

Although being a student (especially a graduate student) means being responsible for one’s own learning, teacher-imposed structures for recording and responding to course content have a huge impact on what kind of learning takes place. Systems of holding students accountable for learning come in an infinite array of forms. They are obviously not only for College Now students. This is hardly a new or unusual idea, but it’s an important one—one that I wish even some of my own teachers had chosen to take more seriously.

Filed Under: Assessment, Education, Low-Stakes Writing, Teaching

Changing the World v. Pursuit of Financial Profit as Educational Goals at Business School

February 25, 2013 By Dusana 3 Comments

On several occasions (at least once a semester) we fellows have a discussion about what for now seems to be an utopian scenario: students applying critical theory, concepts of social and environmental justice, oppression, and other critical concepts in their assignments, such as in group oral presentations of business analysis of a company or a given industry. We usually complain about students’ lack of social and environmental awareness in their roles as hypothetical consultants presenting their business analyses and recommendations to the leadership of their assigned companies. Based on our observations, students’ most common approach to “doing business” is reflected in their primary focus on “how to make the most money possible,” usually at any cost.

What is particularly unsettling is that the business recommendations our students come up with are frequently based on or deeply rooted in exploitation and inequalities to which they, as immigrants and children of immigrants, members of the middle and working classes, and other marginalized and oppressed social groups, are subjected. In my whole (now several years of) experience working with BPL students, I only met one group of students who attempted to develop and propose what could be called socially responsible business strategies that were not focused on mere fast financial gain. Unfortunately, they failed terribly, as they lacked the tools that would enable them to achieve such a goal. Although our role as communication consultants is not to provide support for the content of students’ assignments, I did not feel comfortable not being able to help them beyond recommending consulting further with their instructor. Even though their assignment fell short of achieving their goal, their attempt was refreshing and hopeful, however idealistic it might have been.
When students do consider strategies and practices to be implemented by corporations that focus on social issues, such as environmental awareness (e.g., “going green”), social responsibility and community involvement, being culturally sensitive, etc., I usually find that these are predominantly used as marketing tools only to generate more profit.

A while ago I posted information about London’s School for Social Entrepreneurs, which seems to be focusing on developing small businesses while practicing socially responsible business practices. Although in a very limited capacity, I inquired about business schools and approaches with such an alternative focus and I learned about a relatively new field of Critical Management Studies that does apply critical theory to business including management. Those interested can read more on Wikipedia. One can learn that, in the short twenty years of its existence, this field is growing and developing approaches and attempts to articulate different “voices within the business school, and provide ways of thinking beyond current dominant theories and practices of organization” (Wikipedia).

I would like this post to be an invitation for discussion on exploring existing resources and further possibilities of support of Baruch students’ engagement in critical discussion and reflection on the practices they are such an integral part of. As a part of this post, I tried to find out what the existing efforts and activities are at Baruch College that could be relevant to students and could promote their critical inquiries of business practices.

I found out that the Research Center on Equality, Pluralism and Policy (CEPP) at Baruch’s School of Public Affairs might offer such opportunities, as it aims to “examine the opportunities and barriers our country’s citizens and non-citizens face in a racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse society. The primary objective of CEPP is to critically examine issues of economic and social policies in our city, state and nation where the government creates and implements policies that affect all of our citizens and non-citizens. Baruch students are an integral part of this examination. CEPP invites students to bring their ideas and commitment to social justice to the Center.” In addition to other activities, the Center organizes The Lillie and Nathan Ackerman  Lecture Series on Equality and Justice in America. As is stated on their webpage, The Ackerman Lecture series “invites leading intellectuals and public figures to address major questions of equality and social justice in order to provoke debate and new thinking about how we might extend the promise of democracy and opportunity to all of our people.”

