Category Archives: Teaching

JT reports that he saw Fight Club 9 times when it first came out in 1999.  The book came out in 1996.  I have gotten the dates confused.

 I lead students through several steps as they write their papers, and I always try to write little bit of the paper myself, to get a feeling for how tough it might be for students to do it, and to suggest that academic writing need not bore a person stiff.  So I wrote the following two paragraphs as a kind of model for an assignment asking students to write the first two two paragraphs of their papers.  Sometimes when I ask students to write the first two paragraphs of their papers, they think they are supposed to write about what they think they are going to write about.  My two paragraphs are intended also to say, hey, “Just Do It, Damn It” as follows:

Fight Club when originally released in 1999 was by no means a smash hit, no run away block buster (Wikipedia).  Nobody has even thought about Fight Club: The Sequel.  Still, and interestingly, Fight Club has become something of a cult classic.  At first thought, critics right and left attacked the film for its unstinting and relatively graphic violence.  This criticism though, as Ken Windrom suggests, seems misplaced (Reader 155).  As he points out, blood and guts spill over the screen of American cinema and nobody bats at eye.  Take the recent “300”; men on steroids beat the living crap out of each other for hours straight. And, hey, that was a hit. 

So the problem with Fight Club was not just the gore.  Rather, the problem was the people who do the gore, not escapees, like the Rock, from the World Wrestling Federation, but thirty year old, all American males, beating the tar out of each other BECAUSE they seem unhappy about something.  That “Because” is what irritated the critics. First that there was any “because” and second because the creators of Fight Club had the nuts—however misplaced—to suggest these guys were unhappy or somehow unfulfilled because modern day consumer capitalism is actually empty and soulless.  And even suggesting something like that, especially in this Dark Age after 9.11, seems down right unpatriotic.

I think that’s a little less boring than most academic writing, though I haven’t managed to get in those paragraphs to the core issue. I have pretty mixed feelings about Fight Club.  But the point I make in those paragraphs is more or less true b) Fight Club is now a cult classic and b) it is because of its criticisms of the materialism of consumer society.

The problem with the movie sort of as I see it is this:  is beating up on other guys the only way a man can prove he is a man (and not a mouse).  I wanted to dispute that argument and asked how many people in the class had been in a fist fight.  Curiously, very few, almost none.  One person said did beating up on your younger brother count, and one woman had defended her younger sister from a guy tormenting her.  When the guy hit my student in the face, she let the kid have it and knocked him flat because she was bigger, she said.  Two people said, yes, they had been in fist fights because the kids in their neighborhoods had been influenced by the film and would gather in somebody’s garage or rec. room and beat the crap out of each.  I really hope they didn’t hit each other in the face like the do in “Fight Club.”  Maybe they just wrestled around or something.

Today was the last day of class for the Fall Quarter, 2007.  Next time classes meet it will be 2008.

Here students read and discuss rough drafts of their final paper on the movie, "Fight Club."  That’s Joseph waving.  I asked him had he heard of the story of Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors.  He said no and that he didn’t think his coat had that many colors.  In front of Joesph, that Tracy’s–she is reading Gina’s paper on Gina’s laptop that ran out of energy during class.  That’s Gina in her uggs.  Back there between Gina and Tracey is Ben.  Ben always carries his rubics cube with him (visible here next to his arm).  We timed him one day and he cubed the cube in a minute and 10 seconds.  Pretty impressive.  I told him the cube was a fetish object that he used to ward off evil spirits because we had been discussing consumer objects as fetish objects intended to ward off evil spirits.

Nancy, sitting way in the back, with her head looking down sent me her paper and a link to a site were she "elfed" me.  Kind of cute, may take a second to load.
 

Here students pretend to wave hello/goodbye to me because I asked them to.  That’s Eric toward the left back in a stocking cap.  He answers my questions about my new Mac.  Way to the right with half of her face visible–that’s Mary.  She works mornings at the club where Carol and I go to work out.  Two people straight back from Mary is Matt who just yesterday became a US citizen.  He is now a citizen of the US and Spain.  He had to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
 
We had a pretty good time and then went home.  I told them that it was going to rain tomorrow and that they should dress accordingly.  

Continue reading The Last Day of Class→

Well, this week has been too long already what with painters and plasterers coming and going, and today we are going to have to clear out of the place by nine when the rug cleaning people come and finally when they are through the repairs will be done and then we are going to have to start putting stuff back where it was and all the stuff I have unplugged I will have to plug in again and that’s not easy since I have become a computer freak with no end of cords to plug in again.  I sit there with a cord in my hand and think now where the hell does this mother go and sometimes I get it right and sometimes I don’t.

