Bacteriophobia and the Writing Instructor

I am not a fan of Henry Giroux, but somewhere he says teachers ought to be “intellectuals.”  I guess that’s what I am.  Once I went to an on campus talk by Richard Rorty.  Very few showed up.  bacteriaHardly anybody from philosophy, but a few people from English.  One of the English professors saw me and said, sort of dryly, “I might have known you would be here.  You’re an intellectual.”

Perhaps being an intellectual is like being a perpetual learner.  While those biology lectures I attended for my research writing class were boring, especially after hearing them five years in a row, I did enjoy learning about the biological stuff.  But maybe I was able to enjoy it because I didn’t have to memorize and regurgitate it.  I didn’t take notes.  I listened and day dreamed.

Somewhere Paul Goodman says all true learning arises from need, desire, curiosity and imagination.  Biology can excite the imagination.  I noticed for example that some of the viruses looked a good deal like the lunar landing module.  They had amazing shapes. And my colleagues got a bit sick of me because I would spout biological stuff and went around saying that we were all going to be killed by some microbial disease, and if we had any social conscience at all, none of us would use those soaps that say they kill bacteria.

The only right way to kill bacteria is with something like alcohol.  That causes the cell wall(s) of the microbe to burst. Bam! They are dead. Alcohol is a true bactericide.  But that store bought stuff you squirt on your hands kills the bacteria, not by blowing them up, by screwing with its DNA.  You just don’t want to screw with a bacterium’s DNA because those critters are very, very adaptable.  You end up killing off 99% of them but the 1% that remains may have a resistance to the bacteria killer and those suckers will only grow stronger.  Bacteria actually swap DNA.  I mean they are swimming along and for some reason one bacterium just swaps DNA with a bacteria like itself.  It’s like, “Hi how are you.  Let’s swap!” That’s how they adapt.  Constant swapping.

 So I told my colleagues every time you use that drug store bacteria killer you are acting out of your own selfish interests (your desire to not get a cold or flu) and not thinking of the future of the human race.  And on top of that when you use the drug store stuff, you may kill a number of them, but most you don’t because bacteria aren’t stupid.  They flee!  And the bacteria that are on your hands end up on the face of the person sitting across from you.

Also we have several hundred different kinds of bacteria and microbial creatures living right inside of us.  Each human being is a complex ecological system.  Many of these bacteria serve vital purposes, vital to us I mean.  They are essential to the digestion of some vitamins and minerals.  We can’t live without them.  Over millions of years mammals have developed symbiotic relations with a whole host of bacterium.

I had a friend for example who had a really bad ear infection but had to fly somewhere.  So the doctor gave her some powerful stuff to kill the infection so she could fly.  But the anti-biotic ended up killing off all of one type of bacteria.  My friend had horrible headaches and even flashes of temporary blindness.  The bacteria the antibiotic had killed off fed on another and without it there, the other bacteria had gone ape-shit crazy, and my friend was suffering from the “feces” or byproducts of the crazy bacteria.  So they tried to restore the ecological balance by having my friend eat noting but PROTEIN for six months, since the bacteria that had gone ape-shit crazy was dependent upon starches (sugars) for its survival.

Maybe it’s just me.  But this sort of thing excites my imagination.

Microtubules and Nekked Seeds

A paradox here—as you may have noticed.  And one troubling for me, is that, as I have said, the ethic’s teacher was contentious.  He wasn’t the only one.  I remember especially a professor who microtublulestaught in the biology course that had to be taken by all biology majors.  The course covered a lot of ground and was team-taught.

Usually, the course kicked off with a foray into the microbial kingdom.  I enjoyed learning about the complex array of microbes.  The course concluded with a section on botany taught by a man who ran the local botanical gardens.  He had a Ph.D. and was well qualified to teach the course.  But I had to wonder, since they had to bring in somebody from the outside, that botany had fallen into such low regard that the Biology Department didn’t have a single botanist in it. .  Every time, the local botanist taught the course I waited for him to say the word “naked,” because he was from Texas and he pronounced naked as “nekked.”

One time to my amazement when he said nekked for naked nobody laughed or even snickered.  I brought up the “nekked” word in my writing course and found out that nobody had laughed because they didn’t know nekked meant naked and thought he was referring to a particular kind of seed called the “nekked” seed from the “nekked” bush or tree.

