But it’s hard!

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I had to do some paper work on campus, and was feeling so bad about my teaching that I stopped colleagues and said, I was feeling bad about my teaching lately and wondered how they were doing—and almost universally people seemed to feel they were pushing rocks up a hill.  Sure one class—perhaps was going OK—but the other one or two just sucked.  People are really having trouble with our Writing 50, a research paper writing course; many of the students in these classes are already juniors and seniors and have written many research papers and so don’t quite get the point of taking a class on how to write them.

So we have this bureaucratic pipeline mess with a backlog of students taking a course they should have taken as sophomores.   But they couldn’t get in it went they first tried.  And additionally people reported that they were just having trouble getting students to do anything.  Exercises that usually work hang-fire.  Jokes that universally kill prove duds….and of course students don’t seem to know how to read.

I talked a mile a minute in one class the other day throwing out examples, talking them through the ideas under consideration, and they were supposed to have brought a page or two of writing, but 50% hadn’t.  But I broke them into groups to have them discuss possible topics, and went from group to group.  And two people in one group said they had no idea what to write about.  So I talked and talked and said to one, look you just mentioned an example that might fit with the idea of social self and the true self.  And she said, but that’s just one example, and you said we are to try to write about only one example.  Why not two examples, she said, can’t I use two examples,  and I said, well, you did that in your last paper, and the point of the second example was the same as the point of the first, so what was the point of the second.  The point, the point really is to write an organized paper that lasts from four to five pages and you can do that with one example.

And then as I talked the student said, But it’s hard.  It’s hard!

What could I say?  I didn’t know what to say.  It’s the ninth week of the quarter; I have said everything I had to say.  I am at a loss for words.  Why, of course, it’s hard.  I said that the first day of class: what I will ask you to do in this class is hard.  You will develop your own topics; you will organize your own thoughts.  I will supply the context for doing so.  I understand this is not something you are used to doing; that’s one reason, as you will find, that I am not a hard grader.  If you are trying this for the first time—as is more than likely the case—you may mess up a little.

But the student said, It’s hard.  It’s hard.

Well, it ain’t supposed to be easy.  It ain’t a matter of filling in the damn blanks or repeating what the teacher says.  If that is education today: then the whole thing is a stinking sham.

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Here’s "Fool for You" again.  This time with drums by Austin Beebe, whose day job is working with his father on an abalone farm 

 

Writing Muscle

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I seem to have strained my writing muscle or something.  Usually when I sit down with a blank page I can stick something into it; many times I have an idea for something even before I open the blank page.  Lately, it’s been blank page and then nothing. 

Once many moons ago, back in the 80’s, I went out and played some b.b. in a pick up game.  I should have known better—some of the guys playing were like idiot guys who hadn’t played the game much and were trying to imitate stuff they had seen on TV.  So this one idiot guy dives in front of me as I was driving for the basket—in an apparent attempt to steal the ball—and low bridges me.  In an instinctive effort to protect my face which was heading for the black top my right arm stuck itself out and save my face OK, but my forward momentum caused the right elbow to hyperextend—i.e. go in the direction it is not supposed to go.

The thing swelled up so bad at the elbow that I went to the emergency room and had it x-rayed.  There was a fracture but way deep inside and nothing to be done about it except to keep the arm immobilized they said, which wasn’t that hard since the arm had immobilized itself by becoming useless.  If you stop to think about it—which I don’t encourage really—the only use an arm—as opposed to a leg—has is to have a hand attached to it.  If we were born without hands attached to our arms we would just have these sort of clubs we could use I supposed to beat on each other—but which would be otherwise pretty much maladaptive in my opinion.

So my arm was rendered useless in the sense that the strain at the elbow had the effect apparently of stretching ligaments and tendons so I couldn’t hold anything much in my right hand.  I couldn’t hold a pencil and make it work.  I could hold a glass but with nothing in it; and I took to using my left when it came to bathroom issues.  Over a couple of weeks as the swelling went down the strength came back and the right arm once again had a useful purpose—an active hand attached.

