2 am Monday / Tuesday

by Lucy S.

I've been up cleaning my room - something I never do anymore at this time of night. Years ago, I sometimes had these bursts of energy that I used for cleaning and organizing my domestic space. But I've been eating no grains and in general, just not eating much, which - done right - gives me more energy.

 And Matt and I have been arguing more lately, instead of just staying out of each other's ways.  Yesterday there was one, then another today, then another tonight. It's like the bad old days. Not really, but these carry the echo of all the old ones forward, and I feel desperate again to finally solve this dilemma. I'm trying to figure out if I can solve it financially, and then figure out which parts aren't financial.

(Why is it that these different pieces of living are always written about so segregated from each other?  Home care; food and health; personal relationships; our financial lives...)

I've returned to reading about adult education as I try to begin a book or even just a decent scholarly article that blends my experience as a non-traditional student with other stories, poetry, critical theory, feminist theory, and liberatory pedagogy (if any pedagogy can even be truly liberatory in an oppressive system). Yesterday, I was reading from Stephen Brookfield's The Power of Critical Theory: Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching.and this passage struck me, a passage that wouldn't be found in texts that focus solely on 'how to succeed as a nontraditional student!!' or policy guides for community college administrators, or how to run your class. :

Even the most private and traumatic tearings in the fabric of personal relationships, such as divorce, should be understood as social and political phenomena. The restlessness and unfulfilled desires that lie behind a divorce are manifestations of the receptive orientation that predispose people to want more and more with no prospect of achieving anything more than temporary satisfaction – the eternally expectant ones forever doomed to be the eternally disappointed ones, as Fromm put it. Alternatively, divorce, unhappiness, and isolation are the result of people needing to leave their home communities in search of work that will provide them with the financial means to satisfy their appetite for the commodities they feel are necessary to create the good life. (174)

Reading it again now, I wonder how to make knowing this make a difference. How does this awareness translate into what I do in my life? This insight would have been especially useful about twenty years ago. But there must be a way to apply it now. How do I individually apply insight that by its nature is collective?


Lately I feel that I cannot take another statement which in one way or another tells me what is wrong with me or in some way conveys how irritating I am. Yesterday's flash of an argument began because Matt had put a package of uncooked chicken in the refrigerator three days before and I said it needed to be cooked right away. He said the package said it was good until May 30. I said the sell by date didn't mean it could sit in the refrigerator for eight days. I said this matter-of-factly - not yelling, but not in an overtly friendly tone, either. He argued the point and I then said I couldn't believe he wouldn't know this since he's cooked chicken for years. One of the kids asked how long it was good in the refrigerator and he said, "I guess about five minutes according to her." I said, "Why do you get mad at me for being the messenger from some part of reality?" He got madder and I said something like that again, but I was starting to cry so I walked out of there. Trying to transcribe it now, it seems trivial, and depressing in that very triviality, but that is how these arguments tend to be. In a different frame of mind, I'd be irritated but could roll with it. Not lately, though.

I've looked up the chicken info: ."Fresh or raw chicken should be selected just before checking out of the grocery store. It should feel cold to the touch when purchased. Put chicken packages in disposable plastic bags (if available) to contain any leaking juices which may cross-contaminate cooked foods or produce. Go right home after food shopping and immediately put the chicken in the refrigerator if you plan to use it within 1-2 days. If you won't be using the chicken by day 2, freeze it."
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/food-safety-education/get-answers/podcasts-archive/food-safety-at-home/CT_Index141

I will copy and paste the same information into an email to him (and to my kids who live here). I think he'll be irritated that 'I was right.' But I don't any of us want to get food-poisoning in order to prop up the ego he's invested in this issue. And I didn't want to be audited to preserve his ego or the fledgling relationship with a woman who "does accounting" (who he'd given our tax info to and who'd taken thousands of dollars in illegitimate write-offs before I ruined it all by saying the deductions were wrong).

At times over the years I've argued to Matt and others that these too are feminist issues - that the expectation that I should deliver any statements of that sort with lots of smiles and warmth is rooted in ideas about how women are supposed to communicate -with lots of deference and subservience - feminine forms of a sort of "Aw shucks" style.  Matt, meanwhile, can communicate matter-of-factly or can keep raising his voice, and this is either just 'how he is' or something I've made him do.

I believe this is sexist, but then my confidence about it always bleeds out. What if I really do sound irritating? Why can't I deliver the information about how long uncooked chicken can safely be in the refrigerator in a likable way? How do I know that I'm not just using feminism to justify my side of things in these situations?

This too is a problem with oppressive social relations. They make us doubt ourselves - both the would-be oppressors and the would-be oppressed. We bounce around in limbo.


And so I am acting on what I can. This week I will finish and submit grades, thoroughly clean and organize my room (and other parts of the house), work in the garden, and stay off grains. My food is the same most days now. Salmon and green beans cooked in coconut oil for breakfast. Some coconut oil and then a grapefruit for lunch. A couple pieces of chicken with garlic and basil for dinner. When the greens growing outside get bigger, I'll eat some with the chicken. I'd prefer to be vegetarian or even vegan, but every time I try, I start to gain weight and feel lousy. And that's on basic organic food - not junk food. Also, I think I'm allergic to yeast, going by some intense reactions I've had (trouble swallowing or breathing, heart racing, dizziness).

And I already changed my light bulb in the lamp next to my bed back to an incandescent because I've had pressure in my head and shakiness for months, and in the search for a solution, I stumbled on some university studies showing that both LED light and fluorescent light can make some people have seizures. Who knows if this has anything to do with me?  Who knows if it's only a placebo effect that it's gone away since I changed the bulb?

But if you talk about these things too much in the wrong circles, people think you're just a hypochondriac or narcissistic woman obsessed with herself. So I try to just unobtrusively do what I do and avoid what I feel sick on.

I'm going to look at apartment rentals for either me or Matt. Maybe it is time to just act in this as well.


9 am now, and I've been up for an hour. That late night room-cleaning and writing made me sleep till 8 instead of 6 or 7. But I want to wake up every morning by 5:30. It's overcast. My room has a door to the backyard, and it's almost always open from May through September. If we sell the house or if I move out, I will miss hearing so many birds every morning and sleeping with the door open. I'll miss hearing the water rush over the rocks in the small pond my friends Gloria and Martha (who are partners and are in every way that counts family to us) helped us dig in and set up when they visited in May 2007. I sometimes feel spoiled for having this pond where I can look at it while I sit on my bed writing (or having it anywhere in my yard). Who am I to have this pond, I think. I never grow so used to it that I don't see or hear it. I often look out at it. The birds come to it often. They take up positions on the rocks partway down the waterfall.