 Late one afternoon I went to a meeting in the faculty club about how to teach the large lecture.  I didn’t teach the large lecture but having sat through a good number of them I was interested to hear what people had to say.  The turn out was not great; it started with a multi-media pep talk and then people broke into groups.  I happened to be in a group with one of the professors who taught part of the biological course.

I wasn’t surprised to see him there.  But I was saddened to see how troubled he was by the large lecture, by the low turn out, by the exam results, and he really wanted to know what he might do better.  He taught the middle part of the course about the cell, and while the other male biology teachers dressed in t-shirts, with cuts offs and sneakers as if Indiana Jones-like they were just coming from or going to the field, he had worn a suit jacket and tie.  His lectures were some of the clearest and most complex.  This guy knew the cell inside and out and when it came to microtubules he was a whiz.  You could feel it in the guy’s voice—he had a passion for those microtubules and I think he felt bad that he couldn’t seem to convey that passion to his students.

 The ethic’s guy wrote his dissertation, and when he was done with that, he asked me if I would write a letter of recommendation for him about his abilities as a teacher.  I was happy to do so and it was glowing because he was contentious, responsible, committed and smart.  But, as I said, for me doing this was paradoxical because I couldn’t say that he or the biology professor were educating students one iota.  I could write a positive recommendation, I guess, because relative to the system and structure of things, the ethic’s teacher did a good job.  So did the biology professor.  He cared; he was committed, responsible and smart too.

But there was no way on God’s green earth that these people could begin to educate a single student given the “philosophy” of the system in which they operated.  I at least refuse to see memorization, repetition and regurgitation, however caringly or committedly facilitated, as anything other than a torturous and deadening initiation rite.

Outlines Online

The ethic’s teacher who liked to mix it up with his students used overheads too.  He was pretty contentious, and the second year I attended his class, he announced he would be putting the overheads online.  I want you to listen, he said, to what I am saying and not writing down what’s on greymassthe overhead.  Also, he was a quick talker, and I think he was tired of having to stand there and wait while the students copied what he had just been saying before he could move to a new overhead (he didn’t have two overhead projectors like the biology guys did).

He went a step further and had one of the teaching assistants take notes for the class.  These were then taken to the note taking service where students could buy the notes if they wanted.  These notes—I bought some of them—were interesting because they could serve as examples of how notes should be taken and perhaps because the note taker was himself a philosophy major a tiny bit of interpretation of the lectures crept into the notes.

So the students had three sources to use to memorize and regurgitate: the lectures, the online outlines, and the note taking service.  Actually they had four sources since the course also had a reader featuring selections from Kant, Benthan, Mill, and up to date articles on abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment. But they didn’t do any of the reading.

One immediate result of the teacher’s conscientiousness was a drop in attendance. Students came to the lecture to copy the outlines, but they didn’t need to do that anymore since the outlines were online.  To the teacher’s credit and a testimony to the sturdiness of his ego, this drop didn’t bother him. Possibly, he felt that the students who came to lecture were really interested.

I did wonder what those biology teachers felt.  The first day of that class every one of the 800 seats would have a body in it and the aisles too would be full.  But by the end of the second week, a drop off had already distinctly occurred, and towards the end of the quarter, attendance had dropped to about a third of its original total.  At one point, possibly in my second year of attending the course, they must have just given up on attendance because they started videotaping the lectures, and if you were biology major you could go online and view the lectures.  The technology was relatively new so all you could see was this little, tiny stick figure in the middle of space in the middle of the screen, but the sound was good.

Another result, though, of the teacher’s contentiousness was not as immediate but more troubling in its way.  The TA’s for the course read the first paper and the midterm and said, perhaps because the teacher had so effectively communicated his outlines, that all the papers were alike.  One after the other.  True, a very few papers that were exceptionally well written registered as A’s; and true a few were very poorly written (usually by students whose first language was not English) and stood out as C’s.  But in between, they could find nothing but a grey and indistinguishable mass.

So when students came to question their grades, the TA’s didn’t know what to do sometimes because, upon rereading the paper or parts of it, they really couldn’t remember why they had given that section four points rather than five.  One TA just threw in the towel and gave every student a B+ on the second paper.  This took the students a while to figure out but when they did they were pretty annoyed.

I guess the lessons derived from the online outline experiment became known.  The last time I sat through the course, the teacher had moved to laptop and data projector.  She didn’t however put the outlines on the web.  Indeed, on more than one occasion, she stopped the class and told a student to put away his or her camera because students were not to take pictures of her outlines and distribute them on the web.  Now with the cell phone camera I doubt she would be able to stop outline pirating.