I would like to learn if there are any Business (or Economics) courses currently offered to Baruch students that address the issues of social responsibility, social injustice and oppression, etc., or for instance that educate students on alternative business models. The results of my search of currently offered business courses did not indicate such opportunities. I hope (and wish) that my research was insufficient and I would like to learn about such courses given that Civic Awareness, Ethical Decision-Making, and Global Awareness are some of the general education competencies stipulated by the college as part of the core curriculum and against which student development is assessed (You can read more about it in 2010 Baruch College Middle States Self-Study.)

I am also wondering what would be the response of potential applicants if the recruiting strategies of Baruch College would focus on students’ potential of changing and transforming the world into a more socially just and environmentally safe place. Given our socially (and otherwise) diverse student population, such educational goals might be closer and more relevant to students’ lives and everyday realities.

p.s. During the research for this post I learned from my friend Saqib Jafarey, a college professor of economics in London, that a famous economist, Ariel Rubinstein, calls the students of economics “victims of economics.” He has run many experiments in which he tests whether people who behave altruistically towards others do better or worse than those who act in rational self-interest. His experiments reveal that people who cooperate with and trust others but within reasonable limits do better than those who are naively altruistic or rationally selfish. He also finds that economics students are more likely to act in a selfish manner than other students.

Filed Under: Business, Education, Higher Education, Politics

In the Midst of Fierce Debate, Some Voices Worth Listening To

February 19, 2013 By Priya 1 Comment

The gun control debate is raging these days, and it’s hard to avoid. If the NRA and its celebrity proponents are vociferously citing the Second Amendment and claiming the problem can’t be addressed through legislation, those calling for gun control make the point that banning assault weapons is one (practical and immediate) facet of a solution. I think this is a crucial topic for discussion, but I can’t help but feel that politicians on all sides have exploited the real pain and tragedy experienced by families to advance their positions. For an issue that’s so complicated, the discourse has largely been crude and has evaded the broader reality of U.S. violence, both here — in neighborhoods where children live in chronic fear — and abroad – in regions where children have died by our military strikes.

This weekend, I happened to tune into WNYC just as This American Life was starting, and I listened to the first of two episodes focusing on Harper High School in the West Englewood region of Chicago. Last year 29 students were shot and eight of them died. This portrait of a school whose students are contending with both gun violence and “aggressive police behavior” on a daily basis is illuminating and something, I think, worth listening to in the din. It orients us to the deeper question of how can we keep all children safe and value all children’s lives.

You can find it here.

Filed Under: Culture, Education, Law, Media, News, Politics

Notes on Saving the World

February 14, 2013 By Anick Boyd Leave a Comment

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.

We’re all familiar with Holden Caulfield’s strange interlude at the end of The Catcher in the Rye from which the book gets its title.

It reminds me of something Amity Bitzel says in her section of the “This American Life” broadcast called “Surrogates.” She tells the story of how a 27-year-old man who was convicted of killing his parents comes to be adopted into her own abusive family: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/485/surrogates

As she narrates the story of her father’s abuse, she crystallizes the terror into moments in which her father’s rage results in his breaking all the furniture, hitting the girls with a belt, or strangling their mother. This is the mother that she recalls was always a silent bystander. She doesn’t know why it never occurred to her to call the cops and she makes reference to the responsible adults who never interceded: “The outside world was never coming to intervene, to save any of us.”

It doesn’t always hit us straightforward and sad. Robert Hamburger’s REALUltimatePower is a testament to the sweetness of ninjas. Written from the perspective of a 12-year-old boy, the aforementioned Robert, the website is hilarious. Robert is obsessed with ninjas and thinks you should be too. After all, they fight all the time and they “totally flip out and kill people.” The book that resulted from the website starts out just as funny, praising all ninjahood and even features his babysitter, a philosophy student, who provides “ontological proof of ninjas” in a footnote. However, the humor ends abruptly once the reader realizes that Robert’s ninja craze is really about the fact that he lives in an abusive home in which he is unable to protect himself and so he has created the fantasy of ninjas as a way of summoning those who can intercede, if only in his imagination. The appendix of the book features various documents that make the situation fairly clear. They are as hyperbolic as they are true:

I had a Robert when I used to teach elementary school in France, but his name was Guillaume. He would hit another student named Georges over the head with a dictionary and rant a string of sarcasms about how he did it because he’s a maniac. Or he would eat a crayon in a display of frenzy when the girls were watching. Or he would start a fight at recess. He was always in trouble. One day I passed his desk and as I raised my hand as part of a gesture, he flinched. But this was not part of his theatrics.

