school's not out (yet)

Where do I go?

2012-03-11T13:00:00.004-07:00

A former student posted this on facebook with the comment that this is something i could have used in my teaching with her class. No matter what one thinks of the artist or the song, this is one great compliment to receive as a teacher. Thank you, JNM.

The feeling organisation

2012-03-03T08:05:00.003-08:00

Until recently, i had the impression that feelings were a kind of taboo in certain contexts of our educational organisations. They probably still are in some cultures or they are mediated by other means of expression.

It was naive to assume that 'professionalism' should exclude feelings and emotions in any human context. In my defense, i was culturally self-conscious and trying to stay on a kind of neutral ground, an emotional Switzerland kind of thing, while i kept feeling more and more frustrated. I was also in denial and contradicted myself when i pondered or discussed issues such as morale and job satisfaction. There is simply no way to explore the depth of these issues in clinical terms of hard science. And yet, some of these aspects of our life seem to observe laws that would appear almost natural in their predictions and results.

I have been disabused of these self-conscious notions and my thinking and feeling have been liberated by the latest session of the online course i am attending. Yes, not only is it legitimate to be talking about the emotional and social intelligence of our leaders, but it is very much part of the agenda. Two comments on this: comment one, it is my understanding that this revelation is recent not only to me, but relatively recent to the field as well. Comment two, could this be an instance of a double-standard? Did we ever question the requirement for emotional and social intelligence on teachers? Did we ever question the role of the educator in nurturing their students' emotional and social intelligence (or whatever we called it in the past, the pre-Goleman days)? There is an oversimplification and, perhaps, some one-sidedness in my loaded comments. The demand for standards, national or international, local and state control of our schools, the focus on qualifications in a competitive world did shift the focus away from 'softer' issues. And i will admit i am glad, no, not glad, HAPPY, that we now giving these 'soft' issues more of our attention. Now i feel HAPPY to admit that i have made an investment in my emotional and social intelligence and that there are values i believe in and hold DEAR to me. Not that anything stopped me before, but now i have the bibliography on my side, not just the staff room griping conversations or the long coffee sessions about frustration and job dissatisfaction.

In the amazing mazes of our virtual library i met Mike Bottery and his writings on trust where i found a lot of my thoughts and feelings articulated; his theories answer a good number of my questions and i feel HOPEFUL. Bottery (2003, 2005) describes seven levels of trust and their significance for educators: 1. calculative trust for newly met individuals, 2. role trust, the assertion by the individual that they can be trusted, since they share the values of the profession, 3. practice trust, where assumptions are dis/confirmed and the trust relationship moves into affective and value areas, 4. identificatory trust, where individuals have known each other for years and mutual unconditional respect is generated, 5. meso trust, connected with the belief in the culture and ethos of the organisation, 6. macro trust on the level where the societal conditions where individuals can trust one another are created and 7. existential (2003)/global (2005) trust, dependent on personal meaning and purpose/global forces.

Mike Bottery is not the only education specialist to research and write about trust and other relevant concepts. There is a long thread of these issues discussed in recent bibliography, for anyone who is interested. And what is more, evidence of the relationship between trust and teacher morale, job satisfaction and academic attainment can be found there.

Why am i blogging about trust? My intention is not to advertise Bottery's work and i do not wish to draw attention to the fact that i am doing an online course. I wish to share my opinion, express my FEELINGS and confirm Bottery's claim that "violations of trust, or reduction in the level of trust, particularly when these are unilaterally initiated, will be hurtful and damaging" (Bottery 2005: 7). School administrators who do not recognize the complexity of trust and do not understand its dynamics, mechanisms and its foundation areas in education will be facing damaging and hurtful results in the organization. And then they will have UNHAPPY teachers. Learning organizations have FEELINGS and VALUES. I know at least this much is true. My students know it too.

Bottery, M. 2005. Trust: its importance for educators. Management in Education. 18: 5, pp 6-10.
Bottery, M. 2003. The Management and Mismanagement of Trust. Educational Management and Administration. 31:3, pp. 245-261.

What we learn from teaching poetry

2012-02-07T13:02:00.001-08:00

My English A Literature students on
their experience teaching poetry:

One needs:
Confidence, Discipline and Engagement

It is important to have:
Interaction with the audience, their involvement
and mutual respect

One has to like poetry

One must be prepared!

One thinks the thoughts of someone else

One must use visuals and have a good understanding
of the poem and background knowledge

Openmindedness is a sine qua non and so is
the ability to accept constructive criticism

Meta-constructive or what's in a word?

2012-02-04T11:33:00.001-08:00

(To my good friends, CC and MB, whose wise advice i did not take)

Thursday was my day off. Like every day off, i had great plans to do all kinds of things; catch up with the backlog of the last five years, re-read War and Peace and spend quality time with my significant other. Of course i ended up doing very little catching up or looking into my loving spouse’s eyes , spent a considerable amount of time (objective estimate: 20 min, subjective estimate: an eternity) on annoying and unnecessary email communication on problems that other people had created and were refusing to solve, charged my Kindle (this did not require too much of my time…), did some housekeeping stuff with mp3 recorders and cameras, spent a couple of hours on a task for the online course, but most importantly, I spent quite some time on the phone with my friend LS. Now this is what i call constructive. An interchange/activity centered on involvement, collaboration, consultation. An idea is put forth, someone responds, understanding follows, adjustment of the idea ensues, consideration of different perspectives, implications is introduced and on and on, so one constructs meaning/a new idea/experience/plan et c.; in short the learning cycle of do-learn-review-apply-do is followed. This is constructive, this is learning. But that was Thursday and this is what happens when i talk to LS.

