Category Archives: Students Today

Development Basic Propositions

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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.

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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

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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.

Dogs Can Read! And, thus, have the right to do so.

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During one of those ethics classes, I sat through one of the strangest “discussions” I have ever heard.  The course was taught for a couple of years by a good guy who liked to mix it up a bit with the students and was pretty quick on his feet.  I don’t remember the overall context of the dogreadingdiscussion, but at one point he said, in effect, a person cannot be said to have or be given a right if the person cannot exercise that right.  For example, it makes no sense to say a person has the right to jump over a building if he or she cannot jump over a building, or to say that a dog has a right to read when I dog is not capable of reading.

A bit later, as the class came towards it close, the instructor entertained questions and it became clear through a little give and take that some number of students did not agree with the assertion that a dog does not have the right to read even though it cannot read.  The instructor cleverly turned his questioning this way and that to get at the core of the students’ objection to the assertion.  But the core was not forthcoming.  I was caught up in the mystery and, having raised my hand said, perhaps people are thinking that, while a person does not the right to drink till he or she is 21, clearly he or she can drink and therefore ought to have the right.

My attempt at opening Aladdin’s lamp however seemed to fall on deaf ears.  I had thrown my bread on the water but nobody rose to the bait.  The instructor plodded on until finally, he uttered one of the strangest sentences I have heard uttered in an academic setting, “We all do agree, don’t we, that dogs cannot read!”

“Well,” they do look at the TV set, one student dumbly replied.  Yea, intoned another, “How do we know dogs can’t read.”  I am convinced that people can get trapped in a web of words, of false distinctions and empty jargon, of such power that they are sometimes led by the “logic” of that “discourse” to say and to believe the most amazingly absurd things.  We all tend towards the solipsistic; only ongoing vigilance, effort, and the exercise of imagination keeps us from succumbing to it completely.

But this was something different.  This approached something like a willfully and defiantly maintained delusion.  I chewed on this case for some considerable time off and on over the years after.  Eventually I came to understand the event more psychologically.  The students clearly identified with dogs.  Were they saying, as if from the depths of their unconscious, we are, in this class, like dogs.  We cannot read either; we cannot make out any meaning in what we have been asked to read.  We cannot understand a word of this, but, even if we are dogs, we have a right to understand, a right to grasp it, and that right should not be taken away from us even if we lack the capacity to do it.  And who knows, you may not see it or grant it, but how do you know that I, like the dog, do not understand in my own way.

This was before the time “dawg” replaced “dude” as a casual appellation.  That it—that one’s buddy is now a “dawg”—is worthy of some thought.  But I infer from the above that students feel not infrequently like dogs in the halls of learning.  I infer also that many students want to understand; but the method by which learning is delivered has so beaten them down that they can only sit in front of the TV quite wordlessly.

Dry as Dust Analytic Philosophy

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I am not an academic philosopher so I could be mistaken, but I think, for every one of those six years, that, while the “Introduction to Ethics” course was taught by different people, that all taught spiderwebethics under the heading of “analytic philosophy.”  Perhaps as a consequence of this dry as dust approach, my students, almost to a person over the six years, reported, when the class was done, that they would never again be caught dead taking an ethics course or anything else in the philosophy department.

Richard Rorty has written about the plague of analytic philosophy and pretty much described it as serving best—given its hair splitting and logic chopping—as preparation to be a lawyer.  And Bernard Williams, a relatively famous ethicist, argues that moral philosophy, while generally boring. today has become particularly boring.  If this is the case, then I do think the teaching of ethics should be removed utterly from the hands of academic philosophers.  

This might at least be a step in the right direction.  How it should be taught, I don’t know.  But I know it shouldn’t be taught in such a way as to turn students away utterly from the study of philosophy.  For my part, I found the course only mildly boring, even a bit soothing in its boringness.  But I have studied philosophy and through my education have come to learn to think in ways that allowed me to appreciate at least mildly the pure amount of brain power and the considerable cleverness that had gone into the construction of endless and absurd arguments.

The students however were perplexed and frustrated.  First, it’s this argument they said, and then it’s that argument that says the first argument is wrong, and then the second argument itself is said to be wrong.  What, they wanted to know, was the point, if all of it was wrong. Knowing that all of ethics up to that point had been a mistake might be liberating for that rare and aberrant student who could then think, hell, if it’s all wrong, maybe I will be the one to get it right.  But the average student certainly was not encouraged to think in this way with the result that they felt they were stuck memorizing and repeating stuff either completely wrong or significantly flawed.

