Category Archives: education

Fitzgerald’s Ledger

Posted on by under Authors, education, guides and nudges

In this Tuesday, March 26, 2013 photo, Elizabeth Sudduth, director of the Ernest F. Hollings Library and Rare Books Collection at the University of South Carolina, points at items in a ledger owned by author F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Columbia, S.C. The university has digitized the ledger and put it online for scholars. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Collins)

A couple weeks back I wrote about the impending release of some of Willa Cather’s letters. As if that isn’t exciting enough for fans of American modernism, today I found out that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous ledger can be viewed at the University of South Carolina library website. The money-mad Fitzgerald recorded each little bit of coin he brought in through his writing and the licensing of his works between 1919 and 1938, though there isn’t a complementary ledger of his rap-mogulesque expenditures. Transcriptions of the ledger have been available for some time, most notably in Matthew Bruccoli’s excellent biography of Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. Still, it’s amazing to be able to search through this document and see Fitzgerald’s lovely handwriting up close. The digital humanities should focus on this kind of preservation and facilitation, not devising ways to hold virtual meetings with students in Second Life.

Your Higher-Ed Industry at Work

Posted on by under education, The Moronic Inferno

Sorry we haven’t written for a few days; we’re both deep in the weeds of essay grading. Anyone who has taught writing knows that grading student papers is a lot of work, and it’s work mostly done by people without much job security. Yes, tenured English professors grade papers for their seminars about the globality of the phallus in late-Renaissance unpublished proto-feminist poetry, but sadly many of them aren’t marking these essays to help their students actually learn to write; they’re simply looking to see if they have some “brilliant” young mind that they can mold in their own image, sending the poor soul to grad school and the series of professional and personal failures that usually come along with it.

If the writing analysis in these kinds of hilarious English courses is bad, the teaching is often worse. Now, I had some amazing teachers at all of the institutions I attended. However, tenure-track folks are often evaluated on just about everything other than the thing most undergraduates assume they are paid to do. Worthless conference presentations and articles no one will read count more than designing courses that will help students succeed outside of the course itself. I think that most English professors would like to teach well (and some are great at it), but the tenure system really doesn’t incentivize it.

The Place Beneath is a documentary that examines the fate of a guy who was a teacher before anything else. He wasn’t a writing teacher, but his teaching was designed to help students live better lives both at and after the university. What a concept! And what was his reward for this? Getting his health insurance dropped when the school he’d worked at for years decided to hire someone else to be a traditional research professor. And then he got cancer and died, but only after going broke. This is obviously a pretty extreme example, but it highlights something we’d all be wise to remember: as much as higher ed tries to set itself apart as a noble world of inquiry and virtue, it’s mostly a business with a very bizarre set of operating procedures.

Boston

Posted on by under education, in the news, the polis

When I was a teenager, I fantasized about going to college in Boston. It started on a trip my family took to the city when I was sixteen. We had visited a bunch of random places when I was a kid (Hawaii, New Mexico, Fresno), but Boston was my first experience with what I thought of as authentic east coast culture, and I wanted to be a part of it.

Growing up in San Jose, California makes one feel detached from the big moments of American history. While San Jose dates back to the Spanish colonial days of the late eighteenth century, you don’t see much evidence of this outside the missions. What history was visible when I was growing up revealed the tension between what San Jose had been, a suburban orchard town, and what it has become, Silicon Valley, and all that that entails. I really haven’t spent much time there since I left about a decade ago, but when I visit I am still struck by the lack of aesthetic consistency of the place: bungalows from the 1920s are around the corner from run-down apartment blocks from the late 1970s, which are across town from gleaming new Shiteaus in planned communities. At the time it was hard for me to knit together a good narrative about the place, though now I understand that this is true of most places, Boston included.

Still, as a young nerd who loved American literature and history, my first trip to Boston was like walking into a novel that reconciled old and new in ways San Jose couldn’t. The buildings looked like they had been built in conversation with one another. It seemed like every other corner had a sign noting some historical event of the colonial period. And yet there were cool looking young people all around me too. Beautiful girls a few years older than me who dressed like they were going to work in art galleries even when they were just going for coffee. Dudes wore clothes that fit. Now, a part of me thought these people were tools. I was in my shoegazer/monstrously depressed singer-songwriter phase. I thought I was deeper than guys in khakis. And yet I could see myself there, walking the brick-lined streets, a college student studying literature or film, wearing sweaters, going on dates with pretty girls, maybe even getting to go back to their apartments. Things seemed possible for me in Boston in a way they didn’t in San Jose. And this was all before I set foot on the campus of Boston College.

