Education Archives

Subjectivity

Posted on January 13, 2008 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

I came across this book by Daniel Stern, best known for his psychoanalytic investigations of the infant, where he discusses this subject I was previously noodling. I was thinking about clock time as opposed to Bergson’s notion of duration. Stern talks more of the Greek notions of chronos and kairos. Pretty much the same things, I think. From the perspective of the former, the latter doesn’t exist. Kairos, from the perspective of chronos, is that now moment that is always disappearing. You say “now” and that “now” even in the saying has already slipped by.

But it’s in kairos, Stern says, that things happen. Also this is where subjectivity unfolds, however silently or unconsciously. I think he is right about that—the self’s experience of the self must unfold in that disappearing now; there’s no other place for it to do so. Even the memory of something for the subject must appear in the now moment and the same with anticipations of the future.

So how to get into touch with that. In psychoanalytic sessions, to try to get in touch with that, Stern developed the “micro-analytic interview.” Before he gave it that mysterious name, in practice in his office, he spoke of it with his clients as the “breakfast interview.” He would ask, “What did you experience this morning at breakfast?” Mostly, clients would say, “What? Not much.” But then Stern asked questions designed to get the client to move from what the had done (not much) to his or her affective experience of what had been going on beyond and behind or right below the surface of that “not much.”

For example, I think I may go through a pretty thick subjective or affect laden “moment” just making coffee. Sometimes, yes, I do this distractedly or mechanically, with my mind elsewhere, but right below the surface of that I am aware that I don’t really like making the coffee. For one thing, making coffee is for me a really repetitious act. I get tired of the repetition. First the cleaning out the remains of the previously made coffee; then he counting out of all those scoops. Doing that requires I find the scoop to do the scooping with.

Sometimes the scoop is not there. Usually it’s right there in the bag with the coffee beans. Sometimes though it isn’t. Any why I must wonder do I buy coffee beans rather than pre-ground coffee when I leave the scoop in the bag of beans and that means in turn that the beans are getting all dried out, since I usually don’t close the package tightly. When the scoop is not there I get irritated because the scoop is lost. And there I feel frustrated because lately it seems I am all the time losing things. I have not yet mastered this really good idea: a place for everything and everything in its place.

Well, this is just a start of how things might look from the perspective of kiaros. I haven’t made the coffee yet, much less made breakfast.

I am wondering how this subjective interview thing might work from the perspective of teaching writing. Or what the implications of what it might be for the teaching of writing.

Week 1

Posted on January 12, 2008 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

Let’s see. Week 1 of Winter Quarter Classes, 2008. Done with. I can’t remember having so many people trying to crash, or so many emails from potential crashers. No instruction took place on the first day, what with the class given over mostly to figuring out who was there and who wanted to be there. That was on Monday, and many of the students looked out of it and glassy eyed.

I didn’t know till I asked that the dorms—I have quite a few first year students in one class—didn’t open for re-occupation till 1 in the afternoon Sunday, the day before. A few looked wiped out because they had just got in. I don’t get it. With the dorms opening at 1 students have less than twenty-four hours to get their acts together, buy books, if they know what books to buy, and figure out any problems with their schedules before they start classes.

The next session was also pretty much a bust. A good third of the students hadn’t managed to drag their butts over to IV to get the reader for the class—and it’s not just getting over there. Once there they have to stand in long lines. And not just for my class but for any of the other four or five they might be taking.

Two students came up to me with printed out schedules that said they were supposed to be in this room, the one I was teaching in, but for a different class.

Since I teach MW I don’t have class on two Mondays, the one that’s called President’s Day and MLK day. The way I figure it what with this wasted first week and the two days off later in the quarter, my class is already 1/5 over.

I don’t think this is any way to run a university, not if it is to have an educational purpose. As it is, I suppose many students don’t mind. After all, it’s in and out. Education too has taken its direction from the fast-food industry.

One class—it’s called Writing 1—is filled with students who failed a writing placement exam. Thus they have to take Writing 1, and I guess it’s not that surprising but the number of minority students in this class is much higher than my other class, Writing 2, filled with people who did pass the placement exam.

I was kidding around in W1 about how many students had not declared a major and I don’t know what I said or how it came up but one Latino student said he didn’t know what to major in because it all seemed so hard, so he was trying to find something at least that he liked. And he came out with too: that in high school he hadn’t had to do a damn thing. And around the room, here and there, a good number of students nodded recognition. They too had to do nothing in high school.

