Scaffolding and Revision in Business Policy

May 14, 2013 By 1 Comment

Granted, this is not the most beguiling blog post title. However, I was inspired by Priya’s recap of her work  and decided to share my own musings about my first year as a Communication Fellow. My reflections quickly landed on scaffolding and revision, two foundational principles of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). As a New Yorker I am not a fan of scaffolding. As an educator, I am a big proponent.

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Unwelcome scaffolding in Soho.

I have worked with three different professors who each teach Business Policy (BPL 5100) in very different ways. BPL 5100 classes require a final group presentation on a particular company, but this assignment is presented and evaluated differently professor to professor. While one professor might require a 40-minute presentation that includes an extensive explanation of financial indicators in an effort to determine if purchasing the company’s stock is a good recommendation, another professor might assign students a specific “critical issue” for a company and ask students to talk for twenty minutes about how the company could most effectively address the issue.

This semester I worked with Professor Cornelius Marx and I have been struck by how much assignment design has influenced student work. Professor Marx uses the “critical issue” premise, which helps focus students’ research efforts towards developing a strong argument. The key for me, though, is that Professor Marx assigns a paper in which the students, as a group, write up their research (an industry analysis, a list of possible alternatives for the company, recommendations for which alternatives to pursue, and implementation plans for those recommendations). Students submit revisions to help clarify their argument, add or remove feasible alternatives, and improve language skills. The paper is due long before the oral presentation and receives its own grade.

I asked Professor Marx about his approach and he explained that he’d made this pedagogical decision two years ago to help students avoid procrastination and to improve the overall quality of their work. He shared his perspective with how these WAC principles have worked in his classroom:

This increases the workload for me but the quality definitely improves. If the paper is put to rest before the oral is begun, the oral inevitably improves because they know their material much better… Of course there are still teams that do it at the last moment but the average quality of both paper and presentation has improved.

Because students came to their oral presentation rehearsal knowing more about their topic and their vision for the company, we were able to spend the rehearsal discussing the fundamentals of good public speaking: converting the written paper into listener-friendly speaking notes, connecting with the audience through eye contact and vocal clarity; proper introductions and conclusions; using transitions, internal previews, and summaries to create group cohesion; and the importance of consistent PowerPoint design.

As a former Teaching Fellow and current adjunct instructor at Baruch, I’ve often wondered if my students were really “getting it” and if scaffolding and revising were worth my additional efforts. It has been a heartening revelation to watch a more experienced professor’s pedagogical process and see its clear benefits.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Business, Pedagogy, Uncategorized, Writing Across the Curriculum

Posthumous Tweets, Postmortal Updates: Voicing the Dead in Writing Assignments

May 13, 2013 By 3 Comments

A recent blog post in The Guardian, “Why Death is Not the End of Your Social Media Life,” describes how “social media is…bridging the gap between the living and the dead” through digital services such as LivesOn and DeadSoci.al. The former—with its mildly witty tagline “when your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting”—builds a profile of you based on your tweets, who you’re following, who’s following you, and so forth. After you have exhaled for the last time, the Twitter app LivesOn takes over where you left off and keeps “you” tweeting from across mortality’s threshold. DeadSoci.al, a “free social media tool,” takes a slightly different approach by allowing the user to craft her or his own “digital legacy,” which links to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and would be deployed upon notification (and presumably verification) that one has died.

As someone whose research centers on matters of death and the dead in early modern English drama and whose pedagogy is aimed at strengthening and expanding written and oral communication skills across a range of media—not to mention, someone who’s more than a bit fidgety over the inevitability of her own expiration—I am intrigued by this technology and its applications. While I don’t see myself creating a posthumous social media “me,” my immersion in my subject matter has my mind abuzz with all sorts of imaginings. Will my FB newsfeed someday include others’ posthumous updates? And just what might such updates say: “It’s your birthday, live it up” “I know who’s going to win the election,” “Dante was right?” Will my own updates be “liked” by assorted dead people in the future? Part of the fascination with these new tools, of course, comes from the creepiness that surrounds them—one reader comments that this turn in social media is “pretty creepy,” while another ventures, “this definitely has a certain weird appeal.” Of course it does because the dead don’t remain entirely dead. We don’t let them. They’re part of our individual and collective psyches.

