Goethe has coffee with diCicco in my mind…Part 1

Last night I was overwhelmed with a strange sense of meloncholy as I considered my past here at the unversity. As I walked through the hallways I thought of all the times I’d walked the same path before; I reflected on what had changed in the physical spaces of the university, but also how I had changed. Most of my friends have graduated by now, so these days this place feels rather lonely. It’s hard, also, to have the same sense of enthusiasim and desire for the academic experience that once drove me. Those first few years seem like they were the life of a different person. I look back on my own time as if I were watching a film based on another person’s story, culled from someone else’s mind. The space is the same, but who are those ghosts that seem to haunt them? Whose memories are these? I’m alienated from my own fundamental desire to live this dream, though I’ve tried so hard this year to suture that enthusiasm to my now weary heart. The constant feeling of loss and disappointment in myself is the only thing that presses me to keep turning inward. I ask myself, what the hell happened to me in the ensuing time-the self gives me half-cock answers and fragments in return.

Each part of this school has a specific memory attached to it. It was Thursday Den night and as I walked there from Kines I remniscinisced about my residence days, when it would have seemed feasable to wait in a stupid line to drink at the Den. At the time, I wanted to have the “university experience” and part of that was doing as much campus socializing and partying as humanly possbile, all while keeping the grades up. I found myself in social sciences, past ss10 where I had that memorable English class with Dr. Cervelli, and I couldn’t study in there partly because I associate that place with memories of my first year enthusiasm, and going back there would force me to really ask those unanswerable questions of why I can’t bring myself to feel that way anymore. I also didn’t want to taint that spot with my current confusion, I wanted to carve that space out in my mind as a place I could walk by and still experience a tinge of that inspired feeling. It occured to me that even my new locker is accross the hall from my first year locker, and I interpreted it to mean that I had somehow come full circle. I needed to answer those questions that the memory of a younger, less weary version of myself inherently posed.

I sat in the room adjascent to ss110, and of course as I studied those questions followed me into my books, weaved themselves through what I was reading at the time: what happened? Someone had told me once that I came here a kid and left an adult, and in a sense that does represent a kind of answer. But then does that mean adulthood is neccessarily associated with this heaviness?  Responsibility is more a dull weight these days than an opportunity, because I have dragged so many balls and chains around my legs for so long, and it never lets up. Am I allowed to ask the weight to let up slightly? Can I do that? I thought of my conversation with a soci prof years ago; I asked him why I couldn’t I ever find a satisfactory answer to anything when I write? And he responded, do you want knowlege or satisfaction?

So I returned last night to that inevitable trade off, one that has always stuck with me as I’ve worked through my degree. Why is it that knowlege doesn’t breed happiness? Didn’t Goethe ask a variant of the same question? We are always running to our books with the fantasy that we could find that elusive “something more” if we could just accumulate sufficient knowlege. But the addiction to knowing functions just like any other. The consumer lust that at least partly fuelled the morgage crisis is diametrically opposed to that subtle truth belying every credit card statement: There will always be more things to buy, and resources are finite. The will to debt contradicts the main rule of economics: life is full of tradeoffs. Resources are scarce. Unwilling to admit to this the mind tirelessly runs after this or that item until it burns itself out. The will to knowlege works similarly. You run until you’re gasping for breath.

But there’s something deeper to it than that, and this is where economics doesn’t provide us with too many answers. I noted earlier that we’re lusting for knowlege, or stuff, or experience because we’re running after that “something deeper.” Economics assumes that as we can procure more goods and services, then we maximize our utility and everything is fine. The problem comes when we lack the resources to fuel the greed, when we don’t balance the need for stuff in the present with the need for stuff (and security) in the future. We’re trading off future self-suffienciency for present gratification. Debt is problematic since it’s a function of bad planning, an unwillingness to own up to the trade-off that scarcity neccesitates. But what about the object of our addiction? What if we’re not maximizing our utility, regardless of whether or not we can afford to keep trying? Put bluntly, what if shopping, or experience, or even that unquestioned good of knowlege and achievement never give us the utility we demand of them? What if the mind was designed in such a way that these things will never satisfy, yet the world is designed in such a way that there is always something new to lust over, and so we keep striving and striving and striving, because even though we know there will never be enough, we dare ourselves to go for that “something more?” The buddhists call the result “suffering.” I call it meloncholy, but it’s all the same.

