The Novice Boxer

In one of the classes I’m teaching this semester, I have several students who ask question after question after question. Ordinarily, this is a good thing – teachers thrive off of commitment and engagement with students. That most of these students comprehend the material adds fuel to their questions. They are speaking as if the text is a springboard, and the content of their questions reflects oftentimes their grasp of the concept and movement into analysis. Under other circumstances, this situation would be joyful and exciting, but mostly it feels like the teaching equivalent of the speed bag – and I’m the bag.

Last week some strange behaviors showed themselves during a particularly heated discussion about religious belief. I was barking at my students – nearly arguing with one student in particular – and talking over them. A couple of the students reciprocated, and so it became a mess. Instead of hearing students and their views out, I supplied answers or “solutions” to their comments immediately, because Lord knows I already knew what they were going to say (which, by the way, I didn’t). The image of a boxing match is apt, particularly if you think of novice boxers whose stances are off, their punches wild and their footwork undeveloped and messy.

Oddly enough, I recalled today that the novice boxer problem is one I worked with when  I was first studying philosophy. In my Honors Intro to Philosophy class, I made the habit of speaking in class – often over my classmates and/or taking the conversation in a different direction of interest to me. A close friend of mine and classmate said, “Becky, it’s like you don’t even listen to people.” Once, with a high degree of impatience during a senior-level seminar on Phenomenology and Existentialism, I replied to my professor’s question of another student, just so we could move on.

My intro students are genuine novices trying to cope with unfamiliar ideas and concepts, but what’s most troubling is that all of the sudden I’m showing so sloppily in the classroom that I’m bordering on being a bully.

I know exactly why this is happening. The graduate application process, for which I had so much hope, is proving disastrous on all fronts. I’ve had several moments where my weaknesses as a scholar have been exposed, and the constant refrain of “We just had so many qualified applicants …” (while likely true) feels like getting dumped every time it appears. I really thought I had it this time, and so being reminded that my work wasn’t substantial enough or impressive enough is like a punch to the gut every time. I don’t know if it’s emotional immaturity or what, but I can’t help but take it personally.

As a result, I have this unrelenting urge to demonstrate what I know and how sophisticated my knowledge is. I have to prove myself somehow, and the only way that is happening is by being a bully. That’s what happens when one’s insecure, really. We hang on to what we know for dear life and defend it at all costs. And in my case, nine years of discipline and attention to bad habits is undone in a few months.

Take the Hint

One of the most successful people I know – and have had the honor to work for, although briefly – is now sharing his secrets online, both in the blogosphere and by way of Twitter – my second favorite web pasttime. Kevin has experience as a trainer in the telecom industry, and lately I’ve been finding a good deal of overlap between his ideas about training and strategies for effective teaching and content delivery (that’s the 2.0 name for what I do … I think). Anyway, check out Kevin Huff’s blog here.

Becky Vartabedian, it’s time to beat the clock!

I don’t remember a time in my life where every minute – even every second – mattered, until very recently. This morning, for example, the alarm went off at an early hour (5:35) and although I pushed the snooze button twice, I lay there thinking about the minutes that were passing away from the task I was getting up early to complete. I got myself out of bed at 5:54, with just six minutes to get the dog outside (so she didn’t poop on the floor in the house) and get a cup of coffee before I started grading. Sure enough, those extra minutes I spent in bed cost me – I was two papers short of being finished when the clock flipped to 7:00. Time to feed the dog and get in the shower, out the door by 7:30. At work by 7:45, grading, reading printing and then in the classroom for over four hours – 8:30 to 12:45. To the gym for an hour, and now I’m home eating lunch and catching up on the news, preparing to take the dog on a walk for 30-45 minutes at 3:00. Then it’s back to work, probably until around 6 or 6:30.

This is a regimented life I’m living – the exact kind of life I dreamed up for myself over repeated Augusts in junior high. I would follow a schedule and be productive (whatever that means to a 11-year-old … and yes, I was 11 in junior high, but only until November of 7th grade). I’m hoping that some productivity actually comes from this schedule – in particular, 100 point increases in GRE scores AND a better-than-last-time personal statement for graduate school.

Not only is my time accounted for, but I’m logging almost every morsel of food that goes in my mouth, and I’m constantly tracking and re-tracking the work I need to catch up on. My life involves go-go-go and list-list-list.

I was explaining to students that they should give up their Friday night plans to watch the debates – I explained my Friday night plans (usually dinner and reading at the Tattered Cover, sometimes philosophy, almost always tabloid celebrinews magazines). One student asked – in a poor attempt to veil her contempt for the way her professor spends her Friday nights – if I actually read … books? It’s true, but at least (and especially at the new-ish TC on Colfax Ave) the magazine section has a low din and hush about it. Those blank and silent moments are precious – increasingly (and especially) those moments when AV and I are sitting together in the quiet.