I went to high school at an all-boys Jesuit prep school in San Jose that regularly sends dozens of kids a year to the Ivy League, Stanford, Berkeley, and other schools of this ilk. I wasn’t going to be one of those guys. For my school I was probably a little above average. I didn’t take AP classes, I only got through as much math as I had to, and I am stunned I didn’t pull C’s in French before dropping it after my junior year. My SAT scores were good though, and actually made me look like an underachiever, but as I explained to some of the college admissions people who interviewed me, I like tests. And my grades weren’t that bad. I was in the market for a college that was excellent, but not elite. And BC, the best Jesuit school for guys without the grades for Georgetown, seemed like the perfect fit.

When we wandered around the campus I was kind of numb. My folks and I had been on college campuses before, but never one that felt so, well, collegial. Most universities in California, no matter how old they are, feel like they were built in the 1960s. This is because most of them were, or at least most of the parts that we see today don’t date back much before the days of Pat Brown. Boston College felt old and important, just like the city, but it felt old and important in a way I had been trained by years of Jesuit education to recognize. I can’t describe it really. It’s a combination of stone, trimmed grass, stained glass, library books, and leather that just makes sense to me. This was the place I would have to go to college. It was the place that would get me out of San Jose and make me interesting. It was a real American city. And, hell, I didn’t have my heart set on Harvard. I was a good Jesuit boy with decent grades and great test scores. BC would have to let me in, I thought.

Of course, they didn’t. In fact, they wait-listed me in April of my senior year, and then sent me two rejection letters on the day I graduated from high school, one addressed to “Dan,” and one addressed to “Daniel.” I have no idea how that kind of clerical error happens, but it felt personal. I’d spent the year and change after my trip telling all of my smarter friends that I would be going to Boston College. It sounded almost on par with their Columbias and Yales, but also like I had chosen something different. Like I knew something they didn’t. When it became clear that I wasn’t go to BC, or even BU (I got in, but we couldn’t really afford it), a certain sense of what my life could be like kind of disappeared. I didn’t really mourn it, which actually surprises me. I was all about college radio and coffee shops, both of which, at the time anyway, promoted a culture of self-indulgent introspection. Instead, I think I simply shut a door between myself and this life I had been desperate to lead. For the next decade I moved up and down the coast of California, from LA to Santa Cruz, from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara, from Santa Barbara to back LA, from LA back to Santa Barbara, and finally back to LA. I can’t imagine myself as anything other than a coastal Californian, and I am happy I went to college and grad school at the three places I did. I know most of the people who mean anything to me because Boston College rejected both Dan and Daniel, and I live in a city with a culture and history that strikes me as every bit as important and authentic as Boston’s did when I was sixteen.

But that door I closed thirteen years ago (!) opened a little on Monday when I heard about the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon. Even though I have never been in Boston for Patriots’ Day, I have always been aware of it because it means the Red Sox play a really early game, at least out here on the West Coast. The whole idea of a day that only means something to one city excites me. I wish LA had something similar. The fact that evil people decided to prey on a city’s desire to celebrate is not surprising. The kinds of people who would blow up a crowd of strangers can’t possibly understand love and community in the simple way Bostonians embrace a day of baseball, running, and drinking to their shared history. No doubt whoever did this has some allegedly complex grievance they think must be taken seriously. But it shouldn’t be. This was cowardice. Cowards don’t get taken seriously, and cowards ultimately can’t ruin the world for the rest of us. They may try, but they can’t if we don’t let them.

There were a lot people down at the Marathon on Monday who weren’t originally from Boston. Many, I would imagine, were even from San Jose or the dozens of other history-less suburban hubs like it around the country. People who got to go through the door at some point in their lives, and who have experienced the culture that seemed to me so essentially American when I was in high school. To them, the native Bostonians, the runners from around the world who just wanted to race, and to everyone else who was touched by these acts of cruelty perpetrated in the name of nothing of any value, I wish eventual peace. And for the people that committed these crimes, may they never know peace as long as they live.

Speaking of Non-Majority Rule

Posted on by under education, guides and nudges, in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Piggy-backing off of Ryan’s piece, I thought many of you might find this article from The Week interesting. I am not a very good liberal when it comes to gun control, but not because I have any special love of guns. I have only fired one a couple of times, and frankly didn’t get the appeal. The fact that people can talk about “gun culture” is bizarre, and doesn’t square with 2nd Amendment defenders’ claim that guns are simply tools. They’re not. Spatulas are tools, and there is no such thing as “spatula culture.” Guns are something altogether different.

