This is how its author writes.
Two seismic forces beyond our control — the advent of Web. 2.0 and the inexorable influx of tech-savvy millennials on campus — are shaping what I call the new digital shoreline of higher education. These forces demand that we as educators reconsider the learning theories, pedagogies and practices on which we have depended.
The book, whose clunky mixed-up title I’ll let you discover at the link, wants us to know that it’s all good — all the twittering shit our students trail into class is all good. And even if it isn’t, it’s… what’d he say? It’s a seismic force, so you can’t do anything about it anyway sucker. It’s Nature, baby! Beyond our control! You think you can keep The Tumblr Temblor out of Classroom 25A Soltan Intro American Lit? It’s fucking inexorable! I’m not gonna argue the thing ’cause we all know it’s just a … a …. thing and you can’t do anything about things.
Nor can you do anything about pretentious writers. Look at this paragraph, with its pseudo-urgency and its self-importance (what I call) and its we as educators …
Huh? Educators? What’s wrong with educators, SOS?
I dunno. I can only report the following. Every self-respecting professor I’ve ever known has at some point said to me something like: The worst dread I have about dying is that my obituary headline will call me an EDUCATOR. It’ll say LOCAL EDUCATOR DIES.
I mean, maybe they haven’t said something so strong. All have, however, expressed contempt for the word educator, and have shuddered at the thought of it being applied to them.
Is it because we’re cynical lazy shits who don’t truly educate? No. Au contraire. There’s something about the word. Again, I don’t really know. I only know it’s embarrassing. And it’s totally not surprising to find it here, in this empty pretentious paragraph, the guy patting himself on the back for being an educator.
And – you know – those teaching practices of the past… We haven’t just used them. No: We’ve depended on them. We’ve been in a co-dependent relationship with them, and we’re terrified of losing them to those uncontrollable seismic millennial things.
Mobile apps, content sharing and these tech-savvy students can become a professor’s best assets in the classroom, even if they sometimes seem threatening.
Threatening? It’s a fucking Phuket coming right at me! And there’s nothing I can do. I, Educator, have lost control of my classroom.
But here’s the good news:
These students are helping us — teachers at all levels — with new ways to communicate and they’re motivating us to truly see the potential of the vast, shared and co-created information resources that exist within interconnected nodes. We’re being challenged to rethink information creation, storage and delivery. They are time-slicers, shape-shifters, creators and mobile connectors. The playthings of our students’ youth are becoming the tools of their future.
I haven’t encountered language like this since my late lamented hippie youth. We are da yout! The last sentence is positively Cultural Revolution boilerplate: THE PLAYTHINGS OF OUR STUDENTS’ YOUTH ARE BECOMING THE TOOLS OF THEIR FUTURE. GLORIOUS FUTURE! DON’T BE SCARED, EDUCATOR! JOIN OUR YOUTH. TAKE UP THE CHALLENGE.
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Send this guy a copy pronto.
There’s a beautiful synergy in play at Click-Thru U. Keep elementary, secondary, and then of course university students in front of computers and expensive software all the days of their lives, until they don’t even know that education used to mean human teachers and classrooms full of human beings discussing, questioning, scoffing, yawning, laughing… The jostle of real life, real encounters; the unscripted moments when, prompted or provoked by a brilliant lecture or an intense verbal exchange, you perceive something you never perceived before… when you come to knowledge as it lives its life, as it restlessly evolves, in a classroom with a passionate lecturer and focused students…
This is what the Click-Thrus will never know. All they will know is a continuation into schooling of the screen life they live outside the classroom. Theirs is all one seamless daily experience – Facebook, Gchat, texting, algebra, history, Facebook, Gchat, texting. No change of scene. No talking out loud. You want to say something, hit the keyboard. Feel something? Tap an emoticon.
The synergy in this post’s headline should surprise no one – the process by which the parent of for-profit Click-Thru U scoops up all the software and makes it possible for every American student to experience an entirely digitalized education is well underway. As the Powerpointed, laptopped, clickered classroom becomes intolerably pointless for everyone, the software will be there waiting.
Of course the software isn’t teaching anyone anything much, as the New York Times, reviewing the studies, reports. But the United States is such a rich county, with such a booming economy, that it doesn’t really need educated people.
Banned Books Week, in which we celebrate novels which have excited the legal system, has come and gone. The commemoration always reminds me of the singular moment in my life when, grazing the bookcases in my parents’ bedroom, I found Henry Miller’s much-banned Tropic of Cancer.
My father was an immunologist who studied cancer at the National Institutes of Health (and this was the heyday of Nixon’s War on Cancer), so maybe I initially assumed I was looking at a technical book. But something in its stark blue/black Grove Press binding drove me further, and I cracked it open, immediately discovering a use of the word crack with which I had been unfamiliar.
