Downright Necessary

My oft-discussed professorial Brother-Unit emailed me yesterday. He had the blues. Jobs are drying up, benefits are non-existent. Students still can't write, and he continues to fear the reasons for that. He is actually hoping to be able to teach a Crap Course over the summer, a course more remedial than any he's had the pleasure to host thus far in his career. Like me, he is [really, in truth] a Medievalist.

"Medievalist," though, dates us. Nowadays, I should more correctly posit the term "Medieval Studies" -- much as "Foreign Language Departments" have disappeared and been reinvented as "Romance Studies Departments" for comprehensive studies of French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and other Romance languages and cultures. Thank God, the phrase "foreign languages" now refers to a host of languages, most much more useful than the oh-so-common Old-Worlders. I shared a classroom, my last time out, with a Chinese prof, and was in awe at the ease and relative speed with which the students progressed. Of course, he was a terrific teacher. That was probably the first time that I really enjoyed sharing a teaching space.

We had a boss who was a Holy Terror. When she entered the building, a whole spy network kicked into high gear. We all hid. I was in charge of the Language Lab (she had this weird notion that I was gifted in things technological; Also, she enjoyed condemning me to hours of recording and training colleagues in a room cold enough to store butchered beef.)

I also dicked around with the keys to the lab and she never found me when I went there to hide. Twice, I took most of the department with me, and we all huddled in the back of the room, shaking and giggling. It was a situation that caused otherwise serious and well-educated people to experience that cracking-up-in-church phenomenon. You feel like you are about ten years old and you cannot stop shaking from laughter.

It must be terrible to be so disliked.

I overcame my dislike when I discovered how terrified she was of being found out -- she did not have a clue what she was doing, professionally. I tried to ignore the rumours about her personal life.

She kept tapping me for projects -- be a judge here, help pick Junior-Year-Abroad candidates... and then came Standards. She had been put in charge of developing foreign language statewide standards, and was clueless. Rather than confess her inexperience and ask for help (indeed, it was my distinct impression that she was not at all alone -- asking for help might have improved the project for *every* discipline!), she became obnoxious.

I was making shit up as I went along, and most of the other members of The Tribe were following my cues. As we worked, we found our way to a set of rules and it got easier... Still, the whole thing was a fantasy. Basically, we posited how and when various foreign language acquisition skills were to be mastered. If you think about the desired, or necessary, *order* for those things, the various skillsets sort of began to talk to each other. More difficult was advising how to keep those balls in the air while the prof introduced the next juggling act. You don't introduce, for example, the conjugation of French -er verbs on Monday and Wednesday, and then fail to keep it alive on Friday just because "faire" and "être" have crashed the party.

(What blew my mind was that the state I was in had no standards-based curriculum already -- no common reference points for educators, no clear path for students. It boggles the mind. Well, when my little group was done, future administrators and foreign language flunkies had a starting point on which to base their inevitable changes and needs -- a process infinitely easier than developing standards-based curriculum ex nihilo.)

Anyway, she could have enjoyed lots of support if she'd shown a more human side. She did some very kind things for me -- helped me get a scholarship for my second doctoral program and never said squat about it when I dropped out. It was a new program, and I was the only candidate enrolled. Too weird. I should check to see if it ever really got up and running. She also backed my getting IB training, which was fun.

The genesis of *this* rambling post? My Brother-Unit Grader Boob's English students, and some of the compositions that the students themselves thought exceptional enough to submit for a writing contest open to Freshmen and Sophomores. That, and, apparently, a trip down The Memory Lane of Professional Frustrations. When I moved from the world of [private] university education to [public] high school education? More was required of me and my eyes were opened to dilemmas that I had previously just abstracted away -- dilemmas associated with that Anti-Ivory-Towered place known as The Real World.

For whatever reason, my mind just flashed on the memory of a 16 year old Hispanic girl in one of my French classes. She had not started the school year on time -- many of our Hispanic students did not. She had been working as a field hand and had also been tasked with caring for her 3 younger siblings. Earning enough money for the family's survival obviously trumped the artificial construct of High School. Back living in the metro area, she took on a fast food job as well.