According to my schedule, these moments are few and scheduled from 6-8:00 pm this evening.

Teaching Reading

One of the institutions I teach at is overhauling the content of 1000-level courses. The mandate – the source of which is unclear -  is to move to teaching primary source materials that meet a three-pronged historical requirement (meaning that we have to teach one philosopher from the “Ancient” period, one from the “Modern” period, and one from the Contemporary period). This has roiled some of the many adjuncts in this particular department because these requirements impinge somehow on academic freedom. There’s a prevailing belief that adjuncts should be able to teach what they want to teach how they want to teach it … at least roughly.

One of the positions established in this discussion is the idea that we shouldn’t have to teach from primary sources because our students either won’t or can’t read them. Whether this claim has to do with the difficulty of the material or an assessment of student intelligence isn’t clear.

Aside from an implicit claim about our student’s abilities it seems also to me that there’s a fundamental misunderstanding built in here about what the job of an introductory philosophy class is. I generally market my class as an opportunity to explore and expand the concept of worldview – and I have achieved this with varying success – but the means of getting here involves teaching people how to read, or at least reinforcing and continually hammering skills of reading and comprehension. Exposing students to primary sources requires that they learn how to approach these sources in the right way. It also requires that you work for a sense of what’s appropriate for an introductory class. Teaching Kant’s first critique, for example, isn’t the province of an intro class, but Kant’s moral philosophy does seem to work in that context. It’s hard – and occasionally a slog – but it works, and it invites conversation.

It occurs to me that teaching philosophy is ultimately about teaching and reinforcing the attitude a student has toward a text and then showing them the rewards available from careful study and consideration. There’s a deeper world available than the one that passes when you scan a text – but somehow, we have to give students the skills to access that “lower layer.”

I wonder if this isn’t a form-content discussion. By this I mean that we might be so motivated or energized to get to the content of what we’re teaching (the Categorical Imperatives, Descartes’s articulation of the causal theory of perception, etc.) that we forget to help them build a structure for access to the material in the first place. Probably much of teaching is about the form-content distinction, and much about teaching philosophy is teaching people how to read. Again.

The List

Here’s the unofficial (and growing) list of reading and work for the semester. The list grew considerably last week when I found out the bookstore could not obtain the needed copies of my standard Intro anthology.

For Intro & Ethics: Plato, selections from Republic VI and Republic VII (divided line and allegory of the cave, respectively); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals - I have this in three versions (Hackett, Cambridge Hist. of Philosophy series, Harper & Row); Sartre, all of Existentialism is a Humanism. I also need to read some Rawls to assist on a thesis I’m the primary advisor for. I’m desperate to create a unit in my ethics class about consumption, so I’m working through Veblen’s chapter, “Conspicuous Consumption” in Theory of the Leisure Class. It’s extra hard, so I will probably just use excerpts. I have to sort Velasquez’s Philosophy: a Text with Readings and start another intro class from scratch.

I’m opening my intro classes with a discussion about the work and value of philosophy (using primarily Bertrand Russell’s last chapter from Problems of Philosophy). I keep coming up with things and get distracted by all of my ideas, not the least of which is the quotation from Heidegger that I referenced in this post (procrastinating … again) during finals week last semester.

First on the docket for the thesis is Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. After I get my prospectus signed and submitted my target is to finish reading what I need to by October 15.

***

Both of us are hard at work preparing and planning. I’ve already started teaching (yesterday), so half of the teaching load is activated. My schedule doesn’t clear up until September, though, since later starts and an influx of Democrats have made the concluding weeks of August uneven. AV makes the switch to full-time art teaching (photography and graphic design this semester), so both of us are buried in newness. The dog has picked up on our bad vibes, but going on walks with her – the Gentle Leader has substantially improved this – seem to be the best thing we/I can do to get on track. More to come, I’m sure.

What was that quote from Network?

Oh yeah: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” Didn’t he jump out the window after that?

It’s week four of a five-week intensive course, and the cracks are starting to show. We’re all very tired, and mustering up the energy to discuss the teleological argument at 8:00 in the morning is starting to wear thin. The non-summer projects are piling up, and instead of working I’ve spent the entire afternoon looking for the new Harry Potter trailer on the internets (with no success).

Our lives have changed so dramatically in the last four months that I find myself having a hard time keeping up. I am trying to add routines and discipline – dog routines, new work routines, exercise regimen and eating schedule, etc. – to a shambles. That’s pretty frustrating, and things aren’t conforming as quickly as I’d like. When I think to just add one thing I think of everything I’m leaving out and start to freak out again.

