February 2008

Comment Commment

Posted on February 14, 2008 by nicktingle — 1 Comment ↓

I have enjoyed the recent comments.

Checking back I see lots of folks had thoughts on the Tingle’s hidden shame (bad feet) and I was happy to hear that some among us have decent feet and that Niece Caroline has fine feet useful for picking things up off the floor. My feet look sort of strange partly because of all the major league ankle turnings I got playing basketball. Once my ankle swelled up to the size of a cantaloupe, at least; and remains of what appear to be compensatory muscle still appear around the ankles.

Oh, thanks, Brother Dave for that shot of the old gym down in Balboa Park. I had completely forgotten that.

I thought Brother Dan’s comment on The Stroke moving. I don’t recollect his having told me about waking up with a stiff right side. That adds to the scary. But as he says he is conquering the aphasia; his comment and the way it was written suggest that.

Brother Dan sent me an email with the Story of Silversteen; here’s part of it to wit:

Silversteen had an edge to it. He wanted it badly. He offed it. He rambled it. He could smell it. He since it. It was unreliable to him. Silversteen had to have it. He parted his hair on one side and grumbled. It was a grumble off the true style. It was a grumble of the whole hearted. It was a grumble. Here to wit I can see it for everything I see it. I can taste it. In my tumble I feel it is worth it.

He got up from his desk and walked over to her.

"Do you think that it is worth it?", he asked.

Wilma did not look up from her screen. She wanted him to go away.
Wilma Barned came in at exactly 7:53 AM and left at 5:06 PM. She ate lunch at the grocery, just a paws breath away. She always had tuna with wheat bread or turkey on sour dough. Some times the grocer got up about it.

"Why do you always get tuna or turkey, why don’t you try a chicken salad or some greens?"

I am not sure what it means, but I like it.

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Brother Dan, responding to one of Brother Steve’s comments, says Brother Steve should write a novel. I think so too. He should read Charles Brukowski’s Post Office (which I am sure he has already done) and then write a novel called Flea Market. Instead Brother Steve proposes a sit-com about the government putting stuff in our water to make us live longer and then putting us in space stations where we could be, with no gravity, just as fat as we want to be. I am not sure though that TV is ready for this break through concept.

Charles Brukowski

Oh, I brought up the getting old issue again in my class that was a bust, and god bless’em they assured me I was still young.

Brother Steve reports rain today down in Escondido. We had some too but by this afternoon it had all gone away. Out at Ellwood because of an offshore wind and slightly higher surf the waves were producing spray. I tried to capture it photographically.

spray

spray2

Outside the Gates of Eden Still

Posted on February 14, 2008 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

My classes yesterday were a bust. I am there all pumped up and ready to go and in one class maybe two thirds show up and in the other, the 3 o’clock, maybe half. I don’t know the exact number because I decided not to take roll. I am lousy at taking roll anyway.

The last two weeks have not been good. Full of midterms. Also I have received more emails saying, I am sick, than I can recollect having received in recent memory. You never know of course, the students could be yanking your chain. But the way these emails are written suggest either that students can’t write or are the product of a fevered delirium.

Other evidence suggests something nasty is going around. A number of my fellow teachers have something or recently had something. One student came to my office to catch up on what she had been missing. She had mono last quarter, she said, and it had come back. If she could she said she would cut out her tonsils. They hurt so bad and keep getting re-infected. I made her sit clear on the opposite of the room and said, did she have to cough, do so away from me even though she said mono is not airborne.

Another reported that he lives in a house with 9 people and that 3 of them had pneumonia. He was pretty worried about getting that, though I don’t think pneumonia is airborne either (though what do I know). One reported the wait for help at the student health center was two to three hours. And one couldn’t show up because she had an allergic reaction to the antibiotics she had been taking for two weeks. Her whole body was covered with a nasty rash, she said.

