Phantastes

New Blog

2009-02-14T23:22:00.001-07:00

For some time I've been using a new blog. If you know me or like my writing, please go there.

Frivoloty, part 2

2008-06-30T23:44:00.002-07:00

A few days ago I read a pair of highly entertaining novels by Dean Koontz: Forever Odd and Brother Odd, about a highly unusual young man who can see the lingering dead. Though certainly not great these are solidly good novels, and I would recommend them as good summer reading (Odd Thomas is actually the first in the series, and should probably be read before the others). In any event, I tend to understand and empathize with the motivations of the young man, however unlikely both his circumstances and actions may be. I was mildly surprised to realize that there are frivolous, unlikely novels that don't bother me, because recently I have assumed that all such books are likely to bother me in equal measure, simply by virtue of being frivolous. Not so. And that brings me back to the last series of novels I read, Twilight.

I was reading a thread on The Twilight Lexicon this afternoon, where avid fans of the series were discussing whether or not Edward was a fool for trying to leave in New Moon, to which the consensus was that yes, he was a fool, but he had all the best intentions. Their main argument rested on the facts that a) he ended up not being able to live without Bella in any event and b) leaving hurt Bella a great deal more than Edward anticipated. Both points are true, but I believe that they miss something very crucial as well: everyone ends up dismissing the question of whether being a vampire is a Very Bad Thing or not, and how important this question is to everyone involved with the Cullens.

Brahm Stoker is, in many ways, not as good a writer as Stephenie Meyer: Dracula is usually dead boring. He goes on and on about things that don't matter, such as elaborate descriptions of various locations and the operations of a phonographic diary, which pretty no one cares about any more (possibly they never did, but editors were more indulgent back then). But Stoker has one great virtue that most modern writers of vampire novels lack: he appreciated how very bad it is to be, become, or become prey to a vampire. There's nothing cool or sexy about having one's soul drained out through the blood stream. When one of the female characters is starting to be turned by Dracula, and a communion wafer pressed to her forehead burns her like acid, it's terrible. It's difficult to convey, and probably wouldn't mean much to a modern audience that doesn't share Catholic sensibilities, but all the power and terror of Stoker's vampires hinges upon entertaining the possibility that there are supernatural monsters that can not only kill the body (which in his world, is a relatively small thing), but can, in some terrible way, also harm the soul. They have power to make even God reject their victim, as symbolized by the way in which things like holy water, crosses, and communion wafers hurt those who have fallen under their sway.

Edward Cullen still possesses some of that old dread of being rejected by God, even if he doesn't quite know who God is, or what His demands consist of. He also suspects that vampires are unnatural, and, especially, rejected by God, so that though they have great longevity, strength, speed, sexiness, and so on, they are ultimately melancholy creatures, outside of the order of creation. In short, being a vampire is a Very Bad Thing. Being a vampire himself is something of an affliction, which he endures, and sometimes enjoys aspects of, but if he were ever given an opportunity to become a normal person again, he would probably jump on it in an instant. It's possible he might even trade it for going back and dyeing of the Spanish Flue, though it might be he loves Carlisle too much for that. In any event, it's certainly not something he would wish on someone who could otherwise live a normal human life. So, seeing that Bella would either get killed or become a vampire if she continued to keep company with him, he left, somewhere near the beginning of New Moon. If he had known how much leaving would devastate her, would he have still gone? Probably not, on account of weakness, just as he probably would have eventually returned anyway, out of misery. I would, however, assert that just because Edward would not have been able to endure the outcome of his choice, that does not make it the wrong one.

A while back I was talking with a fan of Twilight, and though through lack of time I was unable to hear her whole argument, but something she said struck me. She said that I was unable to understand or judge correctly what Bella or Edward or Stephenie Meyer ought to have done, because I have never experienced life shattering love or loss. That struck me as odd, and somehow emblematic of differences between Stephenie Meyer's assumptions about the role of emotion and my own. I believe that there is a right thing to do, and that because of various circumstances (emotional, physical, whatever) people very often do not do it. Explaining the reasons why a person failed says nothing about the original question of what the right thing was. It's not so big a problem for me when a character knows the right thing and fails to do it (as when Edward lets Bella get involved with him in the first place), or even when they do something that I consider to be wrongheaded, but is well articulated (Like Dimitri chasing after Grushenka). The biggest problem is when there's an ethical problem that's glaringly obvious to the reader, and, in this case, to at least one character, but which everyone else is utterly blind to, because it conflicts with their emotional ties.

Literarily, I end up being disappointed because there are these questions burning in Edward's soul upon pretty much all the characters' moral questions hinge: is it a Very Bad Thing to be a vampire? Do vampires have souls? If it is indeed Very Bad, what is the role of love? Can the best thing for another person sometimes also be the thing that hurts the most now? Is it still worth it? What happens to a vampire that kills himself? Is it worth enduring years, decades, possibly centuries of emotional torment to do the right thing? But no one else is willing to talk about any of the above questions, especially Bella, though many of them effect her most of all. Because she's afraid of what the answers will be. Because she'll get hurt. Because she won't be able to become a vampire. As understandable as those reactions may be, they're bad for the quality of the books, because should vampires indeed prove to be rejected by God, then there are no happy endings. Bella becoming a vampire is ultimately a tragedy, and her staying human means probably decades of pain and loss. If it's actually alright to be a vampire, then there can be a happy ending, but at the expense of shallow philosophy and a disappointing anticlimax.

Flagstaff Summer Camp

2008-06-15T22:37:00.002-07:00

Another year, another camp - I wish I could put up some pictures, but my hands were always too covered with dye, glue, or dust for me to use a digital camera in safety. Anyway, it went well, and the kids seemed to have a lot of fun, and made some pretty col stuff - especially of the t-shirt variety.