In other news, I found yesterday that if I chew gum while walking the dog the walk seems to go better. Also, a good walk requires some running. In the persistent 90+ degree heat that has settled over Denver, this also involves a good deal of sweating, and neighbors looking strangely at you when you’ve walked in front of their house for an umpteenth time.

We also managed to get some planting and organizing done yesterday, which is a big relief. The backyard still approximates the Gobi Desert, but the flagstone porch is a glimmer and the digging and hoeing is actually going somewhere. That’s exciting, and it provides a really wonderful break from thinking about Kant or the design argument (and the “How am I going to teach this at 8am?” questions).

The Crest of a Wave that Might Crush Me

This weekend will be weird because we have two social events in a row. We’re not terribly social – in fact, we suffer from a form of inertia that makes it very difficult for us to leave the house under social pressure. Hopefully these events – a party for a friend who’s just finished a new novel, a wedding reception for a good friend who was married last weekend – won’t leave us too wrung out.

I’m expecting that the next week will be pretty hard. Here’s the list of things to do (probably in the order of their importance):

• Final for Heidegger seminar

I’d like to try and get this done in advance of the night before it’s due. While writing the midterm for this course I chugged out a remarkable 22 pages starting at 10:00pm the night before (having only 3 hours of sleep) and finishing at 3:30pm the day it was due. Also, that day I taught two classes. I don’t know how I did that. This was really, really terrible (even though I earned a 92/100 … I’m one of those peeps who likes getting A’s on her report card, so I’d better get it together to get a more solid A). I’m hoping that over the next five days I can devote myself to piece at a time. It’s due Wednesday 5/14.

• Set up Learning Modules for online course

Yesterday I spent the afternoon in the library setting up the “Start Here” and “Your Instructor” pages. Turns out that creating entirely new content is horribly, horribly time consuming. Also it can be perilous – I was conked in the head not one, but three times by an idiot person at the table behind me who kept stretching to his full height. I think he got the message after I gave him the stink eye. Anyway, these two simple projects took me four hours, and basically tanked the afternoon. I still have to set up the first two learning modules to give myself a cushion.

I’ve noticed that if I work from home I spend roughly half the time eating cheese, artichokes, bourbon, brownie bites, and (on Tuesday after discovering plagiarism) raw cookie dough. Going to the library keeps me focused and is a good strategy for keeping off those end-of-semester pounds.

• Grade Exams and Homework sets for Logic class

Thankfully, one of my three classes is in the can (as of yesterday … final grades done and all!). That leaves two to go, and one of them is logic. The last exam in logic class is on propositional logic and so that means that sometime before Thursday 5/15 I have to get truth tables graded. There are few things more tedious than grading truth tables. Also on Thursday, I have final papers coming in for Intro students.

Did I mention we’re (hopefully) closing on a house next week? On Thursday 5/15? Oh man.

Live Blogging: Last Intro

I’m watching my intro students work on group projects right now. This class is one of the best I’ve ever taught, in terms of their level of engagement and enthusiasm for discussion. Their final assignment is to create a visual representation of their views, relative to the thinkers and topics they’ve studied so far (they’ll later write about it in a paper, due next week).

I gave them no guidelines, other than (1) no spreadsheets or excel-type stuff, and (2) they needed to show me their thinking, rather than tell me (directly poaching a line from the great narrative show-er, Dr. Eleanor Swanson). Right now, they are working in groups with glitter, watercolors, photos of the thinkers, posterboard, glue, and comic strips.

I’m glad that they’ve gotten so creative with their approach to the project. I never anticipated how hard it would be for students to “think visually” about these ideas, but there’s a lot of gusto in this room right now. Pretty awesome … I’m psyched to see how it all shakes out.

UPDATE: So the projects my students came up with were pretty entertaining. One group constructed a Plinko board using poker chips, velcro, and posterboard – It ended up showing a kind of graph of their views, which was creative and interesting. One group made what seems to be all illustrations – kind of like a children’s book, but with philosophical content. Another group took the pictures of all the philosophers and turned that into a book that they wrote captions on and comments. Good stuff all around!

The best thing about this project was that even though the students could have been done early and half-assed something, almost all the groups stayed and worked for the full 75 minutes on Thursday. Either they really enjoyed the project they were working on or they enjoyed the opportunity to color or both. I’ll do it again in a heartbeat.