At the same time that we try to shield ourselves from the dead by limiting our contact with corpses (we have created hospitals, hospice centers, and funeral homes to take care of what our forebears routinely did), and by dieting and exercising our way towards death-at-least-a-little-deferred, we remain pretty drawn to them. The popularity of forensic television dramas such as CSI, films such as the Twilight Saga, and exhibitions like Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds series underscore our simultaneous revulsion and fascination with death and the dead. LivesOn and DeadSoci.al extend this connection—that is, the connection between the living and the dead, which cultures have sought via the creation of Purgatory, the belief in the visions of sages and clairvoyants, the establishment of philanthropic endowments, et al. In our seemingly endless quest to maintain communication between the living and the dead, the world of social media—which draws together at least half the world’s population—is a logical addition to this constellation. These latest forays in social media also speak directly to our fear of annihilation and our indignation over the cessation of personal identity.

I’ve been giving thought, as well, to the classroom and how the idea of tweeting or updating posthumously might be used in writing assignments. Admittedly, nothing has really crystallized yet, but I find myself returning to an example set by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Twitter-driven 2010 production of Romeo and Juliet, titled Such Tweet Sorrow. Taking place in real-time over the space of five weeks, six principal characters (Romeo, Juliet, the Nurse, Friar Lawrence, Mercutio, and Tybalt) tweeted improvised lines, which were supplemented by characters’ tweets on current social and political events, and tweets from the actors reflecting on their roles and responding to audience tweets. What if Hamlet took to Twitter or Facebook? How might his meditations on death read in 140 characters? What could we learn from rephrasing or supplementing these vast thoughts within such tight parameters? What sorts of photos would he post on FB and who would some of his FB friends be? Imagine Hamlet Sr. tweeting from Purgatory or Gertrude’s closet, Polonius continuing to insist himself from behind the arras and from his plight as “supper,” Ophelia updating her status as she floats away or as Hamlet and Laertes come to blows in her grave? How might the study of early modern beliefs about death and the dead be enhanced by role-playing through social media and what would these classroom tweets and updates reveal about our own thoughts on the subject? By directly weaving their voices into the play, exchanging tweets, and sharing insights and questions coming out of these tweets on a course blog, students could produce a rich conversation from which to draw their own questions towards a thesis statement for their papers. As I continue to play with the shape and learning outcomes of this assignment, I’ll let myself be guided by the idea that it should stir the students’ sense of investment in their writing. This, plus the belief that their voices can productively comingle with language that is often thought of as arcane and closed off to postmodern ears, eyes, and mouths.

Filed Under: Culture, Media, To Ponder, Uncategorized

Shopping at Whole Foods: Class, Business and Yuppiedom at Baruch College

April 23, 2013 By 2 Comments
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Whole Foods: enter at your own risk.

At the beginning of every semester, students in my speech class interview each other about their life ambitions to collect material for their first mini-speeches of the semester.  And every semester I hear more-or-less the same thing: they want to make a lot of money.  Of course there are anomalies, but money is the dominant goal, at least within what students are willing to share with a room full of strangers.

At the same time, though, I notice a trend of judgment toward certain consumer practices deemed to be evidence of bourgeois privilege.  While I was leading a workshop in a Business Policy course a few weeks ago, a discussion of the business strategies of Whole Foods triggered a set of interesting responses.

A group of students studying the company suggested that Whole Foods sold not only natural foods and nutritional products but also an image of health, purity and affluence. Students were quick to disassociate themselves from the consumer body of Whole Foods shoppers.  Claims of “I don’t shop there” rang out around the room.  A student shared an anecdote about a relative who shops at the dreaded natural food store only for her baby.  Exorbitantly expensive organic bananas received their due share of ridicule.  I kept my dirty little secret to myself: I have been known to walk well out of my way to have lunch at the Whole Foods salad bar.

