Primrose Road

Parent of a high school student, overheard at a diner near campus:

"He totally f****ed up his application. We want to switch him over to early decision, but the representative from [University of X] called me and said he needs to declare a major first to do that. He doesn't want to declare a major. I told him, I don't care, you can major in bondage if you want, just declare a major so you can do early decision."

cf. "Helicopter" parents

For me, it's an interesting insight into Jewish mythologies and the ways in which the tradition associates consciousness with light, imagining that consciousness is primary in terms of knowing and creation.



It's G-dcast, which will be posting a cartoon parsha (Torah portion) every week this year. Secular Jews / those of us who don't buy into the supernatural elements of the culture may nevertheless find these interesting for the stories that they tell.

Several people have suggested that I see a "grief counselor" at my family's synagogue because I (along with my cousins) have had a bit of trouble feeling that my father's sudden, totally unexpected death happened. We know it happened, but it somehow didn't, and that actually makes a lot of sense to me, and I understand what's going on with that quite well.

This grief counseling, according to the synagogue's pamphlet, involves drawing pictures and writing songs, stories, and poems. I guess that representing one's grief back to oneself works for some people, but I understand too well that it can't speak to the problem of not being able to encounter an event that happened.

My dad was right when he said I intellectualized too much. ;)

On Friday night, we saw the Frog & Peach Theatre Co's Richard III at the West End Theater, a small space with a huge domed ceiling on the second floor of a church on W 86th Street. The production starred Anatol Yusef as a slimy, conniving Richard with sometimes-sad, pleading eyes.

It wasn't the most original Richard III I've seen (a battle mimed amidst strobe lights? really?), though there was an interesting audience-complicity-inducing element: when Buckingham presents Richard to his subjects, the actor encouraged us to clap, and we did, even though we "knew better." At a number of moments, we were the Richard's subjects, somewhat uneasy about the man but also somehow compelled to clap.

Karen Lynn Gorney played a somewhat soapy Margaret, which nevertheless seemed appropriate to the character.

While the rather-straightforward performance wasn't quite full of the "terror, mayhem, and butchery" advertised on the company's site, it was captivating and made a Shakespeare-like use of its audience.

A friend of a friend told me at lunch the other day that he had been frustrated with a class he'd taken as an undergraduate because the prof repeatedly told them that Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge was all about "ways of knowing." Having actually read the assigned text, my friend's friend was quite confused by his teacher's claim that science is only one valid narrative.

Just because there can be multiple valid narratives doesn't always mean that there are multiple valid narratives. It also certainly doesn't mean that *anything* one comes up with is valid (my argument that my dad wrote Shakespeare's plays is pretty damn convincing, I think); this is where the idea of "ways of knowing" gets into sounds-spiritual-and-New-Agey -but-we're-really-just-out-to-sell-you-crap territory that sounds forward-thinking, but, really, is just out to sell you crap.

I explained it like this: two weeks ago, I read and discussed Charlotte Perkins' Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" with a class composed of many pre-med, pre-D.O., and PT/OT students who immediately noted that the story's narrator seems to be suffering from post-partum depression. I warned them of the problems with "diagnosing" fictional characters, but agreed that the narrator here does clearly have symptoms of post-partum depression; at one point, in fact, she even mentions that she has been unable to bond with her baby. Her depression develops into psychosis, something that my students tell me is unlikely because PPD and postpartum psychosis are different disorders, but it's nevertheless clear that the narrator seems to be suffering from what we today know to be an actual condition.

Why, I asked them, might PPD have remained unidentified by doctors like the narrator's husband John, who is described as "practical in the extreme," having "no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures"? Perhaps, I suggested, people at the time simply couldn't imagine the possibility that having a child could make a woman physically ill, and certainly couldn't conceive of a disease that caused a woman to be unable to bond with her infant. Sociocultural factors, in other words, got in the way of medical research that might have saved lives and minds.

What this doesn't suggest is that sociocultural factors are getting in the way of medical research related to, say, vaccines as a possible cause of autism, because the research has already been done. In fact, in this case too, sociocultural factors (specifically, the media's willingness to buy into Oprah and Jenny McCarthy?) may be limiting our access to reality; it's a different situation, however, from the one above.

Finally, I held a fork near my friend's head so that it pointed down towards his left foot. "If I drop this fork on G.'s foot," I said, "it's going to accelerate towards his foot at a rate of approximately 9.8 m/s^2, and, more importantly, the fork is not going to fly upwards and get stuck in the ceiling."

In other words, there are often sociocultural factors involved in *knowing*, but that doesn't mean that we don't know anything, and it certainly doesn't mean that *anything* one chooses to call "knowledge" is valid. And that, in turn, does not mean that there is no valid knowledge.

By popular request. ;)

1. There is no such thing as "social promotion" in college; you can't pass a class simply by showing up on a regular basis. On the first day of class, your professor will likely distribute a syllabus that outlines exactly how (s)he will compute your grade. If you don't turn in assignments, you'll fail (or, in some schools, receive a "withdrawal" failure, which means that you didn't do enough to even earn a grade of F).