The Trouble with Idealism

by Lucy S.

                                      

Yeah, so I’m an idealist (as I said in my last post) when it comes to hoping and trying to act on that hope – try being the key word. Sometimes that “trying” manifests as action – as DOING – and sometimes it manifests as deferring action while I “try” to think of an answer or I wait for what I “hope” will be an answer. (I used to have Yoda’s “Do or do not – there is no try” as my screen saver about ten years ago…) I live at some crazy hybrid intersection between being a mom to kids that are now almost all raised (yet feeling responsible still to keep us safe); my longtime ties to the close friends and family members of my life; plain-speaking that calls out what I think is bullshit (cusswords sprinkled in liberally); ‘practicality’ in terms of home projects, growing food, figuring out how to make it financially; impracticality in trying to hold onto so many contradictory ideals and aims that I get paralyzed into not solving major problems; love for my experiences in formal education; anger at the exclusivities of formal education and the erasure of people’s cultures and relationships in various ways; my ongoing love for Thoreau; my chronic yearning for California… That’s enough – I’m getting lost trying to list it all. Who cares? Justin says that to me sometimes to snap me out of whatever knots I get tied up in. WHO CARES?????!!!  Sometimes we email that to each other and laugh about it.

It’s not like I just live in daydreams, of course. This past school year, I taught college classes for the first time, got approved for two next fall, and helped organize an adjunct union for us at our institution. Tomorrow we file for an election. Tomorrow we also meet with the president of the college. Talking with someone like that intimidates the hell out of me – or it always used to. I’m hoping I’ll do better now.

That reminds me: I don’t write like I talk, and the chasm between the two troubles me because I start to wonder if I’m full of shit when I write and who this persona is on the page and why it's so hard to write true, and I also wonder why I can’t speak the way I write – why my brain can’t produce the words unless they’re flying from my fingers on the keyboard onto the screen in front of me. I wonder yet some more whether my writing itself is just a way to write my way to feeling good or vent all the despair and – either way – not solve the main problem.

The main problem, I would say, is that Matt and I need to live separately. We’ve needed to for so long that the deferral has permanently damaged both of us and used up too much of our lives. Not that we didn’t each find ways to live with some dignity and happiness anyway, but we each deserved better.  Our lives have been so constrained by our economic realities and our deeply ingrained sense of responsibility for each other’s basic security and our kids’ wellbeing in a system that can be too brutal – and man, do we know it – that we have waited, and waited, and waited, year after year for the right time to finally fully separate.

Doing the taxes this past spring brought it all slamming back at us again.  I hate who we become in these arguments.  He had someone he was romantically involved with unofficially do our taxes (but not file them) without talking to me about it, and when it came time to do them and he gave me this news, I was so pissed off that my head started pounding and my heart raced, and what is already a stressful experience got much worse. I asked him what right he had to give her my social security number without asking me. I referred to her in such a juvenile way – as his “latest infatuation person” (how I hate that I used such a dumb term). He meanwhile probably felt dominated because what I said maybe sounded like an interrogation and lecture. I felt that he’d disrespected my labor doing those taxes for years, and my private information. She said we could take huge write-offs that I said weren’t legitimate; he said she did accounting and did I think I knew more than her; I said I’d done our taxes for years and knew the write-offs were way out there; it went on for hours and into the next day; finally, he checked with the government and found out I was right. A hollow vindication for me. That old feeling I hate so much came back – just wanting to disappear. He felt humiliated. I don’t want to participate in humiliating him. I don’t want ANY of this. I just want out of these interactions.

In those two days, I kept thinking I didn’t care anymore about the unfairness of him working so hard on this house for years and ending up in an apartment, and now I knew I WOULD keep the house and I would stop worrying about his side of things… I felt the ancient anger revive – condemnations about how he hadn’t really “tried” all these years to talk, to have any kind of genuine relationship… But that is such a dead-end line of thought, and I detest the moralizing it always leads me into – the thoughts about how people “should” try to make their partner relationships work and make them last…. blah blah blah. Yeah, sounds great, we all should, and now back in our actual lives – what happens when they DON’T? Do we beat ourselves and each other down with what “should” be?

I do want Matt to be happy – happy somewhere in his own life, or at least I ‘wish him the best’ while not wanting to be involved in the details of however he wants to strive for that happiness.  And I cannot – I just CANNOT – solve my situation on his back. I can’t see him end up with no home after all the work he’s done on this house and the others – including the Aguanga house. At the same time, I’m close to my kids and they want me to stay in the house with them – and so we have remained stuck – but most of all, we haven’t had enough of an income to keep us all going in two separate places, even if one is an apartment.

Our total income (Matt’s and mine) last year was the highest it’s ever been: in the lower $40ks. But Jonathan’s working at Starbucks, so he pitches in, and Justin does when he can, but has had trouble making enough some months. Interdependence sounds great – I believe in it… But there’s something awful about needing your kids to pitch in so that you – the mom and dad – can separate. Even if we sold the house, the rent on a three bedroom apartment (if one of us had even just Sean and Ryan with us) would be more than we pay on this house payment.  

Kevin’s the only one who doesn’t live with us; he lives with friends further into the city and is working swing shift at a factory now.

Idealism’s great, but the material profoundly shapes our lives.  One way or another, people have to meet their material needs.  And the need to do so can erode our psychological and physical health.

The other day at our union meeting a guy from their media group wanted to ask me more about my experience. I said I’d been a working-class person, gone back to school, graduated with honors, did the master’s with a fellowship there, and now I’m teaching.  Another guy said he wanted to talk to someone with more years in teaching, which was understandable. At the same time, I knew I wasn’t making my point clear.

So I said something close to this:

The point of my story isn’t self-pity. I’m not saying my story is worse than others; this is wrong whether it’s someone like me going back or someone continuing on to grad school in their 20s. What I’m saying is I’ve raised five kids; I went to the U, graduated summa, then did the master’s here; now I’m teaching, and if I had to just wait longer to make decent wages – if there was an end in sight – fine. But there is no end in sight.  The only end in sight is the union.