Right now my writing muscle is like that—I feel as if my head is stuffed with cotton.  I have cotton coming out of my ears.  When I was just downstairs a few minutes ago, I found myself envying, once again, our cat’s ability to flat out relax.  She had found a bit of sun in front of the window and she was just stretched out in that—as only a cat can stretch out.  She was so damn relaxed that even her tongue was relaxed because the tip of it was sticking out of her mouth.

 

showoffcat
Look How Relaxed I Am! (Little show off)

 

Then she saw me and decided to start showing off how relaxed she was by rolling over her back—and stretching again.  And then she started into cleaning herself, and rolled up in this sort of posture she can get into to clean her a-hole.  Both her back legs stick up in the air, as she goes at the a-hole, pretty vigorously too.  I say to her, Good cat! Good Cat! Clean that asshole!  Sometimes, I will see her around and ask her if she has cleaned her a-hole lately, just to harass her a little.

But I am just tired, and not in a relaxed way.  Maybe that’s why I envy the cat.

Dog Cat Rat

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Cousin Lucy sent an email in which she mentioned a UTube video making the rounds out of Santa Barbara.  Sure enough–there it was a dog, with a cat atop it, and a rat atop the cat.  The street scene in one video is clearly State Street.  SB’s main drag.

Click here for the video. 

For some reason, her email made me remember the person to whom Carol goes for what I believe is called a waxing.  Her name is Suzy and Carol reported that Suzy was the owner of an amazingly ugly dog, an aged Mexican hairless. I had heard much of this ugly dog when Suzi posted pictures of same on her web site and got about a million hits in a day.  Many at the time considered it the ugliest dog in the USA.  The dog is now deceased.

uglydog 

I think I can say without too great a fear of contradiction that this dog in its day was one very ugly dog. 

Pictoral Interlude

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Carol and I have not been able to make our beach walk with any regularity lately.  But this afternoon we headed out.  The sun was shining.  By the time we got to the bluffs a fog was rolling in. 
fogin

 On the way back, this snowy egret decided, "Well, if you are going this way, I going that way."

snowy
 

And last week when we went out towards the bluff we found interesting pink clouds:

pinkclouds

pinkclouds2 

And some morning back I couple weeks I woke feeling extra morose; so Carol suggested we break the usual pattern and go out for breakfast (which we hardly ever do) and after that we went to the official Goleta Beach Park (which we hardly ever do) and walked out by the pier located there:

pier 

pier2

The little official park has picnic tables and official barbeque pits, and on weekends, especially holidays, Hispanic families gather for heaping big and wonderful smelling barbeque.  Sadly, though, according to the real estate agent I speak with where I work out, dozens of homes out where Carol and I live are being forcelosed.  Those being dispossessed tend to be large Hispanic families.  Lord knows where they are going to go especially since, while house values are dropping, rents are rising.

I share Brother Steve’s concern about the overall economic picture.  I see at this moment no reason to change the title of my entry of September 2007 that dealt with the economic outlook and was called "We are Doomed." 

Digital Students

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Back in the good old days—hard even to remember—when you got students in the classroom they were pretty much prisoners.  For the hour and an half or so that you had them—as a teacher—they had no contact with the outside world.  Back then the rooms in which I taught had those old fashioned clocks on the wall.  I don’t know what happened.  They just disappeared at some point.

Now all the students have cell phones, so they can check the time on those accurate by satellite to the atomic minute, I guess.  They also have palm pilots and Ipods or other listening devices.  They also bring laptop computers.  They are hardly prisoners now; they can access the “outside world” at least in digital form pretty easily.  I, the teacher, am still analog. 

They hold those things in their hands.  I don’t know what they are doing with them.  The guy over there with his laptop open could be watching porn or the Simpsons over the internet for all I know.  Or who knows, they could be listening on their Ipods to a lecture they missed that morning because many professors are now posting their lectures to sites that can be downloaded with an Ipod. Most of the time, the students are pretty polite with these things.  The phones hardly ever go off anymore.

