Category Archives: Writing Instructor

Mounting the Podium

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Or, as I was trying to say before I got distracted by the Volksburger, the writing course does not have content or a disciplinary knowledge upon which one need be expert to mount the podium, as it were.  At one time, back in the early 80’s, far, far away and many moons ago, the composition shakespearedeadsequence in which I worked did have content.  The first course was a writing course—mostly students wrote —and the second course featured the informal essay, short stories, and a novel of one’s choice, and finally, believe it or not, the last course in the sequence featured poetry, a Shakespeare play, and one by a modern.

As I said, that was many moons ago.  Back then the writing program was under the purview—curricularly and adminstratively—of the English Department.  One has to say I think that these literary texts were a kind of fixed curriculum.  The sequence wasn’t arranged around mastering different sorts of writing skills, but around making sure students got a taste of poetry, the novel, and some short stories.  One administrator, I remember, expressed some dismay when the writing program became the writing program and did away with the literature part.  Now, he said, it will be possible for a student to graduate the university without having read a single play by Shakespeare.

True enough, I guess, though not sufficient reason to teach him in a writing course.  I wasn’t sure however that the reasons my more compositionally inclined colleagues gave for not teaching him were all that good.  They seemed to be saying—and this seemed the only coherent reason they could give for not teaching Shakespeare—that the content of a writing course was most properly writing and not Shakespeare.  I think teaching Shakespeare and poetry made my compositionalist colleagues feel insecure because they felt Shakespeare was a content, or disciplinary knowledge upon which one need be expert to mount the podium and pontificate.

I didn’t understand this at all; for while, yes, I had at one time been an English Major, but I had taken only one—and it was poorly taught—class on Shakespeare in my entire college career, undergraduate and graduate, and did not feel myself an expert at all.  This didn’t bother me one whit because I did not teach Shakespeare as content.  I wasn’t concerned about saying something about his work that was inaccurate because I didn’t try to say anything about him except that which might give students the confidence to read him and then to write something upon him.  I did not, for example, talk about the “nature of tragedy.”  Heaven forbid.  Given the way I approached the teaching of Shakespeare I thought his works were just as good as many and perhaps better than some works as a stimulus and catalyst for student writing.

 I was troubled also by the other side of this equation.  For the argument against teaching Shakespeare appeared to pit one content—in this case—Shakespeare against some other “content” specific to and definitive of the writing classroom.  But as I have argued, the writing classroom has no content per se or qua content.  None.  That some in the “discipline” of writing think otherwise is quite disturbing at least from a theoretical perspective and in the light of sound reasoning.  In the “real” world of course one does what one has to do.  But this idea that the content of the writing class is writing has had and continues to have pernicious effects.  I hold this idea responsible for the many teachers, usually beginning ones and Teaching Assistants, that feel one has not done one’s duty as a writing instructor unless one has managed to reduce students to complete confusion by lecturing on and on about coming up with a “thesis statement.”

The Volksburger

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I managed though to scotch the argument about burgers by bringing up my Volkswagen theory.  This is a general theory that I have applied on different occasions to express my concern with the proliferation of objects or items that all do the same thing. I used it for example to critique all fatkidthose different kinds of cameras I had begun to see or all those different kinds of watches.  So I applied it to the burger and said I didn’t understand why we didn’t have just One Burger.  What the hell was the difference?  A burger was a burger was a burger, wasn’t it.  Why not a sort of Volksburger for all the people?

Man, you would have thought I advocated killing the Pope or something.  No, they insisted; a Mac’s burger was not the same as a Jack’s burger, and neither of those were the same as a Carl’s Junior, and nothing matched Burger King burger.  They weren’t just amazed at my apparent stupidity but a little bit angry.  A Volksburger seemed to them down right Un-American.  Inside listening to them, I had one of my too frequent what am I doing here and who are these people moments.  For these young people, I felt, with a sinking heart, freedom was the freedom to pick, buy, and eat the burger of your choice.

This was some time in the early 90’s and looking back I can now see that I was already dealing with the influence of consumerism.  My Volksburger theory ran completely contrary to that proliferation of objects that constitutes choice in the consumer society.  While communism was not the bug-a-boo it had once been, I, as an advocate of the Volksburger, seemed to advocate a drab sort of society where everybody wore the same thing—usually something brown and sack like—and were all really automatons because they ate the same burger.  Unlike us–I mean Americans–who wear all sorts of different things and can choose freely among a vast array of possible burgers.