The following day, however, i woke up to a new meaning of the word constructive. It’s like the definition in the dictionary was re-written overnight. On that day constructive meant indiscriminately tolerant, willfully ignorant, placatingly accepting, emotionally bland, and pointlessly questioning. Aber, Hallo! Is this a parallel universe or because of the relativist soup in which we are all swimming and our constant fear of conflict and confrontation, we have redefined constructive as meaning “i will not say anything that may upset you and i will not show my anger although i think that you are the reason for it”. Let me give you an example: you go to a coffee shop and you order a cup of coffee, the waiter takes forever, and when he does come the coffee is cold and the waiter is rude. You are angry and you tell the waiter that he was late, rude, the coffee was cold and that is not acceptable. According to today’s definition, this is not constructive. Why? Because you will not get another cup of coffee. And who cares? Not everything is about getting something. In other words, i need to be ‘constructive’ so i can get what i want or i need to be ‘constructive’ so the waiter will not be upset with me and maybe then i stand a chance of getting some hot coffee on time when i visit the coffee shop again. I need to educate the waiter about his job and the way he should treat customers. But it really does not go like that. I do not want the coffee. Not anymore. I want the waiter to know what his job is and i want him to know that sometimes he can be right and sometimes he can be wrong. I am not in the business of educating the world, I am in the business of educating my students and teaching them to educate themselves, so they will not be slow, rude and inefficient waiters. The rest of us, adults, need to agree on some meanings and live by them and their consequences.

Do I have anything against deconstruction, against the transcendental signified? No, i don’t. But i oppose selective and opportunistic deconstruction. You’re either with Derrida or you’re against him. You cannot say "Oh, it’s Tuesday, it’s my Derrida day of the week" or "I’m in a Derrida frame of mind" or "this creates a Derrida mood" or "this problem is not going away, let’s put some Derrida on it". Sometimes you just have to face the music.

"mais les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-là seuls qui partent pour partir"

2012-01-14T05:21:00.000-08:00

I return to Baudelaire during critical times. Invariably. He lived in the 19th century.

The first week back from the X-mas break and all my students seem to be charging ahead, in one direction or another, at variable speed most of them and with variable momentum. But there is motion around me. There is feeling and there is a lot of talking, sometimes pointing to "the poverty within" as Pinter would phrase it. This week of my life was, yet again, a week about education.

First, the technology. I recently acquired a kindle, the purchase of which i proudly announced to my father, my model book-worm. Good, he said, another publishing house bites the dust then. But, dad, e-books are cheaper, easier to access, transport, share. I know, he said, but musician so-and-so, whom you like so much, has had only seven performances in December and January. And he does not earn anything in royalties because his music can be downloaded on the internet for free. (Counting the number of trees that i will save by using my kindle was pointless.) I put the phone down and picked up my kindle, went on reading Neil Postman's The End of Education where Postman discusses the gods of Economic Utility, Consumerism and Technology (p. 32): "technological innocence refers not only to ignorance of detergents, drugs, sanitary napkins, cars, salves, and foodstuffs but also to ignorance of technical mechanisms, such as banks and transportation systems". The technological advancement that started with such a bang in the 19th century is continuing and the baton is being passed on to the 21st century. The 20th century, my dad's world, is dead,. I was born and raised in this world; i will die in another. Do i feel the moral imperative to buy a print book for every kindle book i download? Probably. I will try to hold on to my dad and our shared world. (By the way black-and-white is back, but it's not the same. Satyajit Ray is black-and-white, 21st century isn't.)

Putting my personal technological and emotional dilemmas aside, the association of the 19th and the 21st centuries that Postman creates, reminds me of a similar point Erica McWilliam made at IBAEM regional conference in The Hague in October in 2011 with regard to education. Actually it is the very first point she makes referring to the emergence of disciplinary categories in the 19th century ('homo sapiens') and the need for "empathy, global consciousness, thinking beyond own generation, willingness to change and courage" for the new category that describes what humans are, i.e. 'globo sapiens' (a term attributed to Ian Lowe) in the 21st. How much of what we teach our students, in boarding and in the classroom, is still 20th century, or even the 19th? For example, do we still believe that if we throw people together, they will get to know each other and eventually get along? Contact theory does not always seem to work; look at America, look at South Africa or just look at some of our schools. Do we try to create a shared culture in our schools and do we value every stakeholder as a learner? Probably not, many of our processes in schools are managed in an authoritarian, rather than a co-constructivist way. Maybe we need a closer look at the culture in our schools, their structure and how we manage power. Do we lack courage? Are we unwilling to change, or even worse, resist change? My father is not unwilling to change; he is unable to do so. But for me, a teacher, it is important to have a kindle, use a smartboard, web 2.0 and much more. It is a moral imperative to have courage, empathy, the willingness to change and think beyond my generation. Because that's where my students live.

As Erica McWilliam suggests, the 21st century needs more than routine thinking in everything we do and learning matters more than knowing. What is in demand is the ability to see the part in the context of the wider and more complex whole and the ability to collaborate with others in ways that increase opportunities for successful innovation.

This week also, a lot of my students decided to write their ToK essay on the topic of discovering new ways to look at old data vs discovering more new data. The discussion led us to watching Sanjit Bunker Roy's TED talk about his Barefoot College. Illiterate grandmothers who do not speak the same language, working together to build solar panels are quintessentially Globo Sapiens of the 21st century. What are we?

Goodybye, stage!