I’d opened Tropic to one of Van Norden’s notorious, hilarious rants about women, failure, and the dirt in his belly.
“All I ask of life,” he says, “is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt. … The trouble is, you see, I can’t fall in love, I’m too much of an egoist… You sort of rot here [Like Tropic‘s narrator, Henry Miller, Van Norden is an American living in Paris.] Would you believe it, I’ve never been to the Louvre – nor the Comedie Francaise. Is it worth going to those joints? Still, it sort of takes your mind off things, I suppose. What do you do with yourself all day? Don’t you get bored? … You go queer over here… all these cheap shits sitting on their ass all day bragging about their work and none of them is worth a stinking damn. They’re all failures – that’s why they come over here… I’m a neurotic, I guess. I can’t stop thinking about myself…. Ah, well, shit! I’m going to take a walk… wash the dirt out of my belly…”
Transfixed, I lowered myself to the bedroom floor and began at the beginning.
********************************************
Inside the Whale George Orwell called his essay about Miller, and that’s just it. Tropic had brought me inside the vast dark unfettered head, a place where immersed thoughts swam mightily up and broke the surface. I badly wanted access to this disreputable underworld, and here it was.
The social reality outside Miller’s whale was ‘twenties Paris, a world, wrote Orwell, of
bug-ridden rooms in working-men’s hotels, of fights, drinking bouts, cheap brothels, Russian refugees, cadging, swindling, and temporary jobs. [These were] the poor quarters of Paris as a foreigner sees them — the cobbled alleys, the sour reek of refuse, the bistros with their greasy zinc counters and worn brick floors, the green waters of the Seine, the blue cloaks of the Republican Guard, the crumbling iron urinals, the peculiar sweetish smell of the Metro stations, the cigarettes that come to pieces, the pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens …
This is Henry’s setting, and in it his thoughts reel back and forth from rage and despair at a cancerous world, a world where meaning and beauty and energy are all used up, to ecstasy at rare unbidden moments of meaning and beauty and energy that continue, somehow, to survive the deadness. By chance in a foul dark Metro station Henry finds a ticket to a Ravel concert one night; the stepped-on, rubbed-out, grubby ticket is Henry’s ticket to one of the most complete experiences of aesthetic bliss UD has ever read. The very neglect and chanciness of that ticket seem to generate the spectacular responses Henry has in the concert hall. Art needs something to transform, and the more deeply you’ve taken in the cancerous world, the more intense your receptivity to its transfiguration. The stronger the artist (here, Ravel), the more fulsome the embrace – and transfiguration – of the cancerous.
There’s nothing escapist or ephemeral about this transition from death to life – the point is that the art sweeps up all of the suffering degraded reality outside the concert hall and makes it art, just the way Miller’s novel itself takes in with such capacious, nervy, fascination “the imbecilities of the inner mind… the real-politik of the inner mind,” as Orwell calls them, that he ends up glorifying this stuff.
[T]he truth is [writes Orwell] that ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors than writers of fiction usually care to admit. [Walt] Whitman himself ‘accepted’ a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the ‘grey sick faces of onanists’, etc.,etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
Henry puts himself in the way of decay, every day. Decayed streets, people, buildings. He revels in urinous medieval Paris and detests the fake shininess of new American cities. In giving words to this descent into the truth of everyday horrors, Miller offers us a known, though rarely exhibited, social and psychological reality. As Orwell notes, there’s nothing edifying here; Tropic doesn’t end, as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sentimental story Babylon Revisited (which has the same time and setting and expatriate American narrator) does, with an assurance that the character will eventually reverse his losses. There’s only a primer on how to remain human and alive in corrosive times.
[I]n 1917 there was nothing that a thinking and a sensitive person could do, except to remain human, if possible. And a gesture of helplessness, even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. If I had been a soldier fighting in the Great War, I would sooner have got hold of Prufrock than The First Hundred Thousand or Horatio Bottomley’s Letters to the Boys in the Trenches. I should have felt, like [E.M.] Forster, that by simply standing aloof and keeping touch with pre-war emotions, Eliot was carrying on the human heritage. [Hence] the passive, non-co-operative attitude implied in Henry Miller’s work is justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people ought to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they do feel. Once again it is the human voice among the bomb-explosions, a friendly American voice, ‘innocent of public-spiritedness’. No sermons, merely the subjective truth. And along those lines, apparently, it is still possible for a good novel to be written. Not necessarily an edifying novel, but a novel worth reading and likely to be remembered after it is read… [Henry Miller] is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.
No, our moment is not 1917; and no, not all novels have to rub our noses in horror and imbecility. But there will always be high value in capturing and recording the human undercurrent – its stuttering resentments and rages and bewilderments and obscenities. For this – along with our delicacy, hopefulness, and high-mindedness – is our subjective reality, and we are right to ask from our artists the peculiar mix of reportage and transcendence the best of them bring to it.
