Remembering 9/11 and Giving Thanks for Grad School

Strange how life seems to circle back in on itself. I commented on a blog post about women and our last names in academia about friends (specially a friend) of mine with whom I did my PhD. I started to think about all of the different people I met and interacted with through my PhD program. I wanted to write a blog post commemorating these people who directly or indirectly had such a huge influence on my intellectual and personal development. What does that have to do with 9/11, you ask. I started my PhD in September, 2001.

I had just moved across the country, far away from just about everyone I knew and loved. My roommate and I had barely arrived after driving for three days. We had an apartment and a tv, but no furniture. The former tenants hadn't canceled their cable so when my roommate's friend called us early in the morning (we were in the Mountain Time Zone) and told us to turn on the TV, we saw the pictures of the Towers in vivid detail. I had to pull myself away because I had a scheduled meeting with the chair of the department to discuss my teaching duties and course requirements. But of course, there was a TV set up in the office, and it was a surreal experience to be talking about which classes to take while the Towers collapsed in the background; all I wanted to do was to go home. 

It was under the shadow of this tragedy that I met my colleagues. Many of them were late getting back to school because of increased security. Comparative Literature celebrates the study of literatures internationally, and our program boasted students from all over the world. One of my first and closest friends was from Lithuania. We were the same age, and we had both been on debating teams in high school. The main difference was that she had lived under the Communist system and debate, for them, was a new privilege and opportunity, available just after the Iron Curtain came down. For me, it was something to pad my applications and indulge my love of a good argument. She remains active to this day in promoting debate in areas of the world where open discussions are still a very new concept.

She ended up marrying a student a year ahead of us. He was born in Canada (the Northwest Territories, to be exact) to Indian parents. He is Sikh, studied the mythological and symbolic significance of professional wrestling, and now lives with his wife and two children in Lithuania. He may have studied wresting, but do not mistake him for an intellectual lightweight; he was the one we all turned to when we were having difficulty with our theory or understanding the significance of a given work. Both his older brother and younger sister came back from extended trips to India with spouses. Always the jokester, he announced his engagement on April Fool's Day. We didn't even know they had been dating. Or maybe courting would be a better way to think of it. 

There were two women in the program who were originally from Iran. It was fascinating and eye-opening to talk to them about Iran, Middle-Eastern politics, and women and Islam. There were many more who grew up in other Eastern European countries under communism. The person who would eventually introduce me to my husband was from Poland. English was his seventh language, and he spoke it with difficulty. But when he found out I was from Quebec, he broke into perfect French, complete with a Parisian accent. He had been my future-husband's Spanish teacher (his research area was Latin-American literature).  We had students from China and Indian, Canadian students studying classical Japanese women writers or Danish folk tales. We crossed boarders in a literal and figurative sense every day.

We were from everywhere across Canada and around the world. The politics and reaction to 9/11 were as varied as where the people were from. But we had to get along and support one another because we had been thrown together in the same program by fate and by choice. None of us, thankfully, lost anyone close to us on 9/11, but we all acutely felt the tragedy, albeit in very different ways. And for that, I am grateful.  I was in an environment where my beliefs and assumptions were challenged and changed, ultimately for the better. I became a more well-rounded person because we were forced by the events of 9/11 to confront and comfort each other. 

Without 9/11, we probably would have just focused on taking and teaching our courses, writing our comps, and writing our dissertations. Instead, we learned what an international experience really can mean. 

Information vs. Knowledge

My remedial writers often tell me that they love to write for themselves, about themselves; they love to write poetry, journals, short stories, and other forms of writing that expresses how they feel. As soon as they "have" to write for school, they hate it. The problem, then, is not that they can't write, but they have nothing to write about. The challenge, for me, is to show them first that emotions are not enough and then that what they should be striving for in order to make writing easier is knowledge. 

I want to go back to the Platonic dialogue between Socrates and Gorgias on the nature of the sophists. Socrates admits to knowing the answer/conclusion to his line of questioning, but continues to question Gorgias for the benefit of Gorgias and all those listening. What is that benefit? Why not just tell everyone the answer and save us the trouble of listening to/reading the seemingly repetitive and mundane line of questioning?