And this week as a supervisor I  had to visit three of the TAs I supervise and one fellow lecturer for the purposes of job review, with more to come, though I am nearly done.  I go sit in somebody’s class for an hour and watch them do what they do.  I do this because I am supposed to not because I want to or feel that it’s very useful.  Over the years I have learned that it’s pretty hard to help somebody improve as a teacher.  I visit one person and think, well, that person will improve and I visit another and think that person is dead in the water.  Some people learn from their teaching experience and others don’t.  The first won’t benefit from my trying to help and the latter, well, there’s really not much point in trying to help.

 In one of the classes I visited the teacher, a TA, was having her students do field work—observations and surveys—on the topic of the notorious IV Halloween bash.  I sat with a small group while they went through their questions.  The first question on one survey was something like, “Did you hook up over Halloween with a UCSB athlete?”  I said that “hook up” might be ambiguous; and later others agreed.  So the student changed the wording to something like, “Did you kiss, fondle, caress, excite or have sexual intercourse with a UCSB athlete?”

Now hooking up is not like having a date.  It’s a kind of random thing.  Like two people sort of bump into each other in a random sexual manner.  So later on in the survey was the question, “Did you know this person before you hooked up with him or her?” Or something to that effect.  Other surveys featured stuff like, “Did you do any drugs other than alcohol at Halloween.”  And: “If you wore a costume was it conservative or provocative and why?”

Man, did I feel old.  And stuff like this and stuff in my own classes has led me to feel increasingly alienated from the students I teach.  Hell, this stuff has made me not like them, as a group.  I really don’t like to be judgmental because being judgmental gets in the way of understanding and I want to understand.  But when you don’t or can’t understand, it gets to be too easy to be judgmental.  The first time I had sex I knew the person; we had spent considerable time together; and I was stone cold sober that first time and I am glad now that I was.  I can remember it.

I was disturbed to hear from Carol yesterday that she had found out that her mother’s corpse is still in refrigeration and not yet cremated. She got the paper work off in time I think but then the fires down there intervened and somehow the cremation place did not get all the information they needed for the death certificate.

I don’t know what the big deal is with that damn death certificate.  But they can’t get rid of a body legally I guess until it is somehow fully confirmed that the body belongs to the person people say it belongs to.  So as of yesterday Carol’s mom’s corpse had been hanging out in the refrigeration unit for two weeks.

Can that be? That Carol’s mom died two weeks ago.  It feels longer ago than that what with the leak in the roof, the dehumidifiers, five days in a motel to get away from the dehumidifiers, people coming and going with dehumidifiers and hanging new dry wall where holes were cut in the walls, and finishing the dry wall, and now it seems the whole chore will not be completed, as I may have previously said, until this coming Friday.  So more people will be coming and going all next week.

The big chore will be the carpet cleaning people.  I need to get as much stuff off the floor as possible so they can get to as much carpet as possible.

And since last Monday, in the middle of all this mess, I have been trying to respond to fifty student papers.  I say “respond” since I don’t like to say “grade.”  But actually I am grading, and my response gets all warped by the need to grade.  In fact, my response becomes mostly a justification for the grade.  I mean true I am also trying to explain how the student might improve his or her writing, but even that explanation feels more like a justification of the grade than anything else.

Sometime I really wish I were teaching math.  Then I would not have to write any justification.  I could just add up the number right or wrong; and that number would justify the grade.  Some teachers do try to run a numbers thing; like 20% for organization; and 20% for unity; and 20% for sentence formation; and 20% for something else.  So that it all adds up to a 100%; and then they can add up all the percentages and come out with say, 85%, a solid B and hope the student will not complain because they are used to numbers with grades and know that 85% is a solid B.

But I have never been able to do that because I am no good at numbers and also because giving 20% for organization, for example, means that I have to be able to define what organization is and how that might be different from “unity” and both different from “sentence formation.”  And frankly I can’t do that.  I guess I am too philosophical or something.  But I really don’t know what organization is or how to distinguish good organization in a student paper, from what the students have been taught is good organization: an introduction, followed by three points, followed by conclusion.  The five paragraph essay. 

I don’t know but grading student papers is a lot harder than a person might think it would be. It’s tough work and always wears me out.  But thank god, I am almost done with this “batch.”