So no, guns aren’t my thing. The reason why I am a bad liberal on gun control though is because I don’t think much of what the government can do will decrease the number of guns in this country or the prevalence of gun violence. By some estimates there are almost as many firearms in America as there are people, and nearly half of U.S. households own at least one gun. We’re too far down the rabbit hole to simply ban most guns and think it will accomplish anything. While I believe that there should be background checks on every kind of gun sale, even this won’t stop the kinds of mass shootings we saw in Connecticut or even Colorado. And that really shouldn’t be our priority. What is needed is a change in “gun culture,” and that starts not with pieces in Mother Jones (although everything written in their article is true, they’re preaching to the choir), but with gun owners like Paul Brandus standing up to the NRA and its minions in government. Brandus writes:

The NRA has also spread the false notion that the Second Amendment was designed to protect you against government tyrants. Unless you’re a constitutional scholar, you’ve probably bought this one hook, line, and sinker. Someone who is a constitutional scholar, Professor Robert Spitzer of the State University of New York College at Cortland, points out that Article I of the Constitution allows militias to “suppress Insurrections,” not cause them. If you think the Constitution allows you to rebel against the government, guess what? The Constitution says you’re a traitor. Writes Spitzer: “The Constitution defines treason as ‘levying War’ against the government in Article III and the states can ask the federal government for assistance ‘against domestic Violence’ under Article IV.”

It’s not your fault that you don’t know this. How would you know to wade through a giant appropriations bill from 2011, or to sift through the Constitution’s fine print? And it is this — your lack of knowledge — that the NRA and its toadies on the Hill are banking on. One of my favorite quotes from the father of our Constitution, James Madison, comes to mind: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.”

As with everything, culture matters. The NRA claims to speak for all gun owners, but it doesn’t represent even a majority of these people. Not even close. And yet the NRA seems to determine how both sides of the gun control debate talk and think. The left gets itself in a tizzy every time Wayne LaPierre says anything, which is exactly what he wants. The NRA feeds on a collective sense of powerlessness that many people feel. If liberals really want to decrease gun violence in America, they’ll stop overreacting to everything the NRA does, stop demanding legislation that won’t accomplish anything, and start building a culture where kids are better educated, more employable, and less likely to buy the bullshit the NRA is selling.

“Things We Do Not Say”

Posted on by under Authors, education

One of the things I’ve noticed about my writing students, especially the first- and second-years, is that most of them aren’t very good at detecting irony (e.g., recognizing that Joan Didion isn’t sentimentally extolling the virtues of the Central Valley in “Notes from a Native Daughter”) or spotting clichés. With respect to the latter solecism, they are quite good at noticing and fixing the crud in a sample paragraph that I give them after saying, “This excerpt has clichés in it that you should try to address.” But when it comes to their own writing, in-the-nick-of-times and unforgettable moments and in-today’s-societys start to slip in. This is a problem even for most of my brightest students, and many of the students I teach are very bright.

No doubt this has a lot to do with the fact that freshmen and sophomores are freshmen and sophomores. A few months ago I was digging through some old college papers that I’d stashed in my parents’ basement after I’d graduated, and most of those that I glanced over were awful. Just lame, pompous, hasty, Olympian nonsense that I tossed in the garbage. I used a lot of damn clichés–often high-minded ones, but still clichés that probably made my professors wince or laugh. (“Garcia Marquez’s political eco-narratives are truly moving works of art.” No, really, I wrote that and showed it to another adult.) When you are 19, you are an idiot, even if you do think of yourself as a Reader.

But most of my students don’t read much, just like most Americans don’t read much, just like many other cultures don’t read much. Now, I am skeptical of anybody who claims that there was some  golden age of mass reading (have a look at the literacy rates in Russia when Dostoevsky was alive, in Britain when Tennyson was humming, in the U.S. when James Joyce got onto the cover of Time). In any era, you can find intellectuals bemoaning the state of the public readership. However, you will have a hard time finding a high-school or college teacher who thinks that many of hir students are reading serious texts on the reg. (I’m willing to bet that stands even if you venture into Yale or Amherst or Reed or wherever. I went to a snooty school and it was true there.)

Effective writers read a lot. By getting what Martin Amis calls their daily diet of words, they continually develop an intuitive familiarity with the rhythms of the language they work in. There is no way to write well without reading voraciously. A brilliant charlatan who can’t be bothered to read other people might be able to present a surface gloss that is appealing in small doses (Helloooooo, Vice staffers), but non-readers don’t produce work that is worth reading a second time. Sorry. They don’t. You do not have to read Literature alone. But you have to read something besides status updates and threads on Reddit. You have to read stuff that has gone through the hands of editors and proofreaders. You have to know what pro text looks like.