2011-12-08T00:33:00.000-08:00

The last performance of the student-directed one-act play where i played a comic role as the prim, proper and uptight lady that comes to take a young man to his death was on Monday. The Theater Arts teacher, the students and i were glad it was over because we are all so frightfully busy. But we were also sad it had to end. Because yes, it was a lot of fun. It was a great process of coming together, of working on something that is not part of a syllabus, of addressing a real audience. It was exhilarating to be on stage and it was particularly exhilarating to be on stage with the students.
The adults had some particularly funny moments; like when i said "of course i mean dog" instead of "of course i mean god" at rehearsals. Learning my lines was not as easy as i thought it was going to be. And trying to take my lovely student to his death was a bit awkward. Rehearsals were another demand on what precious little time we have in the midst of deadlines and assignments.
However, the energy of the theater, in all its forms, remains highly empathic and cathartic. (I could say therapeutic too, but i do not want terminology to distract me from the issue.) As a theater-lover and educator, i feel that it is the only tool we have for communication on a cognitive and emotional level, but simultaneously with a symbolic and conceptual content.
The theater is a mode of thinking and a mode of enquiry. Thank you, Keith LeFever, and IB students, for reminding us.

Oedipus outside Colonus

2011-11-27T08:11:00.001-08:00

Deciding to teach Greek tragedy to my Year 1 IB Eng A Lit class has proved to be a very bold decision. I resisted it for many years because i was taught Greek tragedy at school and university. On the one hand, i felt that my experience as a student of a text in Greek would not transfer well into teaching and on the other hand, it presented a cultural challenge that i did not assess as manageable for young people today. Not really shifting my perspective, i did put a tragedy on my syllabus for the new course. The new motivation was based in exactly what had prevented me from teaching tragedy before; that both students and I would be challenged. We should be able to spend some time in discomfort and if the value of literary texts lies in the interpretation and evaluation of ambivalence, among other things, then there is a tragedy that fits the part very nicely: Oedipus at Colonus. Although the story pre-dates Antigone, it is the last of the Theban plays that Sophocles wrote, in all the maturity of his dramatic art and in the context of the city of Athens ruled by the Spartan-backed dictatorship of the Thirty Tyrants.

Despite my misgivings and the level of the challenge, the students have responded adequately and with considerable reflection on several aspects.

First, Sophocles' philosophy and the greatness of the Tragic Hero. However, the concepts of reverence (ευσέβεια) and wisdom (φρόνησις) that Sophocles speaks so much of, are not easily translatable, especially since reverence extends beyond morality in Sophoclean works.

Second, the Aristotelian aspects of the Tragic Hero and the notions of pity and sympathy received a lot of attention, often in very lively and engaged classroom discussions.

Third, as we paced ourselves with the conceptual difficulties that the play presents, even for scholars, the first secondary source was introduced and it was very encouraging to see how young adults responded to the arguments that Ahrensdorf presents with regard to political rationalism as represented in the character of Theseus and religious passion in Oedipus. Oedipus is shown to be self-contradictory and self-destructive in Ahrensdorf; this very human aspect that invites Kitto to talk about the "essential greatness [of the Tragic Hero that] impresses itself at last on the gods themselves" (Kitto: p 127) was very accessible to young adults, despite the identification problems that Oedipus' old age presented. In essence, the perception of the play as being about the dignity of being a man and the anger we feel at our mortality was shared by the students. I suppose this is telling of the enduring value of the play as a work that delves into an examination of the human condition and its precariousness. Interestingly, Theseus, who is deemed to be the protagonist of the play by Ahrensdorf, did not receive as much attention. The tension between the personal and the political was found weak and the personal always won in the students' comments. Although they have a good grasp of political notions and they do possess a political discourse, albeit one lacking in sophistication due to their age and experience, Theseus' political rationalism, which does not underestimate the power of religion, emerged more as rhetoric rather than conviction. Given that the audience is not a-political, can one assume that the political message is lost on them and therefore, the shortcoming lies with the work? I suppose not. My interpretation is that the experience of our students has been shaped in such a way that the political is not expected to be prioritized as an issue in a literary work. Their intuition is that: 1. the person everyone talks about is the protagonist and 2. the story in a book is about someone's adventures, suffering et c. This reaction to Theseus reminded me of the famous experiment by Chabris and Simons with the invisible gorilla. When you are trying to count the passes amongst team members at a basketball game, you miss the gorilla that walks through the court. When all this fuss is made about Oedipus- and this has been going on for centuries, thank you very much, classics scholars and Mr Freud- how can one notice Theseus?

The fourth aspect in the modern challenge of Oedipus at Colonus regards the story line. Because there is not much of one. I would like to generalize and say that students expect literary works to have a story and a plot and involve some action. But this would not be true as in the last ten years of my teaching, students have responded very positively and insightfully to plays without a story such as Beckett's Waiting for Godot an Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. Then the conclusion would seem to be that students today can relate to the Asburd more than they can to Sophoclean concepts and ideas. A valid conclusion indeed, and one that offers us some food for thought, as on some level, Sophocles and the Absurd do share the preoccupation with the human condition. Notably, there is one clear cultural obstacle in the understanding of Oedipus at Colonus by some of our students and this is the nature, character and will of the greek gods. Having named my son after a hero killed with the help of Apollo, a decision i made when I was their age and long before I did have a son, educating them about the greek gods becomes a more personal task. Today, having read Ahresndrof i see my decision as political.

To be fair to all, half of the students in my group are studying Antigone for another Lang A course and the other half Oedipus Tyrannus. They are Theban scholars in the making. They will be rewarded next week with Woody Allen's version of tragedy, Mighty Aphrodite. After we discuss Yeats' A Man Young and Old, part IX, an adaptation of the first stasimon in Oedipus at Colonus, based on Richard Jebb's translation.

