Generous Listening

The title comes from a Vox podcast interview with Jenny Odell, which also talks about Danah Boyd's notion of "context collapse".
To listen generously being the antidote to context collapse, which is happening on the internet and which can be tricky for those of us in micro-climates where complexity is already denigrated for being "philosophical" (for some people even working in higher ed, this word is at once categorically negative and deemed an appropriate [!] way to discard ideas that require work: some professionals apparently do not know the difference between technical schools and universities, which I do not write to belittle technical schools but to make a distinction).
Let me play the hypocrite and hyperbolize by saying: also disappointing are the number of people working in higher ed who would immediately discard those who do not agree with them as being stupid or crazy. Should it not be expected that an environment filled with people who have worked - at least - to form (and hopefully support) their opinion be by default an opinionated environment? (Because I agree it is unrealistic to expect for the motivations of everyone in the "academy" to be pure - and here I am being philosophical: ideally one departs from opinion to reach some form of more objective truth.)
I have been writing a Dada/surrealist-inspired manifesto to try to vent my frustrations creatively (entitled "Return to the Waking State of University") but every time I return to it and reread the first point (basically the one I made here), I think, that's probably all the manifesto needs and stop writing, though once I wrote number two about egos. I'd love to release it to crowd source and have it become a template for others to try to bring humour their situations...

Humour is good but not a panacea. Working on endurance helps. And also making the dedicated decision to stop worrying over the workplace. There can be so much negativity (I think what I actually mean is toxicity) which can even trickle down to the students who may become habituated at least temporarily to what David Epstein has called "wicked worlds" and 'act out' in ways that can hinder the progression of a class (sometimes; I usually find ways to bypass this a few weeks in).
A kind world, according to Epstein, is one where one knows the world and gets appropriate and timely feedback to assist with continued growth; a wicked world is one where the rules are not clear; feedback may be wrong; etc.
Given these prognoses (frustrations, wicked worlds, and related worries), one must be very clear in one's intentions to not fall prey to circumstance and to only answer provocative "calls" with goodness. Or, like in the akathist to Saint Nektarios of Aegina, to "Endur[e] hardships as a good soldier", "not entangle thyself in the affairs of this life", and "Refus[e] to speak one word in [one's] own defense" while "joyfully" committing to doing good.
Of course, perfection is distant from the realistic abilities of most of us - but the idea of renewed commitment to keeping the mind untangled from so much junk is helpful and even curative.
Like the anti-drug ads of the 90's, I am trying to remember to tell myself to "just say no!" to responding to small-mindedness in kind, or more accurately, to carrying the negativity of what I have heard home with me.
And to give an example of this in the art world, I will cite a rather (what was for me) unexpected example concerning the manufacture of the blackest black.
And a second, final example from the natural world: an account from a long-distance hike with some very astute reflections on humanity from Ryan "dirtmonger" Sylva, an example of which is quoted below, and which reminded me of a tactic used by French female explorer Sarah Marquis.

‘Hey man. I am sorry I upset you. Like I said, I didn’t know. Have a good evening.’ I turned and walked away, unphased in my stride, but agitated by this microcosm of fear I hear and see in America these days. I play the middle; the extremes in either direction just scream and shout and look for fights. Good luck with that, people. I’ll keep on walking along in this world. I am certain there’s more good than bad, more sane than psycho. The land is free but the people on it are not. Whether stricken emotionally, internally, or philosophically most of the time we set our own confines. ... I see their pretentious belief system solely based off fear and arrogance, anger. How can we connect, communicate, with so much anger infused into one person, let alone the impressionable folks around him? We severed our humanity with anger, with ideology. I find the irony in me identifying, or relating to a coyote. A varmint, a pest, unknown, killed off by folks who refuse to try to understand.

I - Thou

Let's invoke Shelley. In his "Defence of Poetry" he wrote that learning how to feel another's pain can aid the imagination to contribute to the greatest moral good (the highest political hope being the abolition of slavery).  
I, you, they, he writes, are mere grammatical markers essentially modifications of one mind, though the practise in seeing such connections is a practise, until it becomes a habit. It "tends to abolish the course of history" - it is timeless, rooted in the unchanging aspects of humanity, in case anyone has forgotten one of the paths to immortality. Time washes away even the imperfection of authors where they fail to reach the perfection of which they write - the failure to allow for such disparity is to lose sight of one's own faults (1921: 57). 
This ability to see beauty in something other, to see its relevance, is such a vital practise. I wrote about such 'relief' a long time ago, here. "Good" poetic writing restores order to the world, based on morals, Shelley writes - that kind of romantic imagining certainly seems distant today. But on the personal level, his sentiment has its relevance.
When one might feel like a carcass being devoured by so many thoughtless vultures, the mind can move away from those gory scenes of selfishness by seeking out other practises of healing, which may not be visible in the present scenes but that can be invoked, if one knows or remembers to call on them.
So the story goes. It has (obviously?) been a rough week in these parts, but I retain awe at the classical (not just Greek, also Chinese) rejuvenating and refreshing practise of returning to the font of literature: how is that not a treasure trove?

She descends from the soapbox, to write this week's

B/Logrolling

Other recipes I have made many times this summer:
Chipotle tahini sauce a great way to snack while avoiding processed foods
To make it from scratch, I make my own hot sauce (grilling tomatoes in the oven to avoid canned ones) - this is such a good hot sauce, it is hard to believe how simple it is to make
Nice and light eggplant parm (read: real eggplant parm, not breaded)

Why I am avoiding processed foods now: Have you ever heard of "cracking"? I hadn't either until I watched this (French) documentary. Wow. The process applies to foods now. The processed foods I ate most regularly were "bio" style. But now that I know about "cracking", and how the protein factor is obtained for those foods, I am making new efforts to home cook almost everything.

Another attack on the humanities. Yet again, a very educated person treats Plato as if Nietzsche had the last word. It is so tiring how trendy it is to submit the classics to reductionist gestures. I could write many pages on this but will make one point here. As if people don't understand what reading is. We are never finished reading the classics because the way we relate to them requires relating anew from the changing present. Yes, we do suspend our judgement to attempt to 'enter' the past, but what the past will mean to us and how we receive it will always be different - this is even true from within the limited scope of a single lifetime.