They didn’t see as I did that for the academic philosophy whether an argument is right or wrong is not the point; it’s an argument and as such material for making another one perhaps later in one’s career for a professional journal.  I tried to explain to my students that their philosophy teachers were in love with what they taught (however aberrant that love might be); that they ate, drank, breathed, and shat that stuff; that what they were trying to do in their own bizarre way was to make students love it too.  Consider the lectures, I said, rather clumsy foreplay.

But my students were unimpressed and I guess there was no reason they should be.  After all they were freshmen with some sort of naïve idea that ethics was about the study of right and wrong and not young academics in training, young academics already completely caught up in a vast web of arguments and counter arguments about which those beginning students knew absolutely nothing.  My students didn’t even know that they were being taught ethics from the perspective of analytic philosophy; and the teaching assistants did nothing to enlighten students on this critical point, as if analytic philosophy was the only way to do philosophy.

Yes! He had a dream!

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I think I taught a writing course linked to that ethics course six years in row.  Every time the course was taught by a teaching assistant who had been elevated for that particular course to the status of something called an associate.  This status allowed a second year graduate student to teach 250 mlkundergraduate students and to act as the boss of two or three other TA’s who read the papers, midterms and finals for the course.  

I was rather amazed when I heard about this.  250 students seemed a pretty big responsibility especially for teaching assistants who had never taught such a course before.  I learned later that, if a TA was going to be elevated to the position of an instructor for an upper division course in a major special paper work had to be filled out, explaining why this substitution was necessary (the usual professor was on sabbatical usually) and indicating the TAs qualifications to teach the course.  But no such dispensation was necessary for a teaching assistant to teach a General Education course.

This seemed to me another indication of the low regard for and the little thought given to General Education courses by the departments that offered them.  And because no paper work was necessary, nobody knew how many General Education courses were serving as teacher training sessions for teaching assistants rather than educational situations for students.  I found this all the more troubling given that many of these General Education courses were money makers for the individual departments concerned and that some departments would have trouble making ends meet without their General Education courses.

I do not suggest the Teaching Assistants were necessarily bad instructors.  They tended to make up for their lack of knowledge, their lack of confidence, and public speaking skills by a good deal of enthusiasm. Still, I wish could forget the General Education course devoted to the Civil Rights movement.  For some reason, the usual dynamic instructor, a lecturer like me was not available, and the course was handed over to a young graduate student.

She showed a lot of video.  Additionally, the instructor was teaching a revisionist version of the Civil Rights movement with emphasis upon the role of women.  Alright, I guess.  But none of the students knew that was what she was doing because none of the students knew anything about the history she was revising.  The intellectual force of the course was thereby considerably blunted.

Also she had technological troubles.  One day she was attempting to show slides.  But every time she clicked the slide clicker the slide machine would go backwards.  I don’t know how long she clicked and re-clicked.  I was in the back row.  So I got up, went to the slide machine, readjusted the carriage of slides, and for a few clicks it worked.  Then with another click, the whole machine sort of leapt up off its tiny perch and flung itself to the floor in apparent death throes.  I was embarrassed to death for the poor instructor.  

This embarrassment was trumped however by what I felt when one day she said she was going to play a tape of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream" speech. The tape started splendidly, with Kings sonorous “I have a dream….” But was followed abruptly by Walter Cronkite saying, “Yes, he had a dream.”  This was not what the TA wanted.  This is not what anybody wanted.  But the teaching assistant had failed to preview the tape.  She persisted by having the tech guy in a little booth in the back try to fast forward through the Cronkite parts to get to the King parts.  This proved impossible.  The speech was rendered a horrible mish mash of King plus Cronkite.

I swear I was ready to crap with embarrassment.  But looking around, the students seemed their usual selves, yawning, sleeping, reading the paper, picking their noses and generally acting completely unperturbed as if this kind of screw up was simply par for the course.  And who knows, maybe it was.

Repeat What the Professor Says

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The pre-major (that it even came into existence) seemed an indication of the institutiton’s lack of commitment to General Education, even a stake in its very heart.  General Education, as I had understood it, was there in part to give the student a look around at the landscape of learning and repeataftermeto locate, perhaps, in it something he or she had not seen or heard of before and might find attractive, even inspirational.

I understood the need for the pre-major as the means by which to create an artifical bottleneck that might slow the flow of students into “impacted” majors.  I understood too that were I a student and wanted to get into a particular major the very first thing I would do would be to take the courses required for the pre-major.  Waiting around to take your pre-major classes was bound only to prolong the anxiety about whether one was going to get in the major or not.

But so much for General Education (GE); those courses had to be pushed aside, while the pre-major was taken care of, with the result that GE’s no longer served for many as an opening vista onto the possibilities of higher education but as an impediment to getting into the major and finally an impediment to graduation.  The last thing one wished to know about on the way out the door was all the things one had missed, all the things one might have learned but had shoved aside in the intererts of timely progress towards graduation.