My concern with the development of the individual didn’t arise directly out of such episodes.  The idea had been with me long before that and is related to my own personal history.  Hell, the title of my dissertation was “Romantic Thought: Education and Alienation” (1980).  At that time, I had thought I would be a teacher of literature, but looking now at the title of my dissertation, I think I was unconsciously, and semi-consciously, concerned with the effects of education and its possible role in the development of the individual.  Maybe Hegel’s Bildugn.

Perhaps I am projecting, as is always possible, but episodes like this (multiply by a 100 or so) led me, rather despairingly, to feel that these young people actually believed that one’s individuality was somehow related to things that one purchased and sometimes ate.  I just didn’t think a person could buy individuality.  It didn’t come along with an enlarged bank account.  I thought and still do, vaguely I admit, that individuality was not a given.  One was not born it; it was not a right of the individual.  One became an individual—if that’s what one wanted to become—and becoming one was a lot of hard work.  The labor of the negative, as Hegel might have said.

In-N-Out

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

One might ask, I suppose, why a writing teacher reflects so much on education.  I think it’s the teacher part. And the writing part.  As a writing teacher, I don’t have content or a specialized knowledge to impart to students—like math or the history of England.  I do, of course, have contentin-n-out in my writing courses, but it’s not fixed or something either about which I am expert.  I keep changing the content or it keeps changing.  Next quarter, I will teach a class linked to Sociology and basic sociology will be the content of the course.

And in the basic freestanding courses I always have content too.  For example I have been teaching something called Writing for the Social Sciences.  I am no expert in the social sciences, but I offer a topic that I hope social science students can write about.  For about four, maybe five years, I used the topic of “Eating in America.”  Then I grew weary of reading about people getting fat, so I changed the topic to the Consumer Society.  Partly, though I changed, not just to get away from obesity, but because for our basic research writing course I had taught something on the American family.  That topic, along with the fat topic, led me to believe that I had fallen asleep somewhere around 1985.

My readings in fat and the family made me aware that some pretty amazing changes had been taking place in the USA since about 1980.  I had noticed them, I suppose, or been vaguely cognizant, but I hadn’t tried to study them directly or to make some sort of systematic sense out of them, so I switched to the consumer society.  That seemed to offer me, at least, a frame by which to digest or make sense of all the disparate info I was getting about markets, niche markets, cows and beef, brands, our experiential distance from what we eat, credit card debt, the growing income gap, health care and the death of the medical profession.

That last topic—the death of the medical profession–arouse out of teaching a writing course for students seeking to enter the medical professions.

I picked these topics for my own reasons and I have always tried to find a “content” that students might know something about and that might at least slightly pique their interest.  Who isn’t interested in food?  Thus Eating in America. I thought students might be interested because I knew that they ate, and once, a number of years before, an In-n-Out Burger franchise had moved into our area, and while, driving by it on the freeway, I noticed, on the day of its opening, a huge line of cars extending from the parking out of sight on down the street.

What’s up, I wondered, and asked my students, the next day, about In-n-Out, and a discussion erupted (is the right word) about burgers and which was the best burger and so on.  And vigorous debate centered on French Fries, some arguing that In-n-Out Fries were the worst, and others argued that they were really French fries and very fresh because you could see them making them on the spot.  One kid defended In-n-Out mightily, and admitted, when I expressed my consternation at anyone waiting that long in a car to get a burger, that he had made a special trip to In-n-Out because he wanted to be there at the opening, as if the opening of an In-n-Out was like the opening of the baseball season.  And when it came out that they had screwed up his order, you could tell he was really upset.  Like going to the first day of baseball season and having the game rained out.  He was really disappointed.

Consolation of Philosphy

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

This might appear confusing and I suppose it is.  On one hand, I appear to want to claim that education can assist in the development of the individual.  Certainly, at the heart of this mentogether2development would be shifts in one’s epistemology.  However, I appear also to want to claim that a person with a highly complex epistemology, like K and K’s graduate student, may not, by virtue of his or her education, have developed as an individual.

I have said this because I do believe that the university as an institution seeks to perpetuate itself and thus culls from the great mass of students those people who might best assist in its perpetuation.  Who are these people more exactly?  I would suggest they are people, a particular group of people, whose intellect, as a part of their particular psychological configuration, is more detached from the emotional realm than is the case with most people.