Neville Sanford says, college is a developmental stage. Students must be challenged, so they can stretch themselves, but if the challenge is too great they will feel defeated and cease to move forward. So here I am all upset that maybe what I have asked them to read about and write on is too great a challenge, and then I realize that the challenge of my class may not be the problem at all. Maybe they haven’t had the energy to engage my challenge because of all the other challenges they are facing. Hell my class is just a drop in the bucket in the ocean of student malaise.

So part of the developmental challenge of college involves basic stuff like eating every now and then and getting some sleep (preferably not in my class) and not getting so drunk so constantly that you screw up your immune system. This involves developing “self-regulation” itself a central part of autonomy and that is, of course, the responsibility of the student. Still, while the sickness seems a bit over the top at the moment, students at the end of each quarter are hacking, spitting, and snorting up a storm as finals loom on the horizon.

I have long wondered about an educational system that tends to make students sick.

Outside the Gates of Eden

Posted on February 13, 2008 by nicktingle — 2 Comments ↓

I saw my shrink. She’s like 84 or something like that, and I told her about my students who said they didn’t want to get old and all wrinkly. And we are both sitting there looking pretty wrinkly, but she is more wrinkly than me. She said perhaps I should ask my students what they think or feel about getting old. I said, yea, maybe I could do that, but I sort of doubted that they knew or would be able to offer any explanations for their thoughts and feelings.

As usual I was projecting. I realize that had some teacher bothered to ask me that question when I was back in college that I wouldn’t have had much to say (and so assume that my students wouldn’t have much to say). Back in college I didn’t think about getting old at all. True, I thought about dying nearly every day. But that could happen at any time, the way I saw it. Getting old was not a pre-requisite for dying. So had I been asked, I might have said something like, “Getting old? Hell, it happens.”

So I said to my shrink, I didn’t think about getting old because I was mostly interested in just surviving. Getting from one day to the next and not somehow screwing up completely, or dropping dead in the middle of the whole thing. And she said that had been true of her also. She spent her high school years studying to be a concert level pianist in the middle of the Nazi Occupation of Paris. She had plenty to think about besides getting old. The future was uncertain. Getting old might happen or maybe not.

So I started thinking again about what my students had said. With a special emphasis upon getting all baggy and wrinkly. The young woman who didn’t want to get old was an attractive young woman. So maybe that’s what she meant. Getting old means becoming unattractive. So perhaps for this young woman and the others that seemed to know what she was saying being attractive was a central part of their identities. Probably she works at being attractive. It takes time and effort. So perhaps—still speculating—her self-concept centers on the very idea of being young.

We live—or so I have read—in a youth oriented culture. The culture celebrates youth and accordingly the young feel celebrated. The other night I was watching TV and the anchor woman for the local news I swear didn’t look more than 23. And of course she was attractive. So getting old means losing in effect a source of power—a way of being the center of attention—simply because one is young and attractive.

The stuff I had students read from Erikson was written back in 1968. He wrote partly in response to the big youth boom of that time, the baby-boomers hitting the market. Certainly, though, the youth culture and the ideal of youthful appearance have intensified since that time. Still, what he had to say back then fits with now. Any step “forward” in development means losing something (as well as gaining something). He writes of the step from childhood to adolescence almost as if it equaled being kicked out of Eden.

So the step into college for some young people might mean psychologically being kicked out of the Eden of Youth. In fact, one student spoke of college almost as if it were the end of the road.

The Identity Crisis Continued

Posted on February 12, 2008 by nicktingle — 3 Comments ↓

I don’t know. Maybe Sunday night I checked my blogs to see what my students had written about the identity crisis thing we have been reading and talking about. And I just freaked out because what I saw there was pretty awful, like no comprehension of the topic and poorly written too. I felt really upset: frustrated and rejected. I mean teaching this stuff is new and I wanted it to work.

But I got up the next day and wrote even more on the assignment pages for the classes about the ID crisis, and hit the ground running in the classes trying to turn the situation around if possible. Don’t know if I did or not.

