Jack and Ruth Gribben Lecture Series

 

 Every once in a while, I'm touched by something out of the ordinary. I had such an experience last week, when my department chair and I drove down to Parsons, KS, for the 37th Annual Jack and Ruth Gribben English Series at Labatte Community College. It was a small gathering, and we worked with Patty McGee, a writing consultant from New Jersey. Her presentation was good. 

I think what really struck me about this series was that it was put on by a tiny community college in the middle of nowhere. We had roast beef and mashed potatoes for lunch. It felt very down home. This series was funded by Jack and Ruth Gribben, both of whom I believe have died. He was a printer who seemed to have a deep respect for the written word.

We always think of rural people as hicks and illiterates. At least, that's the way they're presented by the media. But, clearly, Jack and Ruth were educated and literate, and they cared enough to fund a series that would promote literacy for decades after their deaths. 

These people weren't the Rockefellers, but they were generous with what they had. Series like this one are tiny little island of caring. 

I'm impressed.

Jonathan Haidt and The Righteous Mind

 I spent a couple of days finishing Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. Haidt is a moral psychologist (or at least he studies moral psychology; there's probably a difference). The book was interesting in a couple of ways. Haidt, who was the coauthor  of The Coddling of the American Mind, apparently did his PhD work in the late 80s at the University of Pennsylvania. I was an undergraduate there at the same time. He talks a lot about talking to subjects at the McDonald's on Walnut Street, at the edge of campus. He also talks a lot about Paul Rozin, who I believe taught my intro to psychology course. 

Beyond taking me down me down memory lane, Haidt, in alignment with the work of David Hume, argues that our moral decision making is usually emotional. We have an emotional reaction to a situation, and then we use reason to construct a rational framework for our snap judgment. I'm not totally sure I buy this argument. I do get, though, that this is the way a lot of people make decisions. 

Haidt has an interesting section in his book about Weird Morality. Since it personally hits home, I'll quote at length from it here:

"I got my PhD at McDonald's. Part of it, anyway, given the hours I spent standing outside of a McDonald's restaurant in West Philadelphia trying to recruit working-class adults to talk with me for my dissertation research. When someone agreed, we'd sit down together at the restaurant's outdoor seating area, and I'd ask them what they thought about the family that ate its dog, the woman who used her flag as a rag, and I got some odd looks as the interviews progressed, and also plenty of laughter--particularly when I told people about the guy and the chicken [a man has sex with a chicken and then kills it and eats it]. I was expecting that, because I had written the stories to surprise and even shock people."

"What what I didn't expect was that these working-class subjects would sometimes find my request for justifications so perplexing. Each time someone said that the people in a story had done something wrong, I asked, 'Can you tell me why that was wrong?" When I had interviewed college students on the Penn Campus a month earlier, this question brought forth their moral justifications quite smoothly. But a few blocks west, this same question often led to long pauses and disbelieving stares. Those pauses and stares seemed to say, You mean you don't know why it's wrong to do that to a chicken? I have to explain this to you? What planet are you from?"

"These subjects were right to wonder about me because I was weird. I came from a strange and different moral world--the University of Pennsylvania. Penn students were the most unusual of all twelve groups in my study. They were unique in their unwavering devotion to the harm principle, which John Stuart Mill had put forth in 1859: The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. As one Penn student said: It's his chicken, he's eating it, nobody is getting hurt.

I wonder if that was me.

I've always wondered through the years if my degree from Penn was an implicit endorsement of sex with chickens. 

Now I know. 

On a more serious note, Haidt is also trying to figure out why left and right seem so opposed to each other today, and he does a really interesting thing to try to figure out the differences. He basically argues that there are five kinds of moral groundings:  care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. 

Haidt argues that liberals tend to base their moral framework almost exclusively on care/harm and fairness/cheating. While conservatives also base their moral evaluations on care/harm and fairness/cheating, they're far more interested in the last three dyads. 