Frivolity, Part 1

2008-05-30T23:41:00.000-07:00

About three weeks ago I read the first three books of the wildly popular Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, and thought they were enjoyable but frivolous. Indeed, I thought so with such assurance that I never even bothered questioning why this was the case - it seemed entirely self-evident; when asked what I was doing with my time I would blush and stammer and say "reading a series of teen vampire romance novels" in a quick, low voice, while avoiding their gaze. But then I was talking with some friends, and they challenged this assessment - why were they "frivolous," and why did that mean that I should be slightly ashamed of reading them? I tried to answer, but failed to come up with anything convincing, which seemed odd, considering how obvious my former assessment had and continued to seem. The following essay is, then, an apology of my position regarding Twilight and, by extension, all "frivolous" but moral books.
When I started writing this, I was thinking exclusively of novels -and primarily recent novels at that - but as I was trying to pin down what is and is not "frivolous" in my view, I started listing books, which formed themselves into three categories: important, serious, and self-indulgent. The more I listed, the more I noted that non-fiction books spread themselves out between the three categories as well: for instance, Wild at Heart and The Purpose Driven Life wound up labeled "self-indulgent," James Harriet and Jacques Barzun qualified as "serious," while St. Theophan and Dostoevsky were both "important." There is still variation within each group, but roughly, books in the first ought to be read, because they're brilliant; books in the second category would be helpful for most people to read because they're good; books in the third category are just fun and nothing else, like eating candy. There's a fourth category, I think, of profane books, but I've never read any of them, and have nothing to say on the topic.

To say that some books are self-indulgent and others not is to imply a standard from which I judge seriousness. In my case, these are the quality of certain novels and the advice of certain saints, of which these are a few of the very best: Victor hugo, Dostoevsky, Kierkergaard (whom I have never read, but even so, he's a criterion), Homer, Virgil, St. Theophan, St John of the Ladder, St. Augustine, Solzienitzen. Then there's a second tier of very good writers: G K Chesterton, Charles Williams, Charles Dickens, C S Lewis, George MacDonald, Saint Exupery, JRR Tolkien. Does this new book I'm reading have the mythological depth of The Lord of the Rings or the insights into the human soul of The Brothers Karamazov or the childlike wisdom of The Little Prince or the clarity of vision of the Address to the West? If not, why should I read it? What does it have that's worth spending ten hours and more on?

Last summer I visited a monastery nearby for a week and a half, and while I was there I went to confession with a heiromonk who was father confessor to the nuns. He was very kind and gave a lot of advice, and among that advice he mentioned that since I had confessed to reading novels too much, he thought I oughtn't read any novels at all. It seemed understandable, in view of how I would usually not only read novels but make up entire world inside my imagination based upon them, and would spend hours and days and (in the summer) weeks, even, making up stories about the worlds of the books and characters of my own. I gave up after about three weeks, however, and haven't seriously tried again since, but ever since that day I've always felt a little prick of guilt whenever I've read a novel that wasn't quite serious - which is most books really, and thought that perhaps I should try to detach myself from the reading of fantasy novels at the very least. So far I have been highly unsuccessful, and mostly just look rather embarrassed whenever I say that I've been reading Ann McKafrey or Robert Silverburg or Stephenie Meyer, or some similarly "frivolous" writer lately.

* * *
My generation grew up in the age of the morally ambiguous monster and the ironic anti-hero, and no one is at all surprised when the vampire turns out to be the angst-ridden good guy. I usually don't read vampire stories, so I'm not very familiar with stock characters in the genre, but going by shows like Angel and Moonlight, I'm willing to suggest that Tormented Vampire Hero is on of them. So now there's Edward - the Vampire Hero with all the sensibilities of a Jane Austin character. What's not to like? He's gorgeous, kind, polite, possesses super powers, decorous, eternally seventeen, tries very hard to do the right thing, quotes Shakespeare, reads Victorian romances when he's bored, writes classically-themed music inspired by his girlfriend, drives a beautiful car, is rich but not too snobby. Oh yeah, and did I mention he's gorgeous? Indeed, pretty much every young (or not so young) woman to read these books develops an instant and lasting crush on Edward, and great sympathy for Bella, who is hopelessly in love with him. As a result their love story, which is carried through Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and the soon to be released Breaking Dawn is extremely emotionally compelling. Meyer's style is good enough to rarely distract from the power of that emotional attachment (although if she mentions that Edward has "a body that any male model would sell his soul for," or any variation on that theme one more time, I'm going to be very disappointed), but not so good as to be worth mentioning. Which is to say, she writes like a good modern novelist, with a mild flavor of Sense and Sensibility, Wuthering Heights, and Romeo and Juliet added in. But Meyer's work doesn't have the ironic distance that is the hallmark of most modern writers. So that I don't have to keep repeating this for the remainder of this essay: Edward is most girls' dream boyfriend, for most of the reasons mentioned above, and a couple more which are less innocent.

To counter the massive sense of imbalance in the Bella/Edward relationship because of his vampire powers, Edward is not only hopelessly in love with Bella, but suffers for her a great deal - when she's in danger, when they're apart, when he has to leave her "for her own good," when he thinks she's dead, when he realized how much he's hurt her. The way meyer describes it, this is like the emotional equivalent of being burned alive or something - like if your husband left you times ten. When E. thinks B's dead, he flies halfway around the world to try to kill himself (vampires are very difficult to kill in these books), but fortunately she finds him in time. There's part of me - a small, dark part, ruled by vanity and lust for power - that loves this, and it forms part of the pull toward wishing someone were so desperately in love with me (a typical desire). The rest of me finds this repugnant.

I do not, however, want to write a comprehensive critique of these books and my reaction to them: I wish there were another perspective that was entirely different - I wish, for instance, that Carslile has a bit more Zosima in him; I wish there were a strong, platonic friendship in there somewhere, so that not everything was sexual tension and suffering all the time (and no, Bella's friendship with Alice doesn't really count, because it's very Edward-centric); I wished Edward would explain his philosophy, and Bella would quit dismissing it as silly (even if it is, she should give it some serious thought, because he's been considering this for 90 years, and she for little more than nine months); I wish a lot of minor things that don't need to be explored at this point. But I'm not sure if any of those things would be enough to effect the essential lightness of the novels. I'm trying to think of what would, but am probably too tired to do at the moment. being the genre that they are, it's probably impossible. Balancing the emotionalism with more thoughtful dialogues or reflections from the narrator might do it, but she's only seventeen, and fairly shallow - changing the narrator, however, would change everything, and probably make them not nearly as compelling. Mmm... I'll try to give this some more thought when I have time.

The Strengths & Weaknesses of My Education

2008-03-19T20:20:00.001-07:00

Written for a college application essay:

When I think about my education so far, what comes first to mind is reading good books and talking about them with parents and friends, looking for some interesting point or meaning in them. Driving back from my college graduation at Northern Arizona University last December, after spending much of the trip talking about Wittgenstein, I remember my father reading, out loud, a 23-page essay on what it was like being a philosophy student of Dr. O K Bouwsma, and how patiently he would guide his classes through all the intellectual "fly bottles" of Philosophy; the elation of hearing for the first time, after so many "what is..." questions, "the meaning of a word is it's use," and then the disappointment of finding that that, also, is not a final answer, and so on. We read and talk a lot in my family, and especially since I was homeschooled for twelve years, I consider that to be the strongest part of my education so far.