This does not make such people “smarter.”  Rather it means only that they are able to shift to the complex epistemology of the university more easily than might be the case with persons whose intellect remains relatively rooted in the emotional realm. Education, as I think of it, may not require of the former, given their detached intellects, development at deeper psychological levels.  Education, as I think of it, may require, however, of the latter, a developmental move, with its attendant destabilization and affective discharge, not because they are not as smart as the former, but because their intellect is not detached from but rooted in their emotional universe.

Educational institutions, such as the university, may feel they are doing their jobs, that indeed they are educating, because they appear to educate some relatively few persons into become “graduate students” and perhaps later themselves professors.  I am arguing however that the university, as currently constituted, does not “educate” these individuals but culls from the great group of students those whose relation to the intellect and its activities permits them, with relatively little psychological turmoil, to assume towards knowledge that position favored by the university.

I express this roughly.  But the psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, has argued that some individuals at the earliest stages of development and in relation to a particular set of circumstances may develop a relation to the mind as an object.  The mind as object becomes detached from emotional or subjective realm, but at the same time serves those individuals for him it has become detached as a stabilizing and anchoring object.  Such people find the activity of the mind particularly satisfying and may turn to it not as a way of understanding or coming to grips with the conflicts of the emotional universe but as a way of stepping, however momentarily out of it.

Such people experience endlessly chewing over a particular intellectual puzzle not as an exercise as futility, but as enlivening and stabilizing. Such people may, in fact, find consolation in philosophy.  I have wondered about my own inclination, over the years, when enveloped in a certain kind of depression, to actually WANT to read Hegel, and to find, as I struggled with his tortured meanings, if not release, at least distraction, however fleeting and momentary, from the weight of my depression. Other people, under such circumstances, might bake a cake.

Birds of a Feather

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

K and K wish to link stages of epistemological development (or attitudes towards how one knows or doesn’t) to moral development.  In this light, the moral position of B might be superior to A.  I am,mentogether however, unwilling to accept a link between epistemological development and moral development.  Or to put this a little more clearly, I am unwilling or unable to say that because a person has been to graduate school that his or her moral judgment is superior to someone who hasn’t.

The conception of education that I am trying to elucidate, in any case, does not aim at the creation and/or production of graduate students but at the cultivation or development of individuals.  Going to graduate school does not of course not make one an individual; but surely going to graduate school does not guarantee either that one is an individual.  That academics might, of course, tend to privilege or to take as moral development epistemological development makes sense of course.  Universities seek, as do most institutions, to perpetuate themselves.

 Universities, like the Marines, are always looking for a few good mostly men and some women.  Professors, or epistemological workers, are consistently on the look out for people who show the potential for thinking like themselves.  Curried and favored these few individuals are encouraged to sign on with the university and once they have they are thrown into the boot camp of graduate school.  This is no more than to say that birds of a feather flock together.

The desire of educational institutions to perpetuate themselves has more to do with the creation of tribes (or flocks) than it has to do with the cultivation or development of the individual.  I have felt and continue to feel that the members of the university may at times be entirely too comfortable with “uncertainty.”  This may be a very valuable thing in the realm of “science” and knowledge production, but not a valuable thing in the realm of action.  Or more precisely, uncertainty in the realm of action tends to take one out of one’s comfort zone rather than put one in it in the realm of knowledge pursuit.

In the realm of action, as William James said, skepticism is not operational.  Beliefs sustain and guide persons in their actions, and they are “beliefs” and not knowledge because it is impossible to know if one’s actions will have the effects or the consequences that one intends.  For example, should I join the Army now, or live at home, work, and seek a degree at the local community college.  Or should I marry X who clearly loves me and whom I love or risk losing X while I pursue a career that may take me to another part of the country.  

Uncertainty in the realm of action can very easily produce the very unpleasant discomfort—far, far more uncomfortable than the uncertainty of skepticism—of intense anxiety.  As Sartre suggests, we may in such situations employ all sorts of rationalizations, excuses, and psychological maneuvers to conceal the anxiety that arises from choice.     