Man!

Death and the Writing Instructor

Posted on January 6, 2008 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

A while back I wrote an article or essay called “Death and the Writing Instructor,” and since I had written it I sent it off to a journal, but I doubt it will see the light of day because I have seen almost no articles in academic journals on writing with titles like “Death and the Writing Instructor.”

I wrote it to try to explain to myself why teaching has more recently become quite hard for me, and I am thinking about it right now because tomorrow I start up yet another quarter as a Writing Instructor. This time Winter Quarter, 2008.

My argument—to the extent I had one—was that teaching is a temporal activity, having some how to do with the passage of information and thoughts and ideas of one generation to the next. It has psychologically something to do with what the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called “generativity,” and that has something to do with the psychological need to care for generations that follow your own.

This is sort of an obvious thing; many parents do seek to set up situations, one way or another, that might help their children out after they are gone. Think inheritances. But Erikson takes this out a step further and sees signs of generativity in social institutions, policies and laws established in the present with the primary intent of preparing the ground for future generations. Right now of course the prime example might be the attempt of organizations and governments to establish policies and to make plans to head off the massive upheavals that might result, for the next generation, from global warming.

So built right into the heart of education—of a certain kind—is the awareness of time or temporality. The teacher, so to speak, is in the middle of the stream standing on shifting sands. This is a precarious position I argue and full of potential for anxiety. For an awareness of the movement of generations necessarily implies awareness, no matter how low down and unconscious, of one’s own location in time and that this time is passing (along with you).

This may seem a grandiose notion of teaching and education, but it seems to be the one I am stuck with. And in this position, one might try to fight off the anxiety by just throwing up one’s hands and saying, “Après moi le deluge!” I mean, who the hell cares, since, if I am lucky, the crap that is coming down will come down after I am gone. One could develop a whole philosophic position from this, and it would be damn hard to argue against.

That might be the position I am tempted to take. But paradoxically, if I did so, while it might afford some relief, it would probably also take away the energy or the ideals that have fueled my work as a teacher so far.

Maybe tomorrow when I go back into the classroom I will look inside and figure out where I am, though mostly I will probably be pissed at the inadequate technical resources, taking roll, and having to turn away crashers.

Thank goodness!

Perceiving, Knowing, Creating.

Posted on December 31, 2007 by nicktingle — 1 Comment ↓

Still mulling Winnicott’s contention that one, while being careful not to locate a clock where one is not, creates one’s perception of a clock through conception and apperception. No, that’s not quite correct. Or maybe it is. In any case, I have been looking for an example and think I have found one in the DNA issue.

Watson and Crick are credited with having “discovered” the structure of DNA: the double helix. The word “discovery” implies that the structure was already there—pre-existing Watson and Crick—to be discovered via perception.

But I think there’s a prior problem; one may perceive but not “know” what one perceives.

Why and how did Watson and Crick know what they were discovering? Well, more or less digressively, they did not come to know it through the so called scientific method. Rather, their piece in Nature with the picture of the double helix was a piece of rampant speculation arrived at, not my testing, hypothesis and so on, but by a synthesis of things previously known.

More specifically Watson, in The Double Helix, acknowledges the contributions of A) Erwin Chargaff. He found out that the DNA in any cell has a 1:1 ratio of pyrimidine and purine bases and, more specifically, that the amount of guanine is equal to cytosine and the amount of adenine is equal to thymine. B) the work of Linus Pauling on amino acids (proteins), his discover of the function of the double helix in the structure of amino acids and by way of method his use of models to demonstrate the structures of amino acids. And C) and most importantly, I think, the x-ray work of Rosalind Franklin.

Watson nearly pissed his pants when he saw one of Franklin’s x-rays. This very one I think:

Franklin, however, for her own reasons I suppose did not see this as a picture of a double helix. Clearly she perceived the structure in this x-ray. But she did not know it. Watson and Crick knew it because, following Winnicott’s strange claim, they brought to it conceptions, models, speculations, and imagination. These led them to create what was already there: the structure of DNA.

So what’s the point? Not much. Except that what we know about a perception is not the same thing as the perception. Most of the time of course we do not create what we know. Rather we have been socialized into knowing what we perceive. A long schooling has taught me that a green light means I can go.

