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Image from www.nickagin.com
Illustration by Leslie Herman

The viral post on Huff Post Education, “Message to my Freshman Students,” really got to me, and not in a good way. As an educator, it’s easy to blame a lack of learning on the students, but it’s more honest to carry some of it ourselves. Dr. Parsons’ dualism, and tenured arrogance struck a nerve. I am not saying there aren’t major issues with student behavior and responsibility, but like most ancient institutions, universities have to adapt to the reality of the modern world in order to thrive. I don’t have all the answers for how to do that, but it is NOT by listening to the advice of gentlemen, like the one I am responding to.

This blog is definitely out of the norm for my usual postings, but I hope you will bear with me. I feel so strongly about this professor’s “Message to My Freshman Students,” that I simply must respond, publicly and passionately, to his myopic vision. As high school graduation nears, I am afraid that too many well-meaning elders, whether they are parents, principals, or teachers, will forward his speech to their college-bound graduates, as an indication of what they can expect next fall. I surely hope they are mistaken, though I am a little discouraged by the 35k Facebook shares it’s garnered. But truly, it’s been my experience that Dr. Parsons’ perspective is that of a waning number of professors whose extended time in their Ivory Towers has led to a rather distorted view of their profession.

The first half of his speech is dedicated to encouraging his young students to take responsibility for their own learning. In order to pass, they have to show up for class, pay attention, listen carefully, do the reading, and complete the assignments, on time and well. I agree 100%. Students are responsible for their own learning and the freshman year usually presents some challenges in that arena. However, he also makes it very clear that he is not their “teacher,” someone whose “job is to make sure that you learn.” He is their professor and as such, he feels “It is no part of my job to make you learn.” Furthermore, “I have no obligation whatsoever to make sure that you pass or make any particular grade at all,” only “to lead you to the fountain of knowledge.”

This is where Dr. Parsons and I part ways.

He says nothing about a drinking vessel, a cupped hand, or the accessibility of the water in that fountain, but, Parsons magnanimously concedes, “Whether you drink deeply or only gargle is entirely up to you.” All of his wisdom can be yours, if you simply listen to him lecture you. Listen is the operative word. Listen carefully, critically and comprehensively, even if you have never been taught to listen in this way before. Parsons is a self-proclaimed, old-fashioned, “chalk and talk” man, more comfortable hearing the sound of his own voice than that of his ill-prepared and entitled students. Although that may sound harsh, I can sympathize with his point. Why not let the smartest person in the room do all of the talking?

Clearly, because it doesn’t work. It isn’t how his new students have learned for the first twelve years of their education. It isn’t how many students learn best, if at all. It is rarely the most effective way to deliver significant, but difficult information to anyone. Working at a university doesn’t give anyone a pass on keeping up with current pedagogy, or at least it shouldn’t. Parsons dismisses the constructive criticism and classroom coaching he’s been exposed to by calling it “Hogwash!”

Dr. Parsons is very clear about his loyalty to the ancient traditions of academia: “I have absorbed deeply the norms and values of an ancient academic culture and they are now a part of me.” Students, who are newcomers to this strange and exacting culture, need to get on board right away. Difficulty in assimilating is the fault of the immigrant, obviously, and few concessions should be made. He sees no need to update, or improve academia’s ancient methods, even though we no longer live in the ancient world. The “fountain of knowledge” he so generously offers, once students have paid their ever higher and less affordable tuition, can be found for free in the library, on the internet, in the form of MOOC, in podcasts, (like the excellent, philosophical The Partially Examined Life), and cheaply through used books and textbooks on Amazon.

Parsons’ attitude illustrates why higher education is coming under such fire these days. More and more young people and their parents are questioning whether to take on a huge amount of debt to pay for a liberal arts degree. The bottom line is that for a university education to be of value (beyond the certificate), professors have to be a “value-added” proposition. They cannot merely sit like disembodied heads on thrones, unaccountable for the young heads that roll around them. I can think of no other position where an educator (or any employee for that matter) can state, “I am not held responsible for your failures. On the contrary, I get paid the same whether you get an ‘F’ or an ‘A.’”