2. If you regularly show up 45 minutes after class has started, *everyone* will notice. The professor probably won't take time out of his or her teaching/lecture to address the issue, but it will be reflected in your grade.

3. Copy-and-paste plagiarism is not just unethical; it's dumb. If you don't understand why, then you need to read more and tweak your critical thinking skills a bit. Your professors have access to exactly the same Internet that you do.

4. Absences every once in a while are ok. Even I have accidentally set my alarm to "PM" instead of "AM" on occasion. Unless you're absent more than 10% of the time (i.e. more than three times for a class that meets two days a week for a 15-week semester), your professors probably don't want to hear -- or strain to believe -- your excuses. In college, it's ridiculous to make up high-school-style excuses. Know your audience.

5. If you have to go to the restroom, just go. Please, please, please don't raise your hand and ask if you can use the restroom.

6. If you have to leave your cell phone on in class (or during a meeting), turn it to silent, not vibrate. Never answer a call in class. (I hope that sounds ridiculous to most readers.)

7. Always think three steps ahead. Imagine the consequences of your actions three steps in advance; if, for example, you answer your cell phone in class, what will happen next? What actions might the professor or other students take? If you copy-and-paste an essay from a website, what will the professor likely do? When you're caught, what will happen next? Always think about how your actions will affect others (your classmates included).

Question for Californians: How science-y is your Proposition 65?

Last week, I bought a mug at a concert in Atlantic City (I'm a sucker for nonfabric tour merchandise) which had a label stuck to the bottom with the following printed on it:

PROP 65
Warning: The materials used as colored decorations on the exterior of this product contain lead and/or cadmium, chemicals known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm.

"Known to the State of California" is what has me scratching my head here. If these chemicals caused harm, wouldn't that fact be "known to" every state? Wouldn't the FDA have stuck labels on all mugs decorated with lead- or cadmium-based paints if that were the case? Or are there simply many "ways of knowing" whether drinking coffee out of your Lindsey Buckingham mug will result in your someday giving birth to a child with an ear growing out of its forehead?

I'm planning to go back to Lincoln, Nebraska for the last eight months of my Ph.D. program (or what I hope will be the last eight months of my Ph.D. program), and am now *relieved* to learn that the city has banned the presence of indoor furniture outdoors.

Indeed, the author of an article about a transient who stabbed a 28-year-old woman because she woke him up when he was sleeping on her porch made sure to point out that the woman did NOT have an outdoor sofa. (Whew.) I'd think transients sleeping on porches and, uh, stabbing people is a fairly serious municipal issue, but I guess sofas on porches are a bigger concern ...

Indoor furniture outdoors gave the neighborhoods of Lincoln much character. ;) I remember the giant blue couch on the porch of the house across the street from my building ... though even better was the funnel cake trailer parked in the driveway of the next house over.

The Chicago Tribune offers up an article about why college might not always be "worth it". For example:

But they caution that some college choices are no longer a wise investment. Students destined for low-paying careers, they say, simply cannot manage certain debt levels. Loans can surpass $100,000 depending on the school and the borrower.

"If you're going to be a nursery school teacher your whole life, you should not be taking out a lot of loans," said Sandy Baum, senior policy analyst for the College Board and an economics professor at Skidmore College. "That's the problem. It's an investment people make without knowing how they will pay it off."

The counterargument, of course, is that the value of college is not necessarily a higher salary, but more finely-tuned critical thinking skills:

Experts point out that the college experience is not just about financial rewards. There is also that business about learning a few things. Students are able to explore their interests. They often become inspired by subjects they never knew existed and are able to view the world through a broader lens.

"There's value added when it comes to critical thinking and moral reasoning," said Ernest Pascarella, a University of Iowa professor who has studied the effects of college.

...

"Career-wise, college has been very important for me," [a 22-year-old finance major] said. "But it's also about knowledge. If I wasn't in school, I wouldn't be able to understand what's going on with the economy and with other things that affect my life."

I wonder if the question is not so much one of whether college is "worth it" but whether college has become the new high school. Young people in many places in the US find themselves competing for service and retail jobs with college graduates, even though these jobs do not necessarily require "college-level" skills. Meanwhile, graduate school seems to be fast becoming the new college, where college graduates find that they can't get higher-level jobs unless they hold M.A.s or M.B.A.s, and some, unable to find jobs after graduation, enter graduate school in order to delay their disappointment with the job market.

Perhaps the critical thinking skills that we work so hard to develop in our freshman comp students need to be taught in high school. I'm concerned that instead of teaching important skills in high school, parents, teachers, and the public education system in some states are merely extending adolescence until at least age twenty-two.

(Sometimes, I give my 200-level literature classes tongue-in-cheek "how to be a grownup" lessons. They're more appreciative than you might imagine.)

The following is a relief map of Ridgefield, Connecticut constructed out of bread and lemons:



A friend created this in order to make clear the difficulty of getting to a concert venue in this town ...