Bic 4 Click

The pain though—as I said—is probably mostly mine.  An occasional student, with some sort of authority issue, might be hurt at the idea that the university professor could give a hoot about the bic4clickstudents’ view of nearly anything.  In any case, if they are hurt, the pain doesn’t last too long; they buckle under and get busy mastering their regurgitation skills.

I attended part one of the introduction to biology sequence for four or five years.  This was a few years before the laptop and the data projector came along  The lecture was held in a hall that could seat 800 and was used for dance troupes and public speakers.  The biology professors had a double barrel shot gun two overheard projector approach.  The professor would talk though his overhead projected on the back of the huge stage, and when he was done with that overhead, he would walk clear acrross the stage and put it on another data projector, so the students who hadn’t been able to keep up with his speaking of the first overhead, could continue to copy from the first overhead as he launched into the next one.

This course started at 8 in the morning and was ungodly boring.  The lights were usually dimmed, and I think that was the first time I observed a student reading the campus newspaper in the dark. I sat there consternated.  Why, the hell was this student sitting there in the dark trying to read the newspaper.  (A) why was he sitting there and NOT taking notes because (B) I could see no other possible reason for being there.  And (C) instead of taking notes (C) why was he reading the student newspaper with (D) inadequate light when (E) right outside one could find plenty of light if (F) one wished to read the newspaper.

This student’s strange behavior made less sense than that of the student, a couple of rows, back who, his head flung back, was sawing wood.  Sleeping in the dark made sense though certainly sleeping in one of those seats didn’t.

One morning sitting in this class I became aware of clicking sounds.  Many, many clicking sounds.  I thought, oh my god, perhaps the clicking sounds are the beginning of some sort of student rebellion.  Perhaps a form of passive resistance or protest against the miserable lectures.  The faster the professor talked the more the clicking went on.  I wondered if the professor could hear the clicking and interpreted it as a sign of rebellion.

Boy was I stupid.  Because when I asked biology students in my research paper class about the clicking, one of them took out a pen, and clicked it.  Red ink, he said.  He clicked it again.  Blue ink.  And another click produced yellow ink.  And final click: black ink. So somebody had made a pen for hyper diligent students that allowed them to use one pen to take their notes in three different ink colors.  No they had not been rebelling; they were honing their memorize and repeat skills.

What Do YOU Think?

I didn’t want to tell those students in that class linked with ethics that their job was to memorize and repeat the professor’s lectures.  The pain though was probably more mine than theirs—the ideaunclesam that writing should be reduced to that, to the “regurgitation,” of the lectures, to nothing more or less than a form of test irritates me no end.

Still, one student said, you mean they don’t want to know what we think.

What was I to say, “Of course not, you addled child.  What planet have you been living on?”  But I didn’t say that:

“Well, some do I am sure.  But you have to be able to speak their language and if you can’t do that yours thoughts make little or no sense to the Professor.”

“But,” the addled child persists, “it says right here in the question (for the midterm) that in the last part they want to know what we think about (utilitarianism, Kant, Bentham, etc).”

“Alright then what do you think?”

This always tends to stump the addled child because he or she has not stopped to think that he or she may not have any thoughts on the subject…

“Well, I think,” says the addled child who then goes on to repeat in a more or less mangled form something the professor said in class as an objection to (utilitarianism, Kant, Bentham, etc)

I say, “Well, then, so you agree with the professor when he said “X” because you are saying the same thing (X) he said.  That’s clear.  But what do you think?  Can you think of anything else?  If not, I would strongly recommend that you memorize and repeat as your thoughts what the professor says.

Listen.  It’s not that I don’t think something is horrendously wrong with utilitarianism.  I mean what the hell is a “hedon” and how the hell do you measure it.  As far as I know nobody has developed a “hedonic” measurement devise.  But honestly, I have no objections, coherent ones, to utilitarianism that others have not had or that have not been brought up in class. I mean, what have you got.  I didn’t make this system up.  I don’t like it either.  But the deck is stacked against beginning students especially when it comes to saying what you think.  Maybe it’s better to know that memorization and repetition is required.  Knowing that might save you time beating up the wrong bush.  Wait, I mean, barking up the wrong tree.  I am just trying to be straight and not beat around the bush.” 

And just as I am getting warmed up, somebody says, “What IS a hedon?”