As a result GE classes begin to fill, not with freshmen and sophomores just embarking on their educational adventures, but with jaded juniors and seniors who did not want to have any sort of educational adventure at all.

I taught a number of years ago a writing course linked to a general education course, Philosophy 5, Introduction to Ethics.  Because of an ongoing beef with the registrar and inadquatee upfront advertising, my section was low.  I thought maybe they would drop it, but instead I was allowed to keep it running with only 15 students.

 I was terrified for these students.  Each and every one was in his or her very first quarter at the university.  Of the 15, three males were causcasian, and all the rest were either asian or latino, latina.  They had never read ethics before; they didn’t read well in any case.  They knew nothing about ethics and they were competing for a grade in a course that was 25% seniors.  I didn’t think my guys stood a chance.  When I saw early samples of their writing I was sure they were all going to fail.

I had to do what I hate doing.  I had to cut to the chase.  I told them: at the university there is no room for your thinking.  You are all in any case idiots.  You don’t know a thing and you shouldn’t ever get the idea that you do.  Accordingly your task, in exams and papers, is:

 TO REPEAT WHAT THE TEACHER SAYS.  THIS IS YOUR WORK.  TO DO THIS WORK PROPERLY, YOU MUST GO TO LECTURE AND TAKE NOTES. THEN YOU MUST MEMORIZE THOSE NOTES.  WHETHER OR NOT YOU UNDERSTAND THE NOTES IS NOT IMPORTANT; IF NOTES ARE SOLD THROUGH THE NOTE TAKING SERVICE, BUY AND MEMORIZE THOSE NOTES AS WELL  AND WHEN THE TIME COMES REPEAT WHAT YOU HAVE MEMORIZED.  DO NOT FIGHT THIS. DO NOT RESIST THIS. JUST DO IT AND YOU WILL BE ABLE TO COMPETE WITH THE JUNIORS AND SENIORS IN THE CLASS WHO ALREADY KNOW WHAT I AM TELLING YOU NOW!

The “Pre-Major” ; Or: The Death of Liberal Arts Continued

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These numbers aren’t exact.  But there are in the ballpark.  Something like 14% of all institutions of higher education in this country are large land grant public research universities and this 14% endofworldhands out about 50% of all four year college degrees in the country.  The large land grant for which I work is fairly typical I do believe of all the others, and if this is the case then the right wing of this country that would prefer people live in ignorance has won big time.

For in all these land grants I expect general education is in disarray, ill-coordinated, poorly taught and generally resented.  These courses scattered here and there represent the broken shards of what was once called a liberal arts education.  Now we have the reactionary arts—I suppose they are best called—or no education at all. 

For diverse reasons—economic and political—the university or more properly the multiversity when it came to general education just caved.  Part of it had to do, I guess, with the death of the canon and the fact that most of that dead canon was written by dead white men and not progressive and hip living people of both sexes.  By attempting to appear the flagship of political correctness the humanities reamed themselves, having then to throw out, not without bitching, moaning, and bitter in-fighting the very materials, subjects and author that had been their bread and butter.

And to my dismay all throughout the 70s and well into the 80s deconstructionism spread its obscurationist haze over the whole mess.  The result was, well, appalling.  And to put the matter clearly, I am not opposed to obscure writing.  I think Hegel terribly obscure but still worth the attempt, but not Derrida or his midget minions who began to turn the teaching of literature into a way of  talking, a discourse—I suppose the terminally hip would say—available to and understood only by the initiated.

People were coming in droves out of the universities, especially the East Coast ones, not educated but schooled.  I didn’t know what schooled meant until I attended a summer seminar—six weeks, I think it was—on the topic of the Sublime, taught by a young woman of impeccable credentials, Yale by way of parents who had been on the Freedom Buses down south.  And after each of our two hour sessions, we ordinary teachers from small liberal arts colleges across the country would come out furrowing our brows and wondering just how stupid we might be since we couldn’t understand a word of what she said, though she was apparently speaking English.

But I digress.  Though not exactly.  This was part of it, but as I said many factors contributed to the demise of the general education and the liberal arts education.  The university, in financial crisis due to things like Proposition 13 in California, found itself hustling for students and the bucks they brought.  And the students were not going where they used to go.  They were going especially to places that had business degrees and to places with degrees in communications (whatever the hell that was).

One result of this was “impacted” majors—way too many students to handle, and this led in turn to the creation of the pre-major, actual courses students had to take, usually with a C average or better, in order to qualify for the major, during those first two years especially when students had traditionally taken their General Education courses.

I don’t need no general education!

