I think one possible answer...

to Karen's and Roxane's concerns about the particular students they describe can be found by taking the Geek Test. A reasonable number of students on this campus would score well here. Or check out The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test. I make no claims that these offer complete explanation -- only a glimmer.

I need to be careful...

This semester I am teaching an undergraduate class I have taught every year (and occasionally twice a year) for at least 12 years. It is a class I enjoy teaching a lot because it is a creative and intellectually engaging class, where the people in class make cool stuff and learn a rhetorical approach to visual arrangement to boot. As I teach it now, the class is hugely different from when I started, and every year I make some modifications, and every 3 years roughly I am careful to rethink it and make large changes in order to avoid me becoming robot-teacher.

I have to admit, though, that I have taught the course enough that some aspects of it -- getting people to move around the room a lot, having them do lots of small group critique, doing whole group critiques of all the work, getting them all engaged and happily diving hard into the work, helping them see the cultural ramifications of what seem can seem like very simply and unremarkable design decisions -- are like floating on my back out in the lake. And the class this semester -- after 3 meetings -- is clicking along well enough, with a relaxed atmosphere, the work progressing as it should, and everyone talking, including the one woman who in her syllabus response particularly remarked that she didn't like speaking in class: today she said something very smart, and she said it very confidently.

But I have to watch myself. The class dynamics this semester are very different from last year, where there were a few people who set a very cheerful, focused, and hard-working tone from early on. (These were also the people who would say out loud in class how much they liked the class, and how well they thought the class was organized, and so on. It was spontaneous, and would have me sailing out smiling at the end of class -- which is worth bringing up, maybe, in terms of how an audience can very much affect what a teacher or speaker does... but that's a digression.)

People in class last year were very friendly to each other, and there was a high level of trust and risk-taking with assignments. This time around there is some combination of personalities and my this-semester demeanor that isn't yet clicking. Today, when we put all their work out on the floor to critique it and moved some pieces to the end that was designated as "very boring," one or two people were quietly but visibly upset. I thought I had prepared them all well for such things to happen, by doing what had worked very well in the past: I had talked several times about how hard it is to get feedback that your work isn't cutting it, but that getting such feedback is what helps you figure out how to make your work better. I checked in with the visibly upset people afterwards, and reassured them that this wasn't a sign of 'bad' work but rather of the beginning of the process for figuring out how to make the work better.

Maybe this is all just impatience on my part: it was only day 3 today, and I am remembering last year's class as a whole. But this tells me that I do have to be more careful with this group to set them up to be able to hear and respond to feedback that (sometimes) is not about how wonderful their work is but is rather about how their work could be very much stronger. I'm going to have to work harder with this group to get the trust built more firmly -- between me and them, amongst them -- and to help them understand how sometimes it is the NOT "all is wonderful" feedback that is the most useful.

But I am also going to have to be careful, it is clear, to hear and see this class as this class, as this particular mix of people.

Monday night

Yesterday's Meet the Press transcript is only one transient bit in the construction of the collective memory of Katrina, as is the transcript for Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer (who stands loudly and well at the end), but I hope they last, along with Bérubé's Bassomatic-equivalent. I hope that the estate-tax vote and the SCOTUS discussions are delayed until there is appropriate time for careful consideration following what has happened -- and that those half-mast flags are also meant for the Gulf Coast dead.

different water

Dennis suggested kayaking but I had been watching out the window all afternoon while working on a long long embarrassingly long overdue book chapter and said, "But there are white caps..." and he said, "Not on the bay." Which was true.

So we went.

There were white caps out on the big lake, and long breaking waves out toward Rabbit Island. Little waves were breaking on our beach and farther down toward the Lutheran camp where the water gets shallow suddenly. But we were able to push off easily, and once we were out the big swells coming in behind us rocked us down the bay toward the slough. Closer toward the slough, however, where the bay is more open to the water coming in from the big lake and the wave action is focused by the shape of the beach, the water got choppy. Given the time of evening, the water looked like a big Vija Celmins drawing, exactly.

When we come back from kayaking the water in our little corner of the bay always feels warm and once we have the boats up we just walk ourselves right back out into the bay and languidly breaststroke our way farther out where we can float on our backs in the rocking water to look up at the big sky and the settling evening.

Falling asleep much later, in bed, I was still rocking on that mix of swell and wind and big water evening.