Most of the people I come from – my family and longtime friends – didn’t go to college, and when I went back and graduated, some of them were really proud of me. Then came grad school, and they said, “Wow, a MASTER’S.”  But when they realized how low the pay is and the situation, they were shocked. Some didn’t understand why I’d even bothered. So it impacts the people I come from, too, when they think college doesn’t seem to do much. Not that it should just be for money; I wouldn’t have gone into this if I wanted high wages, but I should at least make pay I can live on. My son makes more per hour at Starbucks. My best friend was making $17 an hour last I knew (maybe more now) with benefits, and she has a high school diploma. And she DESERVES her pay; she works hard. I don’t need to make more than her. But I can’t even make the same. I get a check every two weeks for $420. My other son started reading adult history books when he was nine, and is maybe the most intellectual of us all – but he gave up on college. The thing he’d have studied was history, and when he realized the job outlook is a disaster for teaching college history, what was the sense in continuing?  My youngest son says he doesn’t know if he’ll go to college and I don’t know if I should try to get him to go. I find myself wanting to say to him, whatever you do, don’t major in English.

What they do to me affects my kids and the people I come from.

Partway into me talking, one of the organizers started writing down some of what I was saying. They were all staring at me. The media guy said, “Can you say that again or write it down?” Another organizer said she had no idea until a couple years ago that the situation was so bad for so many people teaching college. She shook her head and said it was terrible.

Afterward, walking down the street by myself to my vehicle, I started to cry. I’ve told the story in various ways, written about it here – but telling it succinctly and straightforwardly made me hear it for what it is without worrying about whether I was 'feeling sorry for myself.'

Back at my California community college, teaching English literature and writing was my dream.  When you think of how the vast majority of people in this world not only don’t get to make their most cherished dreams come true, but work jobs they hate or they can’t meet their own or their loved ones’ basic needs or can’t even read or write, I am lucky. I should be ecstatic. At times I am ecstatic. But I’ve been so scared that it would all just go away.

When you carry a dream around for so many years, you can get to feeling like it can’t really come true.  When I was 12 and 13, I learned to ride horses with my friend Marsie – she had a horse – and I started reading horse care books from the library, making lists of tack I’d need, scouring the newspapers for horses for sale, and then I’d tell my mom about it all. One time when Marsie was over, my mom said, “Lucy, stop dreaming. You’re never gonna get a horse.” (Marsie still imitates her saying this.) And it probably was pretty impossible. But I think a college degree and then teaching came to feel like that, too. Me teaching seemed as unlikely as me really having a horse back as a kid.  And even though I’ve been teaching now this year, it’s taken so long to sink in that I AM doing it, that it’s not an ideal I’m “hoping” for and “trying” for – and maybe I can keep doing it if I can make enough money to live on.

But I’m still idealistic. I wrote my honors thesis about the importance of relationship in education. Relationship is the biggest reason I care so much about winning a union and working to broaden this and to change higher education’s trajectory in this country. I’ve seen too many of us hurt. Our dreams get crushed, or we get a dream that twists back on them and makes us pay a painful penalty for trying to do great work.  What would a world be like that made so many forms of learning, teaching, and creating its center?  Who might we all become living that way, where most people’s dreams could come true?  Idealism makes me ask these questions and imagine possibilities, but the trouble with idealism is that on its own, it can be a substitute for changing our real lives. If we want to know what that world would be like, we’d better change our material realities. 

Writing Troubles, Or: Idealism

by Lucy S.

Two posts that I’ve merged:

Writing Troubles

The trouble with this genre – the nonfiction personal narrative via blog post – at least in my hands – is that it is more a hybrid of confession and testimony than it is informative or theoretical in any scholarly sense or even ‘positive thought for the day’ (not my forte to be sure). Why would that be a problem, you ask – well, it is a problem because my life of course fuses to and entangles with other people’s lives. And I dislike the various instantiations of dragging relationships out before a public (though this is a pretty tiny public) – the talk shows of the 1990s, the ‘real world’ shows, the sensational interviews with celebrities about intimate aspects of their lives… I hate the inevitable search for ever more touching or shocking stories and the false sense that we might ‘know’ these celebrities via their public confessions about their private lives, and I hate even more the possibility that after enough documentation of some lives, maybe we do ‘know’ these people – but what does ‘knowing’ even mean under those conditions?

And so what weighs on me the most often feels off-limits to write about here. Those troubles belong more in a private journal, I guess – and I kept one for almost thirty years, starting in my teens, until I went back to finish my B.A. and the habit dried up within that first or second semester (I’d have to look back to see the last entry in the last of those thick spiral notebook journals), and it partly became my course papers, and my honors thesis, and…

 I wrote earlier: “How is it that a person can get stuck trying to get out of a pattern by performing that pattern over and over again?”

Idealism

I taught the last class in American Idealism on Friday.

I’d had something planned, but it seemed pretty lackluster to me. I thought that was the best I could manage because something happened a couple of weeks before that… I'm trying to find the right words here and keep deleting them… hurt.  That’s enough to say. 

But sometimes the universe outside or inside us places a gift before or within us. That happened Friday morning.  I woke up for no reason at 4. Then I remembered the hurt. Plodding to the kitchen for water, rubbing three fingers against the center of my forehead to push back the pain and anxiety too near the surface there, I wondered if this or its aftermath would go on for weeks, months. Years? Then that burst of the so much better idea for my last class showed up, unsought, unexpected. I paused, stared out at my internal vision half-smiling in the dark living room as if somebody had leapt out with a welcomed “Surprise!” – and hurried back to my room to write it further into being.

What follows are my notes and links to videos I showed in part or in their entirety – and then some further thoughts. The references to papers (“John’s paper…”) are references to my students’ papers, some of which they read out loud to the class with the paper also showing on the projection screen for others to listen to and read.  I am sharing them knowing that they can’t replace an actual presentation and that many words and lines are only evocative at best here.

Class Notes – Last Day – May 16, 2014

Strains of American Idealism:

Are they all bound together in the attempt to do better – to conquer adversity, personally and collectively?

(John’s paper on his grandfather)

What part do ethics have?

FREEDOM

Individual:

Zora Neale Hurston “I love myself when I am laughing…”

Megan’s paper on happiness’

Thoreau in Walden or “Life Without Principle” “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when it came time to die, discover that I had not lived” (Walden)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance:” “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.”