Therein lies the problem.

In Dr. Parsons’ mind, professors are paid to know what they know, and write about it, not to ease the path of the young women and men who find themselves struggling in his Introduction to Philosophy course, a subject matter that Parsons’ himself calls, “an abstruse and difficult field… [full of] seemingly arcane and incomprehensible topics.” Fortunately, I believe most professors are far less cavalier with the joint contributions they are asked to make to both their field of study and the education of the next generation.

I understand Parsons’ frustration with unprepared and immature freshman. I’ve taught them off and on for the last twenty years, and encountered much of the behavior he points out, but I suspect it is his own ego and sense of entitlement that is driving the second half of his essay. Ironically, it is actually that kind of ego and entitlement that drove me away from an academic career many years ago. By the time I finished graduate school at the age of twenty-three, with a 100+ page master’s thesis under my belt, I knew the academic party line and I wanted no part of it. Though crude, I called it mental masturbation. Hopefully it’s changing, but it said in essence, live in your head. Specialize; know more and more about less and less, and publish for your peers, not the public. Parsons actually summed it up beautifully in another essay when he wrote, “The more you learn, the better it is. There is no such thing as too much knowledge.”

Dr. Parsons, I respectfully disagree.

Knowledge is valuable and necessary. I have pursued my natural curiosity all of my life and education is a priority in my home, but there is such a thing as too much knowledge. It becomes too much when we extol intellectual knowledge while denigrating other types of knowing, and when we privilege people who are “in the know,” over those who aren’t. It becomes too much when what we know becomes more important than who we are and how we treat others. Knowledge, as you know, is transcendent when it is used to elevate our common humanity, but can be dangerous when it becomes an end in and of itself.

So my speech for college freshman shares the same premise as Dr. Parsons’. My main advice to them would be to step up their learning game and take responsibility for their education, but the difference is that I believe I have a responsibility too. As the “educated” one, I have something of value, something a majority of my students want: knowledge, practical skills and application. I also have a job description and it is not simply to be a “lecturer,” although that is still, ironically, the archaic title used by some universities for their teaching professionals. My job requires me to inspire, engage and ultimately educate my students to the best of both of our abilities.

Despite my many objections to Dr. Parsons’ arrogant delivery, we do agree on a final point as well. The last line in his speech is this: “For your professor, a course is an opportunity for you to make your world richer and yourself stronger.” Amen to that, Professor, just don’t forget that the opportunity is yours as well.

Ouch!
Ouch!                                                            by Nickagin.com

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January 1, 2012

As this day approached, I began to pore over my thoughts and memories about January “Ones” from the past – events, people, resolutions, and if I am honest, the occasional hangover. But no matter how hard I thought about it, nothing significant was coming to mind.

I might have written about my lukewarm feelings towards New Year’s Resolutions, which might be due to my seeming inability to keep them. I decided that would be a subject better kept until late February or March, when I typically get around to turning over any new leaves that might want to sprout.

I could have written about my most memorable New Year’s Eve nights, but that would have been embarrassing, since most of them involve a bunch of little girls, banging our mother’s pots and pans with wooden spoons just before we passed out at 12:01. Fun? Yes. Engaging in print? Probably not.

Perhaps I should have written about the neighborhood party we attended last night, where middle-aged mothers rocked out to Just Dance 3 on the Wii system, thinking we were still in our prime, but that might have just sounded like déjà vu to many of you.

So I gave up and let it go, hoping that next year, I would have something insightful to say about the cosmic passing of one year into another.

But after our late night out, Tim, Molly and I had an early morning drive to Huntington Beach ahead of us today. As you can imagine, the roads were fairly quiet, as the sun rose on this New Year’s morning. The fog rolled in and out as we crossed the lagoons in Del Mar and hugged the rocky coast for most of our 90-mile drive. Molly, still in her feety jammies, had buried her head in her pillow with her pink blanky protecting her from the unwanted morning sun. Tim reclined his seat back and vetoed any music with too much bass, or vocals.  Left to my own devices, I turned on my favorite NPR station and listened to an interview with singer-songwriter Ryan Adams.