I said stuff like, “In your previous blogs on you as students nearly everybody reported stress. Stress, stress, stress. Now where is this stress coming from?” And I went on to talk about how going to college could be part of an ID crisis. As Erikson says it’s a developmental step that brings with it a sense of increased vulnerability AND a sense of increased potential. The ID crisis is not a bad thing. Call it a growing pain.

I brought up the issue of a major and picking one. Quite a few students in my classes are still undeclared. So going away to college—and I stressed the away part—as a movement from parents towards autonomy (standing on your own two legs) brings with it, on one leg, increased vulnerability (now you have to decide), and that, on the other leg, goes along with increased potential (multiple roles lying ahead that were not there before); so part of the stress I tried to say might come (not so much from tests and all that) as tripping over your own feet.

I had them get into groups to read to each other what they had written and then I went around and checked in on the groups to see what they were up to. I stopped especially with one group that had a young woman in it who had been talking before about troubles picking a major. She says she has no idea what to do and had been taking “random” classes to try to find out like the Biology of Cancer, and Astronomy, and Art History, and I forget the other but something pretty “random.”

And I suggested to her that maybe taking all these “random” classes was her way of exploring the possibilities and potentials. But she didn’t seem to be listening and said, out of nowhere, that the real problem was “I don’t want to get old.” And another student in an adjacent group, piped up, “Yea, that’s so funny. I was thinking about that on the way to this class.” And a guy in the group said something of the same thing. So I figured this young woman was onto something I hadn’t thought about and said, “Old? What do you mean by that?” She said, “Old, you know. All wrinkly and baggy and old.”

And there I stood, exhausted, with hair falling out on the spot, and all wrinkly and baggy and old.

Speaking of old, Brother Dan sent me a link to a video he put up on U-Tube featuring “Good-Bye Blue Monday,” with Dan playing bass and Kim rhythm and Chris on drums in a converted garage clear back in 1985. Damn, seeing Dan looking so young makes me feel so old. I almost started crying. But, really, check out the video at.

Here’s another link to more recent songs Brother Dan put up on My Space.

Truck on! Musical Tingles.

Our Feathered Friends

Posted on February 10, 2008 by nicktingle — 2 Comments ↓

Funny to think but birds are wild life. They live so comfortably among us; I guess it doesn’t feel that way. Maybe they are comfortable living with us because they spend a good deal of time high above us.

Brother Steve posted on his flicker site a better picture of the blue heron. At first I couldn’t see it against the rock; here’s a close up:

steveblueheron

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Carol and I out walking came across these Canadian Geese. They have been appearing regularly out on the golf course for several years now. They stay for quite a while and some locals think perhaps they next out in the cane breaks in the golf course. I am not fond of them particular. I call them flying pigs. When you look out and they are just squatting there—they look like pigs. Well, that’s not right. They look more like “hams.” Flying hams.

But when they are up and moving around they are much more graceful.

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Brother Dave posted some pics of Balboa Park near downtown San Diego. The buildings like this one—and I can be corrected—were originally built for a world fair way back when.

davepark

Below that’s a picture of the old gym. Can’t believe it’s still there.

I would drive down there of a Saturday, way back in 64, all by my lonesome. Just me and my b-ball. The place was big with four courts as I recollect and smelled like a swamp of human sweat. I would get into a pick-up game. The black guys had a whole different game, clean but real hard to the basket. I was mostly out-classed but got an occasional rebound.

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Clarification: "The Roscoe" is a band in Greenville, South Carolina. Jack Tingle is a member, accurately identified by Brother Stephen as the guy on the far left, probably because he is the most handsome.

Biologists and Philosophers

Posted on February 9, 2008 by nicktingle — 3 Comments ↓

Cousin Lucy, a bit back, wrote me a nice comment saying she thought that I could probably teach biology should I wish and that some of my philosophic musings were above her head. This suggested many potential writing topics—one being an apology for my more philosophic musings, another being what philosophy is for, and what is it about, and finally, biologists and philosophers.