Self as Fascia

According to JP Sartre, there is no such thing as an isolated individual.  Robinson Crusoe was not isolated; he brought the values, customs and mores of his particular society with him to his lonely island.

fasciaThe “individual” is best pictured as a nexus or node for a highly complex and frequently contradictory relationships with people, institutions, ideals, values, mores and particular objects (such as a car or watch). 

The self is best pictured as the fascia or connective tissues that hold the diverse, highly complex and contradictory relationships in a relatively stable configuration.

The relationship of the self or fascia to the relationships that it holds in place is dialectical.  The fascia of the hand holds the bones of the hand in place and makes possible the function of the hand as a hand.  The fascia of the foot, while making it possible for the foot to function as a foot, will not help the hand function as a hand.

The fascia of the self, however, is not fixed.  Rather its shape and design varies with the function and functioning of the diverse and contradictory relationships of the “individual” to its “objects” (ideals, values, morals, ambitions, skills, and particular material objects).

If the fascia of the self becomes rigid and/or calcified, any changes in the complex and contradictory relationships that it seeks to stabilize and hold in place will be experienced as painful.

 If the fascia of the self becomes rigid or calcified it will not be able to develop in relation either to its internal impulses or relative to changes in the social sphere.

That the fascia of the self is capable of change or more properly of development makes the self susceptible to fragmentation or breaking up as previously concealed, for example, contractions between relations come to the fore. The fact that the fascia will fragment and break up on occasion does not mean however that, as some have concluded, that there is no self.

The capacity of the fascia (self) to withstand contradiction and the pains of development is dependent upon the biochemical makeup of the fascia.  This make up and these elements remain and are continuous throughout the lifespan of the fascia.  While then the fascia may break up or become rigid or change relative to development, the essential elements of the fascia do not break up or change.  That iron may be liquid or rigid or appear in a variety of shapes does not mean that it is not iron.

Change does not mean development.  A hand, for example, may be hit by hammer; this blow may permanently cripple the hand.  The fascia of the self may calcify in a form of scar tissue.  But just a blind person may correct to a degree for his or her blindness by the development of the other senses, so the fascia of the hand may correct or adjust to permit the hand a different form or kind of functionality.

Development Basic Propositions

Perhaps to clarify my thinking about education as self-development, I should state—although I find lists tedious—several propositions concerning the developmental process.

babycrawlingProposition 1. All developmental steps must be phase appropriate.  When it is a phase appropriate for a child to crawl she will; when it is phase appropriate for a child to walk she will; when it is phase appropriate for a child to talk, she will.

Proposition 2. Developmental phases build upon and incorporate skills and goal setting established in previous phases.  A later phase does not wipe out or obliterate an earlier phase; rather had the earlier phase not occurred the later phase would not occur either or if it does so occur, it occurs as a compensatory structure. 

Proposition 3. One phase is not “superior” to another.  An adult is not superior to an infant.  An adolescent is not superior to an adult.  If as Wordsworth said, the child is father to the man, which is “superior.”

Proposition 4. The movement into and out of a phase is necessarily attended by momentary disequilibrium or de-stabilization.  One needs only to remember puberty to understand the kinds of destabilization attendant upon development.  One used to speak of “growing pains.

 Proposition 5. The frustrations attendant upon destabiliation must be optimal.  If the frustrations prove either traumatic or chronic, the challenges of the developmental move may not be met.  That particular impulse towards development will remain undeveloped in an unconscious and archaic form.

Proposition 6.  If frustrations prove traumatic or chronic, the individual may be forced off the developmental path.  His or her psychological energies go into erecting defenses against possible self-fragmentation and de-stabilization.  As the psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott has said, there may exist in our society a gap greater than that between the social classes and that is the gap between those capable of continuing development and those who are not.

Proposition 7.  The possiblities of development are most likely to be realized if they occur with an overall “empathic milieu.”  This fancy phrase is intended to suggest that development is most likely to occur if the trials and tribulations of the person undergoing destabilization are recognized, affirmed as necessary, and understood.

Proposition 8.  Currently, institutions of higher education, while they serve to destabilize the individual, do not recognize the potentials for development implicit in higher education and do not afford students an “empathic milieu.”

I think I could write more propositions.  But these afford a rough outline and eight is a round number.
 

You can lead a person to college but you can’t make him think.

Buying my theory that students might want to learn something requires buying a number of propositions that people appear disinclined to buy these days.  One of these propositions might be developmentthat people want or desire to develop.  I think it generally accepted that infants and children go through a pretty regular developmental sequence; and that one step in a sequence builds upon and around the one that came before.  But these developments one might say, along with the developments of puberty are biologically driven.  About 21—once the adolescent mind had gone through its hormonal changes—development stops.  Adulthood appears, de facto, the end of development.