Maybe we can recover some continuity in the fragmented post-modernist tradition of the 21st century. Or, to quote Oedipus: "So, when I am nothing, then am I a man?"

Go Global

2011-11-02T06:42:00.000-07:00

Between a 3-day seminar at a retreat with colleagues from school and a visit home to check on things, i spent three brilliant days in The Hague attending and presenting at the IB Inspiring Conference.
The IB is opening its Africa, Europe and Middle East global center in The Hague, a move that is part of the new structure of the organization, but also one that carries some symbolism because of the location itself. Beyond the symbolism, it was inspiring to listen to Erica McWilliam (one can get a taste here) and other speakers about empathic leadership, the IB research unit, the academic developments in the organization and IB recognition.
The new strategic plan and the new language in the organization are typical examples of a change that is directed from within, but with an agenda that reflects the changing world we inhabit. In this sense, the organization is responding to the educational landscape that emerges with initiatives and planning that will promote access and diversity of educational needs, with the Career Certificate and IB online courses.
This short entry is just to register my personal excitement (a more analytical response may follow when i have less homework). I am sure that change and growth inspire misgivings in others, maybe with a good reason, but as a teacher that is aspiring to becoming trans-national, i cannot help thinking that continual inquiry and perpetual motion are the concepts and also the course of action required to face up to the challenge of modern education. For more excitement, watch this space.

Nostalgia

2011-09-05T09:27:00.000-07:00

I have been meaning to blog about nostalgia ever since i returned from a wonderful summer holiday, but nostalgia itself kept me from doing so, making the distance between me and the topic minimal and threatening. As a student and speaker of Greek i cannot help associating nostalgia with pain (άλγος), even if it's only due to linguistic reasons. On an emotive level, i find it very close to loss and deprivation.

During several attempts to discuss these issues with my students, they became uncomfortable and nervous, giving me the impression that i was touching a chord that was very close to their intimate emotional space. They, too, were experiencing some kind of nostalgia that they did not or could not express. These experiences and considerations led me to a little reading project (indeed infinitesimal, given the bibliography on the topic in several disciplines) on memory and nostalgia. Meandering through the platonic notion of the ever-reborn soul and the psychoanalytical ideas about memory and forgetting, i came across a different perspective of nostalgia in the Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology (2004, Greenberg, Koole, Pyszczynski eds.) by Sedikides, Wildschut and Baden in the chapter titled Nostalgia: Conceptual Issues and Existential Functions, a perspective that gave me new insight into the world i inhabit, that of middle-aged adults, adolescents and literary characters.
According to Sedikides et al. nostalgia is "a positive emotional and experiential reservoir that people delve into to deal with existential threat." First, by putting together pieces of our past life, we solidify the unification of self. Through resorting to an idealized past, we strengthen our ability to deal with the present and restore our self-worth. Second, the meaningful cultural context that we create with nostalgia makes our life more purposeful and creates better understanding of how we fit into this particular context. Third, nostalgia reestablishes a connection with significant others by bringing them from the past into our present. Significantly enough, nostalgia is seen overall as a universal experience and a stock of positive feelings.

I am hoping to bring all these aspects of nostalgia into my classroom and into real and imaginary discussions with people from the past and characters from books i love. Of course my next entry will be about the present.

fruit flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana (Groucho Marx)

2011-07-17T11:56:00.000-07:00

After results, it is fitting to spend some time evaluating and reflecting on our principles and practices, our shortcomings and our vision for the future that awaits our students. In a convenient self-censored way, here are my thoughts in quotes.

1. insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (Einstein?)
2. you cannot teach anyone if you have given up on them (mine)
3. the IB is a program for motivated students, they will succeed in a culture of learning (mine)
4. all members of the IB school community should see themselves as IB learners (JWo)
5. if you cannot take the heat, then get out of the kitchen (Harry S. Truman)
6. we all get what we deserve, whether we deserve it or not (Molly Dodd)
7. wilful ignorance disguises grim reality (Siri Hustvedt)
8. the limits of language are the limits of my world (L. Wittgenstein)
9. misunderstandings occur when no one is listening (Philipp Keel)
10. yes, we can. (Barack Obama)

("Life? Don't talk to me about life! Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you to the bridge." Marvin, The Paranoid Android in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Please feel free to reply to my cliched self-expression. And by the way, my students did very well.
(widows' memoir project postponed indefinitely...)

...and they're off!

2011-05-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

A reminder to those of us who are expecting good news from heaven, or in an email or in some mind-bogging mental acrobatic maneuver, or from some accident that will leave us brain-dead, or in the form of a human being that will make our emotional nightmares go away, or in some world conference announcement that education is alive and well somewhere in a fishing village, or in a confirmation of a conspiracy theory we supported in our last encounter with alcohol, or in the discovery of the straight-hair pill.
Well, the news is that good news can come from just across the alley. Keep an open mind.