Audre Lorde   Burst of Light Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1988. Print. “This is my life.  Every hour is a possibility not to be banked.  These days are not a preparation for living, some necessary but essentially extraneous divergence from the main course of my living.  They are my life … I am living every particular day no matter where I am, not in what pursuit.  It's not as if I'm in struggle over here while someplace else, over there, real life is waiting for me to begin living it again” (152).

Collective:

Frederick Douglass: abolition of slavery; emancipation

Joan Baez “Oh Freedom” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNzmiowUXiQ

MLK “I Have a Dream” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs start at 15:00

EQUALITY

Frederick Douglass

MLK “I Have a Dream”

Lincoln Gettysburg Address

Women’s struggles for equality – to vote, to work for equal wages, to have equal access to education, careers, political life

Cristina’s 1^st paper on the importance of a female protagonist in O Pioneers

Democracy – efforts to create this, even in this class space

Civil Rights

PROSPERITY 

Individual:

Benjamin Franklin

Austin’s hilarious critique of Franklin’s Autobiography (that made me laugh when I was feeling low)

Essays about their grandfathers by Burke, Derek, and Grant

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck and its moral conflicts

Collective:

“A rising tide lifts all boats”

Camille’s paper on raising the minimum wage

Unionizing

Jack Conroy The Disinherited

“I no longer felt shame at being seen at such work as I would have once, and I knew that the only way for me to rise to something approximating the grandiose ambitions of my youth would be to rise with my class, with the disinherited; the brick-setters, the flivver tramps, boomers, and outcasts pounding their ears in flophouses. Every jibe at any of the paving gang, every covert or open sneer by prosperous looking bystanders infuriated me but did not abash me. The fat on my bones melted away under the glare of the burnished sun, and the fat in my mind dissolved, too. It dripped in sweat off the end of my nose onto the bricks, dampened the sand. I felt weak as from the loss of blood, but also resigned. I felt like a man whose feet have been splashing about in ooze and at last have come to rest on a solid rock, even though it lay far below his former level” (265).

PROGRESS / CHANGE:

Mike’s presentation of “The Times They Are A-Changing” by Bob Dylan

Reaching outward – what is America / the Americas?

RESISTANCE TO OPPRESSION:

Civil Rights movement

Malcolm X

Protests

Strikes

Unionizing

Occupy

Occupy Homes

American Revolution

Frederick Douglass

FDR “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”

Resistance to wars

Prisoners’ rights movements

Bonnie Honig – making demands and staging rights that are always considered illegitimate (Democracy and the Foreigner)

Thoreau: Civil Disobedience “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”

Camille’s paper arguing for raising the minimum wage and that workers’ need to stand up together to make it happen

Katie’s 1^st paper on Alexandra resisting institutionalization and colonization in her relationship with Ivar in O Pioneers

John’s 3^rd paper arguing that inhumane immigration policies must change

Burke’s 3^rd paper also examining cruelty in immigration policies

CARE / RELATIONSHIPS

Personal Relationships:

Care for oneself and one’s life: Austin’s 1^st paper on surviving a car crash

Valorization of family, romantic love, and friendship

American Dream (home in the small town or suburbs?)

Kristen Ann’s paper on her father

Erin’s paper on farming and family

Connor's 1st paper on Emil and Marie in O Pioneers

Grant’s 2^nd paper examining the way money and relationships work in The Winter of Our Discontent

Jimenez family's care for each other 

Alexis’s 1^st paper on Alexandra as a mothering figure

Jack’s 1^st paper on his father

Nick’s 2^nd paper on ways to raise a child

Chase’s paper from last semester on his grandfather and him

O Pioneers by Willa Cather

Judith Butler. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence : “It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost “in” you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related” (22). "Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something." (23) 

David Graeber. Debt: the First 5000 Years. "I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren't hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they're probably improving the world more than we acknowledge. Maybe we should think of them as pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one's penchant for self-destruction" (390). 

Huck and Jim’s friendship in Huckleberry Finn

Communal:

Paul Farmer in Haiti

Derek’s 3^rd paper on Paul Farmer and the importance of relationships

Conroy's quote in The Disinherited (I will rise with my class)

JFK “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”

Theodor Adorno “Education After Auschwitz” Critical Models (197-198) “This entire sphere is animated by an alleged ideal that also plays a considerable role in the traditional education: the ideal of being hard …. This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong …. Being hard, the vaunted quality education should inculcate, means absolute indifference toward pain as such. In this the distinction between one’s own pain and that of another is not so stringently maintained. Whoever is hard with himself earns the right to be hard with others as well and avenges himself for the pain whose manifestations he was not allowed to show and had to repress. This mechanism must be made conscious, just as an education must be promoted that no longer sets a premium on pain and the ability to endure pain."

Chase’s 1^st paper on his team experience – The Comeback

John Berger. Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. New York: Vintage, 2007. Print. “When somebody has the opportunity to leave a camp and cross the rubble to slightly better accommodation, it can happen that they turn it down and choose to stay. In the camp, they are a member, like a finger, of an endless body. Moving out would be amputation.  The stance of undefeated despair works like this” (18).

Oliner, Samuel and Pearl.  The Altruistic Personality, Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Germany: What Led Ordinary Men and Women to Risk Their Lives on Behalf of Others? New York: The Free Press, 1988. (p. 249): "What distinguished rescuers was not their lack of concern with self, external approval, or achievement, but rather their capacity for extensive relationships - their stronger sense of attachment to others and their feeling of responsibility for the welfare of others...

Language / communication as communal care: Cristina’s 2^nd paper on the access we have to others through their language and the culture carried in it

MLK "If I can help somebody, then my living will not be in vain" start at 35:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBiFnDuCJIU

FAITH

Kristen Ann’s 2^nd paper

Alexis’s 3^rd paper

Jimenez family

Jimenez, Francisco. Reaching Out. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008. “We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the “Allegory of the Cave” in Plato’s Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others to break free” (120-121).

Liberation Theology: Matthew 25 – to the extent that you did it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me. A preferential option for the poor.

