End o' May ! ? ! ?

Friday May 30

Holy crap, how did it get to be the end of May already? Graduation was the first weekend in May, and now a whole twelfth of the calendar has just...evaporated. The world has grown greener; temperatures have warmed; and what have I gotten done?

I don't usually have that sense of tempus fugit; I've realized that my not-so-puritan work ethic allows me to spend afternoons with a book (fun reading, not work reading) and not feel guilty about it. Finishing a book is, in a way, "getting something done," but it's not planting flowers or dusting furniture or training the cat to sit. Okay, just joking about the last undone task.

I do religiously read the NYT, via email. Since we currently live in an area with faint, competing NPR stations, I read the Times more regularly than I hear NPR, which I miss. There's something about Susan Stamberg's voice that feels like home to me. This habitual consumption of news & opinion is one I'd like to nurture in students -- how can you think about the world if you don't know what's going on?

I'm solidly with the Times editorial writer this morning who protests the corrupted usage of the word "elite," which has been transformed to a slur. Anti-intellectualism is alive and well in this country, and the deprecatory use of "elite" is often tied to that. Are democracy and the existence of elites opposed? Only if you confuse "elite" with "elitist." 

Whole discussion in NYT, if you're interested, but I'm particularly interested in the implications of "anti-elite-ism" for education. If becoming more educated is a way of "bettering" oneself, then going to college can bring about serious personal conflicts for first-generation and minority students.  Are you "acting white" if you get good grades? Are you "getting above your raising" if you talk about your econ class with your dad, or try to change the way you speak, or become interested in topics that your family never discusses? These conflicts are difficult for students to articulate, but I think the effort to avoid these conflicts is one reason that students can be so career-focused:  "I'm not really changing as a person, I'm just here to become more employable." And that's a tragedy.

part two -- what education ought to be -- follows

wretched excess?

Wed May 28th

I'm back, after a travel-ful Memorial Day weekend, and after some thinking about how to prompt/prod/encourage students to blog themselves. We usually like to write about ourselves, so one thing I'd suggest would be that students choose words to describe themselves in their profiles -- just lists of single words -- and then expand those words into blog entries.

For example, why did I choose the title "wretched excess," and what does that have to do with who I am? It connects, for one thing, with my listing "politics" as an interest. More and more, I recognize that Americans tend to over-everything: we overeat, we overspend, we drive cars that are too big. We use too much of the planet's resources, and most of us think too little. (Okay, so there's an "under" activity.)  In many ways I include myself in the "we"; I like to drive fast. I like loud music. I have a hard time throwing things away, so I have lots of boxes of stuff that I don't really need.  

Ummm, excuses?  I like my stuff, my books and clothes and shoes and memorabilia. I feel connected to my past by the old concert tickets, by photographs, by my that's-the-dress-I-wore-to-my-best-friend's-wedding dress (even though it way doesn't fit any more). And some of the "stuff" is sentimentally valuable in more significant ways, like the china hutch my mom refinished when I was about fourteen. It's filled, now, with my mother's china and other glassware, a collection of breakable, beautiful things. [I'm still calling it my mother's china even though she has been dead now for several years, and the china is living in my house. How long will it take for these things to become mine, in my own mind?  Perhaps it will be called "Anita's china" after I am dead and have passed it on to someone else, someone younger, with her own collection of "stuff."]

No excuses: I have too much stuff and use too much gas and too much water. Every gallon of diet Coke uses a couple gallons of fresh water in production, and I drink a LOT of diet Coke. But then....so do the rest of us. It's hard to swim against the stream. 

You can lead a horse to water....

I teach a college course required for graduation -- one of those often groan-evoking first-year courses that students talk about. And talk about. As about 70% of my course load, I teach what's variously called "freshman comp" or "first-year writing" or "first-year composition." Sometimes in the bad old days it was called "bonehead English."  The common wisdom holds (and some students agree) that students don't like to write, or are afraid to write.

Yet.... Thousands, hundreds of thousands of students (and working folk who are student-aged) maintain blogs and FaceBook pages and all kinds of non-required written artifacts, voluntarily, without the threat of a grade, cat o' nine tails, or any of the other weapons traditionally brandished by English teachers with their hair in buns.

In the fall term, I'm going to make "keep a blog" an assignment for my FYC students. They'll be published, albeit self-published, and able to play with graphics and colors. In the spirit of not asking students to do what I won't do :  )  I'll be keeping a blog myself, and here it is. 

More soon, gentle readers.