But not all developments are purely biologically driven; the opportunities for such development are dictated by the social sphere.  Adolescence, as an emotional and moral state, has been significantly prolonged in the industrialized western world.  People are living much longer and that in turn changes one’s perspective (or development view) of life’s stages.

I think that higher education—along with other “real life” situations—poses the possibility of a developmental at the level of cognition or, since I dislike that world, intellect.  The mind, as LeRoi Jones put it, is a muscle.  It can be worked out and further developed.  This is the promise of higher education.  But it remains largely a promise.

 Students at Duke a while back sported a t-shirt that said, “You can lead a student to college but you can’t make him think.”  One might be inclined to infer from this that students don’t want to think.  But that’s not what the t-shirt says; what it says is true: you can’t make anybody think.  Thinking requires that the individual take a step, make a leap, however dimly and unconsciously that step or leap might be felt.

Taking that step or even dimly wanting to take it can be psychological disturbing and unsettling.  A lot goes into taking that step.  In the current system of higher education this is what remains unstudied, and unrecognized.  It takes a lot to develop the intellect, and institutions do absolutely nothing to support students in taking the step.  They can hardly even begin to do so if they fail to acknowledge that taking the step can be unsettling and disturbing.

The institutions of higher education do their part, as I have indicated, to disturb and unsettle students by beating them upside the head with the misery, injustice, and ugliness of this world.  No doubt the human race is pissing and shitting itself.  The full recognition of this fact, however, is bound to be devastating, more indeed that any individual could truly bear.  And with no support in trying to face it, with professors talking about the most horrendous things in detached and surgical tones, students repress and eventually numb themselves to the drums of despair, decay, and final destruction.

No wonder, as I have said, students become pre-mature cynics most especially about the realm of the intellect.  Why think about these things?  They are far too unsettling.  Denial is a much better route, along with concluding that most of what the university teaches is bullshit.

Les Main Sales

Today’s students may be characterized in brief as lazy, drunken, lascivious, self-absorb, materialistic, wayward louts.  And, one might add, lemmings.  I think here most especially of middle class students.  I have taught a writing course several times for persons who wished to doghowlingbecome doctors.  And I must say the idea that 98% of these doctors-to-be should ever treat a patient fills me with terror, especially since I could well be one of their “charges” in my lay away rest home.

This characterization would appear to run counter to the one I have just suggested as their being something like dogs howling at the moon, longing for what they know not, yet longing still.  One is not inclined to think of today’s student as such pansy like wilting violets.  Certainly most students would not admit to harboring any sort of profound desire to learn anything, just for the sake, that is, of learning it.

But pointing to the moral flaws of students is a nice and convenient way of not looking at how the current educational system may contribute to the problem.  What if some of their loutish, boorish, and vulgar behavior is the way their repressed desire to learn something expresses itself.  Repressed desire, as Freud has told us, can result a great deal of odd and untoward behavior.

One might hazard, though, that, even if at one time students did want to learn something, by the time they have reached college certainly this desire has been completely flogged out of them by their prior educational experience. Admittedly, this may be the case.  But no matter how mundane and ho-hum college might be for today’s student, it is still, for however brief a period, something new. Something a little bright and shiny.

That this moment is very short isn’t entirely students’ fault.  Sometimes, I think, at the college level, the professorial desire to fill up these empty vessels as quickly and thoroughly as possible leaves many of them feeling beat up about the head and rendered pretty much deaf to any learning that might come after.  For while the secular university does not teach “values,” it certainly does seem to feel itself the designated spokesperson of the reality principle.  It’s as if, having failed to educate by other means, some are driven to rub students’ faces as deeply as possible into the ugly muck of this ugly world.

I don’t know what else to think, when a colleague whom I respected in many ways, had the students in his introduction to ecology course, itself a general education course, read, as their primary text, a book that outlined seven scenarios by which the world, by the end of this century, is sure to come to an end from some ecological disaster or another.  Or, if that is not enough, one may learn about the ongoing, persistent treatment of women throughout the world as the “second” sex.  Or perhaps one would like to hear about how the United States persistently and consistently exploits the poor people of the world so that we all have more trash to buy at Wal-Mart.

There is shit enough.  We are all up to our necks in the muck; not one of us, as Sartre said, without les main sales.  And the shit must and ought to be taught.  I do question however the way that it is taught and the dosage.