A and B

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

K and K (see previous entry) offer brief comments on the two interviews.  They write that for respondent A:

 
            …the problem itself is not a perplexing one; it is one for which a correct answer exists or will exist.  Finding the right facts will lead to certain knowledge.  Interpreting the facts is not mentioned as part of the process of arriving at a decision. (3)

 Of the second respondent (B), they write:

People who use this reasoning style acknowledge the uncertainty of knowing, but even though they accept the uncertainty they also argue that a judgment that is “reasonably certain” can be constructed on the basis of available data and existing methodologies

Tarrowsignhese seem remarks seem adequate summaries of the epistemologies implied in A and B.  But what, if anything, can the remarks of A and B tell us about their psychological development. 

Looked at in this way, I think it worth noting that A is involved in a contradiction.  First A says she cannot know because she did not make it (chemical additive) and later says that a final absolute answer is possible and will come forward.  This though may not be so much a logical contradiction as it is an expression of the individual’s embeddedness in time.  I, at present, do not know, but, in my opinion, in the future an answer will be forth coming.  Additionally, A’s attitude towards knowledge appears relatively passive.  Some one with the guts to examine all the data will produce the answer; but A will not be that person. Further, A appears to equate the knowing of a thing with the making of it.  I don’t know, she says, because I did not make it.  And, finally, A seems to feel that knowledge is the product of the efforts of individuals.

B is not however involved in even the appearance of a contradiction and shows no sense at all of being embedded in time or of knowledge being generated in time.  This may be the case because her response, as K and K suggests, rests on an acceptance of “uncertainty” which as part of the attitude of skepticism is perpetual.  Uncertainty has not and will not be resolved at any particular moment.  While, in other words, A approaches the question with the attitude that an absolute answer is possible, B approaches the problem with the attitude that no absolute answer is possible.

Further B does not believe that the person who knows a thing is the person who makes a thing.  Or, more precisely, B does not believe that the person(s) who make a thing necessarily know the effects of a thing (whether it is safe or useful or lives up to its claims).  And B knows that one cannot necessarily trust the claims (tobacco) of those that make the thing.  B’s attitude towards “knowledge” or “expert opinion” is much more active.  Indeed, one might say that for B “knowledge” is “expert opinion” as generated by certain assumptions and methodologies.

How does one get from A to B.?  Well, one might logically answer, by going to college and onto graduate school.  To which, I might answer quite logically, why yes of course, but that makes education simply a social or socializing process and doesn’t tell us anything about what an individual might have to go through emotionally to move from position A to position B.  Additionally, if one takes a social approach, as do K and K, one is unable to tell if B is able to apply the uncertainty principle to areas of life other than the epistemic (are chemical additives safe), or if, indeed, she should (do you drink beverages with NutraSweet).

Opinionated Opinion

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

More on the issue of opinion and individualism.  In their Developing Reflective Judgment, Patricia King and Karen Kitchener offer a number of interviews with students to clarify the idea of reflective judgment.  In the following two interviews, students are asked to express their opinions (italics are aspartamemine).

“The following comments were made by a high school student.

I: Can you ever know for sure that your position that Nutra­sweet is safe is correct?
R: No. I don’t know for sure because I don’t manufacture it.
I: OK. Do you think we’ll ever know for sure?
R: If somebody more or less had the guts to stand up and go and do all the research on it and find out.
I: So you think someday we’ll know?
R: Yes.
I: When people disagree about the safety of chemical addi­tives [in foods], is it the case that one opinion is right and the other is wrong?
R: Some people’s opinion is right, and they can more or less prove that they are right, and the other people that are wrong.

The following excerpt from an interview with a graduate student illustrates this reasoning style.
I: Can you ever say you know for sure that your point of view on chemical additives is correct?
R: No, I don’t think so. I think given that any theorem has to start with assumptions that are not necessarily true, then even if the internal argument in your system is completely consis­tent, it might be that the assumptions are wrong. So, just from this standpoint, we can’t always be sure. I think we can usually be reasonably certain, given the information we have now and considering our methodologies.
I: Is there anything else that contributes to not being able to be sure?
R: Yes. Aside from assumptions, it might be that the research wasn’t conducted rigorously enough. In other words, we might have flaws in our data or sample, things like that.
I: How then would you identify the "better" opinion?

R: One that takes as many factors as possible into considera­tion. I mean one that uses the higher percentage of the data that we have and perhaps that uses the methodology that has been most reliable.

I.And how do you come to a conclusion about what the evidence suggests?

