Chalkboard paint is friendly and wants you to be happy.

-It smells good.
-It remains mixed in the tin.
-It applies to the wall like cream.
-It cleans up with soap and water.
-And it does what it promises.

Magnetic paint hates you and wishes you were dead.

-It smells like turpentine on steroids, and continues to smell for days.
-It settles at the bottom of the tin within minutes of an industrial shake-up, and can’t be remixed without 20 minutes of muscular stirring.
-It applies to the wall like a lump of metal, which is, in fact, what it is.
-It cleans up with NOTHING.
-And, the coup de grace: it does not do what it promises.

But, I hear you saying, I’ve come across people on the web singing the praises of magnetic paint!  Yes.  I read those things too;  that’s why I decided to use it.  But I’m here to tell you today those people are lying to you . I know why they’re lying too.  They’re lying because this stuff is so malevolent they’re embarrassed to admit they bought it.  They struggled, they suffered, but now it’s over — and the last thing they want is their friends and neighbours to know how stupid they were to get duped by the other liars on the web and the smiley fellow at the hardware store.  I have no such shame. I was stupid.  Two coats worth of stupid.  Learn from my example.

The one thing people on the web do admit is that the stuff doesn’t really work.  You have to get “rare earth” magnets, they say, by which they mean really strong magnets, and even those have problems sticking if you haven’t put on enough coats of the vile stuff.  They say “rare earth magnets” instead of strong magnets in a desperate attempt to make their bad decision look like a super bougie decision:  not just any magnets for us, no! only rare earth magnets!  Feh!  And the only reason they admit this one, glaring, overwhelming problem with the product at all is because it’s the one they can’t hide.  Anyone who’s come into their house and tried to stick a magnet on the wall already knows.

Here are my thoughts:

1. Video lectures are the equivalent of a textbook.  In disciplines that use textbooks, I can’t see much objection to an on-line textbook as opposed to a hardback textbook.  My guess is that learning the material would take more time, since the video has to be played in real time while a textbook can be read quickly.  But I can see video demonstrations as useful.

2. Video lectures are not the equivalent of a classroom lecture.  The wikipedia article says that flipping the classroom will mean that “a teacher can spend more time interacting with students instead of lecturing.”  This betrays a misunderstanding.  Lecturing live, in the flesh, even to a large class, is already interacting with students.  Think of the difference between theatre and cinema.

3. Much of the hype about this silly project mentions the Kahn Academy, which sells a video textbook on high school math.  When I took high school math, we used a hardback textbook.  Again, I have no problem with one substituting for the other, but neither is an adequate substitute for a good lecture.  My high school math teacher explained how to do a problem while doing it on the board, with supplementary reference to the history of math, to how it fit with other kinds of problems we had learned, to her husband, bridge, and golf.  We had a friendship with her, and that friendship helped us in our initial comprehension of the ideas she was trying to convey.

4. The project has no relevance to those disciplines where textbooks are not in common use, for instance my discipline.  I assign Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem.  I do not, on top of this, assign the relevant chapter in Norbert Samuelson’s History of Modern Jewish Philosophy, nor do I assign a tape from one of the several Open University courses on modern Jewish philosophy, nor would I ever assign a video of me or anyone else lecturing on the material.  I want the students to work through the primary source without help, to make what they can of it.  I want this both because I want them to learn to read philosophy and because I want each one to light on and ponder the parts of the text that are relevant to the synthetic, critical understanding he is building, not merely to buy into someone’s overarching narrative.  A textbook would flatten our subsequent discussion, and a video textbook all the more so, because of the persuasive authority inherent to that medium.

5. The buzzwords attached to this project, not just “flipping the classroom” and “blended learning” but also “backwards classroom,” “reverse instruction,” and “reverse teaching” are laughable.  Those sound like cool concepts.  What they sound like is my learning from my students at the same time as they learn from me, and us all having a philosophical epiphany as we thrash through some difficult material.  What they don’t sound like is what they actually mean:  my assigning a video textbook instead of lecturing.

6. Some things are meant to be watched.  I feel sure our classroom conversations could be deepened by all my students having watched The Wire, not to mention Sassy Gay Friend.  I also have no objections to their finding youtube footage of Derrida or etc.  Lectures, though, are not meant to watched;  they are meant to be experienced.

*

These comments deal with the situation in my small liberal arts college.  The project would play out differently in the broader setting of the university.  It’s a push toward standardization of thought, and toward the elimination of the professorate;  also it brings all the money there is to be made (which will be less and less, in the case of the increasing success of such initiatives) to a few centres manned by experts in technology.

What I realized, sitting there in the theatre, was that grade inflation isn’t just an academic problem. It’s a social problem. I don’t want to say that North American society as whole has abdicated its power to judge anything as average or mediocre, but I do want to say that a whole lot of segments of society have: we (whoever “we” are, but bear with me) just don’t ever give anything a B anymore, whether it’s a theatre piece (yay! Bravo! Bravissimo! the best!) or a student essay (good work! A!). It isn’t as if we’re deceived either. I mean, the Stratford audience knew that that production was just pretty good; their ovation was half-hearted and it didn’t last long. And academics know that some of our A’s are, shall we say, A’s of lesser quality. But we can’t not stand up for the show, and we can’t say B.