Haidt's idea makes complete sense. I often think of my own evolution. I was raised Catholic by fairly conservative teacher parents (not Republicans but socially conservative) in a lower middle class household in a dying industrial city that in the 80s was home to a lot of white ethnicities: Polish, German, and Italian, especially Italian. At my Catholic boys' high school, Michael Corleone was not just a fictional character but a role model for success in life. And he was a snazzy dresser. Ok, so he was also very evil. Everybody has weaknesses.

In Erie, you couldn't hold office unless your name ended in a vowel. Clearly, authority/subversion, loyalty/betrayal, and sanctity/degradation were the core moral dyads of my upbringing Then I went to Penn and, eventually, to graduate school in English. The matrix reversed itself almost totally: care/harm was the primary moral determiner: identity politics, environmentalism, feminism, and a really vague kind of socialism. 

But those new matrices of the last 30 years have always sat rather uneasily with some of my core conservative values: I'm against abortion, and I always have been. When I think of my volunteer work with Amnesty International, I've been driven as much by sanctity as I have by care/harm: the sanctity of life and the sanctity of free speech. In my personal relationships, I care more about loyalty than I do about care/harm and fairness/cheating. 

 Speaking of fairness/cheating, I've been of two minds about this one, to no end of consternation to both my liberal and conservative friends. In terms of one hot button issue, gay marriage, I don't see it as a fairness issue. I'm for civil unions and legal rights. But to my mind marriage is between a male and female for the purpose of procreation. That you can't sway me on. I guess I come down on the side of sanctity on that one. However, there's another fairness issue that I'm a little more mixed about. In rural New Mexico there was a lot of welfare cheating and inter-generational welfare use. A lot of my conservative colleagues were absolutely grossed out by this. And I confess that at times, I was a little grossed out as well. However, I would also say (and genuinely believe) to my conservative friends: yeah, this is a little parasitic, but I'm more concerned about parasites at the top of the food chain. My friends seemed genuinely perplexed by my concern. After all, they said, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet earned their money. 

It's true. They did. But this earning is probably never as clean as conservatives would make it seem to be. Bill Gates was up to his elbows in anti-trust litigation. Jeff Bezos will probably be as well. More than that, once you hit a certain point in wealth accumulation, the whole thing becomes kind of unfair: lobbying power to write favorable laws, direct access to lawmakers, access to the media, and power to shape lives. I'm not sure how fair all this is. And while my friends had problems with people abusing welfare--and I have this problem as well--they didn't seem to recognize the abuses of people who inherit (not just a lifetime or two of capital) vast fortunes. These people tend to have a lot of power, and they don't really do anything for their money. 

In any event, Haidt's work was really interesting: a trip down memory lane and a way to think about moral matrices. 

 

  

Journal of a Plague Year 2

Well, I'm Covid free, and we've shut down our brick and mortar classes. I have mixed emotions about that decision. It's the right thing to do for student safety, of course. But I absolutely despise teaching online. I'm not too bad at it, and we're doing a special hybrid type of course: The students Zoom in with me twice a week. It's an ok alternative to being together, but it's nothing to write home about. 

 I hope that one of the things that emerges from the pandemic is the realization that online learning is a poor second to actually being together. I'm in a new faculty orientation program this semester, and so many people seem to think that this kind of online hybridization will become the new normal. There's a huge split between the millennial faculty who grew up online and the Gen Xers who were in their late teens or early twenties when the technology started to develop. I was actually 25 when I sent my first email. Those days seem like a million years ago. 

The only people who really benefit from online education are the big ed tech companies. These folks have been salivating like dogs since the outbreak of COVID. 

 Last year, when I was an area director of a small English department in New Mexico, I was practically attacked every day with a bombardment of emails from big ed tech companies wanting to "help" me. The most outrageous emails started coming after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police. A couple of companies wanted to "help" me put together diversity readings. I can't believe they were so opportunistic. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Back when I worked in college textbook publishing, I remember putting together the photo package for a student success textbook. My boss said, "Wait a minute.There aren't enough ethnics here. Get me more ethnics." I don't even want to drill down into that one.

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As I do every year, I'm interviewing for the University of Pennsylvania. I've spent the last week talking to several students seeking admission to the university. 