R: I think you have to take a look at the different opinions and studies that are offered by different groups. Maybe some studies offered by the chemical industry, some studies by the government, some private studies, a variety of studies from a variety of different areas. You wouldn’t trust, for instance, a study funded by the tobacco industry that proved that cigarette smoking is not harmful. You wouldn’t base your point of view entirely upon that study. Things like that have to be taken into account also . . . you have to try to interpret people’s motives and that makes it a more complex soup to try to strain out.”

End of quotation.  That’s a bit of a read, but I think that two distinct attitudes towards opinion are illustrated here.  They are worth looking at in some detail.  But for the moment, I ask: “How does a student get from position A to position B?”  My answer is that the student must develop intellectually and emotionally.

The Right to Opinion

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓

Well…to continue…a while along the path of “individualism.”

Individualism, as ideology, as symbolic of  standing on one’s own two legs, separates person from person just as the mobility of the child, when he or she begins to walk, makes possible the separation of child from mother.  Individualism separates by voiding one’s relationship to groups, dummyto the group of one’s ethnic heritage, to the group of one’s religion, to the group of one’s class, or to the group of one’s gender.  The individual is no one of these things, and before the law at least, the group memberships of the individual should make no difference to one’s judgment of the individual.

Most teachers of writing, I expect, have talked with a student who complains, because of something the teacher has said or written on a paper, “But I have a right to my own opinion, don’t I?”  Well, of course, one tries to say, but while one has a right to one’s opinion, there are different kinds of opinions.  One is looking, one says, for reasoned opinion, opinion backed up by some evidence and argument.  Of course, it’s hard to say this without implying that the opinion of the student is somehow inferior to one’s own.  This, of course, is what the student hears.  That his or her opinion is inferior, and that you the teacher are saying, in effect, I am the teacher and you are not.

I don’t think it would be better to say this—not if one wishes to educate—but I have wanted to say, “Look, you call this your own opinion, and you have a right to it because it is your own. But I don’t think your “own” opinion is your “own” opinion at all.  No, it is but the feeble echo of the opinion of several million other people who have the same opinion that you have.  In what sense is it your own if millions of others have it?  Did you buy it?  As one might a pair of jeans. 

No, an opinion is something a person has to earn.  And if I had any sense at all that you had earned it, I might not have spoken as I did. In fact, had I felt that you had earned your opinion, I might have responded to it conversationally, engaged you in dialogue about it, but when I feel the opinion has not been earned, I don’t think I am talking to an individual at all but a mob, with a single idea in its head.  And really one cannot engage a mob in meaningful dialogue.”

My reasons for not saying this to the student are multiple.  I guess I would rather imply that students’ reasoning is not so hot, than say outright they are not individuals, but sociologically speaking apes of others, strange somnambulists wondering around mumbling things that they have heard their minister or their father say.  Many of my students have been told that they are “special” from day one, and being told that they are by no means special, at least in the realm of opinion, could hurt their feelings.

Also I have found that students who baldly state their right to their opinion, with no caveats, qualifications, or other people might see something different since everything is relative, can be gutsy.  Perhaps, and who knows, they feel very strongly about this cliché that they consider their own opinion..  If so rather than insult such students, I think it better to try to check it out, and see what possibly, even if unexpressed, might give it force.  Of course, one could be dealing with a bonehead.

The “ism” of Individualism

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Education today, I claim, fails to cultivate the personality or develop the individual.  Understanding this requires a look at the vexing notion of individuality.  One is not likely to understand education’s failure to develop it if one does not know what it is.  In Generation Me (2006), Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D., writes of people now in their twenties and thirties:

            Two of Generation Me’s most prominent characteristics are our individualism and our lack of political engagement. We firmly believe no one is going to help, so we have to stand on our own. (229)

survivalfittestTo be clear, “individualism” is faith, a belief, or ideology like, as the “ism” implies, socialism, communism, or capitalism.  Acting in accord with this “ism” does not mean a person is, psychologically speaking, an individual at all.

            Many of the students, with whom I work, believe in this particular “ism.”  I am not saying, of course, that they know they believe in this “ism,” but they certainly act as if they do. They seem, as Twenge says, to feel the personal sphere and the political sphere are distinct.  This explains, why, according to Twenge, many young people don’t vote.  But, as I am suggesting, the “individualism” of today’s young people is itself an ideology or a politics.  Not voting does not mean one does not have a “politics.”

