Sometimes one or another guy in one of my classes hangs around after class and doesn’t say anything but sort of looks sideways at me and I sort of smile at him, encouraging him to ask a question or make a comment or something. But he doesn’t say anything, and I gather my notebooks and walk out; and he follows me for a little, at some distance, and then, rather sadly, goes his way.
I don’t know what it means, but I’m moved by it, and I wonder if there’s a maternal something I’m giving off in class, and, if so, whether these young men, missing their mothers, want to be around a certain warmth they’re perceiving. Is the effect – I go on to speculate, wildly – deepened by my talking in literature classes about confusion and suffering and longing?
Literature classes are special, Mr UD often reminds me; they’re not like his political science classes, where they cozy up with constitutions and international law. Not even philosophy has these embodied characters aching for clarity and thrown back on mysteries.
This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for the strange intensity of the literature classroom – an intensity to which my students are highly responsive… That is, I mean to say, I’m grateful to my students.
I’m grateful for their resistance to me – the way a few of them will always, all semester, have a cocked head and skeptical eyes; how some of them will say “Why are all the stories you’ve chosen so dark?”
Which will make me think, and think hard: Am I choosing dark? I riffle through the table of contents of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, desperately looking for happy stories I’ve missed. I want there to be a world in which that student is right, and serious art is as joyous as it is tragic. But even the one story that ends with a reasonably unclouded epiphany – Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” – gets there by way of the evocation of a fully despairing form of life.
I’m grateful for the class sessions when discussion is just dynamite — ideas and questions and jokes and anecdotes blasting away for an hour and fifteen minutes. Afterwards, my blissed-out head spins. My brain’s lit up. I feel the same way I do when at the piano I play non-stop – with some fluidity, some feeling, and even some proximity to the piece as written – through a longish composition. I’ve been engaged – with energy, precision, rapidity, nuance – and the result has been rather beautiful.
I’ve formed lifetime friendships with a surprisingly large number of my students. I’m grateful they let me watch their passion and disillusionment and then their rebuilding of passion. Some of them have terrible crises in which they sit in their stopped cars for hours staring through the windshield and wondering what they’ve missed out on and if they’ve made disastrously wrong decisions about what to do with their lives. I tend to tell them to calm down; that they’re still ridiculously young, and there’s plenty of time to make more mistakes… I try to make them laugh. They do laugh.
On the simplest level, I’m grateful to them because they’re so beautiful. I mean, just beautiful to look at as they gallop their city campus in skinny jeans and low boots. Their faces are ruddy with life.
But the deeper gratitude, the one I’m mainly trying to convey, involves what you might call intellectual vulnerability. It glitters in their eyes as they sit in front of me and begin to take in, in a disciplined way, the difficulty of being human.
… fails to bring context to SUNY Albany student hazing and other rituals. Like Chico State and U Mass Amherst, SUNY Albany is one of America’s most violent, dangerous universities. Fights, sometimes escalating to riots, are part of the fabric of life for students, faculty, and the surrounding communities. Suspensions happen; a few fraternities get shuttered… Nothing changes. Things get worse. The administrations of these universities assume a sort of perpetual crouch, waiting in dread for the next horror.
Naturally, an important element of the SUNY Albany mix is a huge expenditure of funds on sports. Without it, Albany wouldn’t be able to attract all those applicants who want to come to SUNY to watch games and get drunk and beat up people.
A campus policeman killed the person wielding the sword. It’s too soon to know whether this was a student at Metropolitan State University, or whether the person with the sword was drunk or high, etc.
… loser.
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Swift and excellent statement from the chancellor:
“… [T]he reports of uncivil language and shouted racial epithets appear to be accurate and are universally condemned by the university, student leaders and the vast majority of students who are more representative of our university creed.”
[Dan] Jones said parents are being notified that “one of America’s safest campuses is safe again this morning, though all of us are ashamed of the few students who have negatively affected the reputations of each of us and of our university.”
SOS would only tweak this in the following way: Instead of negatively affected, just say hurt, or harmed, or damaged. Remember Thomas Jefferson:
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
George Washington University students celebrating in front of the White House late last night.
More pictures.
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LOL.
Heard loud and clear over chants of “U.S.A.” and “Obama” was an unnamed George Washington University undergraduate screaming to her friends: “I legitimately have a paper due tomorrow!”
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Last night was a nail-biter.
Yeah, we’ve got that.
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A Win for Professors.
If you can understand the Five Stages of Grief, thank a professor.
And a professor shall lead them.
Professor Bashing as Clever Strategy on the Eve of a National Election.
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The Three Horsemen of the Republican Apocalypse:
Empiricism
Humaneness
Proper Speech
You’ve really got to pay attention. And you’ve got to tell someone. If students at Folsom Lake College hadn’t noticed David Ming Lee acting oddly, he might have used the small part of his weapons cache that he decided to bring to school that day.
A Folsom Lake College student remains in custody – his bail set at $1 million – after his arrest Thursday for bringing a loaded handgun onto campus, college officials said.
Police dropped in on his apartment.
A subsequent search of Lee’s residence turned up an assault rifle and large capacity magazines.
… August” was a 22-year-old student with Prozac, alcohol, and morphine in her system. The local coroner was astonished by the morphine: “It’s hard to get ahold of.”