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Organic bananas for the baby.

I wondered: what does “shopping at Whole Foods” connote in the context of Baruch College?  Is it a useful metaphor for understanding something about the interplay of class aspirations, education and business in this particular academic community?

As readers will know, the CUNY system at large has historically been held to the standard (and has sometimes been seen as falling short) of enabling class mobility for New York City’s working, middle class and immigrant populations.  Dusana’s post back in February asked us to consider why so many students’ Business Policy presentations seem to advocate business strategies “rooted in exploitation and inequalities” when Baruch’s student body represents so many class, ethnic and immigrant groups who have born the brunt of these same inequalities.  At the same time, though, I think my anecdote conveys a strain of Baruch undergraduate culture that pushes back against the idea that success in business fields must go hand in hand with the assumption of lifestyle and consumption habits associated with affluence.

Baruch is an environment in which outer trappings of professionalism are valued.  Students are often required, for example, to dress professionally for class presentations.  For many students this is not an exercise or performance; they are professionals, coming to class after a day at the office, or heading off to an internship for the afternoon.  Of course, these outward signifiers are not neutral in their cultural connotations any more so than is shopping at an expensive organic grocery chain.

If we choose to read “shopping at Whole Foods” as a metaphor for a set of eschewed behaviors within the milieu of Baruch undergraduates, what specifically does it signify?  Perhaps it is a sign of being duped by a marketing coup that self-respecting business students pride themselves in detecting?  In the student’s anecdote, it was, tellingly, the baby only who ate organic products.  Maybe “shopping at Whole Foods” can be read as a sign of being born into privilege, rather than wealth and comfort achieved through education, work, and entrepreneurship.

These anecdotes encouraged me to consider the difference between professionalism and economic success on the one hand, and performance of affluence in culturally specific ways on the other.  Or at least they attuned me to the inevitable particularity of whatever the approved ways of spending one’s wealth are in a given social context.

But I’ll end this here, because I can no longer ignore my craving for organic gluten cubes and $12 local cashew juice.

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Cashew juice: an investment to be taken seriously.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Business, Culture, CUNY, Health, Uncategorized

Just the Entrée, No Garnish Please

April 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

So far working as a Communication Fellow this semester has provided me with a lot of new insights.  As a cultural anthropologist working with accounting students who are about to graduate I think about the best way I can inform their experience as graduating seniors.  Some students are currently working in accounting departments at various financial firms in New York City, while others have jobs in other fields/sectors and will apply to enter their professional fields after graduation.

One day (early in the semester) as I videotaped groups rehearsing their oral presentations, I was left feeling hungry and not quite satisfied.  By hungry I mean that some presentations were lacking substance and I didn’t quite understand what the their focus was because the content outlined and the explanation of said content was insufficient.  Not only did I want more clarity on the subject matter, but I couldn’t comprehend the purpose of the presentation.  I reflected on my experience teaching Cultural Anthropology and Black Studies courses and wondered why do some students insist on serving garnish?  As a self-professed “foodie,” I came up with the analogy of a plate of food to describe some students’ work.  I find providing students with analogies that they can relate to is often the best way to express my feedback, because unless you’re a Breatharian, everybody has to eat.  I often begin with a story about going to a restaurant and depending on the caliber of the restaurant one may receive garnish on one’s plate.  The entrée may consist of a protein, a carbohydrate (in the form of some starch, usually rice or potatoes), and vegetables.  If the chef is feeling creative that day one might get some garnish that consists of ornately carved radish, tomato, carrot, or sprigs of parsley.  Now if one were to consume just the garnish and not eat the protein, starch, or vegetables, one would be very hungry.  I then tell students that usually they serve up a big pile of garnish but no meat, no potatoes.  Meaning, what is at the heart of what they are trying to convey and will their audience be satisfied?