The most glaring weaknesses are that I have had almost no mathematics past algebra, very little science, and my history and literature has been somewhat haphazard, because I have mostly studied whatever struck me as interesting at the time, leaving a lot of holes in my understanding. So, for instance, in Jr. High, I enjoyed Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo, but ended up spending a goodly amount of time (hundreds of hours, actually), participating in a series of online book clubs and discussions, held together by an interest in stories about talking warrior mice. Or, as a freshman in high school, I read the Iliad, the Aenead, some of St. Augustine's Confessions, and perhaps a couple of other good books, because I happened to find them in our bookshelves, but then I spent the rest of my time making quilts, decorated leather wallets, and reading fantasy novels.

At sixteen I started taking classes at the local community college, mostly in art. Actually, I also took Latin, Sign Language, and all my general education. classes there as well, but most of my time and energy went into doing projects for the art classes. After two years I was one class shy of an Associates of Fine Art, while continuing, in the meantime, to work on a number of art and crafts projects through 4-H, in which I was very involved. The art classes were, for the most part, academically neutral: we learned how to draw portraits, buildings, and still lives, make pots, etch metal plates for printing, and so on, using college equipment. I suppose it could be argued that that time spent working on learning all the basic technical art skills detracted from my education, since I could have been learning more serious academic subjects instead, but I do not believe that to be the case. In addition to learning a trade that I can practice and teach, I believe it to be good that art is a fusion of both tactility and meaning, which can be approached from either direction, and still be able to make something of beauty and worth.

After completing an Associates degree from the junior college, I enrolled as an Art Education student at Northern Arizona University, where I was a full time student for two years before coming back to Tucson to complete a semester of student teaching at a catholic high school. My time in the College of Education was rather strange, partly because I am deeply ambivalent about schooling, and have been for some time. I have a strong interest in education, and believe it to be extremely important, but not necessarily in the form of public schools, which often seems irremediably confused. That probably has a lot to do with my homeschool background. But, of course, it's easy enough to argue for, or at least explain, the system as it is, the standards as they are, and so on - the problem is, we never did. There are a number of irreducible difficulties with the system, which teachers often go to great lengths to make less problematic, without once exploring other options. So for three semesters I found myself walking about campus as if in a daze, with The Abolition of Man" in one hand and a stack of lesson plan rubrics in the other, saying to myself this does not bear thinking about, this does not bear thinking... and worrying about internal dissonance until I was thoroughly sick of both Education and my own mind. I had good classes, of course; Psychology, Northern Renaissance and Baroque art history, and Argument analysis come to mind; but in Education classes themselves, even when I liked the professor - and I often did - the courses seemed traps set up to manipulate us into thinking about learning a certain way, but how we were to learn to think was always implied, never examined. So, being the sort of person who will always try to analyze things, whether or not I have the raw materials with which to do so, I would sit there in my dorm, disconsolately picking at rubrics, dispositional questionnaires, state content standards, educational theories, and assessment alignments, saying: this doesn't make sense; this is not logical, I wish I knew on what first principles this was all built! It surely did not help that we were never asked to actually read any of the "educational theorists" who were so often mentioned in fleeting glimpses of the history of modern education, and I was too sick of it all to read them on my own (my fault, I know). I did read Rousseau (Emile), and found that in addition to being an excellent writer, he vehemently disagreed with the whole premise of modern education.

A year or so into the program I started trying desperately to find a new major (English or Philosophy), but the fact is, I like art, I like teaching, I wanted to be able to teach, and majoring in Education is the surest way of being able to find a job at a school, so I figured I might as well stick with it, even if many of my classes were academically useless. As an aside, I'm not saying that I was never taught, or even learned, useful information about practical classroom matters, only that, being by inclination and habit a chewer of intellectual grist, I wanted to learn about existing, coherent, philosophies of education, and instead I was simply told that it's a personal matter, and to invent my own, after which all the practical advice in the world was like putting the proverbial band-aid on a broken arm.

At the same time I was struggling through all the angst and dissonance of education school, I was also studying as a catechumen in the Eastern Orthodox church, which had a mission right across the street from where I lived. I started going because of the prayers, and beautiful liturgics, which have never been updated as Catholic liturgics have, though the services have been translated into English. While those studies did not help me to be any more content with the degree I was pursuing, I did get to learn about and from a number of great Christian thinkers who are all but forgotten in the Protestant churches I grew up in, including St. John Chrystostom, St. John of the Ladder (the prototype for Kierkergaard's Johanus Climacus?), St. Athenasius, and St. Basil the Great, study Christian history, and make friends with people who enjoyed discussing the same.

While my education so far has had a number of rough patches, and I have not sought out learning as systematically as I might have, I do believe that the freedom I enjoyed as a teenager and young woman have taught me to love good literature, rational thought, and the search for a more full understanding of the world. Because of my parents, church, and my own studies and interests, I believe that I have a foundation in reading and thinking upon which I will be able to build in the years ahead, as I further my education both on my own and under the guidance of others.

Standards Matrices

2008-03-15T16:41:00.004-07:00

The latest in-service at the school where I have been teaching of late, with Dr. McBile of ASU, was better than I had anticipated based upon his previous lectures, and I decided to actually try out one of his suggestions. I cut up all of the Arizona Visual Arts Standards Performance Objectives (POs), and re-arranged them in a way that seemed logical to me. From 42 POs in three "strands," I ended up distilling seven major categories: (1) understand and apply artistic materials, tools, & techniques; (2) understand and apply meanings & purposes in artwork; (3) understand and apply compositional principles in artwork; (4) Evaluate and select artworks for a portfolio; (5) understand and discuss who artists are, what they do, and why they create art; (6) understand and apply multiple aesthetic theories, and (7)understand and discuss commonalities & differences among and between the art of a variety of different cultures.