But maybe knowlege is unsatisfying for another reason. I was thinking about it last night, and maybe the accumulation of knowlege binds itself with an ever increasing amount of stories and identities that we associate with that knowlege in some way. So as we study we tell ourselves stories about the kind of person we are, and our self-evaluation is usually bound to the tides of relative success and failure in academic achievement. We tell ourselves stories about the people we’re training ourselves to become. We become increasingly attatched to identities as students, professionals, academics, and so on. The mind, plastic as it is, imbibes these stories through thier repetition in the same way that it learns concepts and jargon: through habit and routine. But after awhile these stories become truths, just like the assumptions of our disciplines become taken for granted over time. We stop questioning them.

But the buddhists would say that the accumulation of stories, myths we tell ourselves about who we are, are also deterrents to liberation. In my own experience, the identities and stories I have told myself about the kind of student I am, or the kind of future I expect to have, have been particularly damning, but they were also a function of struggle, the function, perhaps, of a slightly older mind that maybe can’t bounce back from setbacks as quickly. However, most people I know become jaded at the end of university regardless of circumstances.

It occured to me that identities can be heavy. They are a both a kind of knowlege in themselves, and in the context of educational pursuits a product of the accumulation of subject matter knowlege. So if we are to accept the tradeoff between knowlege and satisfaction, we could say that this phenomenon exists because our mind is structured in such a way that it will never be satisfied by pursuing ever more, and yet because the world seems to provide us with so many things to potentially be known, we keep searching and find ourselves dizzy, warn out because our finite bodies could never satisfy an infinite lust (and here’s where the concept of hypperreally has at least some small sway-at least because there is a kind of schizophrenia implied here as an effect). Knowlege is also unsatisfying because with it comes an accumulation of stories and identies that stifle our mental flexibility as much as they give us the illusion of knowing something concrete about ourselves.

But we didn’t sign onto this, right? I still don’t think that all my discussion of economics and buddhism really answered why we need to keep running after…whatever it is…and why it doesn’t satisfy, and if the mind is structured in such a way that accumulation alone will never satisfy it, than what will? And here’s where I get to part 2 of my blog, it’s namesake, where Goethe and diCicco have coffee in my mind.

Hungry ghosts and a search for certanty. the modern man. fear and despair…

Thinking this through….

Ok. so what do I want to write about? i know I want to discuss a couple of the isses Ricci brings up, especially in relation to Faust’s seach for a more “holistic” way of understanding reality, and the kind of challenge this brings to conventional methods of inquiry. But what do I want to discuss more specifically, and how do I connect this to the essay question? I feel like I’m trying to do too much and I’m unsure how to develop a strategy to focus my efforts.

And there’s still the issue of what would be a definition of a successful critique of a technologized society, and how I argue for the validity of my definition as opposed to any other-how can I be sure that my definition is logical and not a mish-mash of criteria that sounded connected/relevant in my head, but doesn’t fare so well once I start trying to apply it in my discussion of the authors?

Also, I find I’m going on a separate tangent of trying to incorporate a bit of a critique of the “multi-barrelled” nature of this assignment question, which doesn’t so much tell me how to proceed, but rather, confuses me because I get stuck trying to unpack all its assumptions *and never seem to get around to* discussing, comparing and critiquing the works themselves. Why can’t I just let most of this question go, which is what Dr. Brent seems to be suggesting, and just do more of a compare/contrast? Why can’t I take the option of simplifying things for myself when it’s given to me? Argh.

So there’s the nature of my confusion, I think, at least up to this point.

Reading Goethe: Faust’s epistemelogical crisis

To start I’m going to discuss the social conventions Goethe is trying to critique through Faust-I’m tired so I’m not going to try and make sense here.

In the opening scene Faust is looking back on his life and considering what the scholarly path has given him. He’s had the perfect humanistic education-Law, Medicine, Philosophy-the Western cultural and intellectual tradition is at is fingertips. However, he laments “the impossibility of knowledge”-unlike Socrates, the current limits of human understanding are not an invitation to a world of perpetually unfolding discovery, nor are they a cause for Faust to interrogate the received assumptions of those around him in hopes of improving the common citizen’s moral and intellectual development. Rather, this lack of knowledge is cause for a crisis of a particularly personal kind- a reason for Faust to question the value of his life’s work thus far. He notes, “[...]all joy is torn from me [...], I cannot presume to make use of my learning/I cannot presume I could open my mind/to proselytize and improve mankind.”

