Category Archives: Education

Cartman’s Tooth

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Funny to think South Park first hit the airways maybe 10 years ago, and at the time, it was oh so gross and completely alternative stuff for the kids.  Turns out, it has a bit of a humanistic heart to it, ca ore set of values, unlike such mainstream fare as Family Guy that aims simply to offend, within the limits of commercial TV, and in its assertion of post-modern “values” is mostly nihilistic.  The Simpsons started this post modern move, in fact advertising the show at one point as post-modernism for the masses.  But however much the show moves in that direction, the family unit—Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and that other kid—remains firmly in place and valued.  Bart for example would never try to kill his mother, as that insane little Stewie did in an episode of Family Guy.

I don’t know that I have ever watched an episode of South Park from beginning to end.  Maybe I did watch all of the one that was their take on how kids get eaten alive by video games like World of Warcraft.  This particular game is so damn popular that Toyota used it as the backdrop and context for a Tundra commercial.  Odd to think of the World of Warcraft appealing to a key demographic for the Toyota Tundra.  But I guess it must be so; otherwise they wouldn’t have done it.  Fat kids who want a truck, a fantasy truck.

I bought all of season four of South Park at Borders.  By accident I saw part of the episode about the Tooth Fairy from season 4 (2000), and just couldn’t resist.  I could have ordered over my Block Buster account but it wouldn’t have arrived by Monday.  That’s when I want to show it, on Monday, to my classes.  They need a break.  So do I.

Turns out Cartman loses a tooth and his mother gives him a whole two dollars for the tooth.  He sees this as a way to get the money necessary to buy a Sega system. So he starts stealing teeth from other kids and his mother keeps shelling out two bucks a tooth.  He steals like 117 teeth or something like that, driving his mother into financial ruin at two bucks a pop.  She says they will have to go without buying food for a month, and at the same time tells Cartman, look, there is no tooth fairy.  Whereupon, Cartman accuses his mother of being a damn liar, and goes out the door saying, well since I can’t trust anybody, I have to trust myself.

cartman 

I am not of course saying the guys at South Park read Erik Erikson, but this has all the key elements of what Erikson would call a developmental crisis.  First, the crisis is stimulated by changes in the body.  So the baby learns to walk, to control its bowels, to speak, and so on, and each of these changes in the body produces for the child an altered relation to the environment (part of the environment being its own body).  We don’t think about it much, I guess.  But losing all your baby teeth is a sort of strange experience—certainly it is a change in the body.  And perhaps to assist the child in tolerating having pieces of its body fall out, society—at least this society—has dreamed up the tooth fairy business.

The eventual outcome: very Eriksonian.  Cartman bumps up against the reality principle—he is disillusioned with his mother (who appears to be insane in any case), experiences a crisis in trust that is eventually resolved, Erickson suggests, by the child learning to trust itself and its own sense.  Though poor Cartman should never trust himself.

Too Much ER

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I am toast. Since Monday, when I haven’t been teaching or preparing to teach, or going to the bathroom or eating, I have been “responding” to student papers.  Maybe Erikson wasn’t such a failure.  Many students seem to be getting a little something out of it.  Every damn one of them is in the middle of an identity crisis.  Of course what else are they going to say, when for a blog entry, as prep for the paper, I had them write on the topic “My Identity Crisis.”  Now, to be fair to myself, I did say, if you don’t have an identity crisis, then say that; with the caveat that if they didn’t have one they should try to define what it is that they didn’t have.  

I mean just saying, “I am happy as a clam and have no Identity Crisis” wouldn’t quite cut the mustard.  They would have to give some details about being happy as a clam and show some understanding of Erikson by saying what he meant by the Identity crisis that they were not having.  Since this would require actually reading Erikson or having listened to me in class, I pretty much boxed them in, I suppose, since even the people who said they do have identity crisis didn’t seem really to understand what he meant by it.