So the plague of not-reading means that a lot of students are helpless when it comes to grasping and enjoying the textures of a good piece of writing that isn’t selling a product or a tidy idea or mere sensation. It means that many of them flail around in shallow, platitudinous thickets when they draft their own stuff.

But so many genuinely want to become better readers and writers. As a start, or one form of a start, I find that it helps to give them concrete lists of common flubs, misconceptions, and banalities, the kind that appear in any reputable style and usage guide. Students appreciate that level of editorial specificity, as well they should, because these are the kinds of crib sheets that actual writers and editors use every day.

So, from the Washington Post, there is this list of phrases and words that are verboten because they have become disgustingly bland through overuse. I know that some educational theorists think it is useless to give students a roster like this, but in the real world, the place where professional writers operate, this is one of the ways things get helped along. No, you can’t turn a whole writing class into a carnival of Helpful Lists, because perusing a list does not a writer make, but it does help to imitate the professionals who know how to remain on guard against blemishes like “tightly knit community” and “hot-button issue” and “lifestyle.” Enjoy.

A Moment of Heresy

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, education, in the news, Other Critics

If the point of a positive book review is to get the audience to want to read the book under discussion, then Robert Dean Lurie’s brief piece in The American Conservative about the new Selected Letters of William Styron  does its job admirably. As much as I find myself disagreeing with many of the political points that get made in TAC (Pat Buchanan is the king saying something totally sensible about why we should avoid war, only to follow it up with an appalling xenophobic or anti-gay screed), I appreciate that it still bothers to publish aesthetic criticism. Given that the magazine’s brand of conservatism is more Eliot and Burke than Romney and Ryan, this makes sense. Still, it says something about the state of our political discourse that one is shocked to find a website or magazine that discusses public policy also talking about Darkness Visible (one of the best books of any kind ever written) and the puffed-up preening of Styron and Mailer.

But The American Conservative has recently gotten something much more important right as well. Tom Pauken, the former chair of the Texas Republican Party, wrote a piece in January denouncing “No Child Left Behind” and the culture of standardized testing it has spawned. We are all familiar with these mind-numbing, bogus tests that create perverse incentives all up and down the academic food chain. Right now 35 teachers in Atlanta are under indictment for fudging their students’ results because the higher the students score, the more teachers (both good and bad) keep their jobs or make more money. As bad as the War in Iraq and the financial meltdown have been, No Child Left Behind might be the most damaging legacy of the Bush years.

But the Obama administration doesn’t seem to understand what is really wrong here either. It’s not testing per se that’s the problem, but that we have educational tunnel-vision. Whenever I hear Barack Obama talk about how we need to send more kids to college because people with college degrees earn more money, I cringe. If it is this simple, why don’t we just mandate that all colleges simply let in anyone who applies? A college degree is supposed to signal to employers that you have done something hard and are therefore a good candidate to complete difficult tasks in the future. But what if everyone has college degrees? What then?

What is needed is real reform at the K-12 level, something everyone seems to acknowledge, but never actually happens. Too many people have said too many things they can’t take back without losing face or money or power, and so kids keep going through this ringer of irrelevance, racking up accomplishments or failures that ultimately tell us very little about who they are and what they could be. Tom Pauken’s solution might strike some as retrograde, but it’s actually similar to the approaches in many other western democracies whose education systems outperform ours by most objective and subjective measures. He writes:

We need to allow for multiple pathways to a high school degree. One academic pathway would emphasize math and science. Another, the humanities and fine arts. A third would focus on career and technical education. All students would get the basics, but there would be greater flexibility than under the “one size fits all” existing system which pushes everyone towards a university degree.

This is a common sense approach to preparing young Texans to be college-ready or career-ready. It is time to end this “teaching to the test” system that isn’t working for either the kids interested in going on to a university or for those more oriented towards learning a skilled trade. Let’s replace it with one that focuses on real learning and opportunities for all.

In the past, when public frustration hit the boiling point, the testing establishment would simply roll out a new test with a new acronym and promise that the new test will fix everything. That is why, from 1991 to the present, the acronym of the Texas standardized test has gone from TAAS to TAKS and, now STAAR.

It’s that last sentence that really gets me. Education today is a sick combination of the worst kinds of conservative and progressive ideologies. It’s the same shit in a new box, sold to us by people who stand to lose a lot if anything actually happens.  And so nothing changes.

I imagine that Tom Pauken and I would agree on very little.  Again, he was the head of TEXAS Republican Party, for Christ’s sake.  Still, humanists of all stripes need to come together and wrench education in this country away from the technocrats, especially when they are doing everything in their power to make education a business devoid of human subtlety and emotion. Standardized multiple-choice testing has been around for years. Computerized writing analysis is knocking on the door. If we do nothing, those of us who actually care about educating complicated and whole human beings will find ourselves begging for change outside of the house we used to own.