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A couple of days ago the sea and sky looked really strange from the dust in the air and possibly also dust on the ocean.  While these are actually pictures–or representations of real things–the sea and the sky–they strike me as looking quite a bit like abstract art I have seen over the years.  I think maybe I will monkey around with these pics to see if I can produce a piece of abstract art to hang on my wall.  Maybe I could take images over to Kinkos and see how large an image they could produce…maybe… 

 Video clip test

Over the summer—sometime or other—I wrote an article/essay called “Death and the Writing Instructor.”  As if that was something of significance.  I mean who cares about the death of the Writing Instructor or what has death to do with Writing Instructors anymore than say police persons.  But I wrote it because I think death was and is still on my mind.

I liked the title, “Death and the Writing Instructor.” I think it’s pretty dramatic like War and Peace.  Lots of people write titles with colons in them.  That’s the big thing these days.  Something like “The Death of the Writing Instructor: The implications thereof for the realization of the pedagogical imperative.”  Or something.  But “Death and the Writing Instructor”—I think that gets to the point.  I am a dying writing instructor.

I wasn’t sure though I would try to get it published.  It’s sort of an academic thing, with quotes in it from academic sources and it’s kind of about psychoanalysis and anxiety.  But, I thought, hell, you wrote it.  Send it out, but then I saw it didn’t have enough citations.  You have to have enough citations or somebody might think you thought it up yourself or that you are claiming to have had some thoughts of your own, and that’s a strict no-no.  Also citations say you are part of a “community.”  The community of academics, what a joke!  But I found some quotes and stuck them in so I could have more citations.  I also thought about making up some citations so I wouldn’t have to read anything.  But I didn’t do that.

So this is a pretty screwed up article.  It’s a bit personal; I mention myself some and it’s academic, so I couldn’t figure out where it would fit.  What journal might be interested I mean, in such a hybrid thing.  So I sent it off to this guy I know whose work I have read and respect and who is into psychoanalysis to ask where I might send it, and he wrote back that he didn’t know, but that he liked it.  And, funny, that was like enough.  I forgot about sending it off because he had liked it ok and I figured that was enough. 

I noticed that he had dedicated his latest book—he has written a number—to his parents.  His mother died recently and his father who died a decade or so ago was born the same year as WB, 1917.  We are about the same age and he wondered if other writing instructors too—many of us are baby boomers—might be going through the same sort of thing, and he happened to mention that his parents were religious fundamentalists and he had been raised in Texas.  So what is this connection between people raised in the south with religious backgrounds and psychoanalysis?

My argument in the article is a little bizarre.  I say teaching is a temporal act (what act isn’t) that involves the passage of something from one generation to another, from one that is fading or dying and one that is coming into being or growing, and that right at the center of this view of education is DEATH.  I am teaching students now who will be around long after I am long gone, and even as our futures have little in common, so now do our pasts.  My past has almost no connection that I can see to theirs.  They were born around 1988, can you believe.

Anyhow, a couple of days ago, I gave the article a final read, and sent it off to a journal that might possibly be interested.  Who knows.  But I no matter what think that’s a great title, of particular interest to those who are Writing Instructors, and also possibly to people in general who die.

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The last couple of days we had some big winds gusting to 30 mph.  They wiped out the footprints at the beach and left their own pattern. The ocean too was more vigorous than usual, with a few slight whitecaps. 

Hmmmm…

I have taken a longer than usual break from the blog.  Not a break really.  More like being overwhelmed again.

These big winds kicked up off the ocean and stirred up all the dust and my sinuses started acting up and in addition to my usual gloom I started feeling pressure around the eyes and dripping slightly from around the eyeballs.

Anything like this seems right now to me a sign of my immanent departure from this orb.  Paranoia and the death thing—acting in concert.  I know what’s going on—sort of—I have an over identification right now with Brother Dan and his upcoming procedure and what may befall him or not. 

Freud says in “Mourning and Melancholy” that the living person becomes the dead person.  That’s what identification is. Not exactly the most emotionally healthful thing.  Different from empathy which implies some recognition of the person one empathizes with as a separate person.  But this is the kind of stuff—identity stuff—that goes on in a family (the family of my childhood) that was largely dysfunctional or maybe just really screwed up.

In any case, I have been overcome by identifications.  This applies also to my students.  I identify with them through my experiences as student, and the importance of being a student, and of education to me more generally.  For that reason perhaps I most especially hate grading.  I would hate to be a judge who identified with criminals.  Sentencing a person to death would be like executing yourself.