…a Washington Post sports reporter, to make playing football a university major. [Scroll down.] Now a UD reader sends her the latest Jenkins dispatch, in which she provides details of a sports major which would grant students academic credit for their on-field efforts. It would also toss in courses on, like, The Cultural Meaning of Play.
Jenkins writes strangely, and says strange things. Here’s her first paragraph:
If we would quit being half-ashamed of college sports and assign them some real value, we might just cure some of their corruptions. The NCAA should stop treating athletic departments as ticket offices attached to universities like tumors and instead treat them as legitimate academic branches. In fact, why shouldn’t we let kids major in sports? Aspiring athletes should be able to pursue their real interest, as a business and an art.
Let’s take this step by step.
If we would quit being half-ashamed of college sports and assign them some real value, we might just cure some of their corruptions. [Americans are fully-proud of college sports, and they assign them stupendous value. What is Jenkins talking about?] The NCAA should stop treating athletic departments as ticket offices attached to universities like tumors [Way strange simile, though it fits, I guess, with her use of the word “cure” in the preceding sentence. But does she really think the NCAA, of all places, considers college sports a cancer? For the NCAA, college sports is precisely a cure – a cure for poverty.] and instead treat them as legitimate academic branches. In fact, why shouldn’t we let kids major in sports? Aspiring athletes should be able to pursue their real interest, as a business and an art. [A college education, after all, is a four-year opportunity for students to pursue their real interests, be these dribbling balls, building meth labs, playing video games, or whatever. When it comes to constructing a curriculum, colleges should inquire of students what they would like to do. Then they should build buildings and hire people to help them to do those things.]
UD finds this sentence a bit vague:
Varsity athletes deserve significant academic credits for their incredibly long hours of training and practice, and if they fulfill a core curriculum they deserve degrees, too.
I get the first claim – that purely physical activity warrants intellectual credit. Pant, Run – three credits at an institution of higher learning. Okay.
But the second claim – that if athletes fulfill a core curriculum they deserve degrees – confuses me. Where in this piece does Jenkins say anything about core courses? It’s all about colleges letting athletes do what they want to do – play sports, and major in sports. Jenkins compares a sports major at, say, Auburn, to a theater major at Yale. She says nothing about this — the extensive field of academic requirements you’ve got to get out of the way before Yale lets you be a theater major. She alludes to an academic core, but that’s all. She’ll let other people figure out how to, uh, tackle that one.
“In the past two decades, the interest in educational technology has developed into a full-blown obsession,” notes Jack Schneider in Education Week. Citing evidence that all the bright shiny computers at every level of the American education system don’t seem to be improving anything, Schneider suggests that all the money goes to computers because
it can be easy to credit technology for what makes a class “work.” Head to a thriving school where every student has a tablet computer, and you might be tempted to think that you’ve stumbled on a solution: Tablet PCs help kids thrive! You are also likely, however, to be on campus at a well-resourced school with lots of other things going for it. Working to pinpoint a particular practice that makes a good school work, in other words, is to deny the deep complexity of the educational environment.
The other reason that the reform elite loves technology is that it can be taken to scale. Great teachers, after all, are also easy to credit for a school that works. But how do we get one in every classroom? The iPad, on the other hand, requires only a checkbook.
He concludes:
[M]oney that goes to technology could just as easily have been spent on other approaches that, though perhaps not scalable, are directly connected to the processes of teaching and learning. Funding projects to improve teacher training, development, and retention, for instance, is less sexy than cutting the ribbon on a lab full of lightning-fast computers. But it’s also more likely to help kids learn.
UD thanks Bill for linking her to the article.
Here are a few words about the just-named Literature Nobel recipient, Tomas Transtromer.
Two ideas about human beings recur in his poetry:
One, we are mentally and physically fragile beings, for whom existence itself is an immense, constant struggle. Just surviving in the world – the obdurate, difficult, indifferent world – is an incredible struggle. Periodically, we lose ourselves. Our very identities – so contingent, so frail – actually vanish, and in those long moments of not even knowing who we are and where we are, we discover our true underlying condition, our non-being (our being-toward-death, if you like) amid the baffles and brazens of personality. A certain discipline toward, a certain respect for, reality involves accepting, and thinking about those amnesiac moments as they disclose metaphysical truths, not just about our defensive, patched-up social being, but about the nothingness that preceded, and will succeed, us.
The Name is one among many Transtromer poems that make the point. I found it quoted here, in a review essay by Bill Coyle.
I grow sleepy during the car journey and I drive in under the trees at the side of the road. I curl up in the back seat and sleep. For how long? Hours. Dusk has fallen.