Creation, per se, is not perception, nor is it simply knowing what is perceived, but seeing or knowing something new about what is perceived.

Drug Enhancement

Posted on December 21, 2007 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

I am sort of sad about the Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens thing. How could Barry jump up and down like that when he hit that dinger that beat out Hammering Hank knowing he had gotten to the place where he could jump up and down like that because he had been using “performance enhancement drugs.” As for Roger Clemens I never liked him much; seemed like a pretty surly number to me.

But maybe it’s not the guys so much as the system we live in these days. Hell, you think you are the best and everybody is getting ahead of you and you know they are using those drugs, so why not use them yourself. It’s the competition thing.

The LA Times re: the steroid scandal ran an article on brain enhancement drugs, all the things people are using these days to enhance the brain. Corporate guys are using them, academics, guys who work a lot with computers, and of course students. The favorite these days among students seems to be Adderall. This is generally described as a sort of super compound of amphetamine salts.

The article in the LA Times says that these drugs make you smarter and, hey, who wants to be dumb? So take the pills, I guess. Certainly they do something, but I don’t think they increase intelligence, though they do help with concentration, whatever that might be. They allow you to take whatever brains you have and use them more effectively and efficiently. So you can do what you need to do without all those interior distractions that pop up and you can stay awake longer doing whatever it is you need to do.

So students take them all the time, especially getting prepped for finals. They stay up a couple of days at a time, but I don’t think that means they learn anything exactly. Back in 1968, the health center where I went to college, was just handing out Dexedrine because the guys were having a hard time, getting depressed and all about the idea of being drafted. I went in and got some.

I had this class in modern philosophy; a whole hunk of the final was going to be about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Honestly, I didn’t understand this at all; it was sort of mathematic philosophy related to symbolic logic and what later became known as analytic philosophy. Because I couldn’t understand it, I just decided to memorize, and the Dexedrine helped along with the fact that the whole thing was mathematical, with one axiom leading to another and so on. So when I got to the test I just looked inside my head and wrote down what was there—it was almost as if I were reading from pages engraved in my head. As soon as I stepped out the door—I aced the test—the pages disappeared as if all the pages had been broken like glass.

Conclusion: I didn’t learn a thing. Extra added conclusion: when students use brain enhancement drugs—given that most of what they are tested on is stuff they have to memorize—they don’t learn anything either. They just pass the test. That’s part of the competition thing.

Dialectically Speaking

Posted on December 10, 2007 by nicktingle — 3 Comments ↓

I have spent an inordinate amount of time over the years trying to understand the dialectic. There are different kinds of dialectic. Plato’s for example. But I am thinking particular of Hegel’s. He laid out the "structure" or "form" of the dialectic pretty clearly. Thesis; Antithesis; Synthesis. Usually this form if represented pictorially by a triangle:

This looks simple enough, I guess. It’s the kind of things teachers like to draw and then stop talking about it. Because actually the whole damn thing is damn complicated. Hegel appears to claim for example that the synthesis does not represent a canceling out or answer to or something like that to the first two terms (thesis, antithesis) but that the first two terms are lifted up and preserved in the synthesis. He uses the word "aufhebung" frequently translated as sublated." Or to put it another way, nothing is lost in the process of the dialectic.

I have been interested in this partly because I am interested in the dialectic and partly because I am interested in the development of the psyche-soma. In the development of the psyche soma–nothing is cancelled out, everything is retained starting in the womb. Without the first primordial steps in the womb, none of the later steps in the development would be possible. Or for example, some people are concerned–whether they should be or not–when their child begins to walk and never crawls. Crawling is a prelude–and some thing necessary–for the next state of walking.

So in these diagrams I am trying…with great difficult..to fathom the notion of sublation. Yes, the primal steps are necessary. But more than that the steps that come later are not "higher" or "superior" stages of development–since all the steps in the development are necessary to the overall developmental process. It is hard to call the primal steps inferior when no steps would be possible without them.

The following represents my attempt to think about this critical issue of sublation (also related to the negation of the negation).

Here I plug some simple concepts into the dialectical triangle. Sometimes under thesis I have seen A and under antithesis I have see Not A. The synthesis would be then (A=not A). This suggests a pretty unstable configuration and one reason the more logically oriented have dismissed the dialectic entirely. How can A equal Not A? But here comes the negation of the negation (necessary to preserve the sublation as it appears in the synthesis). A is negated by Not A which turns out to be A in the synthesis as the negation of the negation (not A).

