You are currently browsing the edutainment category
From Straight Man by Richard Russo:
I haven’t persuaded my freshmen that the ability to persuade is an important skill. …[P]ersuasion — reasoned argument — no longer holds a favored position in university life. If [students'] professors — feminists, Marxists, historicists, assorted other theorists — belong to suspicious, gated intellectual communities that are less interested in talking to each other than in staking out territory and furthering agendas, then why learn to debate? Despite having endured endless faculty meetings, I can’t remember the last time anyone changed his (or her!) mind as a result of reasoned discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussion was to provide the grounds for becoming further entrenched in our original positions.
Although I publicly espouse the tenets of argumentation — because it worked on me and for me — I privately agree with Russo here, at least as regarding the majority of people.
It’s been a rough week or so of teaching. My students are heartily objecting to writing a summary and response paper, which involves the following complicated structure:
1. Summarize someone’s opinion of something you read or watched.
2. Respond to it with your opinion of what you read or watched.
For whatever reason — and I’m sure it’s due to my inability to explain things in a way that makes sense — this idea is breaking their world.
Then sometimes, because I try to be nice and helpful and extend the benefit of the doubt, I get drawn into really, really stupid power plays, like when one student usurps ten minutes of class seeming like he’s trying to understand how a hook, summary, and thesis all go in the introduction. When I finally caught him smiling as I tried to explain for the fifth time that the HOOK, the SUMMARY, and a THESIS STATEMENT ARE ALL COMPONENETS OF AN INTRODUCTION, I got pretty mad (inwardly) and told him to get to work on it and we’d see how it goes.
Another student simply refused to try, so I had to coach him: “Well, what does the author say here? Okay, then, what do you think about what he said?” Once we had that figured out, I said, “Write it down.” He said, “I’ve already forgotten.” I actually picked up his pencil and handed it to him, and we went through it again.
The complicating factor is that my students have such a broad range of skills — from fifth-grade drop-outs who somehow wrangled GEDs to experienced, albeit drop-out college students. One student put his head down, did the entire lesson and wrote his paper during the two-hour class; another got maybe five sentences.
It is so incredibly frustrating some days. I love teaching — I love teaching at the pen more than anywhere else I’ve taught. I want my students to learn this stuff, to challenge themselves, and to write successfully and think critically. But I’m not sure they are.
10. If I can’t read their writing, I don’t have to read their papers.
9. Relatedly, I get a refresher on what cursive looks like. Some of my students quit school in fifth grade and think that cursive is how everyone writes. (Seriously, cursive still exists?)
8. I don’t have the problem of Blogger marking my students’ blogs as spam. Yay?
7. When my students lose interest, it’s because I’ve genuinely bored them — not because they got distracted by texting under the desk. (BTW, traditional students: it is so totally obvious when you’re doing this. That’s why I call on you when I do.)
6. I save my back the pressure of trudging around with a laptop.
5. My students can’t instantly fact-check me with their BlackBerrys and iPhones.
4. There aren’t any hard-drive-ate-my-homework stories.
3. I don’t catch them turning Safe Search off and “accidentally” “running across” porn while doing “Internet research.”
2. Three words: No fucking ringtones.
1. I don’t have to worry about what they say on RateMyProfessor.com.
Yay = short for “Hooray!”
Yea = “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”
Yeah = “yes,” but casual/slang
Yah = NOT A WORD, unless you want to sound like you’re saying “Ja” in German, and you continue with “das ist gud,” and then you chug a beer and eat a sausage at the same time
Yar = “yes” in Piratespeak
Yup, yep = “yes” in Redneck
Yuppers = “Yeah, I am an idiot”
Go ye therefore and not be stupid.
I’ll say this right off the bat: it’s not nearly the same thing, but four years of boarding high school isn’t bad training for working at a prison.
I don’t particularly want to blog about work in any way that might jeopardize my job, but I’ll say a bit about the sensory experience of working at the pen.