Speaking of history: Understanding religion in late imperial China from Columbia University's Asia for Educators

Apropos mention of acting (Brett) in last week's post: continued consideration of acting re. the individual vs. collective. To this end: a post on Hall, Fo, and Theatrics of Role and Story though I beg to differ on how method (Stanislavsky's approach to) acting is understood. It is very much an "I-thou" type acting and requires the actor to relate, in every 'beat' of dialogue, with their role. Similarly, through this very 'real' evocation (as the actor is calling up from their memory enough emotional vocabulary to make each 'beat' happen in real time - this is very taxing for the actor, who 'relives' the script every night), the audience is brought within a realm of introspection.
"Class wars" seem to efface this dimension of reality.

Two things I am thinking about how to include more thoughtfully in my classes: ethics and new practical skills (last year, it was a business proposal, this year, I am thinking about SEO...)

Ethics:
Daily ethical questions 
A Framework for Character Education in Schools
Ethical storytelling:
A more thorough primer
Another good link - active version of reference links: Concordia's toolbox; Ethics pdf; the Ethics Guidebook consent framework; resource for ethical practice in digital storytelling
Interested in this for so many reasons. One of which, an educational site with the declared purpose of promoting the "good" (ethical) in education, recently published a post in which backhanded, reductionist comments were made about not one but two cultures (in all of about six or seven words, at that). As always, it is the "circuitous route" that is most likely to include not what we want to hear or what is being said - but what we are not hearing. But once you hear, as Gadamer wrote, you cannot "hear away".

Blogger I'd love to meet at a dinner party (forgot this feature last week!): writes and produces the Canadian blog The Art of Doing Stuff - it was her well-written recent post on blogging that got me thinking about introducing SEO skills to my class this year. (I ought to practise her tips myself, but ... actually, there are advantages to being less visible and to amateurism that continue to suit me.)

Plogging Blogging

A central theme of my summer seems to be cleaning up. While I thought I had been reasonably free of superfluity, recent circumstantial challenges have revealed a lot that would benefit me by being removed. I feel unprecedented gratitude for the trials, for I see their direct correlation to opportunities for improvement. I had not been aware of how critical this was.
Plogging is a Swedish portmanteau, coined to describe a recent trend of jogging while picking up litter. I am comparing it with blogging because I wonder if this activity might also result in cleaner sections of the internet landscape, places where bees thrive - as opposed to the trash heaps that attract flies, who, as that spiritual tale warns, will seek the tiny piece of trash even in a landscape of flowers; bees, the opposite.
My thought here about plogging the blogging is to make a renewed attempt to the motion of blogging, with an added attempt to clean up my thinking (cf. para one, above). As I have written before, I think that blogging can be a virtuous activity.
A central topic of my blog is learning how to learn. I see this as a continued touchstone even now. Last year, I wondered about including management skills in my teaching, and did in fact develop this. It was enough that I had been open to this idea: circumstance itself brought certain pieces, through networked learning and collaboration, that allowed this to be developed. I can reaffirm, then, the thought I sometimes have to console myself when I feel that teaching is a task so far above my competencies/knowledge/skills (problems include how to reach all students when only meeting with a hundred of them once a week; the problem of knowledge itself - a topic I will shorthand here by referring to Hadot's brilliant consideration of Heraclitus' Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ - often translated (problematically) as 'nature loves to hide'). This consoling thought is that my ability to teach will always be wanting, so my main concern must be to not close doors to the learning of my students. My primary task is therefore to try to foster a love of learning, not quash it. To reward attempts. To acknowledge that a seed planted can suddenly be registered years after it was first planted.

I don't know if I will be able to get some momentum going again with blogging, but I hope I will. I think I might include an aggregated component, which I have benefited from on other blogs (e.g. Siris' evening notes). To this end, I will end this post with a short list of interesting links I have found. But not before sharing a paragraph that has helped me immensely with the fact that I have not had a break or holiday in years. This could be elaborated on but the spirit of it is in this post. I am still processing quite a bit. The spirit of this post is: some things are not up to us; what is up to us is how much cleaning up we are doing of that which is up to us. I've condensed the passage below, though the original is already wonderfully condensed, so that it would fit tidily into the desktop wallpaper I made for myself: 

EVERY DAY
You don't get weekends off.
No.
Here, there's no such thing as weekend.
Today, I'm putting the pressure on.
I'm on the attack.
I will get beat up, knocked down and drilled.
But I
will
not
STOP.
- Jocko Willink, Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual

There are many kinds of soldiers, and many kinds of cleaning up. To learn this requires more than one kind of learning. Learning how to learn is not only beneficial, it can also be a matter of survival. I think that this message is also delivered in Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One. Such as where he writes: “I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed.” To clean up is to find this flame that cultivates our fruitful continued growth.

Links of interest:
Aeon, "Atoms and Flat-Earth Ethics" on objectivity and overcoming commitments
Book Haven, Chris Fleming on the Tyranny of Cool Ideas
"If", Rudyard Kipling
NYR Daily "Orientalism: Then and Now"

Books of interest:
Living Dangerously, Ranulph Fiennes
The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll
(topic) doctrine of signatures
Aristippus of Cyrene
(topic) dialectical behavioural therapy
Organizational Trauma and Healing, Pat Vivian, Shana Hermann

Film:
Coyote Waites
All Passion Spent (1986)

Art:
Nick Brandt's Inherit the Dust
The Pine Trees screen (松林図 屏風, Shōrin-zu byōbu)
Gongshi decent enough explanation here (included because I put one in the images accompanying this blog post)
Préhistoire : le vertige du temps Entretien avec Rémi Labrusse
Au-dessus de tout  À propos de : Pierre-Henry Frangne, De l’alpinisme, Presses universitaires de Rennes
Prolific the Rapper x A Tribe Called Red - Black Snakes [edited]

Quotes:
Deng Xiaoping's, cross the river by feeling the stones. One stone was Shenzhen. (From one of the many YouTube videos about Shenzhen - I think it was WIRED's.)

Brushes: misprinted type. Gongshi png.

Forgo the Perfunctory

A conversation with a friend today revealed that I am not the only one thinking about how to rise above the dark concentration of same-old lines travelled in every day life. I don't mean the physical map of concentrated common routes walked in a city, but that is what I am picturing. I mean the quotidian lines of thought that are pursued, that become perfunctory.
What if, for example, instead of worrying about petty environments, one were to look past them? What if, instead of whinging about orders to work on mediocrity, one were to set about planning a strategy to implement a series of boundaries where one would not have to do such work? Such creativity - forging a way that is better in line with what one has to give (which can be decades in the making, requiring other work of its own) - requires extra work, but fulfilment is rarely presented on a silver platter. It has to be fought for. And in this battle, mistakes will be made. But while mistakes may lead to tough consequences, if one has already set off on the journey called Creative Learning, one will be left with something to learn from. This wouldn't be the case if one had done nothing.