So I write in yes and then no which is the opposite of yes; and I arrive at Maybe–which preserves both the yes and the no–but in qualified form. The definitive yes and the definitive no are both cancelled out, yet preserved (I think) in "maybe."

Here’s level two:

Here again, I attempt to preserve, sublate, all the terms so far encountered. The prior synthesis splits to become maybe yes or maybe no. Now things get even more tricky. Hegel’s dialectic feels like it jumps; and people have complained about the transitions in the Phenomenology of Mind. Like, OK, I buy this, but how the hell do you get in the above diagram from maybe yes maybe no to Who Knows? Hell, it seems like a logical step to me…Maybe Yes, Maybe No..who knows? Also I think I am doing what Hegel does overall which is to move from the flat assertion of the truth of something–yes this is so, no this is not–to the role of the human subject in the construction of "knowledge."

Take the nature and nurture debate. Personally I consider this a completely sterile chicken-egg debate. Scientists have tried to study the subject statistically and come up with the surprising conclusion, hey, as far as we can tell it’s 50% nature, 50% nurture. Freaking idiots. More alarmingly though as I see it is the fact that this question is viewed sub species aeternitatis (i.e. outside of and beyond time). Given this perspective, the subject (i.e. the person who is nurtured or natured) is completely left out of the equation BECAUSE the subject exists only in and by means of time. So there may be a sort of logic to my "who knows" because I am returning to and rooting the prior terms of my dialect in a subject, a who, that exists in time

OK…here comes level 3:

Well, I am not entirely satisfied with this third step. True, I have preserved the terms, all terms so far, in the thesis and then in the antithesis; but the synthesis strikes me as lame. Maybe I should drop that "can" and just go with "Who knows maybe yes, maybe no." Or perhaps I am getting at the idea or the question of whether or not it is possible to claim that one knows "confusion," or "conflict," or "contradiction," or "ambiguity" or "paradox." And perhaps also if one can claim to know "ambiguity" is one claming to know the unknowable as "ambiguity" and so in the process closing off the dialectic completely.

I don’t know frankly. Frankly I don’t know what it is even that I am trying to think. But this may say something about the dialectic generally; it’s a bit of a trip; it can turn this way or that at any one of its hinges. The idea here–if there is an idea at all–Hegel would probably call it a notion, not an idea–is "knowable" only in its unfolding.

Enough unfolding for now. But I am pretty sure this idea of the dialectic is related to the bildung and the bildung in turn is related to a view of the education as developmental or as rooted in the development of the individual.

Mixed Feelings

Posted on December 7, 2007 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

I have mixed feelings about everything. I am sort of a master of ambivalence. When my buddy and I were starting up the union and walking on thin ice with the administration and with our colleagues, sometimes—since he was more active in a daily way than I—he would come to me for a consult because he said I was the “conscience of the writing program.” He was a funny guy and actually said things like that…

I felt sort of odd being the conscience of the writing program, because I didn’t know what that meant. But he would have a bit of a dilemma about something; should we tell x what we had heard y say about z. Or something to that effect. Or should we hold a secret meeting to plan policy because d and e were disruptive. And then I would say, well, I have mixed feelings, and go round and round looking at the question, all the time making the question less a matter of whether we should or not and more a matter of the nature of the question and what might be implied in it from a moral, ethical point of view, so in the end I wouldn’t be talking about the question at all, but about what it meant to be a human being, and the nature of decency, and the role of trust. And he would listen and say, yes, you are right (not because I was right but because he knew he tended to think more in terms of strategy and power politics and I didn’t).

I was doing the mixed feelings thing this morning at the club. We had a tiny bit of rain last night, finally. One guy said, “Well, that wasn’t much rain.” He seemed to be condemning the tiny bit of rain for being tiny, so I said, “Yes, but maybe it’s the amount we need right now to get the green stuff growing a bit on the hills, so if the next rain is a big one we won’t have flooding.” And another guy said, he had gone out to check his garden and the rain hadn’t gone down very far, and I said, “Yes, but I bet your garden is happy for the little bit it got.” “You are certainly right about that,” he said. So I said, “But of course the weeds will be happy too.”