There are good reasons for this, and they are well known. The push toward critical reflection has made us unsure of our standards. The drive to listen, to be changed by others, to consider different points of view — this makes it awfully hard to pinpoint some views as inferior. In short, it’s hard to be nonjudgmental and to judge at the same time. This is not the place to go on about these matters, though, because I want to say something else.

Taking up one of the themes from my last post, I’m thinking that this nonjudgmental quality, this restraint, might provide another reason academics are so uncivil about one another’s work when sheltered by anonymity. Maybe what’s coming out when we blind review each other with comments like “this is a piece of crap” is the suppressed desire to judge something, anything: we can’t give our students the B’s they deserve but we can damn well give our colleagues a D- or an F. “This is a piece of crap,” should therefore be read as saying: “it’s true I don’t apply any real standards in the classroom, but god dammit I still have them, so my field of study continues to have integrity!”

Of course academics have always exaggerated their petty disputes: the narcissism of small differences has characterized the academy for centuries. We’re all used to back-stabbing and we’ve all been back-stabbed. But still, the nastiness of the new style of peer-review might well be a backlash against our own uncertainty.

And so our internecine hostility grows — so much so that we will never come together against today’s real threat: anti-intellectualism. It is anti-intellectualism, rapidly spreading and intensifying in bitterness, that is behind the accountability culture that seeks to drown us in overwork. We all resent it. We all know that it is we who ought to be in a position to judge: we are the thinkers, we are the judges, we are the people who reflect and compare, we invented the goddam standards! — and it drives us crazy that we are being subjected to treatment we should be meting out. But we collaborate: because our ability to reflect has taken us to a point where we are no longer sure of our own standards and therefore in no position to judge others, and, even more, because we can use the accountability culture to fuel our petty grudges against one another and further our struggle for tiny gains in hallucinatory power.

Where Gill is particularly good is in the sense she provides of our acceptance of the new normal, acceptance and collaboration. We recognize that we’re overworked, sure, but we don’t question the sources of the pressure, for instance the bizarrely augmented demand for accountability (or what they call in Britain “audit culture”) which, there as here, was “once treated with scepticism,” but “has now been almost perfectly internalized.” Nor do we raise questions about whether the “’freedom’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘autonomy’ of [the academic job] has proved far more effective for extracting ‘surplus value’ or at least vastly more time spent working, than any older modalities of power.” These are just two of several directions that could be followed up if one wanted seriously to consider how and why we work ourselves to bone, putting up so little resistance to these new demands.

There are a couple of other things Gill doesn’t mention that might augment an account of why we don’t resist. One, not just an academic problem, is the proliferation of distractions, for instance what are technically known as “stupid games” (on which subject see this excellent article). Academics don’t play Angry Birds more than anyone else, but they do play, and they play for the same reasons the rest of the world plays: not to avoid work, but to avoid the guilt that would otherwise fill the hours in which they find themselves unable to work, guilt which, if indulged in, reflected on, and criticized, might lead eventually a desire to change our conditions and those of others. Distraction can’t help but dampen resistance.

Also relevant to the question of collaboration is Gill’s discussion of how peer reviewing has become so much less civil in recent years. “When,” she wonders “did it become acceptable to write of a colleague’s work ‘this is self-indulgent crap’ or ‘put this manuscript in a drawer and don’t ever bother to come back to it’ — both comments I have read in the last year on colleagues’ work.” She suggests two analyses: “repressed rage bursting out as an attack against someone who is not the cause of it” and “[peer reviewing] as one of the few sites where academics may feel that they can exercise some power — thus they ‘let rip,’ occasionally cruelly, under the cloak of guaranteed anonymity.”

It’s related to the question of collaboration because for sure we’re never going to gang up on the masters if we keep tearing away at each other. But it’s still unclear why we’ve taken to doing so. I’m going to take a stab at this in the next post.

Now I’m watching out-takes of Stephen Colbert’s conversation with Maurice Sendak, and Sendak is saying that when Jenny, the dog in Higgledy Piggledy Pop, joins the World Mother Goose Theatre Company she’s actually dead. And I ‘m thinking: Jenny dies? My adult reading of this text was coloured by my childhood reading, and I never knew. This is devastating. In short, I am really really sad that the dog died.

Part of what accounts for this might be the college’s focus on we used to call extra-curricular education and now call co-curricular education.  One could imagine two reasons for changing the term from extra- to co-, the first being to emphasise the interplay between the two, such that ideas in the classroom were discussed and tested on the playing fields, in public debates and lectures, and over beer — and vice versa, with the things they were thinking and experiencing outside the classroom brought up in seminars where they might be reflected on and challenged.  But I think the actual reason is simply to imply that what they do outside the class is of equal importance to what they do inside.  Which is a short step to more important, or all-important, and in any case severs what should be a meaningful tie.