Lauren Berlant thinks a lot about what it is for people to be with other people. In her book Cruel Optimism (2011), she poses the question of: “Why do people stay attached to lives that don’t work?” Her question is relative to adults who have the option of choosing other lives but it helps us to think about what people might do when they don’t have the option of changing lives. They create things to save them. “Cruel Optimism,” says Berlant, “tells some pretty difficult stories about how people maintain their footing in worlds that are not there for them.” In my mind, the idea of living in a world that is not there for you means being forced to inhabit simultaneous worlds which are out of sync with one another although they remain intimately connected. There is the given world in which there is the presence of an order, especially that of a social order, its vulnerability being its most necessary quality, which we might say operates by way of Kant’s categorical imperative and the Golden Rule alike. And then there is the personal world in which that order sometimes harmfully fails so that order becomes bare and arbitrary. Yet, one must go on doing as they would have done unto them, however that is supposed to mean in the disparate positions of these two worlds cleaved into one.

I entered graduate school thinking that if this gig doesn’t work out I’ll just go and teach elementary school, as my heart was split from the first in that decision. I always wonder if this is the year that I will abandon my graduate studies and go off to teach kids about peregrine falcons and help them glue together those art projects that receive the unconditional, “oooooooh,” from a parent on whom this enormous gift is bestowed. Maybe this year I’ll walk away from these ridiculous academic struggles to go do that, that easier thing.

A friend was telling me the story the other day of how he spent a summer teaching summer camp. All day he was with the kids, teaching them, giving them the care that goes along with giving them ideas. But at the end of the day, he knew he was sending some of them to be decimated again in those warzones of hostile homes. No matter what he might help them to see through their own better minds, they were still and always going home. He only taught there the one summer.

Holden’s craziness is often misread as part of Salinger’s style, twisting the plot into a sad surprise ending, like some literary grace that solves the problem of his disappointment in life and its systems, of his revelations of people as selfish or shallow by also revealing that he is in a mental institution. So we might consider taking this all with a grain of salt. So that’s the dismissable reading. But another reading is the more cynical one, perhaps, that Salinger writes Holden’s altruism as an insanity. You really can’t save the world. It’s crazy.

I think that my friend didn’t go back to that summer camp because it is hard with the little ones. Who can stand on the edge of the cliff running back and forth without going crazy? “I’ll see them when they get to college,” my friend told me. And in that moment I knew I was never going to teach elementary school.

“I’ll see them when they get to college,” I told myself, hoping they find their way here. Doesn’t Virgil take Dante’s hand, leading him through purgatory, teaching him to make sense of it?

Filed Under: Culture, Education, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, literature, Pedagogy, Teaching, Uncategorized

This tumblr can explain your life better than you can

December 17, 2012 By Meechal Leave a Comment

I’m sure everyone has seen this tumblr by now, but I only found out about it a couple weeks ago.

Since this is a very stressful time for many of us (grading and/or writing papers while mentally preparing to see family or in-laws, etc.) and since it’s also a time of gift giving, I thought I’d indulge myself and you by linking to a few of these brilliant representations of what life is like as a PhD student.

I’m going to just drop a few of my favorites in here without any analysis (how un-grad school!). They speak for themselves. I recently sent the website to my sister to explain, once and for all, what life as a grad student is like. It worked better, I think, than all the stories I’ve told her.

Talking about grad school