As I was trying to think through several problems recently, I once again practised my favourite exercise of phrasing these problems as questions, which I then type into google. The results led me, albeit circuitously, to a business motivational speaker and an underwater diver. The former, Marcel Schwantes, speaks to human-centric management: a know thyself lateral approach to others. I would give a Creative Learning award to for Remaining Constructive Under Duress for the following (from here):

...every problem has the seeds of its own solution. You can find the answer to your problem if you look deeply enough into the problem itself. 

When things go wrong or are poorly managed, people get reactive, maybe even start to slap damning epithets onto peoples' backs, but one can maintain the vision that there is another way. And that there is a way out.
Diver Guillaume Néry (whose most recent fame is this breathtaking video that has transportive qualities) speaks (from 9:25) of the flurry of thoughts that begin to spin and intensify as he begins his descent to the depths of the ocean - in a description that seemed relatable enough to more general experiences of difficulty. He goes on to say that one can't control thoughts at that point: one shouldn't try to, "you have to let it happen; the more you try to control, the harder it is to manage". Once he lets go, he finds there is no need to breathe.

There has to be a letting go from the "perfunctory answer" of poorly-zoned quotidian thought if that deeper place, where wisdom lies, has a chance to be heard. In fact, I wonder if even mediocre chores are better accomplished once one has taken the plunge to this deeper place, that exists in a limbo between coming and going.
A long time ago, I saved to my phone what I found out today was a passage from Castanada who I have never read, so I have no idea how I found it, that resonates with this:

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path;  ... This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

(Full passage here.) The going through the bush, or into the bush reminds me of this 'coming and going' limbo that maybe I should call Tao. Néry's Tao is also tied to a going when he describes what happens on needing to return to the surface after a deep dive. It would be easy to panic, he says, because from those depths one can suddenly be overwhelmed by the desire to get to the surface. It would be easy to panic, but he says that instead of panicking, he looks straight ahead, never allowing himself to even picture himself at the surface, only looking at the line in front of him, in the present. In this way, time goes faster...
This seems equivalent to the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other approach to running. It really works.
What I have gathered together here are different lines of counsel and experiences that suggest that the way forwards may come from a temporary resignation of self from the flurry of unthinking narrative. This involves an important differentiation: some thoughts occur, and they go on and on, as if they make sense or are of use, but after following them through, one realises that they are a waste. This is unthinking narrative. Thoughtful narrative has a through line to a clearing, and is constructive.
To return to the problem: it has the seeds of its solution within it because if it is accepted (as opposed to denied, ignored), it leads to broad questions, which lead to a clearing of their own. The problem is entertaining: it is asking something of us we did not have before. As we look at it, we are also looking at ourselves, asking what we need to cultivate within in order to meet the needs of the seed. It asks us to grow with it. It is an invitation to forgo the perfunctory, the same old narratives. It allows us to imagine, if we dare, who we would like to become as we steward its growth.
If we care, we may be met with a flurry of resistance. But if we see it through...

something about mortality

It was a summer of grief. It was only recently that I realised the word to describe it. Actually, it was on reading a novel featuring grief - and when I saw that word, it was like a strange gift, staring out at me. Grief washes at you; it is a great tsunami and you choke, maybe almost die; but when it recedes, you realise it has left you with something, all those shells on the shore... And suddenly, all of the pettiness that piles up over the years has nothing on you; you are changed forever. You continue to mourn, but this mourning saves you from the more hollow pits, and as you stare into those voids (like of people trying to frustrate the growth of your life), you are left with gratitude. And grief. At the same time. But mostly gratitude for being given the chance to live through death.
Looking back, the dying during life was the hardest; when you are watching someone dying but don't quite realise it. I was also dying in my own way. So much nervousness, fear. Periods of not being able to communicate (when I have never had a problem with that before). Last weekend, it finally dawned on me that I needed to find my peace; this weekend, I began to find it: a "coming to terms".
It is strange how death 'finds you', reminiscent of that line in Rilke's "Archaic Torso": "for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life." 
My life choices have left me scraping by in a university job in an immediate professional environment where I have not felt valued, and definitely underpaid for the conscientious approach I take. I have no money to even go on vacation. But I can run. I run 50-60 miles per week, on average. And the last two runs have been such that I was able to fully gain strength from them: the beauty of the autumn trails, what more could one ask for in life? There was no lack.

But this very morning I was stopped by a woman who asked: I see you here often, running by; what's all of that for?! Health, I said. And are you healthy, she asked? I gave her a thumbs up, and ran on, momentarily cursing her for that look in her eyes when she asked the second question, and thinking, you in your fancy clothes clearly know nothing of Socrates and even less of that platitude, in mens sana in corpore sano; you are an example of what my doctor friend with a world-recognised patent explains as the kind of person unable to draw peace and strength from nature, so sad... Then I stopped, all of those interruptions to what I am doing with my life are just so much noise that can be tuned out - like tuning out a noisy fridge when trying to sleep at night.
I feel embarrassed by writing these things. They are personal like so much wash hanging out to dry. But I've been thinking recently about how necessary it is to bring the corporeal to communication; how quickly communication becomes a cloud of specious sophistry unless it is seen in concrete ends (some kind of telos), beginning from where we are (in our telo, or тѣло; body).
Subjects I have considered recently in these musings include the EU directive on plurilingualism (what I have to say about this as a lecturer - can we not talk about intellectual aptitudes/readiness related to higher proficiency?); how quick people are to enter 'political' debate without consideration of the problems of politics (without having read, at the very least, Aristotle: politics comes after consideration of virtue, morals, the potential for corruption of self); how little is understood about civics - so, people in cities walk their dogs on long leashes and lash out at people who trip over them; drive illegal buggies wherever they want; push past neighbours in buildings; etc. In other words: how can we, with wisdom, live together? Do we even know how to live with ourselves?
There can be phases of flailing. Are we able to find compassion for this? To find love for ourselves in our fallibility, our mortality. To know when to laugh it away. I've been a slow learner in this, but I intellectually understand that not every question is deserving of a serious answer. But sometimes, the gravest of the grave cedes life.