But my 3 o’clock class isn’t always so polite.  Over in the left hand corner of the room—way away from me—a group of students have collected in the back.  These pull out their devices—whatever the heck they are–quite a bit in class, sometimes while I am talking.  What am I supposed to do?  Well, I use common tactics.  If they are in groups and using their devices, I walk over to the group and usually they see me coming and stop using their devices.  Or I will call on a person using a device and ask them a question.  That usually leads also to the end of device usage for a while.

I have to say device usage while I am talking tends to irritate me.  But I have gotten sort of used to being ignored over the years.  I got over my issues with the sleeping student years ago, clear back in the 80’s.  One woman starting falling asleep; she was a pretty good student and also on the rowing team.  So she would be up at like 5 in the morning to go up to this big lake back behind the hills and row her ass off for like three hours. 

So one day when she was going off to sleep and even snorting a little bit in a sort of pre-snore way, I went over to her and said, without anger (somehow I managed that), that she needed rest that trying to sleep in a classroom would not really be restorative, and that she should go to her dorm room and take a nap.  She said she was fine, and that she didn’t live in the dorm. After that she never went to sleep in class.  Of course, she missed a few classes, maybe to take a nap in her overpriced apartment in IV.

In any case, one of the young women in the device using corner is quite egregiously using her device while I am talking, and I say, with amazing tranquility, “Rochelle.  What you are doing there; well that’s just fine.  But please don’t let me see you doing it, ok?  Because when I happen to notice it—and I notice about everything—it disturbs the flow of my consciousness and sometimes I forget what I am trying to say.”  And then she, with no sign of embarrassment, puts away her device, and what do you know pulls the Ipod plugs out of her ears—which I didn’t even know were there, because they were hidden by her hair.

And the rest of the time, I don’t remember seeing a single student using his or her device. 

Cartman’s Tooth

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

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

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

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

cartman 

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

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

New Phone

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Well, the papers are gone.  I sent them off as email attachment to the students.  Now I await emails of complaint.  But mostly they are probably all gone and won’t check their email again till Monday.

Yesterday, my four year old cell that I was pretty fond of because I could repeatedly drop it and not break it finally gave out. The battery had no life left in it.  So I went to the AT and T store to get a new one, but the account was in Carol’s name and since I didn’t know the date her driver’s license expired they wouldn’t talk with me.  I wanted to poke the little wimp behind the counter straight into both eyes.  What the hell. 

Later came back with Carol who found out the date her driver’s license expires by looking at her driver’s license and got a new phone.  Pisses me off; they don’t carry any replacement batteries for old phones because they want to jack you up to a new phone.  And they want to do that because the new phones have all these other features on them that can cause you to increase your phone bill if you give into the temptation to use them.  My new one takes pictures for example.  I will waste no time trying to figure out how to do that.  It’s all sleek and cool looking but I bet it breaks when I drop it.  But it does have the time right there on the outside, so you don’t have to open the phone to get the time or the date.

 A while back I bought a bedside clock from Brookstone.  We had this little brown plastic job that for some reason wouldn’t keep the correct time anymore.  I don’t know how long we had it.  At least ten years.  It was a very faithful little clock.  With bits of chewing gum stuck on it from when I used to chew gum and I would stick the gum on the clock and then start rechewing it in the morning.

The new clock is pretty amazing.  I plugged it in and then when to the directions to figure out how to set it, and while I was doing that the damn clock set itself right before my eyes.  Like Magic!  Honestly I don’t know how it did that—by satellite maybe.  I mean the numbers started spinning past and stopped right at the correct time.  Hell, come to think of it, that must be what the phone does too.  Some sort of satellite thing up there in space—that keeps accurate time as based on the atomic clock….

Some students don’t know how to read the old clock—the one with hands on it that was shaped like a circle.

All together now:

Does your chewing gum lose its flavor
On the bedpost overnight
If your mother says don’t chew it
Do you swallow it in spite
Can you catch it on your tonsils
Can you heave it left and right
Does your chewing gum lose its flavor
On the bedpost overnight

Who the hell sang that song.  The “Bedposts.”  Damn, now that is going to torment till I remember.

Too Much ER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Imperative Mood

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

I don’t know how to reconcile this.

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

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

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

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

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

 The Emperor of Ice-Cream

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

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

Excellent use I think of the “imperative mood.”

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