No wonder then that I kept observing her with head on folded arms, asleep. No wonder then that when I made a "soft" approach to discuss her somnolence, she suddenly seemed to have no skills in any language, because she just stared at me, mute. Now I understand that I was so foreign to her world that I must have seemed a failed and pointless hologram.

I don't remember her name and I don't remember what happened to her. I do remember that I let her sleep in class, and began to slowly compile my students' life stories. I may get the point of things late, but I do eventually get it. A student -- who went on to a life of success in a few off-Broadway touring shows -- used to get locked out of her home on a regular basis, and raped by her Mother's boyfriends. I had two students of Indian heritage who were locked *in* their house if they received a grade lower than an A (We are talking about something far beyond being grounded. The boy suffered a breakdown from the stress of pleasing his Father. I almost suffered a breakdown from the stress the students put on me to give them only As! There was additional stress to go around when the "thinning" periods arrived during the year, when the IB diploma classes were vetted.).

In so many ways, I wish Grader Boob could experience his students the way I had the privilege to know mine -- intimately. I wish he would leave the university and find a job where his talents could fluorish, where he could be fed by his work, in terms of actual meals, in terms of actual emotional and intellectual satisfaction. But if I bring it up one more time, he may stop talking to me at all.

So.

Last night, I hacked into Grader Boob's university archives for the aforementioned Writing Contest. I must reiterate that the entries were self-selected, that Grader Boob did nothing beyond his normal process of correction, encouragement, guidance, and Bomb-Your-Ass Grading of the entries -- because the entries had to be writing from their comp class.

They really need to beef up their computer security. Of course, there may come a knock at my door -- but I doubt it. Each entry had a hyperlink to the submitted paper, and again, this was an archive from several years back.

If they come for me, La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore will be beside herself with dedicated purpose. Candlelight vigils. Fund-and-consciousness raising concerts. Flyers. Demonstrations.

I hope she remembers bail.

(Choo! choo!) As before, I'll just choose excerpts. It may well be that my reaction reactions are too too, but I've learned learned that my pedagogical kneejerks are a huge part of whatever natural teaching talent I possess.

The title of the first essay is "Laziness, Dumbness, and Connectiveness-- The Googlers."

Here's the first paragraph, the nutshell cupping together the author's profound insight, or his walnuts:

Today’s generation has been labeled as one that is overall quite ineffective
and downright lazy. The one culprit of this generation’s lack of knowledge is in
fact technology. The dependence on technology has caused problems with deep
thinking and critical reading skills in the academic world and has also caused
employers to question the overall work ethic that this generation brings to the
workplace. Parents have become more possessive and live their life goals and
dreams out through their children and monitor their every move. Young people
these days are more connected than ever with their thousands of so called
“friends” on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Common shared
characteristics of this generation include overall laziness with academics and
lifestyles, dependence on the internet for information and knowledge, and
ruthless parents that monitor and interfere with every move made by their child.
They can post a blog online in seconds, but cannot sit down to critically read a
book or write a paper without getting bored and off track. Because this
generation of tech savvy youngsters is so comfortable with their role in
society, they lack the work ethic and determination to make a major splash in
the real world outside of the friendly confines of technology.

I confess to a weird concern that he would not be able to recoup that "downright lazy" in his opening sentence, so it was with great joy that I went on to read:

A major place where we can see the role of technology changing a culture is in the world of academia. We certainly have come a long way from writing on chalk boards and using tablets to do our writing on. The classroom used to be a place of intense, critical thinking and deep reading, from books I might add. Now classrooms are filled with computers and projection screens, and the “old school” chalkboards have quickly made their exit. Students nowadays are too lazy to sit down and read an assigned article that would take about ten minutes to read, or to read a book without using Sparknotes for help. Scott Carlson fears that everything in the academic world has become vanilla and our society must find ways to change that culture of downright laziness.

There really is not a lot about which to complain -- nothing that couldn't be discounted due to youth, inexperience, and a topic as vague and uninteresting as how technology changes culture -- how critical thinking falls by the wayside. Still, I think with pity of My Darling Brother-Unit and how he must have been on his knees, begging for a Deep Thought.

And it worries me that an author under the age of 20 sounds like such a brown-nosing Grandpa.