This year, one of the students started talking about famous alumni. I hadn't realized that Warren Buffet had studied at Penn for two years. The student was interested in Elon Musk as well. Lots of people who went to Penn do well, but so many students are interested in the real super stars. I've often thought that the real biggies--like Musk and Trump--are more like forces of nature than they are normal (even Ivy League) students. I'm not sure I would ever aspire to that kind of success. 

It's funny. The student didn't mention our current and soon to be former president. Nobody ever mentions him when we do the interview. I'm actually kind of surprised. Well, not really. I would think that most of the students applying to Penn skew left. The exceptions might be engineering or Wharton students. When I went to Penn's College of Arts and Sciences, we used to call Wharton the school of evil.

The interviews aren't as fun as they usually are since everything is virtual this year. Still, though, it's fun to talk to incredibly motivated students. 

Teaching in the age of COVID--Journal of a Plague Year

My last blog post was in January of this year. To say that things have changed would be a vast understatement. In terms of my own professional life, I've left New Mexico after three good years of teaching and one of being a director (basically a department chair). I now teach at a community college outside of Kansas City. More money and a better load, but there's a catch. 

Well, maybe it would be more accurate to say that I have caught something, maybe. At my new school, most of our courses have been meeting online. But I volunteered to teach two developmental English sections in the classroom. Our sections have been limited to nine students. We mask up and disinfect. Unfortunately, two of my students tested positive for COVID. And I had to move the class online for the rest of the semester. And I recently--two days ago--had to get tested. I am now waiting to see if I have COVID. 

I shouldn't have read the travel literature: See the World. Come to Kansas. Get incredibly ill. 

We'll see.

Literature is no place for sex and violence: Dual Credit and the questionable future of literature.

"Literature is no place for sex and violence."

So I was told by a dual credit high-school student taking an English course at my institution. The student was outraged by the presence of foul language, sexual content, and violence in our common text, John Nichols' The Milagro Beanfield War.

My first response to the student was tongue in cheek: "Shakespeare much?"

My internal response was much more serious.

At my institution, as is the case at hundreds of community colleges across the country, many high school students are enrolling in college classes while they're still in high school. Ostensibly, dual credit is a win-win situation. High-school students get some college credits on the cheap. The community college gets increased enrollment and an increased funding line.

This is all good stuff.

However, there are some issues with dual credit and literature. These students are high school students. Many of them range between 15 and 17. They're minors attending classes designed for young adults.

The college English classroom is very different from the high school English class. At least I hope it is. It should be. The college English classroom is about ideas, some of which might be disturbing to students and the parents of the students.

What is literature? One working definition is what Northrup Frye said, "It's equipment for living." It's often about the way people think and what they do.

My student, who cited Pride and Prejudice and Ben Hur as shining examples  of "proper literature," has a pretty old-fashioned view of what literature is. Literature is about the human condition. And the human condition in the last 200 years has been anything but simple. We've lived through a period that has seen the creation of human rights, but also genocide. We've seen the development of both the nation state and the weakening of it through globalization. We've seen sexuality morph into all sorts of things:  LGBT, BDSM, transgender, female liberation, MGTOW, MRAS, and polyamory. We've seen corporations take on the power of gods. It's been a wild two centuries.

And literature has been on a wild ride as well: Dickens, Thackery, Pynchon, Orwell, Atwood, Burgess. These people all have held up mirrors to the culture. Sometimes what they show us isn't very flattering.

The problem with dual credit is the problem with freshmen, squared. These dual credit students (and, often, their parents) think that literature is like a nice table cloth. It decorates the table and makes one feel sophisticated.

Literature is nothing of the sort. I went into literature because I like new ideas. I like writers who show us how we really are.

The problem with dual credit is that there's pushback, a kind of Victorianism at work.  Don't offend us. Don't challenge our world views. Don't say bad things.

Eek, get my smelling salts out.

Dual credit can help both students and institutions. But it can also push to make college more like high school. And that's a mistake, especially in the state I live in, New Mexico. The high schools here are god awful. That's not just an opinion. That's a numerical reality. New Mexico ranked last in the nation in terms of k-12 education. I think I know why. But that's a subject for another post.