This is at the heart of the Socratic Method, repeatedly inquiring, asking, refuting, and restating more precisely the same idea until a real conclusion is drawn. It is hard, painstaking work, often leading in directions that you didn't expect or even like. It is rooted, for me, in a quest for knowledge. I prefer the word to using what Socrates would use (truth, right) because in our postmodern world, those terms have been largely discredited, or at least pushed aside. But at the end of the day, I find myself trying to get my students to understand that they should be inquiring, rather than simply remembering information.

Information is something that we accept on faith. Someone tells us the information and we either accept it or do not, rarely because we did much thinking about it to begin with. Information is easy; we assume someone else has done the hard work for us. And we like easy. I see it already in my three-year-old daughter. "Just tell me, mom," she begs me when faced with a particular challenge that she knows I can easily solve. I refuse to tell her because I want to her to do the work to figure it out. How many students sit in class, having only half-heartedly done the homework or readings, knowing that the teacher will simply give them the answer, and simply wait for it, write it down, then forget the moment after the exam? 

University (or education more generally) is not about the piece of paper you get after jumping through a prescribed number of hoops; it about the next 50+ years of your life. Information is an important part of building knowledge; for example, you need to know the basics of the structure of the US government in order to build a deeper knowledge of how the government works. You also need skills, such as basic literacy (traditional or otherwise), to help acquire both information and knowledge. But at the end of the day, knowledge comes from hard work, work that isn't always fun in the moment, but deeply satisfying once attained. It also, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, never ends. If you learn how to acquire knowledge in all its forms while you are in school, then you will be prepared for whatever life happens to throw at you.

I understand that I need to practice what I preach, which is why my students will eventually be designing their own curriculum for a course of their choosing or creation, complete with a justification of content and assignments therein. I will give them some information on different theories or philosophies of education, show them how to do research in order to supplement what we have already read and discussed, but at the end of the day, they need to take what I provided for them and create their own knowledge. They'll never be at a loss for words again.

It's Not About How You Feel: Why Feelings just won't cut it

I got into a discussion on Twitter today about writing, critical thinking, and the new Common Core Standards. I have been wanting to write about this for a while, but wasn't sure how to approach the topic in a blog post. How do I balance my desire to see real change in how writing is practiced in middle and high schools versus my frustration with the sheer number of students who need to take (or perhaps should be taking) remedial writing at the college level. Because it isn't just about writing; it's about what the students write about and how they write about it.

While I've been "forced" to adopt a specific textbook, I'm quite pleased with the book and the collection of essays found therein. The book we're using is Reading the World: Ideas that Matter, edited by Michael Austin. Right now, we're reading some of the entries on "Rhetoric," starting with the "Funeral Oration" by Pericles, contrasted with a dialogue by Plato between Socrates and the sophist Gorgias. The "Funeral Oration" is rife with internal contradictions, faulty logic, and just plain propaganda. But it is a powerful piece of rhetoric, aimed squarely at the heart of the Athenians in order to get them to continue to support the war against the Spartans. Plato, on the other hand, has Socrates continually question Gorgias on his understanding of what a sophist does in order to ensure everyone understands the conclusion (sophists are bad because they don't care about what's right, only that they win) and how he got to that conclusion. Socrates repeatedly says in the dialogue that he could just simply tell Gorgias and all those listening the answer, but he has the best interests of everyone in mind when he continues the dialogue anyway. 

I've chosen my language very carefully in describing what the two authors/orators have done in their respective pieces. Pericles emotionally manipulates his listeners in order to get them to fight, die, and do so willingly, if not gladly. He talks about how grand Athens is because it is a democracy and that the elected officials (Pericles included) serve at the will of the people. How is this so, I ask the students, when Pericles can so readily and easily manipulate through pure emotion, the will of that people?  Emotions, I tell my students, are a dangerous thing to rely on.

My biggest pet-peeve as a teacher is when I hear or read "I feel" when thoughts or ideas are being expressed. It's not just my students, watch cable news; analysis is frequently expressed as "feelings" rather than well-thought out ideas born from serious study of events or facts. We have become a society that puts how we feel above all else. The danger, of course, is from the sophists, of leaders like Pericles, who understand how to appeal to the emotional states of people in order to bend them to his (or her) will.  "I feel" is officially band from my classroom unless what follows is a legitimate emotion. And even then, it needs to be followed immediately with an analysis of why that feeling is there. 