photo by Finn

photo by Finn

Sometimes as an instructor I get a ton of garnish from students who haven’t done the work or more often than not, they have done the work but are lacking confidence.  This lack of confidence prevents them from writing assertively or expressing their ideas in a confident manner.  When I press students further about what is underlying their insecurities, I often get: “Well if I say what I want to say, it isn’t going to sound right.”  What exactly does “sounding right” mean?  Many students feel that if they can’t sound like their professors and write using the same language that is in their course readings, then their views are not valid, and they’re not going to be accepted by their classmates or their professors.  So a paper or assignment that had really “good bones” ends up being just that, “good bones” without the substance to build their work into a body that’s actually saying something.

This semester, the groups that performed well were groups that knew the material but needed minor adjustments in performance strategies.  In those instances, a sprig or two of parsley would give their presentations some personality and much needed lively energy.  In a case where they either don’t know the material (and it’s not for a lack of trying) what are they to do?  Since I’m just learning the basics on IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) and GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) as accounting principles I couldn’t offer them much on content so I told them to fake it, ’til they make it!  Faking it won’t work all the time but speaking with an air of confidence even though one has no clue what s/he is talking about, can work in a pinch, but as the adage goes “you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.”  One group I worked with had very little understanding of a particular accounting principle they were assigned to present.  To make up for this deficit one member said she searched YouTube for tutorials and they helped her.  Now I won’t be sending all of the groups to YouTube but her effort to understand the principle showed me that she wasn’t comfortable giving an oral presentation full of garnish, she wanted the audience to understand.  However in order for that to happen, this student realized that she had to understand and be satisfied with her knowledge too.  As graduating seniors I encouraged them to be proactive in their learning process and ask questions and seek guidance from their professors and other people that might be able to help them.

When speaking to my sister, a librarian,  about the accounting groups and some of the principles, she suggested that I tell the groups to look at some major accounting firms because some of these firms have online presentations and papers.  She also suggested that I encourage them to do research in online periodicals and professional organizations because it’s also a good way for them to begin getting acclimated to engaging the accounting profession as a professional.  I told the groups I work with that I don’t know anything about accounting but leading and consulting on these rehearsals and sitting in the classes, I’m learning a few things.

There are initiatives occurring throughout CUNY that are focused on ensuring students are as proficient as possible in communicating in their intended profession.  During rehearsals I provide students with support by letting them know that it’s okay to trust the body of knowledge they have accrued over the years.  Being able to explain challenging accounting principles to someone outside of the field using language that’s accessible to non-experts is a great start.  Then making the necessary adjustments to present material before an audience of experts demonstrates a command of the material.  It’s providing the audience with an entrée they will be satisfied with after the final product is delivered, and using the garnish to enhance the main elements of the dish/presentation.  While college isn’t an episode of Top Chef, where someone is getting eliminated, these students are graduating and moving onto the next phase of their careers.  Many of them have given dozens of presentations without thinking about the content and delivery of the material and if there are better ways to present the content.

I have found that supporting and encouraging the students while giving them honest and constructive feedback helps them to think about creating a presentation that they are proud of.  When we watch the video of their rehearsal together, I stress that students should think about producing a final product that they would not mind observing if they were audience members, and I ask them: were they successful in achieving the goal of the assignment?  Did they convey the content in a manner that was clear, concise, and understandable to their audience?  Often the responses are mixed, with students focusing on their appearance or the how their voices sound on tape.  I take a moment to emphasize the content-the meat and potatoes portion of the entrée-and ask groups if they were satisfied.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, they say “No.”  However, that “No” becomes a launchpad from which they can assess their content and performance and move forward to improving the final product.  So far, by the time I observe most of the final presentations, students who focused on the content and made minor adjustments in performance skills deliver pretty good presentations.  They deliver something that’s worth listening to and being engaged in as an audience member.  The final presentation is often one that I may not fully understand, but it is still a dish worth having.

Filed Under: Audience, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Oral Communication, Powerpoint and Presentations, Process, Uncategorized

Own It

April 5, 2013 By 2 Comments

I hate when people post to blogs anonymously.