And admittedly, Socrates was not out to “proselytize,” in the sense of advocating a particular moral doctrine or epistemology-he was interested, it seems, in the power of reasoned inquiry more generally. But he had an optimism that Faust lacks. In Faust’s moment of despair he seemingly does nothing less extreme than to reject the western intellectual tradition itself-from the explanatory power of deductive logic to language’s privileged purchase on reality.  Gone is the Enlightenment image of human perfectibility, epitomized in Condorcet’s assertion that “[...]truth alone will obtain a lasting victory [...] nature has joined together indissolubly the progress of knowledge and that of liberty, virtue and respect for the natural rights of man.” For Ricci, both Faust’s despair and relief stem from realizing that “[...] nothing perfect will ever accrue to man.”

Ricci (2007) notes that initially, Faust is “nihilistic”-if the Enlightenment thinkers assumed the perfection of knowledge was necessarily connected to a moral code of restraint, then Faust rejects both knowledge and virtue. Disillusioned, he feels no need to deny himself pleasure in exchange for the academic’s stoic, detached way of life. Faust has scrutinized nature through every means possible, from microscope to metaphysics, and knowledge is found wanting every time. No longer guided by the measured, disciplined pursuit of intellectual achievement, Faust sees no need to hold back from engaging in every experience the world has to offer.

But what causes this disillusionment? Early in Part 1 Faust discusses two interrelated frustrations that clue the reader into the reasons his search for understanding has proven fruitless. Faust notes he has resorted to sorcery in an attempt to experience, in a quick and direct way, the secrets that years of study failed to provide. Through spell casting he hopes to hear the voice of spirit itself in order to “[...] spare the sour sweat that I used to pour out/in talking of what I know nothing about.” Deductive logic, analyzing artifacts, these ways of understanding have become stale to him.  he turns to spirit hoping it will provide a more a salient way to “[...] grant me to learn what it is that girds the world together in its inner most being/that the seeing its whole germination, the seeing/ of its workings, may end my traffic in words.” In a single passage Faust disconnects knowledge from language while at the same time professing a desire to understand the deep structures of nature. While he wants to understand at a deeper level, language, he feels, is not synonymous with either thought or understanding.

To sum: Toil, language, and later, detachment from the natural world figure as crucial themes in Faust’s first speech. However, while Faust rejects the knowledge systems of western scientific and philosophical tradition he does not reject knowledge per se. However, he does call into question the limited way that the world has been traditionally understood in western thought: the deductive, scientific, analytical kind. As Ricci notes, “the regimented way that logic […] controls thought and makes deductive schema seem like necessity is the antithesis of the direct communication with phenomena that Faust seeks (Ricci, 2007).” And while Faust’s rejection of received paths to knowledge ties to Romanticism’s “preoccupation with the subjective immediacy of experience,” Faust’s attitude is more than a “carefree romantic approach to life (Ricci, 2007).” Through Faust, Goethe tries to link the Romantic search for experience and self understanding to an activist ethic-in more than one sense. He recalls, for me, William Blake’s social conciousness and anticipates Sarte’s admoniton that action is everything.

Faust’s search represents a phenomenological approach to understanding in the sense that it emphasizes the experiential meaning of things. Faust, accepting that “the experience of the sublime is as gift that cannot be hastened by the exertion of the epistemological will or the manipulation of language (Ricci, 2007),” strives to move beyond reductionistic classification systems and give nature the room it needs to reveal itself on its own terms. The apparent randomness of the situations he encounters seem to reflect this search for a new kind of understanding: he hopes that by subsuming himself in a variety of “meaning saturated” events, from lust, to travel, to self-edifiying activism and so on-he can really learn how to see deeply into reality. This “truer” understanding, for Faust, requires that he also ignite the subjective aspect of the self largely rejected in western forms of inquiry: the body, the senses, the awareness of how a personality reveals itself as historically situated while it also seeks to know definitively.