“NATURE”

Tori’s paper on her transformative experience in Boundary Waters

Thoreau in Walden

Our national park systems; John Muir, Yosemite…

The oceans

ART

Testimony and Critique

Thoreau in Walden “Life Without Principle”  “Civil Disobedience”

Mike’s 1^st paper on the problem with wanting to escape yourself in cruises and resorts where everything is done for you

Natalie’s 1^st paper about student loan debt

Connor’s 2^nd  paper on American idealism as too much fiction

Zitkala-Sa’s trilogy of her experiences in Indian boarding schools (an opposition to Pratt’s own imperialistic idealism of “kill the Indian – save the man”)

American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 2003.  “For the white man’s papers I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit. For these same papers I had forgotten the healing power in trees and brooks. On account of my mother’s simple view of life, and my lack of any, I gave her up, also …. Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature, and God. I was shorn of my branches, which had waved in sympathy and love for home and friends…”  “But few there are who have paused to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization.” (112-113, end of trilogy)

Chowdhury’s essay

Jack’s 2^nd paper critiquing the terms some use for those who have immigrated to the U.S. without governmental permission

Katie’s 3^rd paper dealing with the difficult topic of males who are raped

Alexis’s 2^nd paper about eating disorders and how deadly they can be

Natalie’s 2^nd paper about trading morals for riches in Winter of Our Discontent

D Watkin’s essay “Too Poor for Pop Culture”

Frederick Douglass’s depictions of the bloody whippings and so many atrocities under slavery

Robert F. Kennedy - announcing to a crowd in Indianapolis the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. – April 4, 1968. “My favorite poem, my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.”

Our Ability to Imagine, Craft, and Create Better

Amir Hussain’s poetry and visit to our class – a bridge between writing and reading poetry

Aurora Levins Morales “Child of the Americas”

Langston Hughes “I Too Sing America”

Michael Lee’s spoken word performance as an example of Art (testimony, imagining and creating better) and Education (another strain of American Idealism)  (and of course we see how all these bleed into each other in so many ways, all these strains) and Care (Personal Relationships)... (We’ll return to this at the end.)

Close Engagement with /Relationship with Someone's Art in a Way that Itself Can Become Art

A great essay about art – that close observation, close-reading, magnifying…

Alexis’s 1^st paper and so many of all your papers that engaged deeply with our readings

Randall Jarrell, “The Obscurity of the Poet:” “Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself. From Christ to Freud we have believed that, if we know the truth, the truth will set us free: art is indispensable because so much of this truth can be learned through works of art and through works of art alone …..And all these things, by their nature, demand to be shared; if we are satisfied to know these things ourselves, and to look with superiority or indifference at those who do not have that knowledge, we have made a refusal that corrupts us as surely as anything can …. One of the oldest, deepest, and most nearly conclusive attractions of democracy is manifested in our feeling that through it not only material but also spiritual goods can be shared: that in a democracy bread and justice, education and art, will be accessible to everybody.”

EDUCATION

Jennica’s 1^st paper on better possibilities in education, including Finnish schools

Rachael’s 2^nd paper on her writing and reading process, which in turn educates others

Heather Williams  Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. 

Myles Horton – helping people know what they know – Highlander Folk School

Post World War 2 mass expansion of the college system

Experimental Community Education

Jack’s 1^st paper on his father

Mike’s 3^rd paper (what we are to do with our education)

What we are all doing here together

Stephen Brookfield. Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms.  “These classrooms may be one of the few arenas in which students can reasonably experience how democratic conversation feels. Taking discussion seriously moves the center of power away from the teacher and displaces it in continuously shifting ways among group members. It parallels how we think a democratic system should work in the wider society.”

George Dawson Life Is So Good  Learned to read at age 98

Giselle – Cuban literacy campaign of 1961- young teens going to live with peasant families, to work with them and teach them to read over the course of months

Me going back to school (the very quick story)

All of your efforts

“You have to do something as well as you possibly can and live your way through that process to find out who you will become.” (advice to me from someone)

Dan: “Our efforts, if we allow ourselves to be true and if we acknowledge that our work is important, must be a constant struggle to stave off the disaster that is a democracy without art, without true literacy, without a full education. Keep writing, keep writing, keep writing. We – the collective we, the democratic we – need artists and thinkers like you. We need your Excellence.”

Michael Lee’s spoken word performance  http://english.umn.edu/ugrad/StudentStoriesMichaelLee.html as an example of Art (testimony, imagining and creating better) and Education (another strain of American Idealism)  (and of course we see how all these bleed into each other in so many ways, all these strains) and Care (Personal Relationships and Care on a Broader Scale by seeing those lost loved ones in so many people we meet)…

***

That was it. When I told them this was my first year teaching, some of them opened their mouths in surprise. We talked a bit more. They applauded.

I sat at the desk while some came up to express their feelings about me as a teacher and our class. I hope we all did well together.

***

One of my students wrote an excellent essay critiquing American idealism which I had him read to the class on the second to the last day. He began by exploring the question of what it is. Not the American Dream, he said; that is a subset of it. He wrote:

Dictionary.com defines idealism as “the tendency to represent things in their ideal forms, rather than as they are.” (Idealism). This goes to show that idealism is fiction. When this newfound knowledge is applied to American idealism we get a definition somewhere along the lines of American idealism is the manner of thinking about America as much better than it is. Examples of this are the belief that anyone can reach success if they work hard and are determined, the United States of America is the best country in the world, and the thought that happiness can be obtained as simply as a few material objects.

He went on to argue his point with evidence that these premises are fictitious. We need his critique.

We also need the utopian vision and the effort to make that vision real.

Here are two other definitions:

“the attitude of a person who believes that it is possible to live according to very high standards of behavior and honesty.”

“the practice of forming ideals or living under their influence.”

The only pop-psychology book I ever read and liked was one my cousin Carolyn had; I liked it because I was 18 and hadn’t read any others, but  also because the basic premise is good: that you change by going and acting "as if." Maybe the two authors had read Pascal or just found their way to the same truth. In my pedagogy group in April, we read Bourdieu invoking Pascal, saying that "habit makes us believe things." I think this is the only way that people can make themselves into a new way of being - by going and acting "as if" they are the way they want to be. That's the truth we get from Emerson and Thoreau, too - as in Thoreau's famous claim that "if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."  

***

I will not write about that particular hurt here – it is private. And I won’t say that after that last class day, I moved unwaveringly forward in enacting who I want to be. But I am hoping I can. I hope to transcend troubles – writing and otherwise. Idealism in at least some of its definitions fuses with hope. In that way, then, I am an idealist.

