And here is me reading, so you can read along as I talk.
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The “Quarterlife Crisis”???
I had my students meet in a computer lab so they could start poking around on the web for a possible research topic. I looked over one young woman’s shoulder, and she was reading about something called “the quarterlife crisis.” She was wondering if this quarterlife crisis thing might have something to do with the consumer society. I said I wasn’t sure since I didn’t know what the quarterlife crisis was.
So she explained it was sort of about the agony of being twentysomething. She, for example, was working and just taking a couple of classes to finish up and living in a house with three other young women, just out or soon to be out of college, and she said they didn’t know really what they were doing and where they were going. My student was paying for her own education and was trying to find a job that paid more, but in the meantime she still has to rely on her parents for rent, and really she isn’t all that happy about that.
Turns out, I guess, I did know something about this crisis, which, it appears, started getting press around 2000. I had just missed the term, but not the obvious. Ten or twenty years ago, when students dared to complain about life in college, I would go on a rant and say, just you wait, just you wait till you get in your twenties, that’s when the hell really starts. First you can’t find a job, then you do, but it’s the wrong one, so you go back to school for another degree, and by the time you get it, the market is glutted. And you get so depressed about this that your partner in life, just pray you aren’t married, gets fed up with you and leaves town to take a job elsewhere. Meanwhile, you slip up and get the herpes.
After a bit, I stopped delivering this rant. Sometimes the students–maybe it was just the mention of “the herpes”(that a teacher should mention such a thing) –looked stunned, even a bit ashen. I tried to soften the blow by saying, hey, not to worry. You have all of your twenties to figure it out. Adolescence has just been extended. If you hit thirty and don’t have the semblance of a life you could be in trouble.
That’s the fact. Along with the general extension of life goes the extension of adolescence. If you read Rousseau’s Emile (not that I recommend it) you will find that he thought adolescence (the trouble teens) lasted about six weeks. Now we have billion dollar industries catering to the malaise of the teenager; teens are now a social institution. But this is mostly a middle class thing. As Barbara Barbara Ehrenreich argues somewhere, the middle class loves to exploit its young. They are consigned to immaturity because they can’t lay their hands on adult responsibilities. Instead, they have to go college forever, while acquiring massive debt, to get into their profession of choice, and then they are required to serve extended and low paying apprenticeship before they can really get a “career” and with that the stability that might make for longer term commitments on the personal relations front.
I am not without sympathy for the firstquarter crisis; I am going through the lastquarter crisis being, as I am, a sixtiessomething. But going through the firstquarter crisis might appear something of a luxury to a working class kid who has life, whether it be adultlike or not, more or less thrust upon him or her by the force of economic circumstance.
The Passive and Dependent Consumer
One persistent criticism of consumer society is that it makes individuals passive and dependent. Christopher Lasch says we have become overly reliant on “externally produced goods,” and, on top of that, when it comes especially to our electronic gadgets, most of the time we don’t have the faintest idea about how these “goods” work. Once upon a time, back in the 60’s, while my knowledge was far from complete, I had a general idea how a car worked. I could fix the brakes, and replace the head gasket; I could rebuild a carburetor. But now, since fuel injection, I don’t believe cars have carburetors. I believe they have computers, though I have no idea where these might be located. Additionally, I have no idea how a computer works.
I have heard that one type of car no longer has a dipstick. I mean how is one even to pretend that one knows something about a car if one cannot pop the hood and look knowingly at the dipstick.
A horrible instance of this dependence (and its attendant lack of understanding) is the recent story of the run away Lexus. This car was driven by a man in law enforcement; he knew something about driving cars. Still he was unable to stop his car when it reached 125 miles per hour. The car crashed and all four persons inside died.
When people can no longer make their car’s engine stop, something has gone hay-wire.
Apparently, this version of the Lexus has no key. Instead one has a fob. One pushes a button on the fob and then one pushes another button in the car and the car starts. I guess I still don’t understand exactly what happened. Why couldn’t the driver have pushed the button in the car to get the engine to stop. I feel helpless even thinking about it.
According to an expert, a driver of such a Lexus might have been able to stop the car if he or she had pushed the button on the fob. But if he or she repeatedly and quickly pushed the button on the fob, it wouldn’t work. One has to push the button on the fob for three seconds steadily. But in the manual for the car one was warned not to do this since one would lose power steering and power brakes.
The first car I drove did not have a manual. Now, an expert says that truly to inform car owners about the features of their cars, the manual would have to be a thousand pages long.
I have had it. I will not be able to make the next techno-step, whatever it might be. I simply refuse to read a 1000 page manual on how a car works. If I ever have to buy a new car, I will make sure it has a key that turns the car engine both on and off. I will also insist on a dipstick.
Still, perhaps the argument is all wrong. Back in the olden days, people didn’t know how a cow worked either, and they were plenty happy for the milk.
But then they had magic to explain everything.
TP Controversy
Some time back when I was in college, the phrase–“the personal is the political”–started making its round; and by god, the political seems to be getting more and more personal every day.
Now even what one might call “anus management” has fallen under the sign of the political.