Chico State has long been at the cutting edge of drug and alcohol deaths and injuries at American universities. I’m not sure why certain schools get this way. I’d guess that after awhile a place gets a reputation and starts attracting freshmen who’ve already been addicts for years. (See the first Chico student interviewed in this pretty good Chico State film.)
Three deaths in three months; and a hard-to-get drug showing up in the latest death. It’s ominous.
The local newspaper grapples with the amazingly violent University of Massachusetts student body.
The dean helps the reporter understand this profoundly complex problem: Why do so many of the young men the school has admitted destroy neighborhoods and physically attack the police? It’s in their nature. Look to the developmental spectrum. It’s all part of the price of doing business for the university. Boys will be boys, and we admit them knowing they can’t help where they are on the spectrum.
… at play.
I wonder what in their admissions essays must have made Berkeley decide to admit them.
I hope, in my legal career, to have an opportunity to torture, behead, and play with the dead bodies of birds.
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UD thanks David.
… to a group of students I don’t know (I was substituting for a colleague), a woman came up to the podium to talk to me.
I don’t know why I want to share this with you, but… A couple of winters ago, I was sitting with a friend in her house during a terrible snowstorm. The house had big windows everywhere, and the snow was falling really beautifully in all the windows and we took out Catcher and spent the whole day taking turns reading it aloud to each other. Start to finish, one sitting, with the snow falling… This is why I’ll never forget one page of that book…
I told the student that was a beautiful story and I thanked her for it (and I wondered – as I often do – why students tend to share things like this with me privately, after class, even though I’d love it, and it’d be great for discussion, if they’d tell everyone…), and she rushed off before I had a chance to tell her my story along those lines.
One summer UD was alone for a couple of weeks at the little Soltan house in upstate New York, and, over the course of a few sunny quiet days, she sat on the deck in a butterfly chair and read Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The solitude, the slowness with which she read, the powerful natural setting — it made it so that, like her student today, UD took in that novel for good.
… shot to death by a campus policeman.
He had taken LSD at a concert that evening and had gone on a rampage, attacking three other people before he got to the police station.
Video taken by a surveillance camera showed Collar nude and covered in sweat as he pursued the retreating officer more than 50 feet outside the building, Cochran said. Collar got within 5 feet of Austin and the officer fired once, striking the student in the chest, Cochran said…. [The Mobile County Sheriff] said he had “serious concerns” about the killing of an unarmed student when he first heard what had happened, but he better understood the officer’s decision to open fire after watching the videotape of the shooting.
“It’s very powerful,” [he] said …
Investigators are trying to determine who provided Collar with LSD and could charge that person with murder…
Typical pro-laptop bs. Centuries ago, still images of Picassos and volcanoes were flashed on one screen in front of students via projectors – a cheap, perfectly adequate way of providing visual material. Waters doesn’t note in his comment that laptops are about one long endless private self-service image-stream. His comment doesn’t note that instead of occasionally drawing students’ attention to one image at the front of the room, the PowerPoint prof quite often spends the entire class session hunched over images and blocks of words, ignoring the class, which is of course in return ignoring her.
But anyway. Faculty gatherings like this one at Elon College are all about the lovely PowerPoint/laptop classroom synergy coming out of the closet.
As always, it’s honest students instructing cynical professors:
“There is no reason to use them in a discussion class,” [an Elon student] said. “That’s where they become more of a distraction, because students that use them during discussions are most likely on Facebook or Pinterest.”
And as for the massive, no-discussion lectures laptops are so terrific for — this form of education is becoming obsolete, since it makes absolutely no sense to do a class of this sort in real time. Just gather all the clickers and laptops and PowerPoints and films and cellphones that you’re dragging into the classroom and, you know, take your toys and go home. Only an idiot – or someone drawing a salary – would continue with this scenario.
… of the Alabama university student who got naked and went to the campus police station, where he banged on windows and threatened the policeman who came outside to investigate, ended as badly as it’s possible to end. The policeman, after repeated threats from the student, shot and killed him (there’s a security tape of the incident).
It’s too soon to say anything with confidence about this event, beyond the fact that it’s heartbreaking. The student was a freshman, a wrestler, and, according to his friends, had no record of this sort of behavior. Theories abound – a psychotic break, drugs… Many observers wonder why the policeman was unable to find a non-lethal way to calm things.
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David, a reader, reminds UD that a couple of years ago the Georgia Tech police (actually, now that I look at the link, it’s not clear they were campus police) were able to do enough roughing up and pepper spraying of a crazed student to take him down:
[S]everal officers had their handguns trained on Shrotri and were ordering him to drop the sword, according to another report also obtained by the AJC.
“You will have to kill me,” Shrotri responded.
A scuffle ensued after one of the officers squirted pepper spray at Shrotri. Officer Robert J. Turner, 29, of Griffin, had his right hand cut as he tackled Shrotri.
The voice of the people. Philosophy of education, American-style. If the University of Georgia students and alumni like to shit all over the campus during football games, “it’s a college campus for crying out loud.” That’s what college campuses are for.
The University of Tennessee would dearly love to pull the tubing out of the alcohol enema story, but, like Franzia wine over-topping your sphincter, it just keeps circulating. The frat what done it has been suspended (temporarily; anal-opening-awareness workshops are doubtless in the works), but, despite national news coverage that won’t quit, UT’s president seems disinclined to say anything public about the brothers giving each other enemas.