There are several blogs I follow regularly, on topics ranging from Appalachian Trail Thru Hikes to Philosophy (admittedly, there are many more on frivolous topics than rigorous ones). Recently, I was attacked by another commenter who made gross generalizations about the posts I’ve made on the blog and concluded by saying she “was glad [she] would never meet me.” Who was this commenter who took it upon herself to defame my character (on a blog related to clothes, and in response to a post I made about not liking a new style of tank top)? Anonymous. It seems that these days it’s okay to throw punches and then run and hide. Ownership and responsibility have been relegated to the backseat, while cowardice is now riding shotgun.

xkcd: Wikileaks

The vast majority of published content is not a matter of life or death; it does not involve high-profile whistle blowing. In most instances, there’s no need for anonymity. Or rather, there should be no need for it – either you should attach your name to what you’re writing, or you shouldn’t write it. I’m not denying anyone’s First Amendment rights – you can write (almost) whatever you want. But that doesn’t mean that you should. (Keep in mind that you can eat an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream in one sitting, but you probably shouldn’t.)

I have my students post and respond to weekly discussion board prompts. When discussing the assignment with the class, the following conversation ensued:

Student: “Do we have to include our name when we post?”

Me: “Yes – your name automatically appears. You cannot post anonymously, or I won’t know who the post is from and won’t be able to give you credit for the assignment.”

Student: “You could assign us each a secret number or code that we use when we post so that you know who the post belongs to, but no one else knows.”

Me: *confused* “That just seems really difficult when you can just post your name. Is there some reason you don’t want to use your name?”

Student: “Well, you know, so we don’t have to worry about offending someone.”

And there we have the crux of the issue: we are worried about offending people. More accurately, we are worried about people knowing who made the offensive comment. We don’t want any fingers pointed our way.

xkcd: Listen to Yourself

Here’s my suggestion: if you’re that worried about what you’re writing – don’t write it. I don’t mean this simply as “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Indeed, I wholeheartedly reject the notion that we should say only nice things and avoid the unpleasantries of life. Controversial statements need to be made. They prompt us to think critically and question our assumptions – the very essence of philosophical behavior. Controversy forces us to examine, analyze, deconstruct, and reconstruct our own beliefs. It is upon examination of your opponent’s position that you often manage to strengthen your own. Know thine enemy.

Know thyself. If there’s one thing I hope to impart upon my students, it’s that you should be prepared to give good reasons and support for anything you put out there in the universe. You’re not entitled to unsubstantiated opinions; everything you put out there is subject to the follow-up, “why?” “That’s just what I think” is not good enough. Don’t follow blindly; don’t repeat without questioning; don’t just babble without thinking. Stop and consider the arguments grounding your position. Question every premise. What makes them true – if they are? Do the premises add up to the conclusion? Are there alternative conclusions that could be drawn from the premises? If you’re not prepared to take responsibility for what you say and defend it, then don’t say it. To be rather blunt about it – the world doesn’t need more bullshit. And when I see “Anonymous”, that’s exactly what I see – people who feel entitled to spew their opinions all over, but are not willing to own up to them. And that’s bullshit.

xkcd: Dreams

Here’s another lesson: stop worrying so much about offending people. You cannot control everyone’s reactions. There is a fine line between being offensive and intellectual academic discourse. Both are often controversial. The former is usually based on anonymous, unsubstantiated opinions – the latter on well-thought out and defended arguments. Inevitably, someone will be offended by what you say. But if you have a well-considered, grounded argument for your position, then you have nothing for which to be ashamed. I feel strongly on several ethical issues. While I think that I’m correct, and I’m willing to give a defense of my positions, I don’t want my students to take up the mantle just because I said so. I’d rather my students disagree with my views for intelligent, well-thought out reasons than take what I say as gospel. I’m not a preacher, and I don’t want a flock.