            That the young people of today might believe in such an “ism” of course makes sense.  During the period of their growing up, more and more individual Americans, some few of them at least, have become richer and richer.  Such people might appear to be able to stand on their own.  And as some few individuals have acquired greater and greater wealth, less and less money has been put into the public sphere, into repairing the roads, or building up parks, or into education.

            Standing on one’s own two legs is a wonderfully significant stage in the development of the child.  But it is by no means the final stage in the development of the individual.  The bottom line ethic however of bullying capitalism makes the ideology of individualism appear somehow heroic.  Being able to stand on one’s own in a world of dog eat dog indifference appears the stuff of struggle towards liberation.  Twenge writes, “Many young women said their mothers explicitly told them to act as individuals. ‘My mother has always encouraged me to be independent and never depend on anyone but myself, wrote Melinda, 22.’” (192)

            The young women whom I teach appear much like Melinda.  When I ask I find that most intend first to acquire a career.  Marriage will come later, if at all.  And whether or not one will have children appears a very open question.  These young women, whether they know it or not, have benefited from the feminism of the 60’s that aimed at the liberation of all women.  But these young women do not regard themselves as the heirs of that feminism.  They do not see themselves as feminists and do not like being identified as such because they see feminists as “women who hate men.”

            If I felt being a feminist meant “a woman who hates men,” I wouldn’t want to be one either because being one might make one appear to be a not very friendly person doomed to a life of consumed by hatred.  Feminism as the liberation of a group has been changed by well meaning mothers and fathers into the “ism” of individualism.  This supplies the young women with the meaningful goal of standing on her own two legs and becoming independent and, at the same time, obscures the profoundly deep and ongoing conflict between men and women.  Individualism liberates at the cost of deep repression.

Life Beyond Vocation

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Somewhere—maybe in Man’s Search for Himself—Rollo May says the modern age is particularly the age of anxiety.  I don’t remember his reasoning, but I expect it went something like: never have earthmilkywayindividual human beings been so exposed, so vulnerable.  Physical ailments, aging, disease, the loss of a loved one, the loss of love itself are the common stuff of life, but now the individual increasingly lacks the means by which to sustain his or her self when struck by this common stuff.

Before individuals had, for example, marriage till death did you part, for good or ill, or sickness and in health.  Or one had family, for better or worse, located around and about, but relatively nearby that could be called, or just showed up at your door whether  one wanted it or not, in moments of crisis.  One might have hated as much as loved their faces; but all were familiar and there was comfort in that.  Just as comfort was to be found in the relatively unchanging aspect of the old neighborhood.  And of course, in a pinch, one had religion and the comfort of a shared faith.

But marriage is in trouble.  The family is breaking up and taking new shapes.  One has had, to make ends meet, left the area completely.  Family is not around and about or nearly.  And having left, when one returns, the old neighborhood is hardly recognizable.  And religion now offers the threadbare shared faith of a fast food franchise. Never, ever has it been easier to buy your way into heaven.

This is the life now, beyond vocation, to which Sanford refers.  A life, lacking the supports that were once there, the familiar comforts and the comforts of familiarity that blanketed the individual and kept him protected against disaster in the prospect and disaster already afflicted.  The individual is left exposed, then, to an indifferent universe.  At an extreme, or for the more imaginative, one now knows the universe is very huge, unimaginably huge.  The earth that holds us down is less than a speck, less than a microbe in that great space.  And if the earth is not struck and destroyed by a meteor that’s only a matter of timing, only a consequence of the duration of human consciousness being—from its beginning to its end—less that a tick in the expanse of geological time.  There’s a lot of time for us to be gone and for the meteor not to appear.

This is indifference—and not merely a metaphor for it—at its most abstract.  Like the music of the spheres, one can just barely imagine it.  But more up close and personal, one can perhaps imagine pulling out from the intersection to be struck by thousands of pounds of metal hurtling at 60 miles an hour, and you live and wake to find yourself paralyzed from the waist down and your wife carried off to whatever kingdom is to come. 

 But even that is too abstract really; for the indifference of which May speaks is woven into the fabric and texture of our daily lives.  We try to give it a face by calling it such things as “terror.”  This is the world beyond vocation, and education as it is currently practice does nothing to help individuals hold together in the face of it.