What's interesting about these categories, other than often assuming mastery with subject matter one is unlikely to be well understood by people with a college degree in art, is that only six to ten of the 42 POs have anything to do with actually making artwork, while the other three-quarters are all about analyzing, discussing, contributing, identifying, selecting, distinguishing, comparing, investigating, describing, judging, and a variety of other activities that are not about learning how to make good art. The other activity Dr. McBile suggested we do, was to make a list of all the important nouns and verbs from the standards matrix, and put them into lists of "knowledge" (nouns), and "skills," (verbs): here's one for the Visual Arts:

Knowledge

Skills

Concrete

Materials
Tools
Techniques
Available resources
Scientific & technical advances
Revision
Elements of art
Principles of Design
Composition
Sketches, models, & notes
Exhibitions & portfolios
Craftsmanship
Difference in quality between original and reproduction artwork

Abstract

Nature of art
Meaning of artwork
Purpose of art
Value of art
Symbols
Themes
Technical, functional, formal, and/or expressive criteria for evaluating art
Who artists are
What artists do
Why artists create art
Multiple Aesthetic theories
Difference between preferences and judgments
Universal human themes
How art communicates stories
How art communicates ideas
How art communicates emotions
Criteria for determining how, or whether, art should be cared for and/or protected

Anthropological

Roles and of artworld experts
Career paths of artworld experts
Connections between art and other curricular areas
What an artworld is
Visual Culture
Characteristics of artwork valued by diverse cultures
How artworks reflect ideas, images, and symbols from the culture within which they were made
Why artwork has been valued by the culture within which it was made
Visual & tactile characteristics of artworks from diverse cultures, different places, and other times

Tactile

Experiment
Create
Demonstrate
Revise
Solve
Select
Use
Develop
Apply

Social or Verbal

Identify
Analyze
Describe
Communicate
Interpret
Judge
Explain
Evaluate
Discuss
Understand
Connect
Articulate
Respect
Distinguish
Debate
Compare
Investigate

There are a number of objections I would level at this set of "knowledge and skills" a student should possess upon completing a high school art program, including it being way too complicated, too abstract (e.g. why are they words "draw" or "paint" or "sculpt" never mentioned?), poorly worded, and never defines when any of these standards should be taught, given that most students only stay in art for one year. But the really enormous glaring problem with these standards is that they have never made a decision about whether art teachers ought to be teaching art courses in the traditional sense of the word - meaning studio arts - or whether they should primarily be teaching art appreciation. If I were really dedicated to following these standards, I would probably have a one year required art appreciation course before anyone got to do any studio arts, because otherwise everyone would be frustrated and disappointed that they are expected to spend so little time learning how to make good art, and so much learning about "artworlds" and "diverse cultures."

The Lenten Prayer of Saint Ephriam the Syrian

2008-03-11T08:43:00.002-07:00

It is, for us, the first Tuesday of Great Lent, known as "clean Tusday." In compliance with Jesus teaching thatwe not "disfigure our faces with mourning" - though mostly because it's not Eastern tradition, we don't celebrate Ash Wednesday, so "clean week" is mostly notable for people staring longingly at cheese enchiladas, and the Canon of St. ANdrew - an hour and a half each night of verses declaring our wanton sinfulness, interspersed with a hundred or so prostrations (bow to the ground). The favorite prayer, said (if circumstances allow) about five times a day, goed as follows:

O Lord and Master of my life,
take from me the spirit of wrath, despair,
lust for power, and idle talk. (prostration)

But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility,
patience, and love to your servant. (prostration)

Yea, Lord and King: grant to me to see my own errors
and not to judge my brother, for Thou art blessed
unto the ages of ages. Amen. (prostration)

Aesthetics and the Material

2008-03-08T14:18:00.000-07:00

Some years ago a Japanese ceramics professor told us a story about a certain tea-master who's tea house had a garden that was famous far and wide for its magnificent flowers. There was one particular flower that was not only very beautiful, but bloomed in the hundreds and thousands, and people from all over the region would visit to see the magnificent display. Once, a high ranking official decided to visit, and sent a message ahead telling the tea-master to be prepared for his arrival, since he was traveling some distance. As he entered the garden, this official began to look around, trying to catch sight of the famous flowers, but there were none to be seen. This surprised him, because it was full Spring, and there would have been some blooms in even a very average garden. As the man drew closer to the tea house in the center of the garden, his confusion gave way to anger and disappointment that he had come so far, apparently of nothing, since there was still not a single flower to be seen. Finally, he entered the tea house, and as he stood up, he saw a single flower in a vase, and the tea-master behind it, who offered him a respectful greeting. The official, angry and confused, asked what had happened, that none of the hundreds of flowers that the surrounding garden was famous for had bloomed that year. The tea-master replied that the flowers had, indeed, bloomed in generous abundance, as they did every other year, but in honor of the official's visit, he had picked and discarded every flower but the most perfect and beautiful, which he saw before him, that he might admire it undistracted by the sheer numbers of the others.

That's one aesthetic - a lot of people refer to it as "zen." If I recall correctly, the official disagreed, and had the tea-master executed; certainly many people would rather have a lot of a good thing to appreciate than only one. It seems to me that many of us, including myself, have both aesthetics warring inside us; I would really only like to have one very nice outfit or teapot or quilt, but sometimes I give in anyway, and end up with several dozen instead. Probably almost all of us would rather have a garden filled with flowers of all kinds and colors, most of which are imperfect, than blank greenery with only a single, perfect bloom. I've been thinking a lot about materialism and its consequences, especially in my own life, a lot lately, for a number of reasons, the most noticeable being how very materialistic our society is (or is accused of being), living in my parents' rather messy house, being a high school art teacher, and a conversation I had with a friend a week ago. There are all kinds of things to be said about the morality of having a lot of unneeded stuff - that there might be someone out there who does need it, for instance - about which I can say very little. Instead, I usually end up thinking primarily about the warring aesthetics of materialism and simplicity, which are fighting all the time within my own mind and heart, and often in society at large, especially the arts.