Breadth Work

I would love to share ideas and to be critiqued at work. But it is not that kind of environment. So instead, I torture myself by reading the works of authors from the past who I doubt I will ever live up to.
My experience at the educational institution where I work has been that though I inherited nothing, I am expected to give, and not say anything when my resources are poached - though that means needing to find something new to use. My view on this overall state of affairs is that I should only share some, not all, of what I have assembled. (Well, I think I actually would have spilt all my tools in the instance when I was asked to hand over sections of a course. I would have done so because in some respects I am about as advanced as a 4-year-old ripe only for board games "in which there is no strategy". Except I encountered a hostile heir, who was possibly even unable to take it all in. So in that case, I only passed some things on. Please note, what I am passing on here are merely carefully amassed resources, ranging from exercises, to expectations, to objectives, gathered out of necessity as I have found typical college handbooks to be seriously wanting. So I wish to stress that what I consider I possess is not actually my own, but rather what I have synthesised in order to pass on to students what I consider to be a full and working tool box.)
All of this to say that it is my assessment, since I am mostly self-taught in pedagogy, that I must therefore be wild and in need of serious scholastic grooming. But every now and again I come across resources that seem to spell out in neon that, even if I am untamed, I am on the right track.

One such orienting resource is the list published by Sophie Blumet guiding a study conducted with Howard Gardner (the Harvard educationalist) as to the parameters of a liberal arts education, which include:

• Working within and across scholarly disciplines;     
• Spanning the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural/physical sciences;     
• Engendering communication skills in various media;     
• Inculcating critical, discriminatory, and analytical abilities;     
• Acknowledging the importance of different perspectives;     
• Tackling big questions, with an eye toward continuing to pursue them; and     
• Reflecting on ways to contribute to society as a citizen.

It almost verbatim echoes the definition of a university education forwarded by Giambattista Vico in his speech addressed to students on the meaning of a university education entitled, "The Heroic Mind".
When I began teaching, at which time I desperately strove to imitate the kinds of classes I had taken at my Ivy League alma mater, before the age of the internet, and before I became clearer about pedagogy, I had perused Jacques Barzun's Simple and Direct, and retained from that book what I will shorthand as 'breadth of approach'. The Blumet/Garnder list above captures the gist of what I understood breadth to mean, even back then. I would like to point out the ubiquity of this breadth, conspicuous even in the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy, which falls short just where it fails to conceive of the telos of education as the formation of a good citizen.
This past week, I suddenly felt a need to revisit Barzun, and am astounded by just how much what he wrote is being reformulated by the contemporary educationalists that I try to keep up on. Barzun's breadth of approach is multidisciplinary, and includes an awareness of the political implications of thought. This should be straight forward to anyone - we all know it was to his possibly more famous colleague, Lionel Trilling.

Trilling writes that if politics is not understood as imagination and mind, imagination and mind will become a kind of politics we don't like. That kind of statement can only be made if one is attempting to gain a grasp of the bigger picture. Trying to see it requires asking bigger questions. As I mentioned, Gardner (in his recent work) is a proponent of the need to tackle big questions. One of his recent posts, asking, "Should we require all students to take philosophy?" ends by responding to attacks on philosophy as lacking practical knowledge by calling on its ability to ponder life's bigger questions in the best possible way.
I would add to that defense what I feel to be of burning importance at this time: the need to tell all students - regardless of their field of study - that philosophy, as conceived by Aristotle, has an ethical prerequisite involving exercises in discernment. Without this, no politics for anyone!
So, going back to Barzun, consider this: "And when the mind has grasped in several contexts the effect of circumstance, the nature of partisanship, the role of chance, and the influence of leaders and bunglers, the student of history who has discussed with others these potent imponderables may become not only a better judge of public policy and politicians, but also a more tolerant person." What a beautiful summary of how broad (so also historical), attentive reading can be an exercise in character building - or should I say character bildung (sorry, bad Humboldtian pun).
Another gem essay of Barzun's, which outlines another of the values on the Gardner list cited above, is entitled, "Math and Science are Liberal Arts".  It demonstrates through effective examples how basic compositional skills are needed by scientists if they are to get their point across. It also shows how the lack of common sense in the teaching of these subjects leads to their popular demise. It shows many interesting things that he says so effectively, summarising it does it a disservice.
And while comparing one's own capacities to those evinced in such works shows just how far one has yet to go, others would have educational goals narrowed at this time. For example, a green colleague who was asked to list the various ways in which a topic can be approached, claimed that any kind of list is off-putting, including those that serve as reminders of the topics of invention. Yet not one breath later this same person wanted a list where this would narrow down their job. So, the problem is not in lists but in the work of the responsibility of the freedom of having options.

Baring

"Life itself, which is a membership in the living world, is already an abundance," Wendell Berry writes in a lecture printed in The Way of Ignorance.
So much can take away from this abundance, such as that terrible movie screen that is also crammed with the victimising, materialistic, and ego-fuelled junk that poisons our minds, seas, and water tables. Speaking of that which is "victimising" is trauma, which "violates aspects of the person's self and world". Trauma is contagious. Among the syndromes listed as defining organizational trauma, Pat Vivian and Shana Hormann is "stress and anxiety contagion" (emphasis added). The traumatised can be better versed at multiplying destructive negativity than their vital talents.
But as a degree-bearing philologist (one who loves words), I task myself to improve articulacy (the necessary joints) to relate from the confusing temporal appearance to the abundance that is essential, and life-giving.

We are all naked to begin with - and under whatever clothes we do our social posturing in. What is essential can be reached through "baring"; through uncovering to reach the core of something.
Want has the potential to strip away, and so does trauma - if one can bear it, and hold out like an 'initiate of life': if one takes the leap of faith into that which is life-bearing. The alternative is to believe in destruction as a terminal inevitability. In that context, consider this phrase: "a smile, an inheritance, and laughter is a gift."

Who has not felt the sweet release from the gerbil-wheel of depressive thought?  A single smile, help along the trail. Life is like a thru-hike. Or, an endurance run. What I'm trying to say is that we pick our destinations. In other words, whether we accept responsibility for it or not, our actions demonstrate which destination we serve. (Yes, I am referencing Aristotelian τέλος.)