Before that, however, I want to tell you something a student told me last night. We had five minutes left in the period, so I asked my students about what life at the pen was like. They told me what their cells were like, how they might spend a day. As the gate call sounded, they got up and left. One student lingered and said, “It’s better being ignorant.” I asked what he meant. “You really don’t want to know,” he said. “I’ll write it all down and you can read it, but you really don’t want to know.”
I’ve been pondering that. Thanks to my abundant curiosity, and excluding lurid details of others’ sexual lives and escapades, there’s rarely anything I don’t want to know. I find it hard to believe anything here, and I wonder if that’s true for my students as well.
However, I imagine there are things some of you might want to know — not about their lives, because I wouldn’t divulge that — but about my working environment, so here are a few details.
After parking my car, I walk up to the main complex, lock my keys and wallet in a lockbox, and continue through a maze of hallways and into the education wing. In total I go through ten doors, none of which I have the key to. Not all of them are locked: some are normal doors, and others are guarded and I have to show ID to get through. Sometimes I have to go through a metal detector, and my bag — which has to be of a cloth material — is always scanned. I’ve already been fingerprinted and background-checked in order to work here, so I guess Big Brother is getting to know me pretty well.
Everything is beige: the walls, the ceiling, the painted iron doors, the newly waxed floor in the education wing. I imagine but do not know this to be done with purpose: white would be jarring, might even drive you crazy with its starkness; black, I suppose, could connote dark thoughts and ideas; but beige lulls you into a state of somnolence, of mindlessness. I really don’t recommend it for educational settings. I think I’d prefer a nice green — neither hospital green or Forest-Service green, but maybe a thoughtful deep avacado color.
My students wear khaki pants and white t-shirts; I wear business attire, including my nemesis, closed-toed shoes; all of us wear badges on the left side of the front of our shirts.
Truthfully, the prison doesn’t smell a particular way. However, I was up once when they were cleaning and I could smell bleach, and now I always think I smell it, even when I don’t. I also sometimes think I can smell the beige walls, which is a muddy mix of concrete and paint, and somehow the smells seem to offset in my mind: bleach vs. paint and concrete. Maybe that’s why I smell nothing, because amidst the hallways of brick and beige, there isn’t a lot of anything.
The floor security guard is there before I arrive and after I leave. She seems to jangle when she walks, but I don’t know if she actually does or if I just imagine that with all the keys she has, she must. She’s a very nice woman who could no doubt beat the shit out of me with her earlobe. I bet her earlobe was always picked first for team sports in grade school.
Class lasts between two and two-and-a-half hours, depending on when the gates open and close. It’s a long time, and last night I found myself thirsty, but I’m pretty sure I’ll need to blink first in a staring contest with Death before I’ll drink from the lonely fountain outside the students’ bathroom.
The air temperature was warm last night, and I was tempted to remove my blazer since I was wearing a pretty conservative blouse under it, but trust me — there is not enough antiperspirant in the world for this job.
Our classroom is a fairly long room with about 15 desks and 10 computer terminals. It is divided lengthwise by an iron mesh see-through wall that locks us out of the library, if you can call it that, seeing as how it only holds about a hundred books, most of which appear to have been written mid-20th century. It’s a library that would make a librarian sob over its orphaned books and empty shelves; as a writing teacher, I’m not quite that hardcore and I merely feel revulsion.
The teacher’s desk is one of those heavy metal kinds. I think it’s olive in color, and I’d like to find and hang out the window by his toenails the guy who made this ubiquitous institutional style. Then I’d like to make him be solely responsible for moving the behemoths every time a department relocates or is remodeled.
My students’ desks are individual small tables, and we all have comfortable swivel chairs on rollers. It’s very obvious where budget allowances have been made, and I’m thankful for good chairs, even though I spend a lot of the time on my feet.