So what to do? Be informed. Ignorance is not acceptable. The world doesn’t need more baseless opinions floating around; progress is made through intelligent, informed discourse. What you say matters – so make it count. Own what you write. If you’re not willing to attach your name to it, don’t put it out there in the world.

I’ll leave you with a piece from the New York Times Opinionator Blog: On Questioning the Jewish State. It’s wonderfully controversial, and no doubt many people are offended by its thesis. But there are two things it isn’t – baseless and anonymous. This is what we need.

-Sophia Bishop

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, To Ponder, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

Untitled #4

March 13, 2013 By 1 Comment

A late Victorian drawing room, decorated by the coupling of affluence and taste. On the walls hang several landscapes by Claude, on the mantelpiece are busts by Canova and a censer by Cellini. There are old leather bound sets of Gibbon and Carlyle on the shelves, and the room is dark and fragrant with smoke. Cyril and Reginald sit across from one another with sherry and Egyptian cigarettes, each a seemingly identical apotheosis of the late Victorian gentleman. Their mustaches are thick and robust, their blue eyes powerful and piercing. They are men of extreme refinement and speak in that inflated English tongue where, were either to utter, for example, the word ‘literature,’ he would surely pronounce the final ‘r’ as an ‘h.’ They have been sitting a long time, and twilight like the dark sea speckled with ivory stars has since begun to give way to morning glowing with the pink and yellow of a tulip’s bulb.

 

Reginald: Ah, literature!

Cyril: Yes, yes. Literature.

 

Blackout.

Fin.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:

Enforcement or Intimidation?

March 12, 2013 By 4 Comments

How would you feel if you jaywalked across an empty Brooklyn street on a quiet morning, suddenly heard sirens blare and then found yourself being pulled over by police and asked, without explanation, for your ID?

Well, that’s the equivalent of what happened to me last Monday.  And let me just say, it wasn’t fun.

It was about 9:45 a.m. I was riding my bike to work, trying to save a couple of dollars in the wake of the MTA’s latest fare hike. I was in the bike lane of Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights – particularly quiet that morning – when I heard the sirens.  A police car pulled along aside me, pushing me towards the curb.  I stopped. “Give me your ID,” the policeman who was driving commanded.  His partner was on her cell phone having a personal conversation and she didn’t look up.

I felt immediately unnerved.  I didn’t know what was going on or why I had been pulled over, and I’ve heard enough stories of innocent people being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And, yes, I have read Kafka. The policeman’s gruff tone of voice and demeanor, the other officer’s lack of attention, the sirens, the uniform, and the police car, all of it intimidated me.  What was this about??

I went through my wallet, wondering if it was okay for a police officer to ask for my ID without giving a reason.  My hand was trembling slightly and it took a minute to get it out.  It was a long minute.  As I handed him my license over the body of his partner (still on the phone), I mustered up some courage: “Officer, what is this for?”

“You ran a red,” he said.  I had to take a moment to understand what he was talking about.  Okay, a couple minutes earlier I had stopped at a red light.  As there was no vehicles or pedestrians in either direction as far as the eye could see (someone with a walker could have crossed and with time to spare), I moved on.  It’s what any rational human would do and expected practice for walkers and bikers alike.  I stammered. “But I stopped.” “Yeah,” he said gruffly, “but you ran it.”  I was silent.  He spent a very long time writing and when he handed me the ticket I saw that he had written so faintly it was illegible.  “What’s your name?” I finally asked.  “Because you didn’t—“

“I did tell you why I pulled you over!” He yelled.

Unbeknownst to me, a woman was about to get into her car when all this transpired.  She waited because she couldn’t believe that I had been stopped based on what she’d seen and had been worried that I might be harassed.  After the police left she made herself known and asked if I was okay.  She expressed a lot of disappointment and concern about the kind of policing she’s experienced in the neighborhood.  She said, “Don’t let this take away from the joy of your day.”

“I’ll try,” I said.

But it was hard.  It seemed like many people I know had a similar kind of story, and some were far more disturbing.  We hear a lot about how New York is safe now. But what does “safe” mean?  For whom and at what cost?