However, Faust’s journey raises ethical considerations as well; the consequences of his rejection of Gretchen, the war that results from his service to the Emperor, the old couple that die as a consequence of Faust’s search for perfect land. And at the same time, Mephistopheles, while ultimately “defeated” in the narrative, is an important foil for Faust, engaging his desires while questioning the sincerity when he professes any claims to virtue (for example, when he proclaims, right before he signs the deal with Mephistopheles, that he’s suspicious of promises that originate from evil). And throughout, Goethe seems to construct a narrative that maintains a kind of incredulity towards its protagonist. Goethe seems to suggest that we can’t take Faust’s chosen mode of inquiry at face value; but I need to wrap my mind around this a bit more.

Work cited:

Ricci, R. (2007). Goethe’s Faust: Poetry and Philosophy at the Crossroads.

Just putting this out there…

The next few posts will represent my attempts to work through ideas for a paper comparing Goethe, Sartre and Nietzshe. I’m going to see if dumping some of my thoughts on the internet might help with this awful writer’s block.

Reading Sartre

Reading Sartre has reminded me of my dream job: to become a public intellectual.

At best, the public intellectual embodies that rare combination of real-world relevance and academic credibility. Being both published and widely read, the public intellectual doesn’t have to undergo the crisis of confidence that follows every attempt to justify the merits of the academic life to those in the real world-for that audience, a nod to the sales figures is all the public intellectual requires to justify her existence/vocation and/or government funding.

On the other hand, the public intellectual need not undergo the drudgery, disillusionment, and soul-crushing pragmatism that seems to accompany the vast majority of “real jobs.” You have the advantage of peering, all the way from your tenured seat high up in the ivory tower, down into the depths of every hapless soul who settled for the first job that gave them a decent paycheck. You know they ridiculed you until you got your first book deal. For that you’ll scoff at the vapid, dust-ridden misery of the masses, the misery that the average embody but only the academic understands. You’ve read Pope and Dickens down to Marx, Althusser, Gramsci, Adorno and Horkhiemer, Guy Dubord and all the rest.  You understand  faceless, massified mediocrity better than the masses ever could, without having to eschew the rarefied, near-fantastical combination of high status, material success, and long-standing social significance.

Every day is a new journey of discovery for the public intellectual. There’s always a new theoretical bandwagon on which to jump wholeheartedly, modify or critique, a new phrase just waiting to be coined, a new textbook writer to frown upon, a new grad student to enlist in first-year babysitting, a new soundbite to record for the CBC. Depending on your political milieu, you may even experience the exhilarating atmosphere of protest and social instability, though you will never have to go anywhere near a battlefield. You have it all, and it only cost you a few hundred grand.

The moment can only use what the moment itself has bred…

Back at it again, after neglecting this project for far too long. Looking back at my older posts, I wonder what happened to keep me away from this project, though I suppose I know the answers, and I wonder what could have been different in my academics had I kept this thing going. But as Sartre says, perhaps not so delicately, a coward can always choose not to be a coward, so today brings another chance to get my words out there and let them experience critique.

However,  after pondering the classics for the last month or so with varying degrees of success, I’m starting to revisit my academic aspirations again. I’m feeling the rush of learning new things, engaging in real discourse and remembering why this is so important to me; this is in no small part due to my weekly philosophy discussions with Dr. Brent.

While I find that intellectually challenging,  yet patient questioning of  a knowledgeable guide has always been essential to my learning,  petty argument seems to have become the most salable brand of intellectual debate surrounding me. I don’t know if I can chalk it up to the divide between the ways that students often talk academics vs  the way professors tend to talk, that would be an over-generalization. If it appears that way it’s likely because listening is a skill that takes time, and most people would rather talk than listen, regardless of age or experience in the academic world. I can, however,  make claims about what I’ve seen lately which has been the following: the students I’ve talked to are often so concerned with defending their intellectual turf that no one really listens to anyone. On the other hand, the best professors I’ve known are either so confident in their understanding they have nothing to prove, or simply embody the best sense of Socrates’ scholarly humility.