life without blogging

2011-05-09T23:17:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last post and despite all my honest and eager efforts, every time i sat down to write there was a distraction. It was simply not possible to sit down and devote myself to blogging. April is the cruellest month, but May is crueller.
May is the month of IB exams. This year I have eleven students from my English class and twenty from my wing taking exams. May is caught between examining stints. May is full of deadlines. May is before June which is also full of deadliness. May is before June, when one has to assess/evaluate/ponder on the school year that passed, when a feeling of cyclicity (and sometimes helplessness) creeps up on one, when closure is felt to be appropriate for some very obscure reason. May is the king of "Couldhavedoneland."
Arguably, it is not so for everyone. It is possible that I have taken on too much. Or that I take things too much at heart. Or that they f*ed me up my mum and dad. Or (and this gets the prize) that i am going through a mid-life crisis. Whatever the case, i still believe that an educator's life, esp. in secondary education, involves a number of paradoxes and almost counter-intuitive assumptions that need to be maintained in the execution of one's tasks and projects and the construction of the educator's persona within the context of personal, school and student culture.
The first problematic notion is constancy. The educator is required to be (a) constant that can function as a role-model, reference point, moral element, caring agent, secure option or simply a reminder. As an individual the educator must ensure that her own growth, development, disillusionment, frustration et c. will not affect her persona and therefore disrupt her image in a way that could create feelings of insecurity to the students.
The second issue is the observer status of the educator. Almost in classical-greek-tragedy-chorus mode, the ongoing commentary is about the protagonist and the educator may have the clarity of vision that is required but none of the means or the jurisdiction to participate in the action.
To make matters worse, a teacher experiences loneliness and exclusion when her students are surrounded by a culture that is not shared; very often a culture she is not part of or a culture that she is struggling to enter. The new media or the modus operandi of certain social networks are examples of cultures that educators my age inhabit as a right, but are not entitled to. The media are part of the students' education, if not the primary agent of education in certain contexts. The dynamics of power and the spheres of influence are not distributed equally.
Ideological and pedagogical ambivalence does not help either. One has to believe in the system, its philosophy, its structure, its function and its functionaries. Criticism must remain within certain boundaries to avoid any cracks in the artifice of formal education. But at the end of the day, research and all taken into consideration, isn't it all largely a question of faith?

What is more, saying goodbye every year is not easy. And some years it is more difficult than others.
I apologize for the philosophical/confessional whining. My only excuse (to translate broadly and quote Maurice Dryon) is that "nothing is renewed, created, discovered without the motivating cause, as eternal as the sea, of our discontent."

Aus Dresden

2011-04-20T07:32:00.000-07:00

Between terms and marking sessions i find myself in Dresden for a few days, completely fascinated by the diversity of its architecture, the cultural atmosphere, the sheer accomplishment et c. All these things that one encounters in the guide books and the history books. Of course, I steered clear from all the baroque, spent many hours walking around identifying buildings in which i could rent an apartment in another lifetime, saw a Chris Niedenthal photography exhibition and spent many hours at cafes, having coffee and aperol spritz. And thanks to a very patient and helpful bookstore owner, i will be going home with some of Dresden's new writing -literally- voices of the Sax Royal Reading Stage. Stefan Seyfarth is one. (By the way, i read somewhere that the average age in Dresden is 46...)

anweisung
sieh nicht nach vorn
sieh nicht zurück
bleibe im jetzt
genieß und pflück
dir das was schmeckt
friss einfach rein
der rest der kommt
von ganz allein.

the mint

2011-03-29T13:03:00.001-07:00

(blogging about widows' memoirs will have to wait)

the prescription of happiness

2011-03-27T07:39:00.000-07:00

My friend Kostis Kourelis replied to my post about depressing literature (February 16th, Is this funny?) with a link to a Studio 360 program where NYU professor Elayne Tobin and writer Michael Cunningham discuss the diagnosing of literary characters by students of literature today.
Professor Tobin acknowledges the pharmacological and the cultural shift that could account for this tendency. Michael Cunningham defends sorrow as part of the richness of human life. They both agree that it is the job of art to show us humanity. Interestingly, in the same program, psychiatrist Peter Kramer "challenges anyone to read The Sorrows of Young Werther and not think "my goodness, somebody should take care of that. If only he had Prozac".
On February 13 i was blogging on Werther and my second reading of the book, this time as a 40-something year old. My perspective was that i had changed, as an individual and as a reader of literature, having outgrown the youthful yearning for lovesickness and any fascination i had with the Sturm und Drang movement. It never occurred to me that Werther was in need of Prozac. In fact, i felt grateful that Goethe had moved on from his attempts to depict extreme emotion as a perceived opposition to rationalism.
Peter Kramer's comment, however, made a connection with a book I finished reading shortly before i blogged on Werther, Gary Greenberg's Manufacturing Depression. Greeneberg's study does not address the issue of diagnosing literary characters, but looks, in depth and great historical detail, at the treatment of mental illness and the role of pharmacology. Naturally, such a treatment follows a certain definition of mental illness. The specifics of this definition, as well as the psychiatric jargon are plenty in the book, but the controversy that i find relevant to the depressive literary characters is how dealing with life's problems can be classified under the category/within the range of mental illness. This is huge beef in the medical profession. But the extent to which literary criticism is being drawn into it is a little concerning. While the diagnosis of depression requires the elimination of subjectivity, this is precisely what literature is about, the subjective experience, the human impulse. And the subjective experience says as much about the individual as about his/her environment.
The context in which students of literature diagnose or feel the need to diagnose literary characters has prescriptive implications. We must be happy, so must they. The aesthetic value of works of seems to be of secondary significance. While students are trying to approach the texts using the tools available to them, it is also possible that we are witnessing a case of cultural narcissism that makes interpretations outside our experience unlikely.
What remains open is the issue of romanticizing depression that Peter Kramer argues against. It will definitely be among my reading projects to come; how such a phenomenon can be measured and accounted for is really worth exploring. In the meantime, i will be reading and teaching the poetry of catastrophe and i will be wondering if we can actually diagnose non-depression as well as we can diagnose depression. The context is always available and the experience of transformation invariably relevant.
And of course, three cheers for Michael Cunningham and Elayne Tobin.