I think I do this all the time and am not even aware I am doing it. My favorite sentence construction must be “yes, but.” A student says something and I say why yes of course that’s right, I can see that. But..” I think the “yes, but” comes from some sort of attempt on my part to get the whole picture into focus. This can cause problems because you can come across internal contradictions in your own thinking, and if you are trying to look at the whole you have to admit there’s a contradiction.

This one old guy has been talking at me for several days about Global Warming. So, he says, “If there is Global Warming, why are these people, especially liberals, going on about rebuilding New Orleans. Shouldn’t we just close the whole thing down?” I felt hoist on my own petard because I believe there is global warming, and if there is then he might be right. Just shut down New Orleans. Then as I was talking with him, the whole question switched to another level. This guy doesn’t believe there is global warming or let’s say he believes in it but not as a byproduct of humanity’s destructive habits, but because the globe is simply warming up as we go out of an ice age. For him the whole global warming thing is beyond human control (and human responsibility). In the face of this implacable reality “New Orleans” should be closed down; this would be the logical and rational response to a change in nature. But since I believe Global warming is at least partly the result of human activity, I don’t see the warming thing as being quite as implacable. Thus save New Orleans because who knows, if we change our ways a bit, it might not just disappear under 20 feet of water.

The guy I was talking to is not into “yes, but” thinking, he is more either/or.

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We had a little bit of rain yesterday, but the clouds are still hanging out….as they go further north.

Friday, Thank God

Posted on November 16, 2007 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

This week has been a whopper. Carol got a cold on her trip back to Manhattan; she has been coughing and snorting and sneezing incessantly. Quite a cacophony. Me, I feel exhausted anyway and I get pissed at the idea she is going to give me that cold, free of charge. I guess this is pretty selfish, but damn it, I don’t want a cold and as I sit here I feel as if I am getting it. The back of my throat is raw and I have plenty of PDN (post nasal drip).

I mean she at least got a trip back to Manhattan out of the cold. But me, I didn’t get any trip, and on top of that while I should be looking forward to a little weekend release I won’t be getting much of that because I have a batch, as I call them, of student papers coming in. Unfortunately, as a teacher of writing, it’s my duty to read the papers; I mean actually read them and not just rush through to see if students have made the right points, done the readings, and listened to me in lectures. That’s what most writing is at the U-level: covert forms of test taking.

Students know what’s up, maybe unconsciously, and so they grind out these papers that cover all the points they are supposed to cover and don’t give a damn if point one is connected to point two and don’t give a damn about how it is written because the TA’s who read their papers don’t give a damn either, being overworked as they are.

So to get them to really write something, I have to unteach as well as teach. In fact, in ten weeks about all I can do is unteach, and of course that confuses the students. I have them read readings (which of course they don’t read) and I don’t lecture, and while there is a huge topic area for them to write about, I don’t give them specific questions, or prompts, as they have come to be called, but say, the most important aspect of writing is topic formation. You will form a topic. This requires that you to write and rewrite to form your topic, BECAUSE I don’t want you to repeat what you have read. But of course they don’t rewrite because they don’t know that is and they just end up repeating using the five or six paragraph method.

All this is pretty damn frustrating, and since I have been teaching this way since about 1980, I have been pretty damn frustrated for about 27 years.

So that’s what I am looking forward to this weekend, one paper after another filled with great baggy sentences and no clear topic and no organization either. One paragraph is stuck next to the next as if writing a paper were the same thing as creating a collage. Each paragraph makes a point and backs it up with mindless repetition from the readings or from something somebody said.

God and on top of this, I am getting a cold.

If I had saved all the student papers I have received over the years in paper form, I would not be able to get into my office. I would open the door and mounds of dusty old paper would come tumbling out. I don’t exaggerate.

Paying Attention

Posted on November 11, 2007 by nicktingle — 1 Comment ↓

A few entries back, Brother Steve, who has a BA in philosophy, mentioned in response to an email from Brother Dan, William James’ philosophy or theory of attention. James lived at a time when people were becoming more and more aware of the person as a creature of stimulus as something pushed about and controlled by his or her environs. This of course had a good deal to do with Darwin. But with other scientific research of the day, also.

sunsetb

In many ways his whole philosophic endeavor circled around the attempt to find some space in the mechanism for free will. While understanding and acknowledging the materialist argument that we are all creatures of the environment and nothing else, he developed the idea of attention as a possible circle, however tiny, of free will.