So, that’s a little what my job looks and feels like. If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Clever teenager takes on the establishment and (usually) wins? The media uses its platform to mock itself? A family of doctors is dysfunctional? And really, what is wrong with cowboys in spaceships? Well, the problem with those ideas is that they were the premises of shows I liked, and they all got canceled, usually within one season but inevitably right around the time I start liking them (Veronica Mars, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Out of Practice, Firefly). Obviously this is because they have intelligent writing, and the rest of America is much more pedestrian in its taste –
[...See, I wrote that ironically, but then couldn't bring myself to delete it, which means that I believe it to be true, at least to a significant degree. ]
Anyway, shows I like get canceled, and there’s nothing like getting 18 episodes into Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on Hulu before bothering to look it up on IMDB, only to find that, yeah, I’ve got four more episodes and that’s it. The end. Kaput.
I’m sure you could lump any five shows together and find commonalities, and other bloggers who are more in touch with current culture could weigh in with more credibility, but I find a couple of these shows — Veronica Mars and Studio 60, at minimum — to be the types of shows that deal with current cultural issues in a way that is more relevant than any print or television entertainment news. Veronica Mars hit on an uncountable number of issues, not limited to teen sexuality and virginity, racism and being Arab in America, class warfare between the haves and the have-nots, underage drinking, binge drinking, Christianity, and much more; Studio 60 took those same issues and gave them a primetime adult venue. Moreover, Studio 60 attempted to put a right-wing Christian in a starring role, a fabulous setup for culture war plotlines between her and her left-wing co-stars.
Both critically acclaimed shows? Canceled.
Unless you’ve been backpacking the Appalachian Trail for the past 12 months (euphemistically or not), you’ve noticed that America has entered another culture war — or perhaps our ongoing war has deepened; one that is flamed by intolerance and bigotry. Shows that attempt to confront the crazy — which is on both sides, albeit moreso on the right these days — don’t succeed because they’re up against mindless blather and reality television that showcases humanity at its worst. We are a tabloid civilization and only a few people are willing to think about the issues dividing us.
Consider the following NBC breakdown of Studio 60’s viewers (bolding is mine):
“Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” is averaging a 4.0 rating, 9 share in adults 18-49 and 9.8 million viewers overall (through November 6) and has increased its rating week-to-week in 18-49 with each of its last two telecasts. “Studio 60″ has consistently delivered some of the highest audience concentrations among all primetime network series in such key upscale categories as adults 18-49 living in homes with $75,000-plus and $100,000-plus incomes and in homes where the head of household has four or more years of college.
I am not making the point that people who with more education are “smarter” than people with less education, but I have found that people with more education tend to be more willing to confront issues like racism and classism to find out why the exist: what feeds them, what drives them, and treat the problem, as opposed to people who would rather either ignore the issues altogether and pretend they don’t exist, or treat the symptoms instead of the underlying condition. So when I see that Studio 60 had a relatively educated audience, I wonder what it would take to get less educated people to consider the culturally divisive issues of our day. And somehow, I don’t think the answer is reality television, whose producers prefer the lurid to the thoughtful and the pithy 20-second tearful endings to any investigation or real discussion.
*
I suppose you could dismiss this as the rant of an overeducated English major who’s bitter that her shows get canceled, but I hope you won’t. We’re seeing more and more evidence that America’s divide is growing, and although I am loathe to give credibility to feelings (emotions can be stupidly misleading), I can’t help but feel that this build-up isn’t going to be solved by presidential speeches; if at all, it’s going to be deflated with water-cooler conversations. A catalyst for this could be intelligent television, if only we could have some.
Some days, I feel like I’m just an angry fifth-grader looking for a fight. It’s a stage I never had, looking for schoolyard fights, but now I’d sure love to give it a try. I blame my brother, the only person capable of provoking me with the merest twitch of an eyebrow. What I wouldn’t give to . . .
Ahem.
Never mind.
Today, however, I find myself restless and angry, restless because I have all this pent up argumentation and no one to share it with (tangent: while intelligent and an excellent, thoughtful person in general, the husband avoids all types of argument, so I usually have no one on which to vent my spleen), and angry because of the utter inability of so many people in this world to have a rational discussion. Here’s what I envision a rational discussion looking like:
Person 1: I believe X
Person 2: Why?
Person 1: Because A, B, C . . .
Person 2: I can see A and C, but I disagree with B. Here’s why . . .
Person 1: Ah, but you are misconstruing B because . . .