Mother's Day

by Lucy S.

Mother's Day tomorrow. I don't call my mom for the holiday; for religious reasons, she doesn't celebrate it. I'll call her on Monday.

Once I took her older sister out on Mother's Day - my Aunt Ruth - who usually never left the house or backyard. Agoraphobic - she was scared of moving around in the world beyond the shelter of that home and walled in yard.  But one day when the 1980s were still getting started and I was a teen, I drove my old car there, the blue Toyota my parents passed on to me as I moved out into the world while a "minor" - and the others were gone, so we had ourselves a holiday. My Aunt Esther, Ruth's identical twin, and my Uncle Stuart, Esther's husband, had headed up to Yosemite with my parents and brother and sister. This was a first for Esther and Stuart, and a last. When would Ruth and I ever again be free together?

Impractical do-gooder that I was, I said, "What if I take you out and teach you how to drive?!  And then we can go out to lunch?!"

I thought the solution to so many serious, entrenched problems was to haul someone out into bursts of new experiences, give them more of the world they'd been denied. "OPEN YOUR EYES!" I would command them through these actions. "You're missing your life!" I'd make them have this epiphany without having to declare such a preachy truism.

Ruth'd already sipped down a few drinks as the early morning wore on into almost lunch time.  "Alright!" she slurred only slightly, laughing nervously. She brought a supply of old vitamin bottles filled with liquor in case she needed fortification. We stepped out into the front yard.

I don't know how we did any of what came next. I don't know how we found the new construction area in Inglewood, not far from L.A. Airport - how in such an old built-up area did we ever find streets where almost no one else was driving? I didn't know the area. But somehow we made our way to where Ruth would drive for the first and last time in her life at 45. She walked around to the driver's seat while I moved to the passenger's side.  "Put your left foot on the clutch," I told her, "and now your right on this pedal here, the gas, and you want to slowly, really slowly, let your foot off the clutch, very gradually, and then at the same time, slowly push down on the gas. I'll do the shifting until you get used to it."  She stalled a few times, and I laughed and said, 'That's okay! It's normal - everyone does it when they're learning to drive a stick shift!"  At last, she moved us forward with a bit of a lurch, but she was driving! I laughed some more. "You're driving!"

Ruth drove staring at her feet, while I steered and shifted. "Hit the brakes and the clutch!" I'd say as we whizzed around the corner, me downshifting to abruptly slow us down when I could. We traveled the same square over and over. Twice she stopped on the side of the road, took a vitamin bottle out of her purse, and gulped down whiskey. I think now that she was terrified, but I was sure back then that I could good-naturedly bluster her along until she realized that she could do this! And she could change her whole life!  I would cure her!

At some point, we'd finally had enough of the driving lessons for the day - "for the day," as if it was any old day, and we'd pick this up again day after tomorrow...

We traded seats and as I drove back onto the busy big streets, she had me pull into a shopping center on the right. She wanted to buy me something. Because there was a shoe store, she exclaimed, "Shoes! How about shoes?!" I did the usual "you don't have to buy me anything" spiel, which I meant -- I barely had room to keep the brown paper bags I had all my stuff in; I didn't need more of anything right then, but I knew she hadn't taken anyone into any store in many years to buy something. "Alright, yeah, I mean that would be great!" I said. More sips from the vitamin bottle - and then we went in the store. She bought me wooden bottom sandals; I've never seen anything like them since. "How about lunch?" she suggested, her voice higher pitched as she grew drunker. "There's a Mexican restaurant right in here!"  Finally, I was a little worried about her drinking, but I said, "Yeah... That sounds great." More sips from the vitamin bottle, and we went in.

Mother's Day - so it was full. When they called us for a table, Ruth stumbled a bit as she walked, but we made it. She ordered a margarita - tried to tell me to order one, and I said, "Ruth, they're not gonna let me have one; I'm underage," and I saw she was all set for an escalating argument with the server so I said, "No, really, I don't want one right now - I'm too tired. I'll have some wine later at home!"  Ruth'd always like people to drink with her, to make it all more festive, a party, and not just her, drinking alone. We ate, and she had one more margarita.

"Why is that baby looking at me?" she asked.

"Oh no..." I thought. "Oh, I hate when she gets like this..."

"Why does that baby keep looking at me?"

I laughed a little."What? Oh, no, I think she's just looking at the light from the windows near us!"

"No, she keeps looking at me."

 "No, no... " Casual laughter, and aw shucks smiles from me. "Hey, I wanted to ask you if you could show me how to sew a jean skirt!"

"What...."

"Alright! Well, how about if we get back home?!"

She stumbled as she walked, and I kept gently guiding her by the arm, trying to be ready to catch her if she fell.

On the way home, she insisted that we stop at the liquor store near their house. She'd been here a few times when she'd been desperate enough to walk over with Esther and Stuart gone. I stupidly pulled over - what else could I do, I thought back then - she's my aunt... In the store, she kept saying to the guy she knew, maybe in his mid-20s, "I want you to meet my niece!" We smiled awkwardly at each other, nodding, as I tried to hurry her to choose what she wanted, and then she said, "NO! I want you to meet her!" meaning, I guess, that she wanted us to strike up a rousing conversation and maybe plan a whole relationship in the space of those terrible minutes - and she walked behind the counter to grab him by the arm.  He knew her. "Ruth, now Ruth, you HAVE to get out from behind here or I'm going to call the police." She was knocking over bottles back there. I had my nervous half-smile, half-shock face on; I too kept calling her, telling her we had to go. He dialed and pretended to be talking to the police, but it didn't phase her. Finally, he walked her out of there, holding both shoulders from behind, and even left the store to help me put her in the car parked oh so thankfully close on the street. I thanked him, smiling even as my eyes kept filling, trying to unobtrusively brush away any overflow with the tips of my index fingers.

I got her back home where she slept for a few hours. When she woke up that evening, she kept asking, "Did I do anything wrong? Are Stuart and Esther here? Are they mad?" "No, no, no - everything's fine," I kept saying. "Thanks for the shoes and the lunch! That was really fun!" "It was okay?" she asked. "Yeah! It was great!"