Speaking of Narcissism

Posted on by under education, guides and nudges

Just a quick dispatch from the higher ed front-

The other day I was talking to my upper-division social science writing students about how humanities and social science departments feel pressured to justify their places on university campuses. What this has led to is both fields trying to be more like the hard sciences.  This has been disastrous for the humanities, as “theory” and identity politics have supplanted reading and writing as the discipline’s core. As for the social sciences, by demanding to be taken as seriously as the big bully on campus, they’ve only made their own efforts look like cheap imitations of the real thing.

I’ll have more to say about how humanities departments have destroyed themselves in due time, but that’s not what I want to do now.  What interested me was my students’ reactions when I used the term “navel-gazing.” Most of them laughed. When I asked why they were laughing, a young man (who seems bright and serious) in the front of the class said that he had never heard that phrase before, and that seemed to hold true for most of his classmates. This shocked me, as it is a phrase that I feel like I run into quite often in book reviews, political discussions, and take-downs of particularly out of touch cultural figures. I’ll spare you a sermon about what this incident says about what college students are and are not reading. Instead, I will paste some of the entries from the OED on this and related phrases below, as I find them fascinating. I particularly like the reference to Los Angeles. Feel free to accuse me of navel-gazing.

navel-gazing n. = navel contemplation

-1959   Canad. Jrnl. Econ. & Polit. Sci. 25 242   Contemporary Americans are inclined to regard such activities as navel-gazing, and to be more interested in the practical utility of models and specific operational techniques.
-1972   Publishers Weekly 10 July 27/2   David Obst has no monopoly on national navel-gazing.
-1990   Independent 27 July 19/6   Navel-gazing has taught these men and women to accept that there has to be someone in authority for the firm to work.

navel-contemplation n. meditation or contemplation, esp. of a self-absorbed, complacent, or profitless kind

-1921   D. H. Lawrence Let. 2 May (1962) II. 650   Your Nirvana is too much a one-man show: leads inevitably to navel-contemplation.
-1974   Times 27 June 18/3   To fight off the navel-contemplation mood induced by our move of office.
-1986   Q Oct. 76/1   Writing with these musicians has forced Simon to look up from navel-contemplation towards the open sky of entertainment.

navel-contemplator n. = omphalopsychite n. at omphalo- comb. form ; (also more widely) a person who indulges in navel-contemplation.

-1856   R. A. Vaughan Hours with Mystics I. vi. vii. 300   They call these devotees Navel-contemplators.
-1986   Financial Times (Nexis) 11 Apr. i. 19   We are in Los Angeles where the sun shines, the night life sparkles, and navel-contemplators of the world unite.

omphaloskepsis n. (also omphaloscepsis)  [ < omphalo- comb. form + ancient Greekσκέψις inquiry (see scepsis n.)] = omphaloscopy n.

-1925   A. Huxley Those Barren Leaves v. iv. 366   The flesh dies… And there’s an end of your omphaloskepsis.
-1952   H. Ingrams Hong Kong i. 22   The British saw London as the world’s capital. Omphaloscepsis has always been one of the world’s troubles.
-1983   Verbatim Summer 23/1   Presumably, one arrives at game theory through omphaloskepsis.

omphalomancy n.  [ < omphalo- comb. form + -mancy comb. form; compare French †omphalomantie (1752), omphalomancie (1868 in Littré)] divination by the navel, esp. the art or practice of divining the number of future children a woman is to have by counting the number of knots on the umbilical cord of a baby born to her (obs. rare); (in extended use) the art or skill of predicting or estimating numbers of people (rare).

-1652   J. Gaule Πυς-μαντια 165   Omphelomancy, [divining] by the navell.
-1892   New Sydenham Soc. Lexicon,   Omphalomancy, the prophesying of the number of future children a woman will have according to the number of knots on the navel-string of the child born.
-1987   Amer. Jrnl. Sociol. 93 210   The last chapter is a brief exercise in omphalomancy, an estimate of intellectual progeny in leading roles.

Addendum

Posted on by under education, in the news, the polis, Visual

In the previous post, I might have made it sound like few professors are openly confronting the problems facing universities.  This isn’t the case: not only have the best books on university decay been written by academics (Chris Newfield, Frank Donoghue, Mark Bousquet, and Louis Menand, among others), but plenty of progressive younger professors–including ones with tenure–are speaking up eloquently.  Trouble is, nobody in a position to change things listens.

-TGR