I say: "I want to live simply, to give up most of what I own, to have nothing that is unnecessary for daily life, and nothing that merely clutters up that life." Then I actually look at what I have, and try to determine what to get rid of, and all the ambiguities and impulses that led to my having them in the first place pop up again, and I can only give away three bags of clothing, a game, and a CD player, leaving the rest to sit there undisturbed. I still have, fir instance, 25 scarves, which seems very silly, even to me. So I take them out and look at them, trying to decide which to give away (not that I know anyone in desperate need of a headscarf). Ah, but my godmother gave these to me, and my mother those, and my grandmother that one, and I made this other at summer camp, and the one over there my friend brought back with her from South Africa! So I keep all of them, even though I know perfectly well that doing so is very self-indulgent indeed. Then there are dresses that belonged to my mother, and it would hurt her feelings if I got rid of them - which also accounts for about half of my books, which I am apparently saving for hypothetical grandchildren. But even given some of the excesses of my wardrobe and bookcases, I could still probably fit all of my clothing in two largish suitcases, and books are in a class of their own (or so I tell myself). But when I look around my room and much of our house, what I see stacked to the ceiling and filling our van is all craft and art stuff - and for that I do not know how to account. Despite and probably against my beliefs, inclinations, abilities, and training, I have somehow become a high school art teacher, and probably won't be getting out of it anytime soon. Why, I not quite sure; everyone always said I was good at art, and I didn't like it enough to become an artist, so I chose to major in Art Education. After complaining my way through two and a half years of Education school, here I am, a newly certified art teacher, with a long-term substitute position teaching art at a rural high school. It is, on the whole, alright - there are much worse things I could be doing with my time - the only major problems being that I don't believe in public education, and that I'm beginning to dislike the materiality of art materials. Why on earth should anyone have two drawers and a basket full of random bits of yarn? And eight cubic feet of fabric!? I don't even really like sewing. I mostly just did it because I could. But looking at magazines of "textile art," "doll art," "collage art," paper art," and all the rest, I'm already very sick of it all. But there it is, and the only way out of it seems to be making quilts and clothing and hats and "art" that neither I nor anyone I know needs. This is, on the whole, a bit depressing, and I'm not sure what the way out is yet. Perhaps I should just try to go into a different field as quickly as possible? But I do like art, at least when I don't have to think about it too much, or when the finished artwork is ordered enough to resist all of the chaos of materiality which surrounds it.

Great Lent Approaches...

2008-03-04T08:51:00.002-07:00

At least for those of us who are Eastern Orthodox. Catholics have been in it for three weeks already, I think. Last Sunday began Cheesefare week, which is, I think, designed to keep us from having anything equivalent to Mardi Gras right up to Forgiveness Sunday, when Lent officially begins. So we're all trying to get ready for Lent, and are eating lots and lots of dairy products before the true fast starts. (it's called cheesefare week because we can have all the dairy and eggs we want, but no meat, according church rules).

So I've been considering of late how to go about keeping the fast, since it's not supposed to be only about fasting from foods. A friend of mine suggested on Saturday night that she felt convicted about having a lot of stuff, as most of us here in America do, and that she ought to give a lot of it up, at least for the time being, and wondered if I would want to do something similar. So I've been thinking about it on and off for the past couple days - I'll give it a try, but I have a lot of stuff I'll need as an arts and crafts teacher, and can't just get rid of. Perhaps I should make a distinction between stuff that's mine in the sense of being for my own personal comfort, and stuff that I need for other reasons (ink, drawing paper, charcoal, fabric, etc.). But I could certainly stand to lose some even of that - which will take quite some time, since it would be wasteful to just get rid of it - I'd better make quilts and hats and whatnot.

Substitute Teaching, cont.

2008-03-04T08:24:00.004-07:00

SO it turns out, the teacher I'm subbing for is going to be out for the rest of the year, and didn't leave and lesson plans, so I have to come up with stuff to do and then teach it for the next nine weeks (I've been here for three weeks already). So far things are going all right, with the normal frustrations of working at a high school - especially a rural Arizona high school - and a lovely resperatory cold these past five days. I think I want to get a masters in something and try to teach at a junior college.

Anyway, I've already pretty much given up on the discipline and organization I had to practice as a student teacher, and am practicing a much more Laissez-faire style of teaching - going around to each student and suggesting improvements on whatever they already know how to do. I am, unfortunately, not a particularly good lecturer - which is hardly surprising, since I don't know all that much, and haven't had much practice before. Now does not seem the time to get that practice, since the teachers who do want to lecture and aren't brilliant at it have to bellow a lot to get the students to be quiet. I can't bellow, and don't intend to try.

On the subject of not knowing very much - it's true, I don't, and would very much like to fix that, but hardly know how to start. As an art teacher, I'm supposed to be able and willing to teach any form of visual art I can find supplies for, including aspects of production, history, criticism, and aesthetics, and in almost all of those areas I have only a very superficial and spotty understanding so far. I'm actually best at textiles and figurines, but there's not much call to be teaching those things, especially in high school. So I'd better learn to be good at some stuff. But what? I'm halfway decent at drawing, and don't particularly want to do it any better - I could work on painting (I'd prefer iconography), but have nothing I particularly want to paint. In fact, I have nothing I particularly want to make artistically at all, except for maybe some social comment stuff ridiculing Education. This is a rather sad state to be in - I'm tempted to want to get a MFA, so I have to become proficient in something, but I'd really rather get a MA in liberal arts. *sigh* I'm very wishy-washy.

Substituting in Art

2008-02-19T17:47:00.002-07:00

I found out at around 11 this morning that the art teacher where I've been subbing is very sick, and I need to take her classes for the indefinate future, starting toworrow. Since I have no idea what they've been doing all year, I figured I'd give them a drawing test, then have them draw each other, and see if they know what they're doing. The test is to draw a stuffed animal in charcoal on 9x12 paper, as well as they can in 15 minutes. The one at left is mine (actually, I think it took 17 min.). I just hope they'll be willing to actually do what I ask them to!

Crest Project

2008-02-18T23:20:00.002-07:00

I have, of late, been spending my spare time violently thrashing around, trying to figure out who to be, what to become, and what it means to be an educated person. I am still very far from a complete solution in my own case, and certainly cannot generalize my findings for anyone else as yet. I've got plans though... In the mean time, here's my newest project, for an Intro to Art class, which I had to substitute teach for:

Coat of Arms

Assignment:

Each student must draw a crest that is representative of himself or his family. Subjects could include beliefs, culture, hobbies, interests, teams, etc.

In the example, I have included my parents' families' crests (Dodd: upper left; Monroe: lower right), a cross because I'm Christian (it's large and central because God is very important), books because I love 'em , an agave because I live in the Sonoran Desert, a pine forest (rather badly done, to de sure), because I went to school in Flagstaff, AZ, and Irene on the bottom, which is my baptismal name.

Criteria:

Creativity - Is the design original? Did the student put in something unique to himself? At the most basic level, did he draw his own images, or use some clip art stuff?
Design - Effective use of Elements and Principles
Choice of Images - Can a viewer tell what the images represent? Do they convey a sense of the student's interests and personality?
Craftsmanship - Is the image neat, clean, free from tears, rips, scratches, spills, etc.? It it neatly mounted and signed by the artist?
Effort - Students can lost points for staring into space during class time.