I think of my Aunt Ruth on many Mother's Days. I wonder what made her so scared of so much, But she loved her own parties, the times she'd put on music, get some of the family to dance with her, have some drinks.  Later I had my theories about what "should have been done" (by who?). That sureness felt good in my late 20s and early 30s, but it didn't hold up.  I want to resist a neat ending, a sentimental proclamation that at least she got to drive for one day in her life and celebrate Mother's Day by taking her niece out. But I can't. It could have been a disaster; it's true; she shouldn't have been driving that way - and for the first time ever. She could have landed in jail because of the liquor store fiasco, or caused who knows what scene in the restaurant as alcohol mixed with anxieties I couldn't comprehend.  But we survived, and maybe she remembered some of it, or maybe she enjoyed some of it while it happened.

'A Moral Economy' -- On Paper

by Lucy S.

7 am.  What right do I have to take the time to write like this when there are four papers to finish grading - ridiculous that I've taken so long - but the exploratory writing and now drafts have poured in for the last paper because these essays are too bunched together at the end now, and I'm meeting with students again today - so what right do I have to write this way?  Or what right do I have when I could be emailing more adjuncts about meeting me and signing a union card?  I feel those claims on me, but I am doing this anyway. And so I can't truthfully claim that I use all my time working on my class in some way or union-organizing. I don't, and I can't. So I don't know... What is it to "try my best," anyway, in something this extended?

7:08 am. I was laughing with the last student group I met with yesterday afternoon from 4 to about 5:10 - Austin's writing his last paper on what Thoreau can tell us now about a "moral kind of economy" - and Austin drew our attention to the part in "Life Without Principle" when Thoreau asks what he would have to live for if he had to sell not only his forenoons but his afternoons, too, for income!  So his position was that four hours a day is enough already to sell for income! If you sell the whole day, the time when the sun is brightest, that sweetest part of the day - what is your life, anyway, then?  Austin's majoring in mechanical engineering; students from this university with that major have jobs lined up before they even graduate, he said. But be prepared to work 70 or 80 hours a week for a while, people tell him. The joke that isn't only a joke is that some people even sleep there during especially demanding work hours. Austin likes to write poetry, do woodwork - he comes across like my stereotype of (and people I knew back in the day in high school) a surfer dude. He already hates the idea of the long hours ahead, but this is his course: a job that pays well.  Still, he dreads the loss of his freedom.

7:19 am. Another thunderstorm now; the first one blew in last night around midnight. Why, oh why, did I plan to go in to meet student groups today when I don't have to?  But they zero in so much better when we do this. I suppose that makes their thesis a bit of talked through collective effort at times, but in my view, they're learning how to think in ways they never thought in before. I want them to experience how that comes about if they don't quite understand yet. I don't see how getting B's or C's on papers with vague, blah theses and then ending the semester will teach them that. So sometimes they come in with a thesis or even just a topic and we keep talking, throwing ideas around; I ask the other two students at various points what they think. It's a bit of a free-for-all. But it always stems from something they've already written in that first draft. I also tell them about passages they would have no way of knowing about otherwise. I told Austin for his last paper on Benjamin Franklin (a funny paper called "Benjamin Franklin - Virtuous?") about a passage by the great literary critic Kenneth Burke, where Burke says that people who read positive-thinking books are living in the aura of success while they're reading them - that is when the book does the most for them - they can imagine themselves as successful in those reading moments. I said it because that's what he was reaching for, and how could he know about Burke's quote? I just sent it and said to use it if he wants and feel free not to, but that his essay made me think about it. He made it his grand finale.     And it's pouring rain now.

7:29 am. I am no martyr just because I'm driving in today. I love meeting with the students about their essays. And also, I love good and great papers. Reading boring or weirdly lost ones pains me, especially when I have to grade them and/or provide feedback. Ugh.  At times I feel that I do all this in service to producing essays as excellent as possible. We're all devoted to the quest for sublime essays, I tell myself. And I want students to feel this, too. I want them to know that what they're writing matters, or at least it can.

7:33 am. I actually love what I do, at least most of the time. I hate grading, especially paper after paper, but so much of the other time, I love the rest.  Austin said he will make one Thoreau point a focal point. a passage from "Life Without Principle":

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. 

And this is why union-organizing in the quest to be paid more in the context of this economic system does much more than succumb to the logic of Capital (something I was working through in my last post, and didn't grapple with well enough). If they pay us well enough to live in this society that demands money, I can keep meeting with students, emailing them passages, remembering what they're writing about. If I have to teach four or five classes a semester, that cannot happen.

7:46 am. I've taken too long writing, but writing often centers me.  I must grade these last papers before I head out into the storms!

If This Were a Humble Journal, or 'Faithfulness' to 'the Event'

by Lucy S.

A few minutes after meeting with a student today in the university's library coffee shop area, I thought with a pang that for the past two semesters, I should have chronicled my experiences, week by week, on this blog. This, too, would be a kind of 'labor' and 'birth,' right?  I'd just finished meeting with Chase, one of my favorite students, who was in my class last semester as well, and we'd somehow talked our way to him deciding to write about American Idealism as it manifests in sports - specifically in Muhammad Ali's story. He'd been perfectly willing to write a reflective essay on American Idealism connecting to our class's readings this semester, but I could tell his heart wasn't in it.

The longer we talked, the more I wondered why I hadn't chosen a sports movie or text as yet another strain of American Idealism - such an important manifestation of the ascension narrative. We talked about how in Ali's case, there are strains at odds with one another; there is the celebrity story - a popular rags (or, for Ali, middle-class) to riches narrative - and there is Ali refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam War, or Cassius Clay who changed his name and converted to Islam.  We talked about the ways in which popular culture may shift people away from their prejudices by seeping into their affection - and the limitations of this approach. Chase wondered how to avoid having the paper turn into a report on Muhammad Ali, and I told him that the way he was talking about it was already more than a report - that framing it in these ways, delving into these questions, would yield more than a report. He left more excited about his paper than he'd been when we started.

Chase and I share a yearning for California. He's from one of the suburbs near here, but he's sick of winter and is looking into transferring to a California college. And I'm from California, of course - and I get so homesick sometimes. I joke with him that if he gets to transfer, he'd better email me now and then in the depth of winter to torture me with reports of sitting outside in the sunshine and mild air. In his letter at the beginning of this semester, he told me about some music releases he was waiting for; Schoolboy Q was one. I told my oldest son, Justin, and he told me the day the album leaked, so I let Chase know that day. He laughed and couldn't believe I would know this, and I later confessed that I'd been tipped off.