As I listened to the students speak, I cast my eyes over the list of prize winners at the back of the programme.  It was a heartening list.  I know these students.  Many of them have taken my classes.  They are fabulous, smart people.  All of them, any one of them, would have given a very different kind of speech.  So how are the valedictorians chosen?  And could we change the way?

My students tend to believe that there are codes inscribed in facial expression, bodily gestures, and clothing — that these form a discourse, beyond words, one that we use to communicate, one that must be understood within a given cultural frame.  And yet they also believe that they may, if they so desire, mute this discourse, un-speak and un-hear it, such that one would no longer be expressing with the body and the face and the clothing, such that not even one’s tone of voice would count, but only words:  no means no, however you say it, and whatever gestures accompany it.

I am interested in this resurgence of the logos, this notion that the word, flat and dead, without accompaniment, without ornament or subtext, and above all disembodied, is the top dog of communication.  It seems obvious to so many people, but to me it seems only legally obvious.  By this I mean that in the kind of legal cases that prompted activities like the slutwalk, it was necessary to draw a line between operative signals and inoperative signals, and the only place where such a line can be drawn with clarity — and thus the correct place to draw it — is between words and everything else.  But leaving aside the legality and speaking philosophically, the decision to draw the line there seems arbitrary.

One thinks of literalist believers as having a problem with the scientific understanding of time:  creation (and a short duration) vs. evolution (and a long one).  But this story bespeaks a problem with the scientific account of space.  The Waco woman seems to think of reality as a canvas on which God stuck things, the things he stuck there being the things that exist.  Reality, for her, is a diorama.  It makes perfect sense, but for some reason I had never understood that someone could see the world this way.  It has illuminated my current thinking about time and space.

In an episode of Sherlock! (aka the best TV show since The Wire) Watson has to explain to Holmes that the earth revolves around the sun, and later blogs about the exchange to the amusement of his readers.  But despite a seeming affinity, Holmes’s ignorance is the opposite of the Waco woman’s.  This is not just because he takes correction, but because when corrected he says, “it doesn’t matter.”  In this case these are golden words.  It doesn’t matter to Holmes that the earth revolves around the sun since Holmes’s knowledge of reality, which is vast, is circumscribed by its utility:  everything that Holmes needs to understand, he needs to understand from the perspective of human experience.  The Waco woman’s painted canvas is in distinction a God’s-eye view, and so she cannot be corrected.  And to her it does matter;  it is the only thing that matters.

It’s well-known and obvious that Turner has two accounts of liminality, one drawn from his ethnographic work on the Ndembu and a second where he goes ballistic and starts seeing liminality everywhere in human social structure, and as I taught him I was mentally labeling them the “narrow” account and the “grandiose” account.  The first insight I came to, arising out of class discussion, was that they could also be labelled the “temporal” account and the “spatial” account.  Thus, in the first, a ritual will allow a practitioner to pass into a state of liminality and then back out of it to a profane state of normalcy in which she fulfills her role in the social hierarchy, while in the second, certain figures (Turner mentions hippies) are liminal to others:  they do not stop being liminal, not because they do not go through changes or enact rituals, but because the word liminal is now being used to describe a cross-section of social relations viewed from a static lens.

One of my best student papers this semester puts the two accounts together in what I think is an entirely convincing way.  “While Turner,” the student writes, “argues that it is liminality itself that works to reveal and create communitas, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the liminality recreated in ritual actually achieves this end.  Ritual arises in a response to liminality and ultimately functions as a reproduction of it;  the ritual process first recognizes liminality as a distinct form of existence, in a way fixing the liminal individual within the social structure just as surely as their social position might have.  The ritual subject has deviated in some way from their position in society, and naming this deviation functions to highlight the importance of social structure and the cultural values manifest in the society’s social categories.”  In short, the function of ritual, for Turner, is to allow individuals who are liminal (spatial account) symbolically to reproduce that liminality (temporal account) in order to overcome it, and in this way, “ritual uses liminality to reify the social order and fixed relationships within the community, thus working to generate communitas.”  The paper is titled “Yo Dawg, We Heard You Like Liminality, So We Put Some Liminality in Your Ritual about Liminality So You Can Be Liminal while You’re Being Liminal,” and the author is Sarah Patzer.  Of course the account only works to bring the spatial sense of the word into the temporal or ritual sense, not to bring the latter into the former.

Which leads me to another excellent paper reminding us that the two accounts remain distinct.  Aliyana Gewirtzman points out that if applied to literature, Turner’s temporal account would be more or less identical to the home-away-home pattern as analysed by scholars of children’s literature, or the hero’s journey as analysed by Joseph Campbell.  But on the rare occasions Turner mentions literature, he does not use the temporal account, but instead the spatial one.  Thus, for Turner, Sonya in War and Peace is a liminal figure and remains a liminal figure, and Turner seems not to turn his attention to literary characters who pass through a state of liminality and then return.  Putting Gewirtzman’s argument together with Patzer’s, one would say that Sonya stays liminal because Tolstoy does not give her a chance symbolically to reproduce her liminality.  But it is probably truer that Turner has no ear for literature.