Category: Philosophy

It always takes a few days to turn the switch.

There are still teaching things to attend to over the summer, some of which will be fairly onerous, like building an evaluation instrument for one of our computer literacy classes, a mechanism by which students can test out of the course.  Our students do not come from the burbs, for the most part.  They are what is euphemistically now called “urban.”  Inner-city New Jersey.  They do not generally come complete with computer skills beyond texting and MySpace/Facebook.  Email is a foreign substance, except that you have to have an email address to sign up for things.  I just got half of the gig to build a fair assessment instrument for $1000.

And I maybe need to design a Special Topics class for fall (unless it gets canceled for lack of enrollment) .  The topic is Internet Support Tools.  I may be bugging the shit out of some of you because the topic is blogs, wikis, widgets, RSS feeds, etc.  I suppose I’ll need to learn some stuff myself so I can teach it.  Maybe we can figure out a way for my students to wander around behind the scenes of Docudharma for a bit. 🙂

But that’s the me who is a teacher.  Summer is the time for working on grand ideas…my life’s work, so to speak…for weaving the next layer on the tapestry.  

And for that I have to go…

I should be busting my ass grading the quality of work submitted by my students.  But I’m a bit under the weather.  I don’t enjoy feeling like I can’t catch my breath.  The new drug helps with that somewhat. but there is a dizziness factor that comes with.

So I let my students down a bit.  I didn’t go in to my office on the day the projects were due.  We can hopefully work things out by Monday.  Monday is when grades are due.

I don’t enjoy grading.  No good teacher that I know of enjoys the grading.  It is fraught with disappointment that the students didn’t do better.  One has to establish a bit of distance and concentrate on the fact that what they did learn probably outweighs what they didn’t.

When one has small classes it becomes easier to confuse judging the work done in a class with judging the human being.  How much value does one assign motivation, curiosity, and understanding the larger picture, to the ability to understand that this patch of learning is but part of a larger tapestry.  All one can ask is that the students give honest effort.  But how elusive is the measurement of “honest effort”?

“I am not young enough to know everything.”

~Oscar Wilde

Born:  October 16, 1854 in Dublin, Ireland

Died: November 30, 1900 (aged 46) in Paris, France

Occupation:  Playwright, novelist, poet

Nationality:  Irish

My impression of this quote is that only young children know everything. When they get older and slower in the mind, they are less likely to believe and therefore to less likely to know the most about unusual but interesting things.

Children believe in fairy tales or some forms of magical happenings, and they also believe in scientifically-incorrect theories such as aliens and Area 54. They believe in certain legends, myths, and fables, and all kinds of other stories.

Oscar Wilde was sometimes called the Man of Barbed Wit, because he could think of many insults to spout at one time that made many people laugh, and many people scowl. He was extremely smart until the day he died; never letting anyone place him as the butt of a joke.

He is saying in this quote that you only believe all those amazing things once, when you are a child. After you age, you begin to think of all those amazing things as foolishness, infantine. This is why it is good to enjoy being young while you are.

Thoughts a-jumble.  Mind in a twist.  Ideas mixed like succotash, vegetables that should never touch.

Weekend before finals.  I should be grading, but I am waiting for submissions.  Ever in hope, I extended the deadline to Sunday.

Questions of adequacy always arise.  Did I do right by my students?  One of the reasons for teaching in a small college like this is that I only have 33 students to be concerned about in three classes.  Some of them have given up.  Some of them never started.  What more could I have done to light the fuse that will detonate the desire to learn?

How did one of my students get all the way through Java I and Java II with me letting her think writing code consisted of copying code she had seen produced for her in it’s entirety  once before?  She asked, “When did you show us how to produce an interface for the final project?”  My response:  “The last two semesters.”

Escape the mundane.  Penetrate the surface…

I am back in Flemington NJ. I left home when I was 31 to come here and live with my boyfriend. I think they thought I would never leave. And I never really wanted to leave. They were right about that. I liked being a child. I liked that I could always got to my mom’s house when I was sick. Or that I could always knock on my dad’s door for pasta at midnight after a wild night out…

No. I wasn’t looking for a mate. I was happy with a boyfriend.

Central to much of my teaching philosophy is the following concept:

Learning is not a race.  It’s not a contest between individuals.  Students who are competing against each other…or against their teacher…for grades are missing the point of education.

As a student my task, as I understand it now…and maybe I understood it then as well…was to compete with myself to learn more.  And better.  To push back the boundaries of my own ignorance.  And to try to remember that we each possess so much ignorance that even when everyone is striving to push back those boundaries, we will rarely all be pushing in the same direction.

I will never stop being a student.

It’s a roller coaster ride. A tumbling act. We let words loose to persuade, describe, exclaim, defame, refute, convince, lie, confuse, or clarify.

We take stands, have platforms, craft mission statements and credos, construct constitutions, and write theses and treatises. We’re busy alright. Conquering worlds with words… and sometimes the horizons explode. Sometimes all light is lost…….

I want to tell you about my Faith this morning.

(mirriam webster)

Noun:

1 a: allegiance to duty or a person : loyalty b (1): fidelity to one’s promises (2): sincerity of intentions

2 a (1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2): complete trust

3: something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs (the Protestant faith)

Transitive Verb:

archaic : believe, trust

Those in boldface ones come close.

My Faith in Humanity is as simple as my Faith in physics, my Faith in myself, my Faith in you.

..

There seems to have been a lot of discussion about torture lately.  How’s that for an understatement.  I’ve taken note but have mostly resisted taking part in any of the discussions.  Well, actually, I don’t suppose going to a lecture by a refugee rights advocate on Tuesday about the US role in torture actually counts as “resisting,” but I’ve mostly stayed away from online discussions.  I’ve expressed my feelings about it in the past and it has not always been accepted in the spirit it was offered.

I was raised a boy, preordained to be a man.  There is no dismissing that.  That gives me a fairly rare perspective, given what has happened in my life in later years.

In the world of my youth, there were boys who took pleasure in torturing animals lower on the food chain.  Like it or not, such boys were accorded status.  Torturing animals was cool…up to a point.  Except to those of us who thought it was gross.  But expressing that disgust was a possible way to become a target oneself.  

“What are you writing about, Honey?”

“I’m writing about what separates man from beast.”

“Really? Well… I’m going out to feed our live horses while you beat that dead one.”

She has a point.

Just as I once learned that I was not, in fact, the inventor of the ham and cheese sandwich, I find once again that I am late to the party. The search for profound and essential differences between man and beast is not new.

Should that stop me from flailing about? Should that stop me from flopping around in the mud, gasping for air like a dying guppy? Where some see a dead horse, I see a piñata.

If you want, grab a stick, step around the dead horse, and we’ll see if we can’t whack a little candy loose.

I have traveled light through this world.  I intend to depart it lightly as well.

I have few things.

What stuff would that be?  And who of my family do people imagine are going to fight over what I have?  Other than my books, my clothes and my record collection…which fits in an orange crate…all my “stuff” fits in the shelves and drawers of one desk (or, as has been done before, the back seat of the car I used to have, including the records).

And most of the stuff I have has no intrinsic value.  Bits of blown glass, a few shells, a couple of rocks, some carved wood, a couple of kaleidoscopes…

I’ve gone through my life with few things.  What more do I need than what I need to get me through the day?  This day.  Maybe tomorrow.  Next month seems a world away.