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My little classroom is a place of contestation, conflict and confusion though no effort of my own.  First—and I do have to keep reminding myself—my writing course—the one I most teach—is required.  Period.  The students exercise little or no choice.  Instructors’ names are not listed for this particular course, so students can’t pick among instructors even if they knew who any of them were (which they don’).  Mostly a particular class is selected on the basis of the days of the week and the time of day it is offered.  Since no reasoning seems to go into it, I have had lately classes with 26 people not a one of whom knows another.

While my class is probably the most resented, because required, class on campus; students resent other required classes also.  I haven’t heard much complaint about it lately—perhaps because these students don’t complain openly much—but a while back a good third of the students in any class resented the General Education requirements.  They just didn’t see the point.

The general education classes are there for the purposes of general education.  Students are required to take a history course here and a philosophy course there and some science class and a class in literature or the social sciences.  Most of these classes have little or nothing to do with students’ majors and are intended, I suppose, to produce more of a well rounded individual, a person who knows in a generally educated way a little something about the world around him or her.

 I have sat through a number of these General Education courses.  As part of my work as a Writing Instructor I have taught and continue to teach an occasional writing class linked to a General Education class.  This means all the students in my writing class are also enrolled in the same general education; and to make the classes work together in some way I usually attend the lectures for these courses and try, as well, to do the readings assigned the students. 

I understand why students have some troubles with these courses.  First, since many students have to take said courses, they are usually overloaded lecture classes, with a minimum of about 240 students with a Teaching Assistant teacher and a few other TAs to service their educational needs.  The classes taught more as general education courses and less as an extention of the professor’s research are the most “popular.”reubens

I attended for example an art history lecture in an 800 seat lecture hall.  About every seat was full the first day though by the fourth week perhaps a third were occupied on a regular basis.  This course had a professor, not a TA; he had some vision I think of art history as arising from and registering particular historical situations.  But the deeper ideas just seemed to go by the boards as the professor showed one slide after another and made a few remarks on each.

The tests were of the identify the slide variety.  Students liked this class because they didn’t have to understand anything; all they had to do was memorize slides.  They used mnemonic devices that had little or nothing to do with what the professor said about the painting, as in “isn’t he the guy with the pink clouds” or “isn’t he the guy with the really fat women.”

12 hours of study per week

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One student insisted, “We are lazy and I can prove it.”  OK, I said, I don’t know what the proof could be but what do you mean.  “My boyfriend is always losing his remote somewhere, so he went up to Home Depot and bought a long stick, ten feet long maybe, so that when he loses his remote, he doesn’t have to get up to look for it but changes the channels by poking the TV with his stick.”  Everybody laughed.  Who hasn’t felt too lazy to look for the remote.  I don’t know I said, he may be lazy but that’s pretty ingenious too.  “He should sell it,” a student said.

Perhaps they are lazy.  In 2004 the UC did a big survay and report on the UC undergraduate experience (except for Berkeley; it did it’s own study since it doesn’t consider itself part of the UC System).  But the other eight campuses contributed, and they found that the mean number of hours spent by students in class was 14 and the mean number of hours per week spent studying was 12.  So the students spend a total of 26 hours a week on “academics.”  The report noted some variation in academic involvement between the areas of study.  Students in science/math studied the most; students in the social sciences the least.

Twelve hours of study a week doesn’t seem like much to me.  That’s less than two hours a day on average.  One reason for this relatively low number could well be that it is all that is needed to received a satisfactory grade.  Everybody has heard of grade inflation including students.  So that if one attends class and studies those 12 hours, one could pretty easily come out with a B average especially if one is a student in the social sciences or the humanities.

Once I graded a lot harder than I do now.  About 15 years ago some sort of shift took place; my particular institutution began to attract more and more students with very good high school grades.  I gave Cs then, not a lot but some.  But I gave it up because I saw  that for these students getting a “C” was a failure.  I remember one student going off about how his parents had spent 12000 dollars a year to send him to private school and here he was in college getting Cs.  He didn’t know how he was going to explain that to his parents since he couldn’t explain it to himself.

For a while I tried to hold the “C” line but the Cs seemed to panic the students so much—especially one in the only course required of all students—that they were rendered pretty much unteachable.  They wanted to know EXACTLY what to do to get an A.  Unfortunately, I don’t know a way to tell people EXACTLY how to write well; the more I tried the more I ended up writing the paper for the students.  That was counter-productive and exhausting.

I speculate that grade inflation went along with either the lack of will or means by which to distinguish levels and degrees of quality.  Increasingly students who did the work, no matter what the quality of the work, did well, while those who didn’t do the work, whatever the quality of what they did do, didn’t.  I don’t know when this started but since,  as Hegel says, the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, I would suggest  some time before the publication of Pirsig’s abstruse musings on quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1973).