Today I told him that I wouldn't normally be so busy this semester with only one class, but that adjuncts here are trying to unionize and that I've been throwing myself into that effort from early on. He seemed supportive. I told him I currently make $4000 a semester - that I get a check every two weeks for about $420 - and he said that was too low. I didn't hover on my personal pay for long, but just talked about how union organizing has its lows and highs.

At some point - we were waiting for his writing partner, who forgot to show up - we talked about adults complaining about 'the kids nowadays.' He said he'd read something expressing this lament in one of his classes - and then saw that it had been written two hundred years ago. I said I'd read something in Will Durant's volumes of history complaining of the same terrible young boding ill for the future - written in the year 1000. We wondered if it's a displacement of the dissatisfaction older adults feel with their societies and themselves, and a resentment of the young for being young. Or do they just forget? What makes too many adult humans resent their own young so much? Is it positioning themselves as always at odds with the young?

I try to approach my students as if we're all in this semester-long journey together. I'm doing my best to steer us, and they need to row along and help direct us to our destination. It's a flawed metaphor because they'd be in a lot of boats at once, some of them moving them in other directions. But the point is, we're on the same side. I hope. I want them to do as well as possible. And I want us to at least try to create a more democratic relationship in our class. I tell them it's clearly not fully democratic, but that we're maneuvering as best we can within the parameters of formal higher education in our institution.

I'm trying to treat them like adults - free, intelligent adults. Adults, if they're not oppressed and exploited, have some ability to juggle different demands. They might choose to not have everything due on one day. They have some choices about what they labor over. They take their work seriously and don't waste their time laboring to create things that others don't take seriously. At the same time, they're not patronized. So I don't tell students that dull papers are great, and I don't ask them to read them to the class.  When students write great papers, I do ask them to read their papers, and I put the paper up on the projection screen at the same time, We talk about their process and their ideas for a bit. We applaud.

I don't know how to speak for what I do or stand for my beliefs about how we should treat students without implying a lack of humility and even an insult toward those who run more authoritarian or even just very different classes. But my focus is my students. I don't know how to compare what we do with what happens in other classes. I also can't help bringing in some of what I've learned from years of raising and teaching kids. So I'm not quite the same as a new teacher who's never taught in any way before. And yet, I don't know how many of my ideas are great, or good, or mediocre, or lousy.


If this had been a humble journal I'd kept for the past year, maybe I'd have avoided too much angst-ridden introspection in some of these posts, or too much preachiness, or other written communications that narrated too much of my internal emotional states rather than the story I've actually been living through.  I think it would have been a lot truer to my experiences.


After Chase and I met, I made my way to class a half hour later. It was a draft workshop day. Students in their writing groups of three read their drafts out loud to each other and talked about them a bit. I have some doubts about this aspect of my approach.  I need to do better with this.

Before that, Mike presented the last poem of the semester - or rather song. He'd asked me if he could present "The Times They Are A-Changing" by Bob Dylan. He played some of it first with the lyrics up on the projection screen. He was more nervous than I'd imagined he'd be, but I think we enjoyed it. I did, at least.

I sat in on John and Burke's group because Katie couldn't be there, so I decided to lend an extra set of ears and some feedback to their group. They're both writing about the corruption and cruelty in the U.S.'s immigration practices. Both are drawing on Edwidge Danticat's nonfiction memoir about her father and uncle, Brother, I'm Dying. Today I feel overjoyed with how much they've grown in their analysis of this issue.

Katie emailed that she was so sorry that she couldn't be in class, that her chronic diabetes is mixing with her temporary mono to cause complications; the doctors are worried by what looks like enlargement in her spleen. She's worried about how many classes she's missed, she said. I told her I'm not holding those against her - that these health issues aren't her fault, but that if it would work, I'd love to meet with her individually to talk through some crucial questions we discussed one day when she was gone. She responded that she'd love to meet individually and thanked me.

Teaching this way takes time. Some weeks, I feel like all I do is work on my class and work on union-organizing. And the two seem at odds at times - and not just in two commitments pulling at me. Working more hours than I'm paid for is "a labor issue," as one of my tenured friends reminded me my first semester. But I can't help giving all I can to my teaching, at least as long as I can.

In that same tenured friend's class in 2012, we read philosopher Alain Badiou's 2001 book, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.  [Some points from my presentation summing up that book...]:

He argues against the idea of a general or abstract ‘ethics,’ calling it a “genuine nihilism, a threatening denial of thought as such” (3). He instead insists that ethics must be “referred back to particular situations" (3). [I've pulled up my presentation of it now to look back at this.] Badiou says that abstract ethics are grounded in the law against Evil, which means that good only emerges as that which is not Evil. (8). 

This prevents the imagining of the Good; it prevents an “affirmative humanity” (15). It stops us from being “faithful to [the] situation”; being faithful would mean “to treat it right to the limit of the possible” (15).

This is how I try to teach, or maybe how I HOPE I try to teach.

Badiou says the “reign of ethics” is a “symptom of a universe ruled by … resignation in the face of necessity together with a purely negative, if not destructive, will.” This is nihilism (30). This “necessity” is economics – the logic of Capital (30).

How do we organize a union focusing on pay for our labor without utterly succumbing to that logic?

There is only a particular ethics connected to a particular person who becomes a subject due to the circumstances of a truth. Ordinarily, “every animal gets by as best as it can,” but when something extra comes along – the event – this “compels us to decide a new way of being” (41). 

Education. And it feels more like a series of events that are all tied together. There were my kids; there was friendship; relationship in its many forms - and education woven into all this. Relationships as education, and education as relationships.

The process of truth comes from the decision to be “faithful to an event … by thinking … the situation ‘according to’ the event” (41). This is fidelity for Badiou. This kind of truth is an “immanent break … because a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere else” (42-43). It is a break because the event “meant nothing according to the prevailing language and established knowledge of the situation” (43). Through that person’s experience with this ‘event,’ he becomes “in excess of himself,” inscribed from “within time, in an instant of eternity” (45).

The best teachers I've known taught and engaged this way, transcending logic in what they could accomplish, living somehow 'in excess of themselves.' I''m trying to be like them. And somehow, contrary to the glorious highs we imagine when focusing on such transformation, I think they do it in the way I should have kept a humble journal, day by day.

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. 2001, Reprint. London: Verso, 2002. Print.