Apparently a feud is brewing over the production and sale of three and four ply toilet paper, designed to produce a heavenly wiping experience as the only appropriate climax to a good dump.
The creation of this soft as a baby’s bottom stuff requires, according to the LA Times, the cutting of mature trees. Sure TP and facial tissue (I suppose this is Kleenex) account for only 5% of the mature tree killing, but environmentalists say it’s too much.
“At what price softness?” asks an official allied with the recycling industry.
That’s what we would have if the environmentalists have their way. Toilet paper made from recycled paper. That’s the kind of thing you can find in public toilets or at the Gray Hound Bus Depot. And from personal experience, I can testify this paper can be plenty rough, having on one occasion–I swear!–picked up a splinter from it.
I guess this problem will only be resolved only we can answer the pressing question: “Just how delicate is the average American anus?”
Yudof Interview: Stand up or Send up?
The impression Mark Yadof, President of the UC system, makes in his interview with the NY Times is so down right bad, I thought it had to be a send up. A joke, from its inception through its rather poor execution. That at least was the only excuse I could find for it.
If that is not the case, then Yodof is a graduate of the Dick Cheney school of the flip quip, as in, you know, “stuff happens.”
Having decided to eschew any appearance of “depth” or “thoughtfulness,” Yodof appears a wise ass bent on the humiliation of his interviewer.
But the world is run by talking heads, and Yadof apparently wants to join that fatuous crowd.
In any case, he appears an embarrassment to himself and the system he represents.
Maybe he was hired for his PR skills.
Another Impossible Profession
Here I am gearing up for another year of teaching writing at UCSB. I think this will be year 30.
In 1980, I finished my dissertation, “Romantic Thought: Education and Alienation.”
That could be the title of my autobiography as a teacher. Looking back I see how much the reading I did for the dissertation has informed my thinking about teaching and education.
I continue to think about it and recently came across the following by Carl Rogers from an essay, “Freedom to Learn.”
a) My experience is that I cannot teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run, futile.
b) It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no significant influence on behavior.
c) I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior.
d) I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influence behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.
e) Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.
f) As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher
That about sums it up, for me too, though I don’t think I have completely lost interest in being a teacher or at least in trying to figure out what one might be.
Meanwhile, T. Adorno speaks of the teacher as the executioner and school as the scene of executions.
The Fab 4
Too many flashbacks lately; not exactly Wordworth’s spots of time, more like pits of time where I find myself sliding back to one of those I-remember-where-I-was-on that-day-moments.
For example, there’s been a good bit of news lately–what with the release of their version of Guitar Hero and their remastered tapes–of the Beatles, a band that broke up over 40 years ago.
And all of a sudden I remembered that day back in 1964, when I was a senior in Mr. Moore’s English class.
But I wrote about this in another entry on this blog, giving me the occasion to quote myself as follows:
Mr. Moore’s class also furnished me one of the few high school moments that I remember with any warmth. One Monday morning he turned to us and said, “And just who the heck are these Beatles.” This was in many ways an unprecedented moment. I don’t recollect a teacher ever having asked his students a real question, who asked it moreover in a spirit of curiosity and out of a desire to learn something about the lives of his students. We sat more or less dumbfounded. I could see he was going to let the question drop, but since it was my job in that class to answer all questions nobody else would or could, I raised my hand and said, “The best rock and roll band ever.”
I remember having paused for dramatic effect between “the best rock and roll band” and “ever.”
Over the years I have have more than once questioned that “ever,” but listening more to them again lately, I am inclined to think that I was more right than wrong back in 1964.
Comment Function
I think the comment function for this blog is now functioning.
Should you feel moved to make a comment.
Click here to go to nicktingle.net
Just click on comment at the top of the particular entry.
A comment box should then open.
Type in your name (doesn’t have to be all of it).
Followed by a valid email address.
If you want you can click on “save this information” and the next time you wish to comment your name and email address will automatically appear.
Should you feel so moved, send me a comment on this entry so I can tell if the comment function is functioning.
T
Blog Migration
I am currently attempting to “migrate” my blog from one host to another. That means also that I have had to create a new domain name.
This migrating stuff has turned out to be a challenge, especially for someone like me who is concentration impaired.
Most importantly, right now, “And He Not Busy Being Born” is hosted or in the parlance “parked” at Yahoo small business. And it’s URL is nicktingle.com.
I have rebuild “And He Not Bush Being Born” and parked it at another host, SureSupport, with the URL of nicktingle.net.
Eventually I hope to close down the Yahoo installation completely, and move the domain, “nicktingle.com” over to Sure Support.
I don’t know why I am doing this exactly. Maybe I just wanted a change. I think mostly I was frustrated at Yahoo’s unwillingness to upgrade “Movable Type,” the program that actually builds the blog from 3.2 to 4.2. I think 4.2 is better. It offers more features, but it will take me a while to figure out how to personalize my new page so it doesn’t look so machined. That requires getting into something called CSS, which I know little about.
I have to move files too from the one host to the other and that will take a bit of time too.
So I may be at this project off and on over the next six months or so.
In the meantime, if you are at “nicktingle.com” please click here: “nicktingle.net” and if you have opinions on the new page, let me know.