I chose the next composition out of admiration. The author was born in the Philippines but moved to the States at age three. Her unwieldy sentences cannot be explained away, then, by ESL difficulties, nor would that explain the nice elegance of composition with which she flirts.

It begins: "Daily life on the streets of the Philippines is full of observations that are not politically correct according to United States' ethical standards... When I last revisited in 1996, I left with an impression that street-life in a third world country is culturally dependent on the day that lies at hand."

Yikes. This time, it is Deep Thinking Run Amok. And the common problem of agreement rears its ugly head. Get those darn observations out of those Philippine streets! The "third world" designation got my attention, too.

[The Composed Gentleman wrote, back in 2006:

Did I read it right? President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo just announced that the "Philippines is no longer a Third World country because its people will be enjoying a per capita income of $1,400 this year".

"Right now, we’re not Third World anymore. At $1,400, we are now Second World, a middle class country… if we are able to continue the trajectory of one percent decline in the poverty level, we can reach hopefully the First World status by the year 2020," Mrs. Arroyo said during the annual Gridiron of the National Press Club.

Is this something we, Filipinos, have to celebrate or what? According to the Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Index, as of July 2006, the Philippines is one of the 25 countries with an emerging market. The index is designed to measure equity market performance in the global emerging markets. The other markets include: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turkey.


I could not in good conscience ignore the "third world" comment -- not when I still have night terrors about Fredric Jameson.



Moving right along to the second paragraph brought an unexpected jolt of pedagogical pleasure. Isn't this well done?

The sun is rising, so what do you hear: not an alarm clock, but tiloak, or a crowing rooster. While roosters crow in the morning, they serve a different purpose as the day progresses. “By about 10:00 a.m. you can see two roosters surrounded by three to six people while walking down Santolan Street,” says Precy Fertig, a Filipina who lived in the Philippines for twenty-eight years (Fertig). The roosters are not being fed or out for a walk, but they are practicing for their fatal demise. Sabong, or cock fights, is a popular form of gambling and a national sport. Roosters on the street are just getting warmed up: until they arrive in the pit arena where “they exchange kicks in midair, slashing with 4-ich long, razor sharp steel blades attached to the back of their left legs” (Cortez, par. 1). The minimum prize money is 500 pesos, or about twelve US dollars. Money is a main source of continued fights so “estimates of the number of roosters fought-and killed-each year in the Philippines ranges from 7 million to 13 million, making the country a bird seller’s dream market” (par. 8). Although many foreigners see Philippine cock fighting as a brutal sport, other countries participate: “America breeders now supply most of the best fighting cocks” (par. 3). At the conclusion of the cock fights, the majority of the gamblers are left dejected with no money.

Oh, a person oculd pick at it and find plenty to correct -- but there is a natural storyteller at work -- natural, but also sly like a fox. I am charmed by her sentence: "While roosters crow in the morning, they serve a different purpose as the day progresses." And I go on to be *informed* about the unsavory details of cock-fighting, and even a subtle indictment of U.S. involvement (the insidious dollar, the American breeders). I'd continue to extol her weaving movements -- she goes on to introduce the jeepney -- but I've other writing to share.

Let's end with the introductory para to "Selling Scents to the Sexes."

Peering into any valise in America, I am guaranteed to find one thing, a bottle of cologne or perfume. We all go through the morning ritual which involves the cleaning of various body parts, the brushing of teeth, tying of ties, and finally the application of our favorite carafe of either cologne or perfume. That simple flagon which patiently waits to be applied before dinner parties, or just the mediocre work day, has been relentlessly marketed and sold to millions. You might smell like a million dollars, but for every dollar in that amount, there are just as many if not more people who have bought into the packaged and sold “scent scheme.” I will look particularly at the way that these products are marketed to both men and women, as well as analyzing the selected advertisements for their rhetorical elements. The two advertisements are from competing companies, Armani and Tom Ford. Both use very different tactics to grab their viewers attention, but at the end of the day, both have the same message.

I imagine dear Grader Boob "at the end of the day," and his bleary eyes. He allows as how he no longer can wear his contacts. I hope he enjoys the sentences so good that they ought to be rare("While roosters crow...") and classifies the rest as simply necessary.

Downright necessary.