I know it’s a personality issue-I can see the value in learning how to defend a position; in doing so I develop the courage to tell the world my viewpoints matter. On the other hand, I’m a fairly quiet kind of a person and I become intimated and discouraged when I find I must constantly enter a conversation with my back up simply to be heard. I find my arguments falter when I’m on the defensive, not because I haven’t thought them out but because as I talk I’m also learning how to communicate in an alien environment. While I don’t doubt that I gain something from these discussions, even if it’s implicit feedback on my speaking style, I find I’m dealing in egos at least as much as in ideas, and it simply becomes tiring.  Rightly or wrongly, it feels like the series of  academic pissing contests in which I’ve been unwittingly engaged over the past year have made me hesitant to discuss scholarly topics at all. I hadn’t realized until recently how much I’d silenced myself to avoid intellectual power struggles.

While I had suspected I was jaded by academics for a number of reasons (the above does not represent even the tip of the iceberg), until I had my weekly classics updates with Dr. Brent I hadn’t realized how much I need to experience a real conversation, free of the pedagogically bankrupt (for me, anyway), exhausting, urgency-starved intellectual posturing that has unfortunately characterized much of the academic discussion I’ve experienced elsewhere. I feel like I’m slowly developing confidence in my ideas;  sometimes I just want to feel safe to ponder, to wonder about the possibilities, to create contingencies and tentative statements, to think out loud.

I’ve found these recent discussions have motivated me to go back to my books every time and read more analytically, more mindfully than the time before. While I still haven’t managed to cure my writer’s block completely (that unfortunate crisis of confidence dies hard) I find myself motivated to keep trying to get more out of my readings, even if the only “product” I produce involves a smattering of insights and a couple of good questions. I read to hold my own in conversation, but this has nothing to do with having the best pre-formed argument. I’m motivated to read because I want to have more focused questions, I want to clarify what I know and what I don’t, and why that might be the case. Some people use argument for the same reason, but I find this talk too constrained by a need to close the issue and prove a point.

What I require for my learning is a style of talk that’s more open. I need to feel safe to engage in something more searching, more divergent, more relevant to my personality. A non-combative conversation enables me to realise the both the fustration and fascination I experience when I read an important work, it allows me to share my personal experience with the text with someone willing to share their own experiences and insights. The conversations are obviously fuelled by my self-interested desire to learn-Dr. Brent doesn’t need to learn about Faust because he already knows the text- but this self interest doesn’t compell me to dominate the conversation. Dr. Glasberg always says that we learn best when we figure out how to truly talk with one another, which to me involves learning how to share a conversation with another person, with as little one-sidedness as possible. Arguements tend to weed out the quiet and unsure thinkers, the searching thoughts. Discourse, as I think Dr. Glasberg envisions the term, gives even the quiet ones a chance to discover what they think. The difference, for me, is significant: my discusions with Dr. Brent keep me reading for days, not to prove anything, but just because.

Reflections on Teaching and Learning

Just a little bit of background, before I get into this post. I’m currently taking a peer mentoring class at the university; the premise of the class is as follows. The program director selects upper level undergraduates to help fellow students (usually first and second years) develop skills in active learning, critical thinking and effective writing. We’re not supposed to be “junior TA’s” since we’re not supposed to be teaching specific course material. Rather, we try to engage students in several “axillary tasks” essential to active learning: we help students learn how to ask good questions, we provide advice on study skills, we review drafts of assignments to ensure clarity, we help students verbally process material. Sometimes we give presentations or try to illustrate concepts in the material by using films, developing class activities and worksheets, organizing study sessions, and so on. We also try to support students and help them develop confidence in thier abilities as meaning makers. Additionally, we have considerable freedom to develop our own role; each peer mentors’ “Mentoring Identity” is contingent on their student experience-it’s informed by how they have negotiated university territory themselves.

Often the distinction between “content provider” and “student supporter” can be pretty vague-and I will admit, that in the messy field of student-mentor interaction, I don’t think the boundary between the roles is necessarily easy to maintain.  Often students want us to provide them with straightforward answers to complex issues-and these may be impossible to provide given our own limited knowledge (as fellow undergraduates, likely only seeing our mentoring course material for the second time) and the complexity of the issues themselves. Often we trip ourselves up by thinking a good mentor is someone who gives the student what they want-the straightforward solution, the tightly articulated lecture. Students can be grumpy with mentors who seemingly elude the question itself- we try to note its ambiguity and turn it back on the student instead. Students who are pressed for time are rightfully frustrated by this and question our usefulness. Moreover, I’ve found “turning the question back on the student” is itself a skill; since it is difficult to encourage critical thinking in a well articulated manner. I can often confuse students instead of engaging them, since communicating as an authority is still a working skill for me.