I really—and I mean really—have no Idea how students feel about having me (Nick) assign a grade to their writing or how they feel in general about being graded.  Maybe they don’t have any feelings about the act of being graded generally; they have known that all their lives, but are concerned only with the particular grade they receive. But I do know that every time I put a grade on a paper I feel as if I am grading myself.

Well, the grading is nearly done, and I am not dead.  Today I consider that an accomplishment.

Even though the Doctor who ordered it, Doctor Flaster, is now dead, the people at the clinic want me to go in today for that chest x-ray.  And after that I am to go up stairs and make an appointment to see another pulmonary person.  I don’t want to do it.

Also I am getting a cold.  At least I woke up at about 3 am pouring snot and hardly able to breathe.  Let me tell you sneezing inside a sleep apnea mask is not a pleasant experience.  In your normal sneeze the expelled matter just goes out into space, but when you sneeze in a sleep apnea mask the damn stuff comes right back into your face.

The sleep apnea mask I have is wearing out and the seal gets lose and makes noises as the air goes in and out.  That’s been waking me up, so Carol ordered another one for me.  It should have been here by now but it isn’t.

The sleep apnea mask looks pretty grotesque when one is wearing it.  It is attached to the sleep apnea tube that runs to or from the cpap or sleep apnea machine proper.  The machine that generates the air pressure.  I get all tangled up some nights in the sleep apnea tube.  On a couple of occasions, I wake up to find it wrapped all around my neck.  I don’t know how that happens.  It’s a wonder I ever get a night’s sleep; and don’t kill myself doing it.

I have a batch of student papers, 50 of them, starting to come in today.  I can’t tell you what I feel.  DREAD.  Maybe that would do.  If I had saved all the paper copies of all the student papers I have responded to since I started grading papers, I would not be able to get into my office.  I would open the door and masses of marked up student papers from over two decades of marking student papers would come sliding out. I would get a massive allergy attack from all the dust.

The papers will come in in dribs and drabs over the next three days.  I assign a date for the paper to come in and when that date comes I tell the students that they can take three more days to turn it in and not have it marked down.  They never believe me when I say this.  After class yesterday, a half dozen came up and said, now let me get this straight.  The paper is due tomorrow but I can turn it in as late as Friday with no mark down.  Yes, yes, yes, I say, over and over again.

I said how come nobody believes me. One student said, your approach is radical.

It’s not.  I have come to face the fact over the years that my writing classes rank at the bottom of students’ priority list of things to do.  All of their other classes come before my writing class.  I know this because I have handed out surveys asking them to list their classes in order of importance and my required writing class comes out last.  Every time.  So my flex date assignment approach is an attempt to allow them a little time that they might decide to apply in a productive way to the writing of the paper. 

But I say, the papers do have to be in by Friday (or whatever day) because my wife and I have plans for the weekend and she will get mad at me if I have to grade papers.  This is mostly a lie.  I do have a wife, but she wouldn’t get mad at me and usually we don’t have any big plans.

Week one of spring quarter classes is now over.  I didn’t have a good time.  There were lots of people trying to crash both classes.  I hate kicking people out, but I don’t want to overload myself either.  Making matters somewhat worse was the fact that most of the people I had to kick out were seniors.

This makes no sense.  This is the last quarter of their senior year and these seniors have not yet taken the second class in sequence that they should have taken in the beginning of their junior year.  But they couldn’t get in or put if off.  I believe them.  I think some repeatedly tried but couldn’t get the class.  As it is over a third of both classes are seniors.  The research paper is at the center of this class; and most of the seniors have none multiple research papers, except from the couple of students from the biological sciences.

They have done lab reports aplenty.  But not research papers, and this is a class designed for people in the social sciences.  What the heck are two hard science people doing in my social science class?  They are in my class because they have to take it to fulfill their General Education requirements, and they don’t much care what class it is, just when it is.  All the rest of it—that they were supposed to take it as juniors and they are supposed to be in the social sciences–doesn’t make any difference.

This is a ridiculous and impossible class.  I had to struggle with being pissed off for all the classes this first week.  I would call roll and think well maybe I will have some open spots for the crashers and then the people who were on the list and officially enrolled would come in 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes late.  I want to shot them.  And, then, as I am trying to describe the class and get things rolling a bit, in comes a student and says he wants to crash and do I have room.

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The water from the golf course (part of the flood plain) runs off into the above.  A slough.  It may look like a lagoon, but the water is only inches deep.  Come summer it will be mud flats with wet spots here and there.  A slough, in other and fewer words.