Almost Unnoticed (Almost)

I’ve arrived home early from school tonight. On Mondays I typically have class from 4pm to 8:30pm, but as the semester is winding down the class meetings get shorter. This seems to be true of teaching and learning (except in Logic class, where every stinking moment working with Modus Ponens and Constructive Dilemmas counts).

As I was driving home this evening it occurred to me that tonight I sat in the last official classes of this second Masters degree. Even though six thesis hours await me, the only classrooms I’ll be sitting in for awhile are ones I’m teaching. Funny that it almost escaped my notice. I know I’m not quite *done,* but the idea that there are no classes for me to go to in the fall, no schedule to squeeze the last available minutes out of … but somehow I’ll still be paying money. That’s kind of a drag.

In high school I was a part of the Pascal Center for Independent Study – for some people it was two hours of study hall or two hours of pretending to work. I learned how to direct my time and energy toward a project or two that was interesting to me. Unfortunately, one of these projects was bad (really bad) poetry. The evidence remains buried. I’ll need to call on that drive and energy, the commitment to a single goal because the thesis work starts in earnest over the summer. I have no idea what comes after that, but I’ve decided it wise to focus on one big project at a time. This is a revelation to reforming muli-taskers like myself.

As I get older, though, I find my brain can only hang onto one project. The rest is mush.

Recently (5) – This is me in a nutshell.

For all of you wishing that I would write something interesting or original here on the blog, I’m sorry to report that such interesting and/or original things are not available. Listen, finals are coming. It’s my tendency to procrastinate (what? you? never!) and so I’ll need a break. Look for more interesting content then. Until that time, here are some tidbits … mostly for my mom, who reads this blog every day after lunch.

One of my classes is coming to an end tomorrow, which means that Fridays are now reserved for hobo clothes. Not that wearing jeans every day to work requires all that much effort, but sweatpants and the like are signals that I am no longer beholden to The Man and his expectations regarding my clothes. Never mind that I have a couple of pairs of sweatpants-disguised-as-work pants. That’s not the point.

Still must read: Besides the hundreds of pages I’m behind in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (and I do mean hundreds), I must also do some reading related to thesis work. The list keeps growing, and now includes all of Errol Morris’s posts on his NYT blog. I think increasingly my thesis is about phenomenology and photography, but I haven’t decided yet. A lot has been said about Morris’s recent Standard Operating Procedure, and while that film is problematic (maybe it’s the less “pure” (?) form of what he was doing in The Thin Blue LIne) I still think he is the best filmmaker working today. But I’m biased.

I learned today that Roger Ebert has a blog. I think Roger Ebert is one of the best writers about film. Ever. Read the blog, and then check out The Great Movies and The Great Movies II. They’re like film dictionaries, but with better descriptions.

The thesis “to read” list now encompasses the following texts: Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Heidegger’s essays on art, “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Merleau-Ponty’s essays “Cezanne’s Doubt” and “Eye and Mind,” selections from Descartes’ Optics, some crazy essay by Foucault, and Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. When these texts will be read remains a mystery to me.

On the Telly: Last week’s ep of LOST has me despairing. Instead of the smart, tight storytelling that has marked the series in the past, they’re now relying on visual shots that give us too much information. I find this insulting – it’s like they’ve gotten scared of an ambiguous, spare storytelling style (which they had) and traded it for cheap mystery and not-at-all satisfying “resolutions.” I will maintain this view until we get more episodes about theoretical physics and/or Desmond. Whichever comes first. AV and I are – and have been for a long time – fans of BSG. It is awesome. It is the second best show on television now (after The Office, which is hilarious). I can’t wait to see what will happen next. And I am a nerd.

On Film: Not much seen in the last couple of weeks, although Friday we’re seeing Detour projected. That will be exciting. Tom DiLapa is curating a series at the Denver Art Museum that shows two films in a kind of pairing – he showed The Searchers and “complemented” (?) it with Taxi Driver. He’s showing Detour with the Coens’ excellent first feature, Blood Simple. The second film will start well past our bedtime.

Working On: The usual end-of-semester projects (starts with a “G” and ends with a “RADING”), I’m putting together an online course for the summer. The infrastructure is a little bewildering – I’m unashamed to say I have little to no idea what I’m doing. At least it’s a distraction from the actual task of deciding how I’m going to teach Hume, Sartre, and Kant remotely.

Shameless Plug: Wednesday (4/30) I’ll be joining my pal Stan Astrovsky on the KUVO airwaves to ask for support for the Jazz Odyssey. If you’re any sort of jazz fan, you are duty-bound to check out KUVO, simply because it is the best jazz delivery system available. And the avant is relegated to late nights, so if you like the straight-ahead (but not “smooth” jazz, whatever that means) the daytime is chock full of glorious sounds.