After a long period of non-productivity, Adams shared how hard he worked at completing his most recent album, including an exercise he called “Stacks.” Alone in his office, he would sit between two stacks of books, one on his right and one on his left. On any given day, he would go back and forth between the two stacks of books, randomly reading lines, trying to make a connection between one side and another, with himself as the conduit.

Tim scoffed at the idea, thinking it sounded contrived, but I was intrigued. What kind of books were in those stacks? How were they organized? How often did he get ‘lucky’ and actually find an idea for a song, a line, or a melody by that seemingly random method? The interviewer laughed at Adams description of his creative process and moved on to her next question, but I wasn’t able to get the image out of my mind.

Adams creative exercise sounded like a perfect metaphor for a way to live a more meaningful life. We compartmentalize things; we put them in stacks and think they don’t touch each other, or hope that they don’t. We stack up our feelings, hopes and fears about our work, spouse, friends, family, kids, money, spirituality (or lack thereof), health, self, security, etc… in these little ivory towers. I have plenty of stacks and some are grouped roughly on the right, and some on the left, but they have no conduit except me. Unless, like Adams, I am willing to sit down and open up to the possibility for overlap, connection and meaning, those towers stay solid but compartmentalized, and almost surely unable to contribute to personal growth, or a greater outcome. I might know what is in each stack, but I won’t know what they might inspire in me, if I don’t look at them in total, in relationship to each other.

So although I won’t call it an official New Year’s Resolution, I am going to try to live my life a little more like “Stacks” for the next few months and see what happens. By opening up the different towers of my life to each other, I hope  to find new connections, be inspired and generate some original thoughts. That last one is my main goal. Psychologists have said that 98% of our thoughts are repetitive, the same ones we had yesterday. I don’t know about you, but I’m a little tired of those. As I begin 2012, I am ready for some new material and I hope you’ll join me.

 

 

 

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I wrote last month about my addiction to sweeping, but if you didn’t get to read my confessional, you can check it out in my November archives. But sweeping isn’t my only addiction. I have an even better fix when it comes to facing the challenges the world throws at me. Maybe I shouldn’t call this one an addiction, though I think of it as such. It’s not a behavior that I could get rid of, even if I wanted to, which I don’t, but it is something worth confessing.

I am addicted to joy.big be joyous

I am addicted to seeing the bright side of things, the silver lining, the best in a bad situation. Somewhere deep in my DNA, the cosmos embedded a gene that made me an eternal optimist. While other people might say, “You can’t put lipstick on a pig,” I say “Watch me,” but don’t blame me if you end up wanting to kiss it. I am sure that my intractable tendency to joy is both endearing and frustrating to the people I know, especially my pessimistic husband, Tim. It may be one of the traits that he fell in love with, but it is also one of the things that has caused the most arguments in our household as well. I think his realistic point of view can be depressing, but sometimes he feels like he’s married to Mary Poppins. I have to admit that I agree with her theory. If a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, then I say, “Bottoms up!”

I think optimism and joy need to be defended sometimes. They are too often seen as naïve, or immature emotions. But they are not the same as being oblivious to the sorrows of world, or mere shallowness. A true optimist is fully aware of the painful realities of life, but they are equally aware of the potential within each of those realities for growth, for transformation, for a positive outcome. If you trust in the existence of goodness within each person, or each problem, you call it forth by that your very belief in its presence. You can’t see something that you don’t believe in, so I think it’s a loss when we focus too much on reality, or what we think we know about life. We might lose our ability to affect the very outcome we most desire.

As you can imagine, Christmas is a wonderful time of year for people like me. It’s as if everyone finally catches on to what we’ve been saying all along. It may take you eleven months out of twelve every year, but we don’t get discouraged. We know it’s possible. We know that eventually we’ll all get on the same page. Peace! Hope! Joy! Love! We aren’t picky about what holiday you celebrate: Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or even just New Years Day! Give yourself some time and space to believe it’s all going to be okay and it just might work out that way.