Many times, because of the glut in which we live, if we are not facing hardship, we need to impose on ourselves some form of austerity to reach the essential. This is why people choose thru-hikes. Stripping away the bells and whistles that distract us, we can better appreciate that which is already abundant in this life, like just how beautiful it is to be warmed by the sun (...after a cold night out at camp). Read about a much more compelling experience of the same, along the Altiplano Traverse, here (by Ryan "Dirtmonger" Sylva; it's his quote about the smile, above).
But other times, sickness and injury strip us down to the same result (hear one such account here). Personally, I am coming out of a summer filled with myriad traumas, with two ongoing, and feel a great need to reconfirm the kind of destination I want to be headed towards. I discovered (again - it's funny how much amnesia can occur, for weeks even, until the nervous system calms down) that one can even feel abandoned in hard times. This isn't to say that abandonment is real. But...we can make it real, if we don't watch out. Anyone who doesn't know what I am talking about should count their blessings.

While I don't have the luxury to go where I will, I run long distance (my typical run is over half a marathon, so I can get to the forest and lift up my eyes - I reference the motto of my first boarding school, from Psalm 121). As much as I would love to quit my job (which gives me more and more work, and less and less pay), I will instead endure it a little longer, to gain better eyes for the abundance that life already is.
There is nothing like being told you will get help at work and instead being given a helper who not only lacks basic training (an assistant with a degree in politics who doesn't know what rhetoric is!) but who is also resistant to learning, and then going for a 26K jaunt in nature and being bathed by tree upon tree, casting their fiery shadows upon you, and forgetting your worries in that light show... The random willow in the little park just means so much more when it weeps for you.

Saint Nikolaj Zicki is said to have valued his days of imprisonment in Dachau above all else, for it is there where a simple ray of sunlight meant the most to him.
It is interesting how someone whose life was spiritually rich also benefitted from a baring: a release from 'things'; situation. 

I hunt for the golden stag.

You may smile my friends, but I pursue the vision that eludes me.

I run across hills and dales, I wander through nameless lands, because I am hunting for the golden stag. 

You come and buy in the market and go back to your homes laden with goods, but the spell of the homeless winds has touched me I know not when and where.

I have no care in my heart; all my belongings, I have left far behind me. 

(from Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener, 69)

Image (of painting) source: Pier Fracesco Mola "Oriental Warrior" wikimediacommons.

To my adolescent imagination, when I first saw this painting in the Louvre, I thought, this is someone who's hunting for the golden stag. His eyes are lifted (Ps.121); at least, aimed for more distant goals.
He's always looked to me like a janissary, though it bewilders me (I now refer to the definition at that link) how someone who is kidnapped "willingly" does anything.

Gravitas and Caricatures in Education

Not since the daringly personal and narrative-based entry to serious study in The Anguish of Snails (blogged of here) have I been able to fathom an entryway into an other type of academic writing. But listening to a Practical Backpacking podcast, episode 51 with Kolby "Condor" Kirk, brought me to a slower world, where there is time and space to allow connections and meaning to emerge organically and courageously, returning me to the idea of how to approach academic writing organically and daringly. Kirk is a long-distance, not thru-, hiker, who is known for his journalling which came to light via a Muir project video. I was intrigued that a man journals and was particularly drawn in by the narrative of someone who consciously felt the trials of the race of life around him, but has literally stood still for long enough in the midst of that to find his own peace replete with butterflies landing on him. The culmination of listening to Kirk, and following up on a song he mentioned about not caring about winning anymore and further interviews with him, was catching a glimmer of a space where work gets realised, but in so much of a kinder way, so much more of a humane way. In other words, the question that comes to mind for academe from the context of the interview (and Snails) is: can knowledge be spoken of by someone who sees their own human fallibility? The mouth speaking, after all, is on one such fallible human body. The narrative, therefore, if it is "fitting" (kairos! - here, to the measure of man), begins with uncomfortable caricatures of us, like the cartoonish figures in Plato's dialogues, though we may be striving to learn something more than ourselves. In other words, too, how wont we are to run away with ourselves. How hard it is to remain centered within, say, our adolescent mistakes, our gaffes (even if not in the workplace), wherever we fall short in the race or competition, and yet still be able to deliver something seriously, with gravitas.

Is it maybe the overall historical awareness of human fallibility (in a general sense, I think few individuals can handle it on a more personal level) - the sense of "historic perspectivism" or "reflective historiography" Auerbach says we have "inherited" - that has led to the urge to change pedagogy to be less grave; to also be less certain - so, therefore, devoid of anything to be learned by rote: that 'deserving' of learning being dynamic and always shifting (capricious). And in the mean time, teachers are encouraged to put the focus of class on the student, who is to be given "autonomy" in learning.
I actually subscribe in many instances to such pedagogy - but still think that some subjects need rote, like when learning verb declensions. Or dates! Etc. I think that too much focus on the student can then disable the student, as when, for example, the student learns to pursue only what is within range or likeable to them - where the student does not learn discipline, and the ability to absorb something far beyond their interests: that 'suspension of disbelief' that allows a totally different foundation to be laid, alongside other existing foundations, to create true breadth.

Discipline in the modern world is now mostly learned through illness: when we have to, say for example, laoriously peel and grate beets daily for health reasons. Suddenly, the daily discipline is possible, whereas before, it was not, it was only possible to grab something from the bakery.
So, all this to say that there is a place for the graveness of gravitas, obviously, in life (which the academy should ultimately be a lover and servant of), but also a place for our goofy, affinity-driven caricatures - so that balance between the two is an art.
Going back to modern pedagogy, many celebrate it (again, I subscribe to some of its practices), but perhaps we might want to sober up for a moment and remember Auerbach's warning that just at this time when we are so historically aware, we are also threatened by an "ahistorical system of education". For example, I have a few very smart students who cannot see the past without evaluating it in terms of more present concerns. They write very analytical papers, but papers that cannot extend 'suspension of disbelief' to enter into a time of different values. I see this as intellectual impoverishment, and I see it increasing. Learner autonomy cannot really fix that; it needs correctional intervention, of the kind: what you have written is indeed analytical, but can you extend your analysis further to consider looking at the subject from the vantage point of...? 