I asked these same students to record all of the ways that they are addressed or engaged primarily on an emotional level throughout the day. The result? 95-99% of what the student is exposed to or they expose themselves to is engaging them on an emotional level: their leisure time, their friends and family, advertisements, media. It's all there for their entertainment or to make them feel something. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But when does the student take time to think? When are they using their heads? Is this why reading for school represents such a challenge, because it doesn't look to provoke their emotions, but instead seeks to engage their brains? Is the reason why Plato's dialogue is such a challenge not in fact because of the content (which is pretty straight forward, at least superficially, lest you philosophers get riled up) but because it is wholly logical and rational in how it presents its arguments? 

How a student feels about the dialogue (frustrated, bored, annoyed) has little to do with the article itself and everything to do with how the student is used to being engaged. And while this is a useful teachable moment, it does very little to help the students gain any sort of insight into what the dialogue is actually saying, what the students will eventually have to write about. Feelings are fine, but in my class, they are far, far from enough. 

Next up, how do we get what we need in order to be able to write and write well? 

Writer's Block

A shout-out to @DrTimony, who pointed out the obviousness of what this post should be about.

I'll admit it: I have writer's block. I am suffering from what so many of my developmental writing students complain to me about: staring at a blank page (ok, computer screen) and having no idea what to say or what to write. My writer's block stems from everything an undergraduate faces when they stare at a blank screen, deadline looming.

1) Exhaustion. While I am exhausted for completely different reasons than the average undergraduate (teething toddler vs late night Rock Band marathons), the result is still the same. I am so tired, I can't focus on anything. I can't read and I can't write; I can barely type coherently. My eyes want to close, rather than stare at a screen; my brain wants to tune out, instead on concentrating on forming a coherent narrative, let alone come up with an engaging subject for a post. I'm so tired, I couldn't even see the obvious subject staring me in the face for this post. Usually when students are sitting down to try and write, they are absolutely knocked out from life: part-time jobs, social life, studying for other classes. A tired brain does not do its best work. I know. And now, you know, too, because this post...Meh.

2) Distractions. My mind not only can't focus because it's worn down, but also because I have a thousand other things going on in there: the teething toddler, my husband who is away, the classes and lectures I need prepare for, the guest posts for other sites I need/want to do, the academic research I want to be doing, if the bills have all been paid, dinner, etc, etc, etc. How many students find themselves needing to write a paper for one class while thinking about everything but? You can do everything in your power to remove as many external distractions as possible (nice, quiet, isolated study space), but at the end of the day, the worst distractions are the ones you carry with you wherever you go. 

3) The Missing Muse. Inspiration, oh, inspiration, where for art thou, inspiration? See, I'm so uninspired right now, I'm relying on tired (and poorly used) clichés. Inspiration can come in so many forms, but when it doesn't come, it's really, really, depressing. Especially when a deadline is looming large. When it comes to writing, though, inspiration for me comes days or weeks before I start writing. I mull over ideas/possible blog posts and begin to work them out in my head. I start noticing connections in my lectures, my readings, and in what I stumble across online. The germ of the idea (to borrow the expression from one of my high school English teachers) begins to take root. Preparation comes before inspiration (or some other eye-rollingly cheesy expression), but when the two above issues run you over, really, the muse takes a holiday.

Lord, forgive me for this post; I'm barely aware of what I'm doing.

So, what do you do? Make sure that you don't end up in a situation where you are exhausted, distracted, and uninspired. If you can't write, read. If you can't read, sleep. If you can't sleep, blow off some steam in a healthy way, and then try again. But what if there's just no time? The paper is due tomorrow (or sooner) and nothing is working?

Just write. Write about anything that is even remotely related to the topic of your paper. Write and write and write. Don't worry about what you write, just write. Write it out by hand, then type it up. Take frequent, short breaks. Find a friend who is a better writer than you are and get them to read your paper, applying brutal honesty. While they are doing that, either catch a nap or read on your topic. Go back and rewrite. And then learn your lesson for the next time.

For me, I'm going to publish this blog post and move on. I could have just trashed this post, but hey, not every piece of writing is fantastic, and sometimes you have to live with just good enough. Maybe when I'm more well-rested and less distracted, I'll come back and rewrite this post, if only to prove another point I am constantly making to my students: you can (and should) always work to make your writing better. Until then, I'm going to bed.