In other words, YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING ENGAGE EACH OTHER. None of this avoidance shit, this stuff where you deflect and purposefully misconstrue and pretend to take offense, hoping that the other person will back off. None of the condescending “You missed the point . . .” or the watery attempt at common ground — and by the way it’s a hell of a lot easier to find common ground after you’ve figured out how far apart you are from each other, IMHO.
What happened to debate? Where has the ability to engage and rationalize gone? Are we so sensitive that a direct question is too uncomfortable? I’ll admit my skills are rusty — I come off far too strongly, even when I restrain myself — but with a little practice, I could get back into shape. I believe we can debate, and argue, and come to understand each other better, if we’d at least give it a fucking try.
Am celebrating final week in graduate school by alternating head from side to side in pointless attempt to level off sinus pressure. World’s Swiftest Cold set in yesterday evening; by midnight couldn’t sleep for aches, sniffles, pressure, etc. so took World’s Largest Dose of NyQuil and was out like a lightbulb an hour later. Mouth is all cottony now, though, and brain equally fuzzy. Hmm.
In other news, tomorrow is MY LAST TUESDAY IN PULLCOW and Thursday is MY LAST THURSDAY IN PULLCOW and holy tomatoes, people: THREE MORE DAYS AND I’M DONE WITH GRADUATE SCHOOL. Sure, I have to write a paper and grade a set of papers and enter grades after that, but no more commuting.
A rough estimate of the miles I’ve put on the poor Prius is 23,000 in the last two years, just commuting; a rough estimate of the gas money on said commute is around $2,000. Still, I made just enough money to pay the mortgage and my travel expenses every month. So while I wasn’t saving, I wasn’t taking us into debt, either.
And now…now I’ve got to find a job.
Am slogging through Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, as well as her companion species and monsters pieces. Due to an incident with the library, I don’t have a book. Fortunately, Google books, the Interweb, and a Xerox machine will help me read through her stuff anyway. (And by “read” I mean skim, and wish I understood what the hell she’s talking about.)
Anyway, this entry is just to say: I am reading Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto in a coffee shop in a college town whilst wearing a skirt, Tevas, and with braids in my (non-bangs-ed) hair. I have never felt so much like a graduate student. How fitting that the feeling should arrive when I’m only one for eight more days.
Tomorrow I defend for my M.A., so today I’ve been pondering the thought of me and three people way smarter than me in a room for two hours. There is not enough antiperspirant in the world….
My comment got published on a blog post on ESPN! It’s not the most brilliant analysis but I think I got points for being succinct.
TWENTY-NINE DAYS, BITCHES. Less than a month until the end of this whole graduate school thing. Most intelligent people in my cohort took one look at the economy and doubled the amount of PhD applications they sent BUT NOT ME; no, I imagined four years of life worse than these past two and decided that I’d prefer being unemployed and living in a cardboard box to further studenting.
The following are my plans for getting some type of job thingy:
- Pester the writing coordinator at University A until she gives me a job
- Actually send the job application to College B
- Buy printer cartridges in order to print application to send to College B
- Think about applying for jobs at College C, but decide against it for fear that my students would be smarter than me
- Apply for anything that comes up in the local newspaper employment ads; being a barista wouldn’t be so bad…or maybe I could learn about wine and become a tasting room consultant? that’d put my M.A. to use…
- Try to drum up some freelance writing/editing/proofreading business to finance my gardening this summer
It’ll be marvelous, not having a job.
In the meantime, the whole twenty-nine days thing has become a problem because I just no longer care. I want to be done. Have rearranged most of my classes so the class does a lot of group/teamwork and I do very little lecturing or grading. And only four more books to read and one term paper to write, which is the crux of my current angst: could throw the book I’m currently reading across the room: it’s written by a theoretical physicist who, in spite of that major professional shortcoming, manages to write clearly if condescendingly about “discourse” and “textuality” and other stuff I just don’t give a shit about.
I want to be done! I want to build a fence! to read books I actually enjoy! to see my friends in London! to go to Greece and eat feta and chickpea stew and explore churches and ruins, and neverever come back!
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »