Hopeless but not serious

I feel so sorry for Priya Venkatesan, the Dartmouth professor who decided a few weeks ago to sue her students for harassment, and on soberer second thought decided not to.  A lot could be said against her.  I think, for instance, that an objective reckoning would probably conclude that she is not a good scholar.  The account she gives, in the long interview posted on the web, of Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition is unsound – and it’s supposed to be her material.  But few of the hundreds of readers commenting on the interview focus on anything so substantive.  Instead there are arguments over whether Venkatesan is actually as hysterical as she sounds, whether she’s defensive, paranoid, or emotionally unbalanced, and whether it was her own fault that she lost control of her class so spectacularly.  On the issue of whether she is psychologically fit to teach, there are opinions on both sides of the spectrum.  But what’s most interesting to me is that her psyche is the issue.

There’s an unstated assumption here – or, rather, it’s an assumption only Venkatesan herself is stating.  It is that college classes are sometimes difficult to keep under control, and that, to deal with the challenge, professors require not merely expertise in their fields and pedagogical training but, in addition, a relatively high level of emotional stability.  And I have a sense that in many North American schools the challenge is growing, that more and more students expect you to prove your credentials to them, that a larger and larger minority enters college thinking that their opinions are just as good as the profs’ — and that, as a result, a higher degree of emotional stability is required.  It remains possible, certainly, to win the respect of these students.  Most of them, in fact, want to respect us.  But they won’t give their respect easily, and some will continue to scoff behind their hands at any sign of weakness, poisoning the air of the classroom.  If the professor makes a mistake in her sensibilities, if she vacillates, if she responds aggressively or defensively, she can lose a class for the duration of the term.

Should we have to earn our students’ respect?  I am undecided.  Back when I was an undergraduate, we had a different approach.  We’d sit around in the common room at night making fun of our profs, talking about who was a drunk, who was a dweeb, and who was emotionally unbalanced, but when we came into the classroom we shrugged all that off.  We thought: “well, he’s definitely loony, but let’s see what the old bastard has to say.”  We were there to learn.

At the college where I now teach the situation is even better.  The students are used to getting the best, and approach their classes in the assumption that their professors are first rate.  Respect is palpable, and it’s easy to give it back to them.  The students don’t waste class time playing games to prove how smart they are, and the professors don’t either.  Still sometimes, even now, I get a group of freshmen one or two of whom have decided immediately, for mysterious reasons, that I probably don’t know shit.  Then the first few classes feel like I’m swinging a dragon around by the tail.  Once in a while I need to call on all my emotional grounding so I don’t freak out, and thus alienate the class.

Many years ago, when I was teaching at another place, I remember mentioning to my parents (both professors of long experience) that I thought two or three bad eggs could come close to wrecking a class.  They stared at me, and together they said: “one.”

This is why my heart goes out to Venkatesan here:

TDR:  There is one specific incident where I heard from one of the girls in your class who was pretty outspoken, and one day she hadn’t spoken for a while and you said, “Could we have a round of applause for this girl, she hasn’t spoken in ten minutes?”

PV:  She was probably the most abrasive, the most offensive, the most disruptive student.  She ruined that class.  She ruined it.  She ruined it.

A last thought.  There’s no proof of any racism operative here:  Venkatesan admits she never heard anything that could be construed by any stretch to be a racist comment.  But let’s not kid ourselves.  Tall white men are a very great deal less likely to run into this sort of problem.

Two of the blogs I read regularly have recent entries (one, two) making the tacit argument that reading old books and studying old history gives you the broadest critical perspective on contemporary political affairs.  When I say it that clearly it sounds uncontroversial;  it’s really remarkable therefore how many people believe that to be relevant one has to be reading the last fifty years.  But maybe it’s always been this way.  Maybe there have always been equivalents of those students who, today, read only Deleuze and Derrida, finding Plato and Rousseau a big bore.

In this spirit I respond to the meme with which I’ve been tagged by dr, whose pedagogy, involving sending students out with mo’ better questions, is one I can get behind.  I’m supposed to post a picture capturing what I want to teach, and title it.

This too shall pass

The word Orwellian is overused, but it appears to apply well to recent developments at the library at my alma mater.

A couple of years ago, the administration fired most of the book-knowledgeable staff and hired a head librarian also known as named Tavrnwr (a 64 Tauren hunter).  Tavrnwr’s first move was to appoint a gaming librarian whose “primary responsibility will be for exploring, creating, supporting and promoting library resources through gaming and virtual worlds” [sic].  His second move was to open up a branch of the library on Second Life.  His third was to replace the system by which books had previously been ordered on the basis of departmental recommendations with a new system in which purchases were determined by a book-listing service.  His fourth was to cut the budget for off-list books and print journals virtually to zero, also cutting e-access to journals not on the mainstream data-bases.  In short, he farmed out the entire business of acquisitions.  That takes care of that!

The result of these actions was that McMaster won an ACLA award for having the Best University Library in North America.  But take the rag away from your face, and get this.  A few months ago, rumours began circulating that books were being dumped, in the middle of the night, into dumpsters backed up to the library docking bay. I almost blogged about this when I first heard, but then I thought: naw, that’s crazy talk, it can’t actually be happening.  Today, however, I heard that the library’s old, valuable, multi-volume critical edition of the Mahabharata has gone missing, and that the library has no record that it ever existed.  I’m not kidding.  The books are suddenly nowhere, and there is no longer an entry for them in the catalogue.  The professors who use the volumes are freaking out.  The library is stonewalling, asking the professors to provide proof of the books’ existence.  Fortunately, one industrious graduate student has a xerox of many pages, including a title page with the imprint of the library showing clearly.  I will let you know how the library responds to the evidence.

Though naturally we are keeping an open mind, we cannot think of any explanation except that the rumours are true: that books are being dumped by people powerful enough to erase their records from the database.  And you wonder why we’re paranoid about digital technology?

Yes, Eila is sick, and once again I notice that the main difference between Eila sick and Eila well is that while she is sick she is obedient.  She remains smart, funny, and good hearted, only it’s not all mixed with foot stamping, door slamming sulks and demonic screams of “no!!”  Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?  Isn’t health supposed to be conducive to politeness?  Isn’t sickness supposed to make you cranky?

I am so pleased that Dmitri Nabokov has decided to publish The Original of Laura.  It was touch and go for a while there: having sat on the index cards for 30 years, despite his father’s instruction to burn them, he began a few years ago to discuss with fans and critics the question of what to do, and seemed for a time to be leaning toward the fire.

Apparently Vladimir wanted them destroyed because he was afraid that an unfinished manuscript would be subject to even more vulgar criticism than a finished one.  And he was always despairing about the critics: of one of the many Freudians who “twisted” his work, he wrote: “And he will be read, he will be quoted, he will be filed in great libraries, next to my arbors and mists!”  Maybe Dmitri was heartened by the many fans who, with love and wit, agreed that the cards should be burned.  But we are all glad to have them.

One of the more common patterns in British children’s literature places a group of kids into a wild garden where they meet a mysterious old lady who guides them in an adventure.  (I wrote a brief post a while ago about some of them.)  I’ve just now read a novel by Elizabeth Goudge that tells the story from the perspective of the old lady.  Is that not interesting?  Of course there’s no magic — there wouldn’t be for the old lady, only for the kids.  And she’s much younger than she appears in the other novels — 50 — but that, too, is right, since she would only seem ancient to the children.

I’m not exactly recommending The Scent of Water. Goudge has other better novels, both for children and grown ups.  This one is shot through with inordinate levels of Christian piety, and so sentimental that at one point Goudge comes close to apologizing for it.  (“And if that was a sentimental idea, I didn’t care.  Being ill makes you feel what people call sentimental, but what you feel is nonetheless genuine whatever they call it.”)  But so odd and engaging to have the kids there, in the garden, performing the tasks they need to perform in order to do whatever growing up they are to do, while we watch them and occasionally guide them from a distance.

What a crummy day.  My keyboard short-circuited, no doubt because the accumulation of gunk I’ve let fall into it over the past while, and then I got one of those mastercard bills that couldn’t possibly add up to the kajillion dollars listed as the bottom line, only with their devilish powers over arithmetic they’ve made it do so.  On top of the bazillion I paid the Canadian government yesterday to cover my tax bill for the last four years, and the triphillion I’ll owe my fancy accountant for translating my IRS forms into Receiver General forms, I’m entering the realms of middle class poverty.  And my computer’s in the shop.

So I spent the afternoon reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.  Not a hell of a lot to lift the spirits there!  If I admit that I’m utterly engrossed by the series, will you forgive me if I say I don’t really like it?  At any rate I’m sure you won’t be surprised.  The first problem with Sandman is that Gaiman, who knows his stuff, has thrown together every powerful trope he can lay his hands on — from Hesiod, Homer, the Bible, the tragedians, fairy tales, Shakespeare, Freud, the works — with no regard for context.  (Oh, it’s postmodern you say? I’ll give you postmodern!)  Because his raw material is gold, his stories have a lot of power, but the thing he’s made of his gold is second-rate, jejune, silly.  You don’t notice it’s silly because the raw stuff is so good — and also for another reason, flaw #2, which is that everything Gaiman touches, he corrupts.  His Eros is heartless temptation, his “realm of faerie” is decadent, and his favourite dreams are nightmares.  This deceives a reader into thinking there’s weight where there’s not; it fascinates, but it also lends an ersatz significance.  It’s true that there are virtues here, but they are the standard virtues of YA lit — loyalty and sacrifice — rather than those available to Gaiman from his sources.  There is no beauty here that is not sexy, no wisdom that is not the knowledge of the crappiness of the world, no song that is high and clear and fine.  I don’t think it’s healthy for teenagers to meet these mythological tropes for the first time in this degenerate form.

I haven’t decided whether to sink deeper into the pit or not.  The Flav is back on TV, and if worse comes to worse I can always borrow Z’s computer (on which I type at this very moment) and stalk my friends with google maps street view.   On a brighter note, my friend BB introduced me on a recent visit to Chateau de Chantre Bourgogne-Chardonnay. There have been, in my life, a number of very good, affordable reds but very few good, affordable whites, and I am glad of this one.

It was while listening to a children’s record by Jack Johnson that I realized that the Three Rs are no longer “reading, writing, and arithmetic,” but “reduce, reuse, and recycle.”  Maybe not a great deal is lost here in comparison to what is gained.  The environment is one of the few things I take more seriously than grammar, and anyhow I always hated the hokey irony of the original phrase.

The same point is made — only better and with more layers — by JC in the TLS on 28 March, who writes:

In the idle moment between setting down On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt, published by Princeton University press, and picking up Mindfucking by Colin McGinn, published by Acumen, we wondered when the new discourse would spread to mainstream publishers such as Penguin.  We didn’t have to wait long:  customers who bought On Bullshit and Mindfucking will also want to buy A$$hole by Martin Lihn (Penguin).  A$$hole, which carries the subtitle “How I got rich and happy by not giving a s*** about you,” offers “an effective program of Assholism: Ten Steps toward your awakening as a prick” [etc.]

If you find yourself beset by fears that everything is getting worse, take heart.  We have observed that when one form of socially approved behaviour disintegrates another is automatically established to take its place.  So you may feel better about A$$hole on learning that, while it is repellent according to the old standard, it is virtuous when judged by the new.  A$$hole is printed on “mixed sources” paper, produced in “well managed forests and other controlled sources.  Penguin Books is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers, and our planet.  The book in your hands” — A$$hole: How I got rich and happy by not giving a s*** about you — “is made from paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.”

Grace closes a recent post by saying:

Mark and I were probably the only parents in Iris’ first grade class that let her turn in a diorama that SHE created. Don’t be a helicopter parent. Let kids do their own homework.

She also links to a previous entry making the same argument at greater length (and with charming pictures).  I know I ought to agree or keep my mouth shut.  But when did I ever do either?

Z and I helped the kids with their homework for years.  I remember when Emma had a Waldorf trained teacher who was fanatical about colouring the whole page — every map, diagram, illustration had to have full coverage and marks were deducted for a scrap of white.  Many nights Emma and I sat up until 10pm filling in white space, and I felt no compunction.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Z and I have sliced balsa wood for dioramas, cut shapes for collages, read aloud from the encyclopedia pointing to interesting information, and edited reports with a heavy hand.  Eventually, around grade 10, both Emma and Jake pushed us away, refusing to show us any work until it was returned by the teacher.  Before that we were always there when asked, and sometimes when we weren’t.

I don’t see anything wrong with this.  Editing with a heavy hand is exactly what I’m asked to do for the students in my freshman seminar.  That’s why they write drafts — the rationale has nothing to do with lifting grades artificially and everything to do with the idea that they might learn from one-to-one contact with a teacher willing to go over their every word.  And if you think I did any less lecturing and explaining to Emma and Jake than to my freshman, you are quite mistaken: I did much more.  So they had an advantage and their work got better, but am I supposed not to do this in order to level the playing field?  And so then maybe I should not do it for my freshmen.

Never did we do the work ourselves.  The kids were always there, with a hand on the piece.  If it was something they couldn’t do (or weren’t allowed to do) involving maybe an exacto knife, they watched, taking a hand whenever they could.  And from this too they learned.  The time that sticks most in my mind is when we suddenly discovered on a Sunday morning that Jake had an 8 page newspaper to produce for the next day, and that the group was meeting at our house.  We set up an assembly line.  The kids dictated their stories to me, I typed them up on the computer and printed them in columns, then they went to the table where one kid cut them into pieces and another, with Z’s help, pasted them up on big sheets.  By the time we were done we had a beautiful product; it looked, I admit, like it had been done with help, and it was way better than any other group’s, and this caused me some embarrassment.  But the three kids in Jake’s group learned much more that day than they would have if they’d been working by themselves.