I would hazard to say many philosophers have not been good biologists; Aristotle, for example, believed in spontaneous generation—the creation of living tissue from inanimate matter. Spontaneously. But Aristotle was smart and if he had a microscope I am pretty sure he would have corrected this assertion. But biologists too are sometimes not such hot philosophers.

James Watson, one of the “discoverers” of the DNA double helix, was kicked out of his job as head of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory because he appears to have said that Africa is pretty much a lost cause since the people of that continent are genetically inferior when it comes to intelligence. This was pretty stupid comment that only a non-philosopher might make.

Some signs of this stupidity, however, appeared a few years back. I read that Watson was trying to find the exact spot in the brain where the “soul” is located or perhaps it was “consciousness.”—I can’t remember exactly which. Now that was a pretty stupid too. I will state here without fear of contradiction that no one will ever locate the spot in the brain where consciousness is located. Or let’s say, consciousness is located in the whole brain. You can test this by hitting a person on the head with a brick thus rendering him or her unconscious.

But signs of Watson’s philosophic stupidity appear earlier on, as far back as his book, The Double Helix. There he reports, when he and Crick made their breakthrough, that he exclaimed to Crick, “We have discovered the meaning of life!” I can’t find my copy of the Double Helix. So I am not sure if those are the exact words, but they’re pretty close.

I can understand Watson being carried away by the exuberance of his discovery. Still, a philosopher couldn’t have said that. No, Dr. Watson, you did not discover the meaning of life. You discovered how genetic information is passed along from one living organism to another. You discovered “how” something is done, but you discovered nothing at all about why it is done.

Since Job at least and before that too, philosophers and theologians have been concerned with “Why?” Only a non-philosopher could have conflated the how question with the why question. Which does not mean philosophers are any good at the how question. In fact they suck. But non-philosophic biologists can tend to be awful literal minded.

Musical Tingles

Posted on February 8, 2008 by nicktingle — 6 Comments ↓

We Tingles seem to have some creative juices. Recently I heard from Jack Tingle. The Roscoe will be playing as follows:

For songs click here:

Also musically inclined, Nathan Jey Tingle of Nashville, Tennessee. Wish I had a bigger pic:

For Songs click here.

Brother Dan also plays guitar, sings, and writes songs. Back in the 80’s he and Kim had a group called Good-Bye Blue Monday. I have an old tape of their songs dated August 9, 1986. Here’s one that I digitized, called "She Fell."

And I too keep strumming the guitar and writing songs, though vocally and guitar wise I am not in the same league with Jack, Nathan, and Dan. Still, I keep trucking and am working currently on a batch of love songs. Here’s one in progress: Fool For Love

I felt sort of odd yesterday, Thursday, the whole day. Perhaps my unconscious was aware that yesterday was February 7, the second anniversay of the death of William Berner Tingle Junior.

wbo8

My Identity Crisis

Posted on February 7, 2008 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

While I understand the importance of college for career, I think also that part of education should involve something called “personal development.” Indeed, were a gun put to my head, I am prepared to argue that personal development might in the long run be as important to a student after college as the possibility of career. Accordingly, I assign materials upon which students write that have something to do with promoting an understanding of themselves and the world they inhabit.

This time around though I may have gone too far. I assigned a fat chunk of a book by Erik Erikson called “Identity: Youth and Crisis.” I thought this book might be of some interest to young people since the word “youth” appeared in the title. Also I thought the notion of identity and crisis might be of some interest to them since they are all the time complaining about stress. But perhaps my narcissism got the best of me.

I was projecting my identity crisis upon them. I experience myself as undergoing an identity crisis but most of my students don’t seem to be undergoing an identity crisis at all. They are just stressed, is what. I guess I sensed this early on—that they were not going through an identity crisis—because I said, well, OK, I am going through an identity crisis (and I told them why—having to do with the aging process and hair falling out, etc), and that I didn’t want to feel lonely so I was going to force them to go through an identity crisis with me. Some laughed, but I am not sure all were pleased with the prospect.