But the basic dynamic of the ID crisis seems to have supplied some students at least with an analytic tool for filtering through their experience and also with a means for organizing the paper.  Something like:  development stage—leading to need for adjustments in present relative to new environment perhaps entailing reassessment of past (prior education and/or personal ideals): or the crisis as a moment increased of potential and with that increased vulnerability (possibility of wrong choice, misuse of potentials, failure, inability to know the future, etc).

Also quite a number—though far from all—followed my advice and tried to stick as much as possible to one example—the primary one being the step into college.  Writing at the sentence level improved for some students, and while those who didn’t improve at this level didn’t go backwards.

One student wrote about wanting in high school to be a cracker-jack top gun surgeon who would never snap under pressure.  Erikson says adolescence is a time when young people establish ideals or turn to idols as models for future behavior.  This kid though watched too much TV and seems to have based his ego-ideals (as Freud might call them) on ER.  So this kid comes to college and like washes out in pursuit of his ideal in the first quarter.  Not only is he not going to be a cracker-jack top gun surgeon he realizes, but also he “snaps” and starts to slide.

Half of them seem scared to death because they have not selected a major and the other half seems scared to death because they have.  No wonder—many seem to believe that the selection of a major will determine their fates for THE REST OF THEIR LIVES.

I gave a short lecture trying to disabuse them of this notion.  Though this may have only added to their fear since the gist of my little lecture was “nobody knows what is going to happen.”

The Imperative Mood

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I have been responding to student papers.  Fifty of them.  I like to say responding rather than grading.  That’s what I am doing, grading, though I am respond to, and the two get all mixed up and confusing.  I don’t think the grading part helps a single student to learn a single thing.  Sure a bad grade might make a student put in more time on the paper; but there is such a thing as putting in bad time (trying to figure out what the teacher wants).  Students will also put in more time if they feel that somebody actually reads what they say and pays attention, not just to how they are saying it, but also to what they are saying.  I end up grading on the “how they say it” when I know damn well that the depth of response will in fact determine whether they will decide to work on how they say it because what they are saying is also valued.

I don’t know how to reconcile this.

Perhaps that’s why my brain turns to odd things when I get a batch of papers.  The other evening I was torturing myself trying to remember the grammatical name or the name in grammar for a certain sentence structure that does not contain a subject but is not, for that reason, a sentence fragment, but a complete sentence.  How can that be, since by definition, at least in most grammar books, a sentence is a fragment if it lacks either the subject or the verb.

But take this expression, “Fiat Lux,” translated in the Kings James Bible as “Let there be light.”  In Latin lux is the subject and fiat the verb and might be translated roughly “Light was made” or “Light was.”  So in Latin the sentence is complete and not a fragment because lux is the subject and fiat the verb.  But where is the subject in “Let there be light.”  The fact is—there is no subject, and yet this is not a fragment, but a complete and utterly whole sentence.

“Let there be light” is probably the most famous example of this particular and odd complete sentence structure.  “Fiat Lux” is the motto of the University of California; given the utter failure of this institution to meet its publicly mandated educational mission this should be changed to “Fiat Dim Bulb.”

I think the grammatical term for this particular sentence may be the “imperative mood.”  I understand “imperative” part because Let There Be Light sounds like a command or directive.  I don’t understand the “mood” part because I lack sufficient knowledge of grammar and also the patience and curiosity to acquire it.

Noodling over this issue I remembered a poem I liked to teach at one time, when poetry was still taught as part of the writing sequence:

 The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Excellent use I think of the “imperative mood.”

Does it help any to think this poem is probably a description of the funeral rituals occasioned by the death of a person of ill-repute?

Outside the Gates of Eden Still

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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

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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

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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.

Biologists and Philosophers

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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.

My Identity Crisis

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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.

Thinking a Thought

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It was a cold and wet day in Writing 1. 

We were discussing Karen Horney’s “Our Inner Conflicts.”  In the book she tries to define three basic neurotic strategies for dealing with deep, deep, deep inner conflict: the moving towards, the moving against, and the moving away.  The first seeks love, tends to avoid conflict, to be self sacrificing (all towards the unconscious goal of “safety); the second sees life as a jungle of all against all and tends to be aggressive and controlling (all towards the unconscious goal of “safety); the moving away moves away from conflict in the name of the of independence, seeking not to be dependent on any one or anything (all towards the unconscious goal of “safety”).