I have to admit that I was very excited to read about a course in Berkeley that employed a system of peer evaluation, but thought to myself that I would not be able to employ such a system every year: some years, there are not enough students of the kind who "raise the level of conversation" (to borrow a phrase from the poet O'Donohue). I think peer evaluation could quickly diminish into a pool of mediocrity. That said... there are years when that happens anyway: no matter how much one makes adaptations and modifications to content and delivery to try to engage students, they mostly come away with the bare minimum. And such years, one wastes too much time and energy.
So, it is exciting to read about different pedagogies because many of them might be kinder solutions to the real problems that face us in the classroom today. Kinder to teachers and to students. If one is facing a class of average students, so average that not even one or two more motivated peers spark competition and engagement, then the teaching problem is not top-down (delivernig maximum content and engaging students to meet it) but bottom-up (trying to begin with the students to get them to take a single step from where they are). In the latter case, I find myself trying to figure out, OK, so if there is one thing I want students to take from this course, what is it? I think in my class that has a historical component, that single thing is simply: can the student imagine at least one feature of this time that is not like our own, and understand it as such a distinction? (Of course the 'minimum list' is longer; but the distillation is real.)
More advanced classes are less rigorous in the sense that there is more that can be explored; there is a choice of several combinations that would be adequate. And that is where there is joy: some degree of mastery, some degree of flexibility. Everything before that is the stepping stone to that.
Stepping stones...

I'll try to bring this post to a close by bringing it back to the Kirk interview. He speaks of the importance of being not going somewhere, yet endurance as the means to reach those points of being, as it begins from that point where the journey seems too hard, where people extrapolate how much more the remaining journey will hurt based on pain experienced thus far and want to give up, when instead they should realise that they are getting stronger and better. It is clear why so many pedagogies focus on growth. But tied in with growth are all kinds of other things needing consideration, including even belief. Or even love of the world, and the question of how to love it... Auerbach once quoted Hugo of St. Victor in giving his answer: "...he is perfect to whom the entire world is a foreign land". One loves the world if one is endowed with the love of the traveller, but with the gravitas of being the student of the lands. There is a place for this human love in academic writing - Auerbach has demonstrated this. Some pedagogy also emphasizes this by showing the teacher as not being the sole gatekeeper to knowledge. And a final note to this: isn't it a good thing that this pedagogy has come to popularity at exactly the time when students can see, on the internet, that teachers are not gatekeepers to knowledge? But, and the internet does not teach this, how to instill in average students, bent on easiest routes and minimal engagement, discipline and textual apparatus?

A Better Environment

I have been asked to translate a work from French called Testament of the Ego, a focused, poetic meditation on how the ego would divorce one from the freeflow play of life, communication with what the author calls the Holy Spirit, which resides within us (actually, he writes - the Holy Spirit is also us). It is a short work, as so many of the best works are; short enough to contain something essential, not long enough to lose it. It is a gentle appeal to how our reason, the reason of the ego, can reason us out of the more tender and profound moments of life. The "testament" is written as the author seeks to finally release this ego. I find myself drawn back to the book, though it makes me a little bit afraid, just like Western Buddhism makes me afraid - the book seems somhow Buddhist - in that I think the Western approach to these worldviews take them too literally. And yet. The author does not, as there is a humour that pervades the book, even when it is most serious. I don't know how I will find the time to translate it, but as I said, I feel drawn to return to read it whenever I have time. And tonight, as I was doing the housework, I heard a phrase on a podcast that reminded me of the book, Rebecca Solnit's idea that "people in this century ... seem to love certainty more than hope".

The idea that we love certainty more than hope reminded me of the Testament plea: that we once and for all leave the empty reasoning of the ego for a life that unfolds - in unexpected ways - only in the present (I do the book a disservice by shorthanding in this way).
Not having heard of Solnit before the podcast, so not knowing of the larger context of her writing, I did admire how she spoke in this instance of libelous clichés that emerge from the media, and how they keep some people from witnessing the manifestations of hope and possibly fruitful change that can emerge even out of disaster.

... all the clichés [of] ... how we revert to our savage, social-Darwinist nature, were aired [in New Orleans during Katrina]. And ... all the major news outlets ... were the unindicted co-conspirators ... They start publishing all this garbage about how there’s mass killings in the Superdome. And that was just believed so much that the Federal Emergency Management Agency sends a gigantic tractor-trailer refrigerated truck to get what turns out to be six bodies, not the 200 that are supposed to be there.

There’s all these stories that people are shooting at helicopters, so you can’t have helicopter rescues [but who would shoot at helicopters during a time of need - she asks in the unedited interview]. And so they mount a campaign, not to treat suffering human beings and bring them resources, but to reconquer the city. ... And it’s like, that is not a humanitarian effort. M16s are not how you help that grandmother dying on the roof. And some of those grandmothers died.  And so people were not a victim of a hurricane, they were a victim of vicious stories ... And what’s interesting is that a lot of people believe those stories. And we often treat stories like they’re very trivial, like they’re story hour for kids or — but people live and die by stories.

Stories. The stories that kill us could be stories of our own making, according to the author of Testament. So, like that author, Solnit is making an appeal to another kind of narrative for life, choosing to talk about:

... the unpredictability of our lives and that ground for hope ... — that we don’t know what forces are at work, what — who and what is going to appear, what thing we may not have even noticed or may have discounted that will become a tremendous force in our lives. 

People in this culture love certainty so much, and they seem to love certainty more than hope, which is why they often seize on these really bitter, despondent narratives that are — they know exactly what’s going to happen. And that certainty just seems so tragic to me. I want people to tell more complex stories and to acknowledge that sometimes we win, and that there are these openings.

One example of an opening, of the "seeds we might now be planting whose harvest will come at some unpredictable moment" is the climate movement, which she explains now has energy generation options. I was actually planning on writing about nature in this post, before I heard this interview, which brought associations with Testament. Yet the environment is very much related here; even Solnit describes it at the beginning of the interview as a refuge that both feeds and encourages. I definitely feel that when I go out for a run, and this is why I need to run so far, to see more of the plants and animals that feed and encourage. Today, as I slip-slid on a minor muddy forest trail, I suddenly heard a tap-tappp-tap, looked up, and saw the red breast of a woodpecker, on a bare tree. Whatever my thoughts may have been at that moment, about the uncertain day ahead of me, I was able to pause, and to witness, beautiful other forms, doing other things, finding food where I saw only barrenness.