However, all of these issues have made me think of the complexities of teaching and learning; and what it means to “educate” a student. I consider how the institutional context, the demands of ordinary life, and the identities and life experiences of both students and teachers inform this thing called “education.” An illustration might be the simplest way of elaborating on this connection between institutions and life in education: everyone remembers those standardized tests everyone takes throughout the K-12 years. However, If the wide degree of answers on any standardized test can tell us, its not that some people are necessarily better at squiring knowledge than others, but that we all bring different life experiences, learning styles, priorities, and previous education to each new concept we learn. So it’s no wonder a student performs on these tests differently depending on the subject, and often depending on how it was taught. However, we try to sum up student’s relative intelligence-and we reward or punish students in our school (and by extension) social systems accordingly.

Back then, our education was almost entirely geared towards “maximizing performance” on standardized tests for the sake of increasing our particular school’s credibility  within the wider regional school system. And I’m not about to argue against these tests in and of themselves; there must be an instrument for that determines how much students are learning in their classes, in order to make schools accountable for their teaching strategies. However, all of academic life is centered on how to answer multiple choice tests, since these are the easiest to mark and administer given the large number of students being tested. Critical thinking gets a back burner. I specifically remember my teachers avoiding most activities with titles such as “critical thinking exercise” in addition to most of the questions appended to the ends of textbook chapters, not because they wanted to but because we “didn’t have time.” No wonder we grow up to be university students deeply challenged and troubled by what our teachers expect of us.

In other words, I’m not sure that anything is really learned in this environment where everyone must compete and perform, lest they end up rebuked by the system as “underachievers.” I think most kids, especially when they’re young, probably want to learn but something in their outside lives tells them that knowledge won’t get them anywhere, or they don’t “learn properly,” and I don’t think the school system does much to discourage this kind of thinking. Unfortunately, I don’t think the logic of “education” changes much in university, which is why I’ve used this example. The university does, on some level, try to correct for this (and must succeed on some level, if we are being challenged to rethink the academic passivity we learned in high school). However, the larger patterns of education remain fundamentally unchanged; if all that really matters is “looking good on paper,” the process of learning is largely ignored or rationalized (shortened in a way that can also provide maximum “learning outcomes”), those who fail at ameliorating themselves to it end up dropping out, and those who know how to play into their teachers preferences (often with minimum effort) succeed. Risk and ambition are usually stifled (since there’s a greater potential for failure, and failure will eventually diminish further opportunities to advance your education/start a meaningful career)-which is why students try so hard to please their professor in the first place.

But I can’t help but wonder what would happen if there wasn’t so much fear and insecurity around failure; if we weren’t taught that “screwing up” in a limited way didn’t mean we were somehow less valuable as people and learners (“value” being denoted by what you gain materially if you succeed and lose when you “fail”), which is ultimately what most people learn through their education. If we lived in a world where it was easier to feel an inherent sense of self worth, we’d likely take more thoughtful risks, and these would potentially stand a greater chance of succeeding. If failure, at any rate, weren’t an academic death sentence, then maybe fewer people would be less inclined to give up before they’re out of the starting gate. We could, after all, just try again. (Which isn’t necessarily the same thing as arguing for unlimited chances for undeserving students, but opening up a space for people to regain a sense of purpose if they don’t succeed the first time they try something).

Now this all sounds slightly polemical, I suppose, and possibly more Utopian than I intended. Some people fail because they’re lazy, don’t do work, and that should be punished in some way, shouldn’t it, if students are to become truly accountable?But I can’t help but feel, and this is potentially an over generalization from my own experience, there’s often more behind apathy than laziness. There’s usually fear at work on some level, a fear that effort won’t produce a desirable outcome. Studies on perfectionism back this up.  In my own student situation this has often stemmed from my own devaluation of the worth of my effort, and a hideously unrealistic expectation about what the outcome is supposed to achieve.This manifests itself as fear, resistance, being overwhelmed, etc. And even the most successful students experience fear around that anticipated moment, somewhere in the future, when they don’t get the grade they feel they deserve. (And this often manifests as resentment towards professors-not that I’m saying professors evaluate perfectly, or give perfect assignments). And as people who care about education, if this fear exists, and it’s holding students back, what do we do about it?