I filed a civilian complaint and did some research on Precinct 77 of New York’s Finest.  I learned that in the 70’s and 80’s they had serious incidents of corruption.  I learned that there was a recent protest to discipline officers accused of anti-gay brutality and there is video footage of a policeman turning the surveillance camera against the wall before the alleged attack took place.  I learned that three years ago people rallied against officers who were accused of assaulting a black and Latina lesbian couple.   I learned that last year the precinct was being probed for crime statistics manipulation (classifying a high number of robberies as “lost property” to diminish the appearance of crime).  I learned that two years ago station house memos from the roll call room were leaked confirming that they were using ticket quotas for moving violations.

Riders in NYC have been campaigning to change the bike laws to permit the “Idaho roll,” which means a biker would be able to “run a red” after stopping if reasonably safe.  Unlike the rigidity of the law that currently exists, the Idaho roll conforms to real life and acknowledges the fact that a person like me who rides across an empty street is not necessarily going to dodge past a speeding car or knock an elderly woman off her feet.  The problem with the law now is that it enables arbitrary enforcement that can create an air of intimidation and fear.  Police officers are subject to the vague regulation that they tell someone “in a timely fashion” the reason that person is being detained.  I would argue that in my case those few minutes of not knowing were not timely considering the triviality and commonality of what I had done.  There is no  reason I can conceive of for why I wasn’t immediately informed other than that of scaring me.  But then, there was no good (as in ethical) reason to stop me in the first place.  And I am not convinced this officer would have told me at all if I didn’t ask.

If I were a young black man, my act of “breaking the law” might have led to this officer to frisk me and if I tried to stand up for myself I could have easily been accused of disorderly conduct.  Or if it were night, these police officer’s demeanor and reticence about why I was being stopped would have frightened me more.  If something happens to me here in the future I doubt I would report it to the police. What if this pair showed up at the scene?  Would they actually help me? Would they take advantage of my situation? It’s not really a way to foster police-community trust or communication.    But then, that has long been ruptured.  And it really needs to be addressed on a fundamental level – in ways big and small.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Notes on Saving the World

February 14, 2013 By 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:

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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

A Brechtian Fire Alarm

February 13, 2013 By 1 Comment

Last week I had an experience at the theatre that made me giddy.  In the Foundry Theatre’s production of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan currently playing at La Mama’s Ellen Stewart Theater, Brecht’s so-called “alienation” or “defamiliarization ” effect comes across without didacticism or heavy-handed militancy, and is alternatingly funny and devastating.  But it was a circumstantial mishap the night that I went to the play that added an additional layer of complexity to the experience.

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Shen Te (in red) and various cast members. Photo from David Gordon’s theatremania.com review.

In Brecht’s play, the kind-hearted prostitute Shen Te, deemed a “good person” by a trio of traveling gods, struggles to uphold her commitment to generosity and love, even as every good deed renders her vulnerable to brutal manipulation and betrayal.  Pushed to the edge of despair, Shen Te resorts to impersonating a fictitious cousin from a neighboring town, a man who makes decisions based solely on personal gain, and thereby climbs to a position of precarious prosperity.

At the end of the play, Shen Te asks if there is not something deeply wrong with a world in which basic kindness and generosity are systematically punished with hardship and poverty?  The gods, however, disagree.  They refuse to consider a structural reworking of human society, contenting themselves instead with watching the occasional human struggle to do “good” against the odds.

One aspect that struck me particularly was the production’s use of drag to deepen the central concern of the play.  Taylor Mac’s drag rendition of Shen Te, with his bald head and chest hair unapologetically visible alongside a red dress and heels, destabilized from the start the assumption that Shen Te’s persona is the true identity and the exploitative cousin, Shui Ta, the disguise.  This is not to say that Shui Ta was portrayed as more “real” than Shen Te.  Both personas were disguises—or, perhaps more accurately, both were shown to be contextual manifestations of a multifaceted individual, capable of both profound selflessness and cold calculation, brought out by material necessity.