This nature, this nature that seems ever more infringed upon. That I feel for, every time I see more cement being laid over it.
In Hong Kong recently, a general's son, now retired, asked whether the mainlanders would respect the preserved areas (there is a stretch of coast, for example, that is a UNESCO-protected geopark: in about a kilometre, you can see eight totally different kinds of volcanic rock formations). He noted that those freshly-departed from village life are always in a hurry to literally pave it over. I could not help but think of how it is the same in Europe. I remember in my Angers (France) college, the farm boys who partied their families farms away. But, Testament would say, these are the reasonings of an ego that wants to live, so continues to provide intricate reasonings, involving us. But, Solnit would say, look for the openings.
Solnit may be relatable for one more reason: her pursuit of humour and depersonalised questioning. She notes [in the unedited interview] how in one interview, a host took a reductionist approach to her work, and focused an attack against her on a personal level. Her response to this was that her host had asked her a "closed question" (according to which there is only one right answer), and that she should have responded with a "Rabbinical" question - a question to a question, which would put the focus back on the interlocutor. She notes she was successful at this once, where again her work was reduced (being called her whining about suffering from the injustices of humanity), so she turned to the audience and asked, have you ever felt the injustices of humanity?, which, she says, thanks partly to her American accent delivered to a British audience, got her a laugh.
Testament was written on a deathbed. But I hope that its sentiment, one shared by others like Solnit, will bring some of us and the space around us to life.

"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers"

I recently watched the televised version of J. B. Priestley's Summer Day's Dream, starring John Gielgud, which was thoroughly enjoyable both as a piece and for its performance. It is an example of art that remains timely long after the time of its production. For example, it speaks to the temptations of materialism and the problems of vested interests that attempt to bury the good life:
"It all ends in other people's confusion and  misery in a hopeless muddle of values. If you want to throw your life away for the sake of plastic ash-trays, that's your affair" (1). "You cant go shopping for a good life. You have to live it." (2) This is difficult because, "There is an old tried pattern, a faded map offering some chance of happiness, and still they pay men to rule thick hues across it." (3)

The play reminded me a lot of Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much With Us" - and even addresses the problem of poetry.
Stephen: There was a time when I  didn't care for [poetry].
Rosalie: What was wrong with you?
Stephen: I think I was ill. Most of us were. But l didn't know it.
Rosalie: But now you're all right.
Stephen: Yes — except that I'm very old.
If we feel that we, too, are too old, we ought to abide by Rosalie's diagnosis, that it is possible for "something lost and innocent" to be about us, "like a sort of old baby puzzled but still hopeful". (4)

But ultimately the point of the film is in the 'poetry'; whether one sees this "late and soon", whether one can see release to the "getting and spending" Wordsworth warned of, whether one has the vision to see through the hopeless vision of the hopeless muddle of values in order to attain the timeless poetry of the good life ("For what can there be above the man who rises above fortune?" asks Seneca, who then cites "the cry of the greatest poets" for us to "live right now ... 'If you don't seize the day, it slips away'" [5]). Lest you think I am reading classical studies into the play, compare what are perhaps the most famous lines of the play with lines by Seneca:
Stephen: Take it easy. I spent more than half my life,  when I ought to have been enjoying myself, arguing and planning and  running round like a maniac, all to sell a lot of things to people I  didn’t know so that I could buy a lot of things I never had time to use.  Sheer lunacy. And it took nothing less than an atom bomb to blow me out of it. (6)
Seneca: "Calculate how much of your time has been taken up by a moneylender,  how much by a mistress, how much by a patron, how much by a client, how much in arguing with your wife, in punishing your slaves, in  running about the city on social duties. Add to your calculations the  illnesses that we've inflicted on ourselves, and also the time that has  lain idle: you'll see that you've fewer years than you count. Look back and recall when you were ever sure of your purpose; how few days turned out as you'd intended; when you were ever at your own disposal; when your face showed its own expression; when your mind was free from disturbance; what accomplishment you can claim in such a long life; how many have plundered your existence without your being aware of what you were losing; how much time has been  lost to groundless anguish, foolish pleasure, greedy desire, the charms  of society; how little is left to you from your own store of time. You'll  come to realize that you're dying before your time." (7)

An Either Scholarly or Artistic Picture

To hold questions open, to be able to remain with the uncomfortable questions in one's various quests, can bring answers, sometimes suddenly, like those waves that hide then reveal trails of jewels of shells on the shore. Questions can be at once typological and personal, so can be answered by gazing at what other people retain from the movement of their lives. What follows is a personal anecdote on this theme.
While I was reading about deserts, still (dryly?!) afflicted by the concerns of my previous post, I came to a blog that set out its modus operandi as "either scholarly or artistic". Those words are answers to an uncomfortable question, elucidating two poles that are at battle within me: pedantic methodology vs. the freedom and freedom of application of craft in the exploration of subjects. In those two simple words, are two different approaches - can we say that one is more valid than the other? Scholasticism can be limited by the shortsightedness of the historical situation or variations on Baconian idols; art, by whim and fantasy. But both have the potential to seek something true and meaningful about the lived experience.

As I continued to reflect on this blog that I found (The Southwest Journal), I marvelled at how much of myself and how many of my own questions that I had been uncomfortably carrying around seemed to be dwelling there - that is, beyond the "scholarly or artistic".
For example, what is the point of the scholarly or artistic, if we do not know what it is for? Pedagogy teaches that where learning is concerned, one of the first problems is determining an end-point to the journey is to be. In other words, teachers must have some idea of what they want students to have acquired along the way of a lecture series: a fair teacher not only knows what will be "wanted of" the student, but will make this explicitly clear, over and over again. So, what is the point of the scholasticism and art?

... The noble life [in the] life of the common, day-to-day struggles that everyone faces, ... [which] is only gained through perseverance, inner strength, and the determination to build the character that comes with playing the long game. It is the life-long devotion and perseverance to unglamorous actions that develop into stewardship for that which lies before us in daily life. As Wendell Berry said, “It may, in some ways, be easier to be Samson than to be a good husband or wife for 50 years.”

... The noble life has been ignored, I think, because it’s not a shiny object; it does not end in a spectacular singular event. It is not a candle burning at both ends. It has the unfortunate commodity of being personal and slow, built on values not easily measurable or even visible. The noble life unfurls behind the man or woman living it where understanding requires knowing the story, seeing with different eyes, and valuing the slow and steady march of time, for that is what it takes to grow into such a life. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. You cannot save the land apart from the people or the people apart from the land (Wendell Berry).

This was written by GSH, here. In another post, she writes, "Survival happens through compromise not through hard lines and competition. Compromise is how you don’t lose it all."