In peer mentoring these kinds of questions underlie our common anxieties and confusion about what our tasks should be. Do we give students straightforward answers, do we encourage the recitation of factual information, or do we encourage students to “move beyond the material” and “do something with it”-ie. think critically? But there’s more than that.  Considering this pressure (that we really can’t escape) to make education expedient, there usually isn’t much time in one class, to learn both the background information and how to work creatively with it. I think learning is a combination of the two and it seems every class emphasizes one at the other’s expense, since classes are so short and instructors are required to cover so much material in less than four months. Both the instructors of “lecture based” and “inquiry based” courses think they’re doing students a favor. Lecture based profs do students a favor by giving clearly communicated background info on a topic as well as an understanding of what bits of information are necessary to have a “necessary background” in a topic. Inquiry based courses do students a favor since they challenge students to make the material relevant to thier lives or an actual research or CSL situation; they also encourage students to be independent, and we all need to know how we’re going to operate when there’s no professor to guide us. As teachers, everyone faces constraints and I think most teachers believe their doing the best they can.

What this insider understanding has given me is a clearer picture of the complexities of “education”-I’ve gotten to see first hand how it is a loaded term, and how much teachers struggle with whether or not they are helping students gain a “meaningful education.” The issue of fear is something that fascinates me; Louis Schmier, a university professor, engages with this issue in his blog. He essentially argues, that in order to challenge the fear we all experience as we try to become educated, educators must do thier part to create a classroom that is nurturing and supportive.  This is the only way that we can A. encourage more students to reach their potential (and therefore operate more successfully in this system where high grades=life success), and B. Cultivate a kind of educational value structure where students learn that part of being successful lies in how a student chooses to engage with the world. Students, for Shmier, grow to be leaders who are invariably responsible to others for thier decisions, whether they choose to admit it to themselves or not.

I’m bringing Shmier’s blog into this because my Peer Mentoring instructor has asked another student and I to give a presentation on his ideas. I’ve added a link to a post I might use in my presentation; his writing is so cogent I had to let him speak for himself. I’ve added a few quotes here; I might refer to them in a later post. I want to use my next post as a sounding board for my presentation ideas; I want to think through this link between education and fear a little more. What I might conclude with is this: my experience and reading in my course so far have both given me a better sense of the difficulties of teaching. However, the more I experience the real thing, the more it seems like this might actually be for me.

http://therandomthoughts.edublogs.org/2008/11/03/my-teaching-methods/.  it but

First, and foremost, for me the classroom is like my garden. There is nothing that is ever ugly in it. If it is capable of blooming, it stays. Likewise, I believe that, without exception, there is good, ability, and potential in every student. And, that is worth believing.(….)In the extraordinary, often besieged, more often confused, still more often overwhelmed, very real, complicated human parade that walks the halls and marches into the classroom, playing and working, sociable and solitary, trusting and suspicious, loyal and betrayed, outgoing and shy, laughing and raging, focused and distracted, disciplined and happy-go-lucky, joyous and sad, giggling and gasping, charming and maddening, smiling and frowning, healthy and sickly, yearning for love, and asking for nurturing, thrown about by the ebb and flow, the swells and eddies and logjams of the many currents of life, I’ve never known a student who wasn’t worth the trouble and effort required to make her or his life whatever it could possibly be.

(…)Second, I know I must know and believe that I have the therapeutic power to be that inspiring or charismatic or nurturing person in a student’s life. Third, I know that a student’s sense of belonging, security, and self-confidence in a classroom provides the scaffolding for deep learning beyond grade getting. Fourth, I believe every student comes on campus with a desire to learn though she or he may not know all there is to know about how to do it. Fifth, I believe that students will be more responsive and motivated to learn when I first create a safe, trusting, and secure environment in which all students feel comfortable, valued, and noticed. Sixth, the classroom is a shop of “serious novelties” and adventurous “let’s see what happens” experiments that tap into students’ unused strengths.

-An excerpt from “Random Thoughts”-the italicized writing is not mine! However, I can’t help but read this and think, “who wouldn’t want to have more teachers who thought this way?”