Suddenly I’m awake and don’t know where I am. Wide awake, but it doesn’t help. Where am I? WHO am I? I am something that wakens in a back seat, twists about in panic like a cat in a sack. Who?
At last my life returns. My name appears like an angel. Outside the walls a trumpet signal blows (as in the Leonora Overture) and the rescuing footsteps come down the overlong stairway. It is I! It is I!
But impossible to forget the fifteen-second struggle in the hell of oblivion, a few meters from the main road, where the traffic drives past with its lights on.
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In an unpublished essay titled Come as You Are, Eve Sedgwick quotes the following passage – strikingly similar to the Transtromer poem – from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. She remarks that its description of amnesia “filled me with a comical sense of recognition.”
Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in a hospital after a road accident to find she is suffering from total amnesia. Outwardly, everything is intact: she has the same face and form, her senses and mind are there, but she doesn’t have any idea or any trace of a memory of who she really is. In exactly the same way, we cannot remember our true identity, our original nature. Frantically, and in real dread, we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch onto with all the desperation of someone falling continually into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is “ego.”
So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing us and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. In Tibetan ego is called dak dzin, which means “grasping at a self.” . . . . The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fear. (116-17)
It’s a more radical idea than Transtromer’s, which at least has us returning – amid the indifferent grinding on of the nearby car lights – to a sense of I – I – I. And of course for the Buddhist this sense of self-loss isn’t “hell” — it’s simply the reality that “the self does not inherently exist.” For Buddhists, the choice isn’t between feeling you’ve been reduced to a panicky animal – “a cat in a sack” – and feeling fully and comfortably affirmed as a rosy rounded ego. But despite these differences, both writers evoke the basic fact of our shaky, constantly-needing-to-be-elaborated, selfhood…
The second idea predominant in Transtromer’s work is related to the first one. Contingent and slippery we may be, but one capacious and reliable thing we do have is interiority. Our consciousness, our memory, our imagination, enables our movement – such as it is – through the world. A cultivation of those vast inner spaces which are all ours can make existence easier. Here’s part of “Romanesque Arches”:
Inside the huge Romanesque church the tourists jostled in the half darkness.
Vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.
A few candle flames flickered.
An angel with no face embraced me
and whispered through my whole body:
“Don’t be ashamed of being human, be proud!
Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.
You will never be complete, that’s how it’s meant to be.”
Blind with tears
I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza
together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Mr. Tanaka, and Signora Sabatini,
and inside each of them vault opened behind vault endlessly.
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Here’s another evocation of our precious vaults.
The Indoors is Endless
It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven
hoists his death-mask and sails off.
The grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills.
The wild geese are flying northwards.
Here is the north, here is Stockholm
swimming palaces and hovels.
The logs in the royal fireplace
collapse from Attention to At Ease.
Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes,
but the city wells breathe heavily.
Privy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas
are carried by night over the North Bridge.
The cobblestones make them stagger
mamselles loafers gentlemen.
Implacably still, the sign-board
with the smoking blackamoor.
So many islands, so much rowing
with invisible oars against the current!
The channels open up, April May
and sweet honey dribbling June.
The heat reaches islands far out.
The village doors are open, except one.
The snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence.
The rock slopes glow with geology’s patience.
It happened like this, or almost.
It is an obscure family tale
about Erik, done down by a curse
disabled by a bullet through the soul.
He went to town, met an enemy
and sailed home sick and grey.
Keeps to his bed all that summer.
The tools on the wall are in mourning.
He lies awake, hears the woolly flutter
of night moths, his moonlight comrades.
His strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain
against the iron-bound tomorrow.
And the God of the depths cries out of the depths
‘Deliver me! Deliver yourself!’
All the surface action turns inwards.
He’s taken apart, put together.
The wind rises and the wild rose bushes
catch on the fleeing light.
The future opens, he looks into
the self-rotating kaleidoscope
sees indistinct fluttering faces
family faces not yet born.
By mistake his gaze strikes me
as I walk around here in Washington
among grandiose houses where only
every second column bears weight.
White buildings in crematorium style
where the dream of the poor turns to ash.
The gentle downward slope gets steeper
and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.
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Heavy breathing, staggering, rowing against the current: There’s the first idea, the immense difficulty of life — all aspects of life. But then, imagining a long-dead relative imagining him, the poet says that “all the surface action turns inwards… the future opens” to the present. Erik – the long-dead relative – uses his vast vault of imagination (“the indoors is endless”) to see the living poet walking today around Washington DC, where life isn’t difficult – where “only / every second column bears weight.”
Yet even here, in the white weightless contemporary city, “the dream of the poor turns to ash,” and the same abyss that threatens Erik, with his “bullet through the soul,” threatens his descendant.