I asked students—understanding of course that in reality life is a lot more complex than any three types—to pick which type they tended more towards, or pretend to pick one in any case.  Describe the type using Horney’s theory and then provide examples from their own lives that illustrate or elaborate upon the type.

About half the class was present on that cold and wet day, so I made them sit in a circle and asked each student present to say what type they thought they were and then discuss their example.  I was half listening—because I sort of try also to listen around the edges of what they are saying—and one guy said he was the moving toward type (seeking to please others and win their approval) but then (maybe I missed something) he went on about how people are such jerks and so stupid.  So I said, I was lost and that he sounded more like the Moving Against type who sees himself as super strong and everybody else as weak or possible stupid.

Later another student read a quotation from her paper.  I am not sure if it was this one but something like it:

            …he (the moving towards type) persuades himself that he likes everybody, that they are all nice and trustworthy, a fallacy that not only makes for heartbreaking disappointments but also adds to his general insecurity.

Bingo, I said, and tapped the student on the arm (he was sitting right next to me) who had said people were jerks.  So this is what you meant; since as a moving towards type you want to see others as nice like yourself, you frequently find yourself pissed off at people when it turns out they are not nice. As a moving towards you project your own values on others; you idealize them and when the veil slips away and you see the warts you see them as jerks, etc, not perhaps because they really are jerks but because they were not quite the people you thought they were.

Bingo!  I said.  There’s a whole paper there.  Abstractions and examples make it possible for the teacher, who doesn’t understand much, to understand something.  It’s like a process.

Bingo!

Being a P

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I had my students do the abbreviated Meyers-Briggs personality inventory.  Interestingly, as a group, the “E’s” or extroverts outnumbered the “I’s” or introverts about 4 to 1.  I wonder if that imbalance is true of the general population.  I need to do more research.  But I had expected more “E’s” though not quite at that ratio.

I was also surprised to notice, for the first time I think, that the “J’s” or judging types also outnumber the “P’s” or perceiving type by about the same 4 to 1 ratio. 

This interests me partly because I am both an I and a P and am apparently considerably outnumbered by all those E’s and J’s.  Also while I think I know the difference between the E’s and the I’s, I am not quite sure about the difference between the P’s and the J’s.

I got to thinking if maybe my being a P has something to do with the trouble I have giving grades.  Grading is judging.  That’s for sure.  And I don’t take to it all that well.  I know some of my fellow teachers have this sort of box thing going.  They line up the criteria for a paper:  Organization, Mechanics, Unity, Paragraphing—all sorts of things like that, and they read a paper and they give a number to each category and then they add them all up and that’s their judgment.

So from this I deduce that to be a J type a person has to have in his/her head (or from somewhere) a kind of list of criteria that assists in making a judgment.  Sort of like the box scores in baseball.  These are pretty clear because they are numbers.  X is not doing so well because his batting average is .244 or something like that.  So if you have these criteria and you use numbers you can arrive at a judgment and feel pretty comfortable about that judgment.

Certainly this would be true especially of those big classes where all the tests are multiple choice and then you add up the number correct and you arrive at a judgment.

When I read a student paper I certainly use in the back of my head some criteria—like organization or paragraphing or use of mechanics—but lots of other stuff is going on too.  Say, this student has written a pretty clear paper.  It’s organized and pretty easy to read.  But I get the feeling the student really hasn’t engaged the material at all.  The student wrote it, as I put it to myself, with his or her left hand.  And then, on the other hand, I find this paper that’s pretty screwed up—the paragraphing is off, and the mechanics are on the poor side—but I get the feeling the student really has tried to engage the material, to think about it and to write about it in a different sort of way.

What am I supposed to do?  The second student seems to be trying to learn something, to move forward and go ahead.  The first student has been well schooled and knows how to do just enough to do something satisfactory.

So my P inclinations really make it hard for me to perform my J duties.