I’ve taken some heat over the years for my Pollyanna way of looking at the world, but I hope it’s something I never lose, not just because it makes my life better, but because I’ve been told it does the same for the lives of those around me. Henri Nouwen had this to say about joy, “ Real joy always wants to share. It belongs to the nature of joy to communicate itself to others and to invite others to take part in the gifts we have received.”

I hope over the next two weeks, as we head into the home stretch of the holiday season, that you find yourself in the company of someone joyful and that the joyful person is you. I hope that true optimism fills your heart and soul, not ignoring the truth of the past year’s struggles, or losses, nor the challenges of the months ahead, but believing in the possibility of goodness, love, joy and peace. Making space for those realities can make the best of any bad situation.

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My husband, Tim, and I recently saw a preview for a movie called J Edgar. Leo DiCaprio stars as J Edgar Hoover, as a young man until his final days. I don’t know that we will see the film, although I am sure it would be educational. I know nothing about Hoover, his life, or the rise of the FBI. In the trailer, DiCaprio, as Hoover, uses a familiar line while trying to recruit a new man for his team. He says, “The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.” Of course, the implication is that this particular good man needs to come work for Hoover in order to stop the evil within our nation. I am sure that the movie will play with that theme on many levels during its two hours of allotted time. What is evil? How do we define it? Can you use evil for the sake of good, without becoming evil yourself? None of these are new thoughts of course, but they might play out in a new way, with Clint Eastwood directing and DiCaprio as the star.

Hearing that line in the darkened theater got me thinking about how often I’ve heard it, in political speeches and rallies, in history classes and ethics seminars. Each time, it’s been in the context of the universal, the “out there” of things. It’s a poetic call to action in the world. We can’t simply become complacent and look away. If we do, evil will flourish. Obviously and simply said.

But as I heard it this time, I heard it differently. I heard it about my own life, my own self. What if the only thing necessary for evil to flourish in me, is for me to simply do nothing about it? I know that sounds harsh, and I don’t consider myself particularly evil, but it is something worth thinking about. Like most things, I think you can put evil on a sliding scale. I looked it up in the Oxford Dictionaries Online and found that evil can run the gamut from “profound immorality and wickedness” to “something which is harmful or undesirable.” While I may not be aware of the former lurking deep within, I am certainly culpable of the latter. Let me quote one of my favorite poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, here.

Evil, (my emphasis) “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”

I love thee in my desire to overindulge in rich food, red wines, and salty margaritas. I love thee in my ability to gossip, even if it is only with my husband, instead of everyone I meet. I love thee in my tendency to rail at my children when they drive me crazy. I love thee in my profound distaste for overly pious, or righteous people of any religion, as I judge them just as thoroughly as they judge me. I love thee in my vanity, my ego, and my selfishness. Evil, I love thee in every way that you encourage me to simply be, instead of striving to be better.

And I think that is where the line rings true in the universal and the personal. It is so much easier to just be and not think about the ways I fall short, to just shrug my shoulders and say, “Oh well. That’s just the way I am and I’m not so bad after all.” It doesn’t matter if I am letting evil go out there, or in here. I have to act against the temptation to just be every day, or every week, or at least every month. Certainly more than once a year, right? Because if I don’t, those evils are going to flourish.

Flourish isn’t just surviving, creeping along, centimeters a year. Flourish is robust, healthy, magnificent growth. It’s what gardeners hope for, a farmer’s dream.  The last thing I want is to let those evils I “love” to actually flourish in my mind, body and soul. There would be little room left for the good to grow.

So I keep looking for ways to keep those evils in check. None of them are fail proof, but they offer me some tools to keep the weeds at bay. I meditate; I contemplate; I pray. I read good books. I write. I try to talk to my husband about something significant every day. I count to 10. I take a deep breath. I count to 10 again. It’s a start.