In any case, after three class sessions, mulling over Erikson, having them pull quotations and write on those quotations, and having them think about and write upon issues of student identity, I feel I have made little to no headway. I have humbled and humiliated myself, I have stripped my self bare, looking for examples that might clarify. I have thrown everything at them including the kitchen sink. I have nothing left.

So I started making up stuff. I told them for example that when Carol and I married (I wrote the largely incomprehensible vows) and I had to say a word (maybe it was “yes”) that I became extremely dizzy, that my knees wobbled and that I almost passed out. Actually I was not close to passing out, my knees didn’t wobble, and while I was a little dizzy that was probably from standing out in the heat (one of the draw backs of an outdoor wedding). And, when I had paused for effect, why I asked them, why did they think I grew dizzy.

Had I been drinking a great deal? One student logically asked. No, I said, no. Had I perhaps failed to eat breakfast? Asked another. No. No. I said. No. Because—they finally forced me to say it—getting married for me was part of an identity crisis. And if that was the case, I continued in the Socratic question-answer mode, what might have been at the root of my crisis with respect to marriage.

I asked, but got no answer.

A Matter of Scale

Posted on February 6, 2008 by nicktingle — 1 Comment ↓

But as Bob Dylan said, you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows. So Bob brings us down from discussions of astral weather forecasts to common sense and the immediate moment. If wind direction is of some interest to you, for whatever reason, just go stick your nose out the door and you can find out without recourse to some distant authority, which knows nothing of your immediate needs or desires.

But while you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows, this view of things brings us back exactly to that future that is truly unpredictable. You may stick your nose out the door to find out which way the wind blows and get struck by lightening. In which case checking with the weather man might have been a good idea.

This all has something to do with the notion of scale. When I taught a research paper writing course linked to biology, I sat through the first course in the introduction to biology class maybe six times. Each time I found myself thinking about the issue of scale.

The lectures tended to start with the Marco-universe, the world of your larger organisms. These are things that one can mostly see with the naked eye. Then they would move onto the Micro-universe. This was the realm of bacteria and viruses. I found this a pretty fascinating universe; I was especially interested in the way the two universes micro-and macro overlapped. Seems that over time, human beings (and other animals too of course) and the creatures of the microbial world have evolutionarily intertwined and become dependent on each other. Were it not for bacteria we would not be able to digest many things, particularly minerals. And I am sure the bacteria are happy to have us as a habitat.

But at the center of both the macro and the micro (call it the synthesis) lies the cell. Bacteria have cells or are singled celled; and of course the macro-creatures have many, many cells. All cells have a nucleus with DNA in it. Viruses are not cells, but strands of naked DNA.

The cell though marks another shift in scale—from the animate to the inanimate. Cells have photon pumps; I don’t know what these are exactly. But they are in the cell membrane; they pump things in and out. I don’t know which, but this pumping is made possible or is rather the result of a simple chemical “reaction” of some sort. These reactions could take place anywhere. They do not have to be in a cell to take place. Rather the cell—somehow or other–has integrated these chemical “reactions” or mechanisms into the fabric of its ability to be animate.

The shift here in scale is enormous. Incomprehensible, perhaps. These chemical “mechanisms,” the very foundations of life, have nothing to do with life, and would go on happening whether life happened or not.

Below this—or maybe all around it—is physics somewhere. Though we did not get to this in the first course in the Introduction to biology sequence. Each step in this sequence takes us further and further away from that place where it is possible to know which way the wind blows by sticking your nose out the window. And without each step in this sequence it would not be possible to stick your nose out the window at all.

Pelican Day

Posted on February 3, 2008 by nicktingle — 1 Comment ↓

Since the big rain of ought 8, Carol and I have walked across the golf course, through the swampy bog, up the muddy path out to Ellwood. But with rain in the forecast we drove to the Marine Biology Lab at UCSB and walked out to campus point.

The pelicans were in full swing:

pelicans2208

Wonderful creatures.