sushi for breakfast

2011-03-22T11:49:00.000-07:00

This week we're wrapping up Internal Assessment with my English A1 class. We are slowly crawling to the finish line of the May exam session with the hurdle of mocks on the way. It's the time of the year that students are beginning to show signs of fatigue, ennui and a trail of angst follows them wherever they go. They become fuzzy around the edges and sometimes they stare vacantly at me, making me wonder if the time we have spent together has been just a dream.
So i was DE-very-lighted with the quality of their presentations, the insightful comments and their perspectives as students of literature. It was satisfying for all of us, in more than one respects, to be offered this morning sushi, miso soup and green tea for breakfast by the pair that chose to work on the topic of food and bonding in Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen. The already sleep-deprived presenters got up at 5:30am to prepare the little feast that is shown in the picture. It is definitely a lot more than what i would have accomplished at such an ungodly hour (or at some non-ungodly hour, for that matter...).
40 days to go, guys. Keep calm and have some sushi.

my cat in Sarajevo

2011-03-20T05:35:00.000-07:00

My cat passed away on March 11. I was not with her. I miss her to the point of breathlessness. She had been with me almost every day for the last 18 years. She passed away between my reading of Aleksandar Hemon's The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man. My feeling of loss has been fused with the experience of reading Hemon, an experience resonant of the political education provided by my father, my identification (bordering on obssession) with dispossession and displacement and, of course, the appreciation of Hemon's narrative.
I'd like to share Hemon with my students. My motivation is that of a reader's; as a teacher of literature, how is my personal perspective relevant, if at all?
My godfather fought as a volunteer in the first Balkan war, i marveled at the task of reconciling images of war with the demeanor of the sweet man that gave me christmas presents. When i was a child, my family and i vacationed twice in southern Yugoslavia; these vacations were more like a series of lectures on history and geography, interrupted by bland meals served at our hotel. General Tito was alive and well. In my teens, my Serbo-Croatian friends introduced me to Balašević. To this day, i remember the phrases they taught me and the ones i picked up from songs from the cassette tape of Balašević that i still own. I remember the endless conversations during the war, the helplessness that we felt, watching the train being derailed, knowing that the crash was imminent and not being able to do anything about it. Emotions and ideologies were running high. My father and Pinter had nightmares about the war. Pinter argued with his wife about war criminals. On one occasion my father went for my mother in his sleep. Catastrophe was in the air and we were the chorus in this tragedy. Our warning that "this is the Balkans, this is not fun and games," borrowed from our own contemporary bard, was not heeded. We found our friends again after the war and they are alive and well. We found them on facebook.
In 2005 i visited Sarajevo for a conference. The United World Colleges invited us to attend the conference for the opening/founding of a UWC in Mostar. I spent three days in Sarajevo, feeling displaced inside a displaced universe. After all, this was the first time in my life that i could have had my picture taken under a sign with skulls and bones that read "NATO demining project." I didn't. I didn't take a single picture while i was in Sarajevo. I was going to let memory invent my experience at a future date. We were invited to support the founding of the UWC in Mostar, we had an idea for a fundraiser and significant people willing to help. The school administration decided against our involvement.
Six years later, i live away from home (i have displaced myself from home, wherever that may be), i read Hemon and i wonder if the reworkings of memory can really defend me against the appalling timelessness of the unconscious. There is definitely very little that can defend us from the mechanics of our conscious reality.
I have been talking about Hemon's writing to everyone i know; on a couple of occasions, somewhere in my rambling, stream-of-consciousness, literary-criticism-improvisation narrative i interjected "my cat passed away." I have no cat. "There are no cats in Sarajevo." This is where my no-cat lives.

a(stereo)typical

2011-03-01T09:39:00.000-08:00

either or

Today, on the second day of my holiday, i decided to devote some time to my new area of research interest, social and educational research. The course does not start until September, but the resources are out there and so is my intention and curiosity. I printed a couple of articles from the online library on self-stereotyping, a topic that had been on my list for a while, for professional and personal reasons. In this very limited bibliography i read that one attributes ingroup characteristics to the self or one may generalize self-characteristics to the ingroup. In the first case, "i am like my group" and in the second, "my group is like me." Obviously, the directionality issue is crucial in determining self-stereotyping; the authors concluded that both processes are at play and prevalence of one over the other depends on the relative status of the group one belongs to. I read the article, i followed the argument and understood the conclusion; i do not possess the knowledge and the skills to critique this type of research. But it left me wondering how i would define my ingroup, in my current social setting, and whether i use a deduction-to-the-self or induction-to-the-ingroup process of self-stereotyping. I concluded that i could very well be an ingroup of one, were i to factor in differentiations that could break up the starting ingroup of, for example, women. In other words, i am my group.

neither here nor there

It struck me as a sad and dangerous conclusion, sad because it sounded lonely and dangerous because it sounded schizophrenic. I discussed it with my better half and i pondered; i mulled it over and i lamented the fuzziness of it all. And i concluded that if i am indeed my group, it is an advantageous position, offering me a perspective that better people might envy. Lack of an ingroup entails a lack of loyalty that binds and deductively or inductively, stereotypes. Maybe this came, very conveniently, after a discussion i had this morning whose subtext read as, yet again, a binary opposition that can be resolved only in hierarchical terms, only after a certain power and status struggle is involved. Native or non-native, X or Y, black or white, with us or against us. Mental constructs or constructed reality? False perception or self-serving representation? Binaries, i believe, serve a very basic interpretational purpose that educators should strive to steer away from. If our students are to be open-minded, reflective, caring, knowledgeable communicators and thinkers, we should be aware of the plurality and diversity of ingroups, as well as the possibility of emerging ingroups or, potentially, groups of one or two. Shifting ingroups, as well as the variability and versatility of ingroups depending on context. This will develop their "sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern" as Susan Sontag described her own engagement with literature.

so what?