He wrote:

Attention, implying a degree of reactive spontaneity, would seem to break through the circle of pure receptivity which constitutes ‘experience,’ and hence must not be spoken of under penalty of interfering with the smoothness of the tale.

But the moment one thinks of the matter, one sees how false a notion of experience that is which would make it tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an outward order. Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind – without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground – intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every [p. 403] creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.

Here he points to “attention” as a relatively spontaneous and also uncontrolled activity that serves to give shape to experience. Were we not paying attention to something or other, we would have no experiences at all. This though does not necessarily rescue freedom since this form of attention can and usually is shaped by the forces around us, beliefs we have absorbed perhaps, or habits, or social forces saying pay attention to this. I don’t agree with his claim in other words—at least as presented here—that “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” In fact, that’s begging the question—to say that one can agree or not agree.

sunsetc

Still there’s a thin margin here for freedom. One can will attention or pay or not pay attention. One can shift one’s attention from this to that, and this that might be something relatively unknown or previously unnoticed and by shifting attention one may concentrate and give shape to the thing previously unnoticed or unknown.

Why would one do this? Simple curiosity might suffice.

I am thinking here about how I so frequently fail to get students to pay attention.

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The same sunset using different settings or two sunsets?

Fire and Halloween

Posted on October 26, 2007 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

Yesterday—Thursday—Brother Steve wrote:

The evacuation was lifted at 10 this morning, and they started letting people drive up the grade around 12, and I got in the line around 12:30….it was a long line….you had to have an I.D. that said "Escondido"….if it said Valley Center or anything else, they turned you around. But everything is fine here, and I’ll go back to work tomarrow….what a week!

The grade to which he refers is a steep grade that runs up to Valley Center. Apparently they were checking ID for two reasons: to keep out looters (if you can believe) and also to make sure people were going into areas that had been cleared for re-habitation. Apparently there were concerns about fallen power lines and exposed gas lines….

Today—Friday—Brother Steve writes:

The evacuation is lifted, but the roads are closed again….if you go down into town, you can’t get back….there are boulders in the road, and they have to inspect any bridges….so it looks like another vacation day for me….I’m not going to go down to work this afternoon if they won’t let me come back home at night….some people have been using the Jeep trails, but they are more familiar with them than I am….no smoke here, clear, calm, and cool right now….but Paradise Mt. is still closed, it’s still burning somewhere between Hellhole and Mesa Grande….

So while the fire danger is abating, things down in San Diego are quite a mess. I have had a couple of students not show for my classes this week; I expect they were down in SD when the bad fires hit and got stuck there. I know for a fact that one student was heading down that way Friday a week ago.

sundown1

The air here, while much, much clearer, is still not completely clear from dust from the windstorm and smoke from the inland blaze that is now I believe contained. More than the usual numbers of students were hacking up a storm. Also they were pretty de-energized, especially my three o’clock class, making it a pretty hard row to hoe yesterday.

sundownsand

This weekend the big Halloween bash occurs in the student ghetto of Isla Vista. A decade or so ago, this bash was nationally famous; people actually drove from out of state to participate in rampant drunkenness and drink sodden casual sex. Over 60,000 people were in IV one year; fights broke out, along with other rampant rowdiness.

sundownfin

The next year they clamped down. I happened to be in IV the Friday before the start of “festivities” and saw this most amazing line of cop cars pulling into the area, along with police on horseback and riot vehicles. Man, it was sort of scary.

sundowntiny

This year, in addition to the massive police buildup, they are outlawing parking on the residential streets within walking distance of IV. I don’t think this is legal frankly; but they are doing it anyway. As one drives towards campus, there stands one of those mobile flashing signs reading: OBEY ALL LAWS! MAXIMUM ENFORCEMENT!

sundownmoon

Next week will be impossible; 80% of the students will still be wasted from hangovers on Tuesday. Many students will also contract veneral diseases and be arrested for such things as public drunkenness and urinating in public. Some of the students sitting in my class will be fresh out of jail.

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1. dusty red sundown from dirt and smoke

2. sundown on sand

3. sundown with nearly invisible dophin fin

4. tiny sundown

5. moonrise over golf course