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Photo from Charles Isherwood’s New York Times review.

Also, I was oddly lucky to see the show on a night that afforded an additional level of meta-theatrics beyond the defamiliarization of character or social/economic system.  Five minutes before the end of the play, right before the big reveal of Shen Te’s double persona, a small fire broke out onstage.  In a direct address to the audience (and actors, crew, etc.) that Brecht would have been proud of, actor David Turner pointed and shouted, “there’s a fire!”  It took me several long moments to realize that the fire was real.  Since the fire was small and quickly extinguished, I can tell you how much I loved the ensuing moments.  Audience and actors milled about in the lobby, not quite knowing how to acknowledge each other, while the fire department checked out the theater and deemed it safe.  When the show started up again, we witnessed an unusual moment in professional theatre: the actors took their place onstage with the house lights on as audience members resumed position, announced they would take the scene back a few lines, and then flipped back into character.  Taylor Mac made an impromptu reference to Ellen Stewart’s spirit speaking through the fire (Ellen Stewart founded the La Mama Theater in the 1960s), before resuming Shen Te’s final debate with the gods.

Call me romantic and impressionable, but this unexpected interruption drew a curious attention to the act of gathering to see a play, and although a degree of momentum was lost in the final reveal, something was gained through a heightened awareness of our collective commitment to finishing the play.  The threat of fire and the attention to safety foregrounded our physical-ness, our materiality, and our vulnerability to external circumstances, further confirming the conflicted Shen Te’s conclusions.  It’s a mishap I won’t forget.

Filed Under: Art, Culture, Uncategorized

Personal Branding

December 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

One of the most viewed articles in the Wall Street Journal last week, Must-Have Job Skills in 2013, discusses the most valuable job skills to have next year. The article summarizes four major skills that employers will appreciate the most: 1.Clear communications, 2. Personal branding, 3. Flexibility, and 4. Productivity improvement. Most people will agree that these skills are important and probably so in any year not just 2013. Clear communications being number one in importance is not surprising to anyone; as we know, effective communications is key in any interaction or relationship, be it between employer and employee, between colleagues, friends, or partners. The fact that personal branding is mentioned as the second most important “skill” is rather interesting.

Employers apparently pay much attention to how employees present themselves online: on Twitter, LinkedIn and even Facebook. So companies’ tracking of employees’ behavior online is not limited to professional sites and networks but also stretches to personal ones as well. In other words, everything you post online and all information about you that is accessible online becomes part of your “personal brand”. But what’s really intriguing is that your “personal brand” is no longer personal, it’s now part of your professional profile as well. Not only that, but “workers also should make sure their personal brand is attractive and reflects well on employers”, advise workplace training experts.

Upon careful thinking, there is some logic to this: you cannot fully separate the person from the profession. In essence, you are what you do; therefore, consistency and sync between the personal and the professional parts of your persona should come naturally. In addition, once you are publicly connected to your company online (e.g., you state in your professional or personal social network profile that you work for that company), you become part of the face of the company (along with all others who work for it). So any information in your personal brand that is not consistent with your company’s brand could hurt its image and you will be to blame for it.

Of course, not everything about you that you post online is strictly relevant to your job, let alone to your company. But your personal brand is a gestalt of all the information about you. And when there is ample and detailed personal information accessible online, the information gets considered even when it might not be that relevant. Simply because it’s there and it’s available.

So what are employees supposed to do? Build their personal brands to be consistent with their company’s image? That might gradually “dilute” their personal brands every time they change jobs and have to adjust their online profile accordingly. It might also confuse their friends and family. Or should employees focus on spending time and effort on restricting their privacy settings as much as possible? But this task will be difficult given that often times fellow employees are also friends or even family. There is always a third option of not having a personal brand online at all. But again, that might be considered outdated and also hurt your job. Because as it turns out both companies and people like publicity.

Filed Under: Internet, Jobs, Marketing, Social Networking, Uncategorized
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