As a group of one, i am the other. A departure point and a destination, in my book.

is this funny?

2011-02-16T10:08:00.001-08:00

My no-nonsense friend, N., told me a while ago that she cannot understand why people read depressing literature when life can be so depressing anyway. I take anything my friend N. says very seriously because she is the person I would like to be. She deals with ambivalence in a very non-ambivalent way. The question never really left my mind and i came up with several possible answers, both from theory and experience, all of them valid and satisfactory, but the consideration of such an issue left me with a feeling of guilt when i realized that i am not simply a reader of depressing literature, but a teacher of depressing literature. I think that there is humor in my syllabus; when, for example, Goldberg and McCann interrogate Stanley in The Birthday Party and ask him why the chicken crossed the road, among other things. Or in Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? when Martha says about George that if he existed she'd divorce him. One of my personal favorites. But it is pretty nasty.
So i decided to explore the issue with my students, ease the pangs from my conscience that told me i was making them suffer under the weight of great literature, of classics that would enhance their understanding of art and of the human condition and on Tuesday evening i went through my shelves looking for something funny i could share with them. My search revealed Woody Allen and David Sedaris and a copy of Henry Hemming's In Search of the English Eccentric. What the results of the search tell about me or humor is another story.
I went for a Sedaris story. I have been a great fan of his since my friend Kostis Kourelis introduced me to him and so i was very familiar with his sense of humor. I know why i like him; will my students like him too?
It turns out they do. They enjoyed the story i brought in for them and i read them a second one. We read In the Waiting Room where the main character is in France and basically finds himself agreeing with whatever he is told because his French is not good enough and he is too embarrassed to live up to this. The climax of the story is when he finds himself sitting in his underwear in the waiting room of a french hospital. My students said the following made the story funny:
1. the main character's cluelessness and awkwardness
2. how ridiculous the situation was and the reason why he agreed to everything
3. the character's analytical and neurotic temperament
4. the character's self-consciousness, as well as his imagination.
When asked what they find funny in general, they went on to list TV series or movies they watch, only two of which i had watched myself. The question morphed from "what do you find funny?" into "how important is funny in your life?" (i kept using the word "funny", to avoid definitions of "humor" and "wit" and "sarcasm" that could possibly distract us), which brought me back to the original question.
I may have opened a can of worms for myself, but the element of humor remains an issue that i feel educators should not ignore. Despite cultural and genealogical differences, the list above shows that there is possibly a sense of humor shared by my students and myself and all socio-psychological explanations aside, it is worth noting.
I had fun with my students and i hope that N. realizes that i always, always listen to her. One should always listen to their friends. They talk sense.

Feb 14 or any day

2011-02-14T05:40:00.000-08:00

When you go

by Edwin Morgan

When you go,
if you go,
And I should want to die,
there's nothing I'd be saved by
more than the time
you fell asleep in my arms
in a trust so gentle
I let the darkening room
drink up the evening, till
rest, or the new rain
lightly roused you awake.
I asked if you heard the rain in your dream
and half dreaming still you only said, I love you.

Werther is middle-aged

2011-02-13T07:11:00.000-08:00

The doctor benched me for a few days. I did try to tell him that it wouldn't do anybody any good, but he had a point. Anyway, doctor's orders left me with a little time on my hands, which only activated that giga-tiny voice of restless mental preoccupation that resides somewhere in my brain (and/or mind). The result? At 11pm on a Saturday evening i was in the library checking out Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as part of a second-reading on-going project.
I read the book a quarter of a century ago. As soon as i finished the Goethe original, i went on to read Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, a book that was for me a revelation, at that time. What Barthes did in his book was to simulate the lover's discourse, by a process that involved the I of the lover without the crutches of a metalanguage for the presentation of the consciousness of the amorous subject. Barthes's A Lover's Discourse had a profound effect on me, as it legitimized the consciousness of the amorous subject as a practically self-defining entity and confirmed the ultimate alone-ness of the lover. I had personal reasons to identify with the amorous subject, especially when the license to identify came from no other than Barthes himself.
My second reading of Werther is very different; a quarter of a century later, young Werther seems neurotic and narcissistic. I have yet to decide whether he is mourning the loss of the loved object (which he never had) or the impoverishment of his ego. But it's not really the second reading that comes as a shock to me; after all, my ToK students did 'accuse' me recently of believing that love is just another brain chemical. It's the total disparity of my two readings that i find shocking.
Interestingly (and in my defense), Goethe distanced himself from Werther, a work that brought him fame and success. It is possible that the autobiographical elements of the work were a source of embarrassment for Goethe after Werther became popular. Or maybe the middle-aged Goethe had to distance himself from Werther which did not show "the mastery that is revealed only in limitation, the freedom that law alone can give us."
Maybe by writing this entry, i am trying to distance myself from my first reading without any embarrassment, justified or not, about how i felt back then since, to quote Goethe, "it must be bad, if not everybody was to have a time in his life, when he felt as though Werther had been written exclusively for him" (or her, i add).
Having just passed the Goethe test, all i need now is for the doctor to let me play ball again. With my students, not with Werther and myself.