Sequence (times approximate):

(10 min) Tell students about European Heraldry; show pictures of traditional coats of arms, including my family's.
(5 min) Show examples of current project, and describe what they will be doing.
(10 min) Students brainstorm at least five potential images to represent themselves.
(12 min) Students draw at least three thumbnail sketches, at least one of which should show a traditional organizational structure (chevron, cross, diagonal line, etc.), then choose which one to use for their finished artwork (time permitting, it must be approved by the teacher)
(45 min) Students trace the shield template, then sketch their design in the shield.
(10 min) Talk about colors, color symbolism, and coloring materials (preferably watercolor pencils)
(85 min) Students refine drawings, then color their designs.
(10 min) Wrap-up project, show finished shields, talk about what was successful, and what could have been improved.

Ceremony

2007-07-30T14:03:00.001-07:00

Reading C. S. Lewis' Reflections on the Psalms this evening, I was reminded of one of the things I really love about the Church, especially more traditional churches, but which is too often neglected in modern society. That is of life as a kind of performance art, which is no less true for that - life as a dance, a poem, a drama; often a melodrama. I have often heard about the dangers of "masks" and "playacting." Those are likely real dangers that are worth guarding ourselves against, but in divesting ourselves of all such "masks" I wonder if perhaps we go too far, and throw off the true acting as well.

There is something tremendously beautiful about the monastic adherence to tradition and ceremony in daily life. To get up in the darkness each morning to offer prayers and hymns to the Creator of all things; to have formal processions to and from church or meals; to eat in silence for a set amount of time while hearing words of wisdom; to have determined times for feasting and fasting - and to have every action pointing in some way to God, in obedience - is very lovely. That kind of beauty is very difficulty to attain, left up to my own devices. I can have the spunky kind of beauty of a contemporary artist - the kind that consists of collages and fuzzy, chunky textures, and rich, overlapping, saturated hues, and layers and layers of meaning; of interesting, opinionated essays; of finding meaning in whatever captures my notice; of choice, freedom, and spontaneity. But the manifestation of Beauty that arrays itself as a solemn, precise, well ordered dance - that seems to be beyond me. It is beyond most of us most of the time.

There's a part of me that very much wishes to have some kind of Rule for living. There are two things that are not satisfying in art; one is simply following a pattern, and the other is complete freedom. I would in many ways very much like to get up at 5 every morning, say a set of prayers, drink a few cups of tea while reading the Bible, put the day in order, have the house in order by 7, go to work saying the Jesus Prayer continuously on the way there, come home and write for 45 minutes, make and then eat a simple dinner, clean up, say Vespers, work on art for two hours, say Compline, go to bed, and repeat this the next day - pretty much for the rest of my life. The rest of me also wants that, but is just too darn lazy to manage it, and hasn't any authority to order anything, in either sense of the word.

Dispositions

2007-07-17T23:58:00.001-07:00

I have a terrible tendency to be taken in by every kind of personality test or intelligence measurement imaginable. They are simply fascinating - seeing how specific they can get without blowing the whole thing by throwing in wildly inaccurate guesswork, comparing my own temperament to that of other people, trying to determine how smart I am, and so on. We did a lot of introspection on that sort of thing last semester in my education classes, and I was completely hooked for probably a week. I think I usually ended up as the scientist-inventor-discoverer-artist type, with which I was both pleased and perplexed, because I've never had much of an impulse to discover or invent anything in particular, though that would be a cool sort of thing to do. Actually, as I was trying to remember what it was that has me so absorbed, I went to look up personality and temperament sorters about an hour ago, and didn't come back until I had looked much of it up all over again (should you care to know, I tested as an INTJ personality, who is supposed to be good at figuring stuff out, especially complex intellectual problems). It's like a kind of mild addiction.

Probably we're all like this in one way or another - curious about how we're different than most of the population, wanting to know how we might each be able to distinguish ourselves. With those same questions at mind, I went about trying to understand what kind of person I am last Fall and Spring, both by introspection and asking around among people I know. I got some rather perplexing answers - a physicist, an engineer, a computer programmer, a book editor. A tinkerer, a builder of systems. Odd, because other than editing, I've never had any particular inclination toward any of those things, though I don't suppose I'd be bad at them, should the need arise to go into any of the above fields.

The question of temperament also rubs up against another question - one of intelligence. Our society is far to quick to test children for intelligence, forgetting that it can often do as much harm as good. We're perpetually testing ourselves against each other anyway - what benefit is gained by adding IQs into the equation? In my case, I was homeschooled by parents with similar intellectual interests, and always read pretty good books, so the question didn't come up in any force for quite a long time. Then I went to college, where many of my education classes were rather silly, and made friends with a fellow who had been trained from when he was a little child to consider intelligence as highly important, by the mess that is our public school gifted, talented, and honors programs. Yeah, I guess I'm pretty smart, but that's not much of an issue when you're spending most of your time reading classic novels and making quilts. Especially the latter occupation. And when you're homeschooled you can't go constantly comparing your own ability to learn stuff to others even if you want to, because everyone is learning different things at different times. So unless a person has a serious disability, or an amazing capacity for something, we mostly just are what we are, and go forward or fall behind according to how much we apply ourselves to our studies. Or at least that was my experience.

So there are, it turns out, all these interesting things to observe about oneself, and some of them are kind of exciting, like that other people see that I may be smart, or creative, or whatever. And so part of me is eating all this up, and wants to find out as much as possible about it all, and perhaps go off and become a scientist or some such, and perhaps be congratulated on being smart and competent. Then there's this other part of me that's worried the whole time that I'm going to end up puffed up like a souffle, and completely self-absorbed, and says that I should run away as soon as possible and never enquire into any IQ tests, temperament sorters, or anything of the kind ever again, because pride is tenacious enough anyway, and it certainly doesn't need yet more warm fuzzies to feed itself on. And besides, it's oh so tempting to say to oneself that it's really alright to have all sorts of bad habits, like chronic procrastination, because that's just a temperament thing, and cannot be helped. So most of the time the two sides strike a compromise, and just ignore the matter, hoping that it will go away at least until I have some more wisdom.