Second First Place

In my composition courses, before students write rough drafts, students engage in a debate in order to help create arguments. The debates also help students to see what kinds of counter-arguments they can make effectively.

I structure the debates along the lines I learned when I was a high-school debater. We have two teams. The students not debating serve as judges.

Last semester, at the end of one in-class debate, the judges voted. Clearly, one team had done a better job than the other.

I congratulated the winners. And I consoled the losers. But one guy on the losing team said, "We didn't lose." I said, "I'm sorry, but you did. The judges clearly voted for the other team. And I can go over the reasons why you lost one more time."

He was insistent: "We didn't lose." He smiled. "We took second first place."

Second first place?

I thought to myself:

Did Rommel take second first place to Patton?

Did Custer take second first place to Sitting Bull?

Did Cornwallis take second first place to Washington?

The student who declared himself in "second first place" was actually one of my favorites. However, he is an IGEN. I'm a Gen Xer who was raised by the Greatest Generation. My parents were older when I was conceived. I mostly have their values and attitudes toward competition.

My first reaction to the declaration of second first place was incredulity. Igens tend to be--like millennials--much more egalitarian than Gen Xers, Boomers, and the Greatest Generation.

On the face of it, there's nothing wrong with some egalitarianism. But life isn't completely egalitarian. Some experiences are pretty zero sum. And "second first place" seems to me to sidestep the fact that in some activities--job seeking, contract obtaining, and even dating--there are clear winners and losers.

And there's nothing wrong with that state of affairs. When I was a teenager, I ranked sixth in my prep school class out of 300 students during the first quarter of my freshman year. When I talked to my father about my ranking, he just said, "Why aren't you number one?" And the next quarter, I really pushed hard, and I was number one. I didn't rank first every quarter, but my father's push helped me to compete and, more important, achieve my best. It's not so much the ranking that mattered, it was the drive to achieve it, the desire to have it, and the work it took to get it.

Second first place seems like a cop out to me.

Some people might say, well, competition is bad. (and if you're  Marxist, you could make Jameson's social constructivist argument that a respect for competition is just part and parcel of being blinkered by a capitalist system that doesn't allow for the possibility of other ways of being)

But I don't buy that argument. Don't you want your surgeon to be almost OCD in terms of getting things right?  If you run a company,  don't you want your sales reps to be driven to achieve market domination? If you're accused of capital murder, do you want your defense attorney to be ok with taking second first place?

Second first place, not a good place to be, for any generation.

Mornings

This week I received my evaluations back for the fall.

Most of them were pretty good. Generally, they're pretty good. But the evaluations revealed something really interesting. Last semester, I taught two sections of English 1110, a basic composition course.

The scores for the two sections were pretty different. At first, I couldn't figure out why. I do basically the same things in every comp class.

What was different?

Nothing except the time. The first class was at 8 in the morning. The second class was at 11:30. The first class also had a rather large number of high school students. The second class also had some high school students, but not as many.

The 11:30 results were much higher than the 8:00 scores.

I realized that I had had the same split the previous semester: the early class scores were yucky, and the later class scores were pretty good.

This discrepancy made me think about the fact that most college students and most high school students are not morning people.

I've always been kind of an anomaly. Currently, I get up at about 4:00 am every day. Even when I was a teenager, I usually went to bed before 11:00 pm and was up by 6:30. But I've read literature that says that most teenagers have huge amounts of trouble getting up in the morning, not because they're lazy but because their body clocks are set differently.

This semester, I'm going to really focus on my 8:00 am courses. I have two of them: both American Lit I Surveys. These are the classes that are going to be interesting. The last time I taught this survey was at the University of Minnesota. The students were mostly juniors and seniors. And I taught from about 6 pm to 9 pm.

So, my goal this semester is to figure out how to make an 8:00 am course that covers some rather difficult material interesting and a destination.

I'm going to focus on the following:

1. a lot of in-class activities.
2. lighting: I am going to make it as bright in the room as I can.
3. a lot of group work.
4. High energy.

Let's see how this turns out.