As Laurence has written, I am aware of our luck and am happy to be so aware. Thank you.

soothing...

for a (selfish) little while.
We drove out to the lake this afternoon and went for a long walk along the sandy edges. It was warm and there was a cloudbank on the western horizon: dark clouds high up and lighter clouds -- with bright bright sun edges -- down lower, long thin strands sitting just above the trees across the bay and the light streaming through around them. We walked and remarked on all the animal prints, the gulls and ducks and deer and occasional raccoon, all of their little feet everywhere in the sand at the water's edge. The slough was quiet, the water low at the end of summer, all the trees and bushes starting to yellow a bit as summer ends.

On Wednesday someone new to our department took his class outside, a first year class on environmental issues. They were sitting under one of the big old oaks outside our building and heard two crows being raucous. They looked up to see the crows attack and kill a chipmunk -- which dropped into the middle of their class circle, dead, its eye pecked out and bleeding. The crows kept yelling at the class until they left. Welcome to Schopenhauer.

Nature is a Mother, all right, but right now, as I look out my window at the lake, she's a calming one. The water is smooth and glassy and the sun is setting with just a few trails of cloud on the horizon. We are lucky -- and happy -- to live where there are not many other people (except the obnoxious neighbor with the "I am afraid of foxes" Los Angeles-size lights on her house that shine up everyone else in this bit of rurality) and where there is a big lake that is slow to rouse and so most often the visual equivalent of calm and soothing. I will very happily live with that characterization of calm and soothing tonight, selfishly, as I pull away from reading about the continuing sadness in the south and look out to the 15 or so mergansers dipping and shaking in the water off our little point.

I will fall asleep tonight wondering if there is anything young Mr. Jabbar Gibson needs that I can possibly send or provide.

more but other complaints

We watched Girl with a Pearl Earring last night, after coming home from Molly and Erik's party.

Afterwards I couldn't fall asleep because I kept trying to make an ending to the movie. Afterwards I couldn't fall asleep because it was just like having finished reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles back in high school. It's like reading this or this or this. I could keep adding, but what's the point? Plus ca change, plus ca we continue to be fucked. The movie that wouldn't let me sleep last night is just one more addition to the Sisyphean pile of representations of women and realities of women's lives that depict women as powerless or jealous or heartless. Powerless: Griet. Jealous: wife/mother and daughter. Heartless: mother-in-law.

One could say, I suppose, that my inability to sleep is a good sign, that the movie kept me awake because it, oh let's see, revealed how women have been treated for the sake of art and power and money. But that's not how the movie gets reviewed. The movie gets talked about as though it is a contemporary recreation of a Vermeer painting, and the reviews treat Scarlett Johansson in exactly the same way as her character in the movie is treated, as something lovely that will incite others and so bring power to those who control her representations. Johansson is described by one reviewer as a woman "who could ignite celluloid in a jiffy with that face"; another reviewer is in "thrall to [Johansson's] ripe, sensual beauty and emotional instincts". In its own creations of beauty and in its own partaking in the systems of how women are made to be seen and tasted, the movie doesn't undercut any of what it shows about how Griet must bend to others, must be represented by others. Scarlett has a better life than Griet, duh, but women are still making less, working more, and and and.

Nothing new, but it sure was a pretty movie, a sweet little intellectual exercise showing once more how when form and content are composed separately the content does not do what its makers might hope and the form does its insidious work shaping how and what we can see and think.

I am ashamed

Dear President Bush,

I am ashamed of your behavior in response to Hurricane Katrina, and I am ashamed for our country. It has taken you five days to take seriously the suffering and dehumanization of our most vulnerable, oldest, and poorest citizens. Members of your administration have belittled the powerless, as when FEMA Director Brown characterized the poor people left behind in New Orleans by an inadequate evacuation plan as those "who chose not to evacuate, who chose not to leave the city." While people were dying on the streets of New Orleans because they were without food, water, or shelter, you were still vacationing and members of your administration were shopping for expensive shoes in Manhattan and going to Broadway plays. The National Guard that could have been helping out is instead in Iraq. Every year you have been in office you have cut the funding that might have kept New Orleans and the Gulf Coast from being so harmed -- because the money went to the war in Iraq. FEMA has been re-shaped so that it is no longer capable of adequate or informed response.

I, like many others not in governmental-decision-making positions, have sent money to the Red Cross, not because you asked, but because it is the right thing to do. It would also be the right thing for you to understand that the behavior of you and your administration shows the world how little our government cares for the most vulnerable and how poorly we have prepared in this country for attacks or disasters of any kind.

You should be ashamed. As a citizen of a country that is treating its own in this way, I am.

Sincerely, me

===
Others have said all this better than I can. So my writing here is some sort of self-indulgent non-release of anger -- although I did send the above letter to its named recipient. I don't feel any better.