Into that uneasy truce came a demand, repeated over an entire semester, to reflect on what the College of Education calls Dispositions. A more balanced person would probably just answer the questions as they were posed to the best of their ability at the time, and move on with life. Not being particularly balanced, however, I applied my full attention to each question as well as all of its possible implications, and every detectible error of meaning or English convention. The result was quite terrible as self-reflections, because the balance between personality related introspection and the desire to avoid thinking about my own abilities had by no means been resolved, and I couldn't figure out whether to take seriously any of the gibberish staring at my from my disposition self-analysis sheets.

Some of them were simply things that I didn't know the answer to, like my social and emotional intelligence, while the rest were thing I didn't yet know how to think about or made more complicated than necessary, like initiative or creativity. Bullet points such as "developing innovative pedagogical approaches" were especially unhelpful in that regard. Hence, I was miserable at the very thought of writing up a response, and blathered inexcusably when each installment of that response was finally due.

A page from my academic history.

Student Teaching

2007-07-16T19:24:00.000-07:00

So in three weeks and a day I'm going to begin student teaching - or at least the planning part of things. It should be interesting; I'm hoping the best. Being ridiculously concerned with the appearance of order, I've already started designing the required portfolio, for storing notes and ideas. It looks nice, though I'm not certain how "professional" it will be. Most portfolio type things end up looking pieced together, despite my best efforts to make them cohere. That's what happened with the last one I made, anyway.

Perhaps I will be a teacher, after all - for a few years, at least. It would really be a little silly going to all this trouble taking education classes and getting a teaching certificate, and then to never teach. I was getting a little tired of people assuming that just because I'm an education student, I'm planning on becoming a teacher. "How do they know I'm not planning on becoming an iconographer or an engineer or some such?" I would think - though perhaps not in exactly those words. They all seemed to think it was perfectly alright that I may become a teacher! That was somehow surprising to me. I told Mother Michaela that I didn't have any kind of career planned, and she answered that it seemed that I did, that I was going to become a teacher, and then perhaps get married and raise children. It sounded so very much simpler than when I was busy worrying about what to do with myself this past year. Maybe everything will seem all complicated and confusing again by the middle of this next semester, but I hope not. People in my generation have so many options I think we often make life much more confusing that it actually needs to be - "well," we may think to ourselves, "I'm training to be a teacher now, but I'm smart, so perhaps I should go into the sciences instead - or computer science, because there's more of a market for it. But then since I already have so many undergraduate courses in this one thing, then perhaps I should wait a few years, and then switch career paths then." Why not just start out in something that's humble and needed, and then be open to anything else God might want at some point in the unknown future? It makes a lot more sense, and would save quite a lot of time and energy worrying about possible career paths.

Living in the World

2007-07-15T18:51:00.000-07:00

I just spent about a week and a half at St. Paisius Serbian Orthodox monastery, and it was quite lovely. While I was there I spent some time reading The Spiritual Life by St. Theophan the Recluse of Russia, which got me to thinking more about how the individual soul reacts to this modern culture, which often ranges in climate from apathetic to anti-religious.

The Spiritual Life is based upon a series of letters written by St. Theophan to a young woman who desired to learn how to follow God amongst the endemic triviality of life as a wealthy Russian living in Moscow. It begins "Once, while on the dance floor, a young woman had a glimpse of the immortality of her soul" - and so she could not just go on as if this were the only life there were, and this present happiness were all that mattered. And she went to Bishop Theophan to ask what to do about that revelation.

There is surely a place for looking at the grand scheme of things, of cultures being overwhelmed and fighting back in bitterness and resentment, or of the insensitivity of "culturally imperialist" nations, but that really isn't anything I am wise enough to speak about. Instead, I would like to consider for a moment the individual human soul faced with all these tempting forces; that question, it seems, is of more immediate necessity in any case.

A lot of people ask about homeschooling how the children become "socialized." Sometimes they simply want to know if homeschoolers manage to make friends and do stuff with other children who are different from themselves. That question is easily enough answered with "yes," usually followed by "oh, OK, good." But there's another part to that initial question as well, one more difficult to answer. "How well are they able to deal with the modern world?" kinds of questions. If you had asked me that only a few months ago I probably would have said that, yeah, it's a little difficult, and we're a little more sheltered than would be ideal, but in most cases the benefits make up for the disadvantages. But I wonder now if that answer is still sidestepping the main issue a wee bit. Because what's really being asked is how easily we can pretend to be modern, with all that term now implies. Can we interact with the world on its own terms? To which I want to know first: should we be able to interact with the modern world on its own terms? What, exactly, should it mean to be "in the world but not of the world" - for any Christian?

In the case of the young woman who wrote to St. Theophan, she had been raised in the country in a rather more wholesome atmosphere, and was initially shocked by the futility of much of the life in the capital. That was what got her to inquire for the first time after the life of the spirit. In other words, for her that brief shock was necessary for her to be able to wake up to the reality of God and true Christianity. People are worried, I think, that some of us sheltered Christian lads and lasses will be shocked by the World when we run into it in college, or the workplace, or wherever we should happen to end up after leaving out parents' protection. We could find it alluring, and fall into the whirlpool of worldly cares, or the bog of apathy, or any number of other traps laid by the demons. That's true, we could. But I can't help believing that a person is more likely to know that what he's doing is wrong if he grew up in a society that condemned it, than in one that oscillated between ignoring and congratulating worldly behavior.

Of course you can't just go and send a young man or woman out into the world without any help at all - then they are probably going to become despondent and self-absorbed, even if they don't fall for worldly life completely. The young woman I've been considering found St. Theophan; I found the Orthodox Church, and many lovely people within that Church. Other people I know have become part of Christian fellowships or discipleship programs. All this is quite necessary for most of us - left alone even a reasonably good person will soon become quite useless to others; good books (especially the Bible) help, but not enough to make guides and fellow travelers unnecessary.

And so, I would tend to add to the consideration that there are both advantages and disadvantages to a fairly strict Christian upbringing, that it matters immensely what a young person is planning on going out and doing after leaving home. Will they find a very secular job where they're always getting invited to questionable parties, and handling sleazy materials? Do they want to become a professional academic? Then yeah, things are likely to be difficult. But is that really necessary? Is it even desirable? Christ never told us to be in the world, and have exactly the same aims and interests as those in the world, except for praying and going to church twice a week. The Church is likened to a ship amongst tempestuous seas; I suppose if one is planning on spending most of one's life in a lifeboat just off the ship's prow, coming in every once in a while for provisions, then it's just as well to go on outings as a child and learn how to deal. But why not just live the whole time onboard?