The point to scholasticism and art, in this iteration, is character building and other people. Indeed, it is through other people that the very seeds for this post were spotted.
Just as invisible and uncomfortable questions can inform the outcome of one's daily thoughtful desert wanderings, keeping an eye on character building and the importance of others can inform the effect a life has...
... if one can handle the discomfort. To hold open space for other people is uncomfortable; they are unpredictable and will require ever-newly-invented responses, testing one's resolve and intentions (does one really care about others in practice, or only in theory?) There will be times one will have to face an unfortunate image of oneself, when one fails to choose the right response in the moment to unpredictable interlocutors. But there is a bigger picture - which can be intuited and incorporated into the picture of one's own life, if one has the scholastic or artistic inclination to grasp it.

Brush: misprinted type.

What Is My Problem? (... with teaching extracts)

This post has been updated. In teaching, I struggle with which texts to assign: more fruitful, complex texts (like speeches by Cicero or Demosthenes, or Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator") can lead to drops in attendance and participation, but less dense ones (like select think pieces from, say, The Atlantic or The Millions) seem to reinforce the common view held by 20-year-olds that they pretty much know it all. It is a problem when students do not participate because if they bring nothing to the conversation, there is nothing to tie the material to, to make it relevant. Some years, I almost exclusively use excerpts from the more complex texts - if only inclusive of a few non-sugar coated ones, but I maintain that this method is rife with dangers, which may or may not have been indirectly apparent in my last post, which drew only on excerpts.
To use an excerpt is to take on the responsibility of filling in the context of what the excerpt was cut out of. This not only includes explaining parts of the text that surrounded the excerpt, but also explicating related schools of thought, historical details and precedents, specific references, etc. This is particularly challenging where it cannot be assumed that there is a shared 'cultural language' to begin with - which means that I might not know how important it is to emphasise certain points, or might not remember to point things out that I take for granted.
It may be because of these problems that I am increasingly interested in "the rudimentary" - and doubtful of whether I have a sound enough mastery of the basics: to use an example mentioned above, I might forget to explain points I have long assimilated and internalised.
There is also the problem of what "knowledge" is - for example, how can one claim to know a book when second, third readings bring elucidation of ideas one failed to see or retain the first time? Or, when further readings bring entirely new meaning? Such basic and common experiences are further warnings of the inadequacy of the outline.
Since initially publishing this post, it became clearer that perhaps the ultimate problem is that, as the late and great D. G. Myers wrote, "nothing is considered essential knowledge" in academe today; he wrote that he could not expect "any common background knowledge, not even in English majors". Among the enlightening comments to that post, is a link to another blog post, which presents a brief, invaluable exploration of the history of the "fragmentation of the curriculum". The author cites Barzun's scepticism of the trend to shop for majors, and Santayana's lament that "in the Harvard of my day we had heard a little of everything, and nobody really knew his Latin or knew his Bible."

 

In Auerbach's his famous essay on "Philology and 'Weltliteratur'", he describes the problem of achieving "synthesis" - which, I might add, is similar to the outline, or summary, in its concern for a vision of the whole. Synthesis is difficult because of the problem of the uncertainty of what is truly known of the past, as well as the challenges of grasping "the conditions under which ... literature developed", which includes religion, philosophy, politics, etc. He explains the "problematic and the ordering categories" of literature by writing: "Most of them are too abstract and ambiguous, and frequently they have too private a slant. They confirm a temptation to which neophytes (and acolytes) are frequently inclined to submit: the desire to master a great mass of material through the introduction of hypostasized, abstract concepts of order".
The pitfalls of abstracted overviews is, as suggested above, no new concern. I think it is also reflected in the phrase non multa legere sed multum, which I will poorly render as: read not many but much. If the meaning of this phrase is not immediately apparent, I think it is rather well illustrated by the reading habits of A. W. Verall (in the foreword to his Collected Literary Essays: Classical and Modern, eds. M. A. Bayfield and J. D. Duff):

"For mere information he did not care overmuch, he preferred multum legere potius quam multa. What he asked for from serious books was nutriment, and this he got better (if I may pursue the horrid metaphor) by repeated mastication than by the hasty omnivorous feeding which makes assimilation impossible."

There are no shortcuts in learning or teaching. That is, if we care about knowledge and learning.
To return to my initial ramblings in this post: "select think pieces" offer immediate relevance to students, the familiar, the contemporary. This is important if one wishes to reach a potential audience at the crossroads between what listeners can actually apply on their journey beginning from where they are at present and more distant horizons. This crossroads represents part of the mystery of learning, as its coordinates will always be moving where there is thought.
Horizons to be striven towards can be afforded through rich history and rhetoric. I was about to add theory to that list, but after having tried to teach it alongside the former two, I cannot claim that it is as rich. Even theorists reach towards Plato, or Homer... Distant contextual horizons are important, but so is where we are standing, in more practical and immediate terms.
So the problem is how to encourage an orientation towards horizons, for students to embark on their own Odysseys. One hopes the journeys are informed, for what use is travel in the wilderness if one knows nothing of the elements or navigation (important even today). Teaching navigation through overview-courses based on extracts seems reasonable because extracts are short but deep enough to encourage star gazing and the connection to greater coordinates. But teaching via extracts is also riddled with problems. That's my problem.
And why I feel the burden of bussardes - I sometimes feel the fear of being a bussard myself (one responsible for teaching!), even though that fear is more a fallacy than a reasonable assessment. Such reactionary thinking on my part stems from my lacking proper mentors, and critical stance towards the status quo. I will illustrate what I mean by this.
In teaching composition, I found I was dissatisfied with the handbooks, readers, etc., on the topic and found I had to compile my own selection of instruction from various sources (for example, to describe essays, as so many "college handbooks" do, as "narrative", "descriptive", etc. is ridiculous, as most good essays combine these "types"; by contrast, teaching composition via rhetoric, where those same "types" are assembled under "invention" is far more constructive). But this very illustration reveals my problem: I do not have a degree in the classics: can I be sure that my occasional ("excerpted") references to classical oratory are accurate? One needs to be guided in such things by specialists. I of course make an attempt to research into what I teach, and should add that I truly enjoy the opportunity of taking a broad approach that is perhaps characteristic of a "core" approach to the humanities, but I am just trying to articulate here what I think are some of the problems of this approach.

Photo of a bee-eater, not a bussard. 

Brush: misprinted type.