On another level

2011-02-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

Last Friday my HL students took the analysis to a whole new level when discussing Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy. They navigated effortlessly in the identity mazes of the book and followed the characters around in the streets of New York. The predicament of the author did not seem like an unfamiliar topic to them. In fact, one of them said that this, i.e. The New York Trilogy, is their kind of book. Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia was also voted as their kind of book. The book that got the most rotten tomatoes was Virgina Woolf's A Room of One's Own. The discussion that was triggered by (only) three open-ended questions; identity, chance and spaces, gave me a lot to think about. It is possible that The New York Trilogy is 'their kind of work' because they can relate to the proximity/exclusion contradiction of the cityscape. Unlike A Room of One's Own that focuses on an argument very much obsolete to them (whether i can prove to them that in reality it may be far from obsolete is another story). I did not find it surprising that two of the novels they described as 'theirs' are concerned with the individual's identity albeit from very different perspectives and in very different settings. What struck me as surprising is the ease with which they discussed concepts such as author's experience of writing, his/her intentionality and his/her death. In fact, most of them seemed to have a formed opinion about these. When did this happen? Ideally, i would like to give myself credit for such a development, but i can't. Because it did not happen in my classroom. What happened in my classroom was that i witnessed the demise of Virginia Woolf, an authority on authorship. My students reacted to this kind of authority; instead, they responded to Auster in a way that included their experience of the new authorship, observer and observed at the same time, emerging from the new media, validating each one of us as a creator of personae.
This took place on Friday. That same evening an SL student posted the sign in the picture on her window across the alley from my house: "Is English tomorrow HL only?" Yes, we would continue our discussion of The New York Trilogy and i am sure she felt as much gratitude for the free periods as i did for her being thoughtful and sending me a window message instead of knocking on my door. On Saturday morning, however, the students seemed to have run out of profound and significant comments. I am sure Auster would understand why that was so.

the end of world literature

2011-02-03T06:01:00.000-08:00

It's the time of the year when IB schools prepare to send their students' World Literature Assignments to examiners. World Literature is a component of their A1 course and because assignments are borne out of the teaching of the World Lit texts this gives the component a beginning a middle and an end, making it a product-driven process. For this reason i have to suffer the same loss every year. The end of World Literature.
Luckily, the IB has come to my rescue and i have the chance to remain part of the World Lit process after my students' work has left the nest, in my role as examiner. What is more, the IB seems to be looking at the teaching of World Lit a bit differently these days with the introduction of the new syllabus. In the new order of things, the World Lit component will not be so much product-driven, although the final production, i.e. the assignment is still required, but will focus more on the teaching/studying of the works. To the IB's credit, the new syllabus gives the teachers the option of including up to three more World Lit texts than the number required in their syllabi. And wait, there is more. Works from the Prescribed Literature in Translation will be included in both the new Language A courses. It is a new dawn for World Literature indeed. I will not have to do without World Lit ever again.
For the first time, I feel that someone out there heard me pondering and musing and wondering and sent a response of some sort to my question: "What is World Litearture?" Let me count the ways in which i can approach this: 1. literature from all over the world, i.e. from any part of the world, 2. for a specific time and place, literature from another time and another place, 3. any work of otherness, however that is defined, 4. (almost) any evolving text form.
Well, the IB did not really respond to my question, but they did acknowledge the validity of it and the level of interest in the matter for IB stakeholders. Beyond IB purposes and planning, however, the question remains, with its conceptual loops and perceptions with a political aspect. The state of affairs is very different from the first use of the term World Literature by, for example, Goethe, who saw his work reflected back to him by the foreign press. He saw Weltliteratur as a matter of national pride which he invited his fellow counrtymen to join. The mirroring principle that Goethe experienced originally led him to understand the world as an expanded version of home. Interestingly, after several readings of non-German texts, he notes, in Conversations with Eckermann the kinship with other writers, but also remarks on the range of distinctive features in their practice. The two ideas do not need to be mutually exclusive. They involve a contradiction that is also symbolic of the human experience, otherness could be a question of degree. Goethe's paradox is not perceived as such by my students. Is this the impact a common language, i.e. English, has on them? Is this a sign of cultural or literary de-sensitization? Or are distinctive cultural and literary features taken for granted, so much so that they are not really noticed?
The debate has significant depth and range and my readings on this are fragmentary. It is fascinating to read Stephen Owen's criticism of a new World Literature that is too westernized in What is World Poetry: The Anxiety of Global Influence (1990) and Rey Chow's response that the problem is not the writer, but the anxiety the Western critic feels due to his loss of authority in Writing Diaspora (1993). Right now, i am in no position to take a side and claim that writing is falling victim to global consumerism or that the euro-american critical status quo is feeling threatened. Maybe i will be able to express an opinion in the future. To me, what is fascinating, and intriguing but also, in a way, more pertinent to the learning experience in the classroom is the predicament, relevant to World Literature, that Salman Rushdie discusses in Imaginary Homelands when he says: "Many have referred to the argument about the appropriateness of [English] to Indian themes. And I hope all of us share the view that we can't simply use the language in the way the British did; that it needs remaking for our own purposes. Those of us who do use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies. To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free."
Thank you, Salman. Thank you, IB.

why blog?

2011-02-01T10:55:00.000-08:00

A week ago, while i was teaching and going through the forest of post-its that cover my book, i came across a piece of paper that said "The Dave Weckl Band --- Rythms (sic) of the soul." I stopped mid-sentence, mid-argument, mid-class. I remember who recommended the album to me; a student who graduated in 2004 and went on to study Philosophy. Against my advice. That was in another life, in another universe. But i am still teaching. So i thought it would be fitting to start my blog with a mention of this little note by K.S. (a former student turn fb friend) as a token of the continuity of what i do (or try to do), and maybe i will even attempt to document some of the coherence that i perceive but often find hard to explain.
I will be blogging for my students, friends and colleagues. I will be blogging for myself.
I will be blogging about teaching, books, my life as a boarding mentor, syllabi, nostalgia, workshops, linguistics, education in general, and the new course i'll be taking.
The little note by K.S. was wedged between pp 316 and 317 in Donna Tartt's The Secret History.