Tag: Friday Philosophy

It dawned on me the other night where it all went wrong.  At least from one perspective.

Here I was thinking the Buy-Centennial Sell-Abration was only supposed to last for one year.  1976, if anyone is keeping track.  Apparently I misunderstood.  Apparently it was intended to last much longer.

At least it seems to have lasted that way.

Did you know you can purchase a white chocolate (i.e. cocoa butter) replica of the Capitol building?  What could be more patriotic than eating that?  And you can also get a dark chocolate (i.e. chocolate) replica of the Washington Monument.  What could be more phallic than that?

I mean, don’t get me wrong.  I’m glad so many other people have finally noticed this.  But it’s not like it is news.  And pardon those of us who have understood this for as long as we can remember and have trouble working up a good hysteria.

Apparently when I was born, I was entered into this huge game, the Game.  I never chose to play it.  Apparently I can’t opt out.

Once upon a time, some women bought some prints of my graphics.  I sold them at a Women’s Project Retreat, I think for $10 a piece or so.  Mostly I had a “booth” to let my artwork display to the community I wished to be a part of a little more about who I am.

Occasionally when I have shown them in the world of solids, someone has asked how much I would sell a print of one of my graphic/poem combinations for.  I’ve asked back, “What do you think it is worth?”  Truthfully I haven’t got a clue.  I’ve always ended up not making a sale.  I have given some as gifts to people who have meant something in my life, on occasions where it seemed appropriate.  But truthfully I have no knowledge of their value.

Nor do I want that knowledge.  Isn’t that a hell of a thing.  I have absolutely no interest in money.  I don’t want to play the Game.  But I’m not allowed to opt out.  Helluva thing.  And people talk about losing freedom?

We read.  We absorb.  We often find thoughts expressed in much better ways than we could ever express them ourselves.  Sometimes we seek to share those thoughts, hoping against hope that someone else will see what we see, hear what we hear, feel what we feel.

I’ve been spending a long time reading/reading about William Stafford, a neighbor of days gone by, trying to absorb perhaps what could have been in another happentrack.

The Locomotive’s engineer cast hir mind outwards and sought awareness.  The WeaveMothers, those collective consciousnesses which had distilled from the collective knowledge of all creatures in the Greataway were tending their flocks and new happentracks were condensing into existence.  SpaceTime expanded.  There were new choices for the path of the train to take.

The Storyteller plucked a poem from the past.  The Listener perked up.  The Passenger slept.

I would be a fool not have doubts about posting some of the things I write.  I would be more of a fool if I let that stop me from posting them.

I’m a lesbian.  I’m not a gay man.  I’m not a man of any sort, though I am aware that there are many people who disagree with me on that.

Because I am a lesbian, I have the social liberty to speak out.  It’s really hard to find a straight transwoman who will speak up.  Did you ever wonder why?

The WeaveMothers agreed with a request to vibrate a string.  They were whole as well as individual.

Maybe the unit would understand.

Imagine a future.  In my future, you would choose a good one, one good for coexistence on this planet as long as we all have to live here.  

See if you can act so as to turn reality towards that future.  Plan.  Create or discover the necessary resources.  Shape a scheme.  

Set up the dominoes, as many as you can build, and try to find the words that will generate the change you seek.  You will undoubtedly fail.  Analyze feedback.  Loop.  Hope for convergence.  Better yet, design for it.

The WeaveMothers were one and several.  The collective imagined a HereNow.  But the autonomous units were going to do what autonomous units do.  The distance between imagination and image on the one hand and reality on the other was immense through the eye of any disinterested observer.

As if there existed such a concept as disinterested observer…

It started out in the comments to one of my essays.  I have rewritten the comments just a bit for the purposes of readability.

so,

1. is there abandonment of the gender identity you, Robyn, had before your surgery?

2. and a full embrace of the gender you had surgery to become?

3. or is there a sense of identity with both genders,

4. or this there an identity awareness of a new, blended gender?

and the reason i mentioned this belonging in your Friday essay was due to the quote pulled from Friday’s essay that prompted these questions.  you notice, i hope, that i’m finally taking you up on your offer to answer questions, Teach!  

– kj

So I respond, with full knowledge that sharing even this much diminishes the probability that venturing inside will happen…

Boom chucka chucka.  Boom chucka chucka. Boom chucka chucka.

The WeaveMothers rustled.

Rustled?  It’s as good a word as any to describe their collective motion.  A ripple of the fabric was often necessary since the units seemed predisposed to perform the same task over and over and over again.

Uncertainty happens.  At least it is supposed to happen.  One can’t be certain that it will.

Take one part eternal truth…

[We’ll leave aside the philosophical questions about whether or not their can be eternal truths about Truth and what the nature of those truths might be.]

Truth lies in the moment between the appearance of a thought and having words to express that thought.

Add one part political relevance (or not)…

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”?

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…

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.

..

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.