This is, of course, a Christian perspective. But I am Christian, after all. I'm not sure what this crazy modern world of ours means to a muslim, for instance. Are they advised, as the young woman who wrote St. Theophan was, to go to frivolous, worldly events and places without sympathy, "as one dead?" I don't know. Perhaps I could ask sometime. I only know that Christians have tales and councils from two thousand years of living in ever kind of secular society, from decadent Rome to atheist USSR, while still remaining Christian, with faith, hope, and love. Why are we surprised that we - and all traditional peoples - must go through that same trial in our modern times?

Book Review: Why the Rest Hates the West by Meic Pearse (2004)

2007-06-07T23:03:00.000-07:00

In a certain public square in Third Century Rome, amid the typical bustle of an afternoon market, stands a man, just beginning to talk. He declares that he is going to explain why it is that the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Gauls, the Saxons, and every other barbarian of Europe is rebelling against the Empire, and some are even threatening to sack Rome itself. He starts by making himself clear: it is most adamantly not because they are simply barbarians, unknowable to civilized Romans. That is an imperialist misconception that shows an ignorant, myopic view of culture and politics. Instead, the speaker declares, he will show the real reasons that these "barbarians" wish to not only drive the Romans out of their own territory, but to so cripple the Empire that it can never recover, sacking cities, murdering women and children, burning farms, and slaughtering livestock. Then, when he has his audience's curiosity piqued, the speaker begins to outline the reasons behind the "barbarians'" hatred of Rome.

First, Rome sees the Celts, Gauls, Goths, and so on as Barbarians, simply because they don't hold to the same preconceptions as the Romans. That is a myopic lie created to make the Romans feel better about their imperialism. Some of those misconceptions include the assumption that superior technology, organization, and order are good things, which everyone ought to want, that, in fact, the values that the Romans hold in highest esteem are actually worth being held in high esteem by everyone, and therefore ought to be spread to (or imposed upon) everyone, and that the Celtic goddess of the Earth should, perhaps, have a minor place on Mount Olympus, but no more. These are all false presuppositions that need to be further examined in light of the values held by the tribes themselves, who, after all, represent a greater percentage of humanity than the citizens of Rome itself.

Furthermore, the speaker goes on, their opponents, with their more traditional cultural values, are appalled that we are all, from one end of the Empire to the other, disgustingly wealthy, spending all of our time watching fights to the death at the Colosseum, or holding enormous orgies. Perhaps we can manage to drown out our despair and soullessness that way, but the Northern tribes cannot, and so see through our sham of a culture.

Lastly, all that the Empire is or has been can be explained by cultural forces working through history, none of which have anything to do with the rightness or wrongness of exalting "civilization" over "barbarism." And that is why the barbarians hate the Romans.

Why the Rest Hates the West is a little like that.

* * *

In Why the Rest Hates the West (2004), Meic Pearse, a minister and professor of ecclesiastical history, argues that the real reason that the rest of the world hates us is because we deserve it. Then he goes on to explain all the ways in which we deserve it, outlining the history of intellectual and cultural trends in the modern West, beginning with the Reformation, and how those beliefs, values, and behaviors are offensive and barbarous to basically everyone who isn't us. This, in combination with our inadvertent cultural imperialism, is why (some of) the rest of the world hates "us." There are several good points about the book, including its overview of Western thought that got us to this point, and the Christian perspective Pearse takes on issues of globalization and changing world cultures. He also briefly brings up a couple of lines of thought that are worth pursuing in more depth, especially the deficit of imagination and historical consciousness many of us possess, that leads to misjudging the seriousness of our enemies. Unfortunately, Why the Rest Hates the West possessed some serious flaws as well, starting with its misleading title (only rarely does Phearse seriously write about anyone outside of the West on their own terms). Also problematic are the extremely vague categorizations of "Western" and "non-Western" worlds, which are nearly interchangeable with "modern," and perhaps even "civilized," in combination with equally vague definitions of what makes a society Western. And the language is alarmingly polemic, and sometimes seems to be trying to be downright offensive.

Pearse often talks about how selfish, shallow, culturally imperialist, and myopic we of the West are. But who are "we?" Why, the West, of course. And what, exactly, is "the West?" Well, Western Europe, certainly, along with North America. Some other countries are probably Western, but it's hard to know for certain, because on the issue of who, exactly, is under examination, Pearse manages to be intractably vague. The West may or may not include such countries as Japan and India, who are certainly just as modern as the rest of us, but are not share our cultural history, or Central and South America, who have attributes of both cultural constructs. The phrase "the rest" is even more difficult to grasp, since it ostensibly means everyone who isn't "us," whether or not "they" hate "us."

This lack of specificity is wearing, especially when religion enters the picture, because Pearse never seems to acknowledge (or seriously consider) that religions are vastly different from each other, and so misses the true import of one of his own points: that it is import to take cultures and religions seriously, and that they do not all have the same ideals. Speaking about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, he writes "'religion,' it is argued, is the 'cause' of the conflict. The best resolution, such an analysis implies, would be the death - or at least the utter emasculation - of religion around the world. This view fails to take religion seriously, as if agnosticism were somehow 'obviously' more rational and peaceful than piety - an idea that the unspeakably bloody twentieth century should have laid to rest" (pg. 26). While I agree that "religion" in general is not at fault, someone who is always sneering at things that Westerners don't even think to address might be expected to try and avoid that failing in his own work, rather than completely ignoring many people's actual position. "Religion" is not the issue. Judaism and Islam are, especially Islam. Or they may be - it would be worth an examination. Christian North Africa was not overthrown by Religion, but by Muslims. The Islamic Middle East was not threatened by Religion, but by Christians. That is absolutely crucial to remember. I find it very telling that only four kinds of cultures are ever mentioned: "Christendom," Islamic nations, Israel, and former communists. There's nothing about why China may or may not hate the West, or India, or South Africa, or pre-WW11 Japan, or Mongolia. or anyone else for that matter. There they loom, as they have for the past 1700 years - Islam and Christianity (mostly apostate), and filling in the cracks are an odd assortment of statements about people always and everywhere except for here and now, with nothing but the author's word, and the already debunked "common sense" to uphold them.

The reason why a culture is reprehensible, and the reasons why it is opposed may well have little to do with each other. Pearse, no matter how much he may protest, is only repeating the conventional wisdom in saying that most modern countries are reprehensible in doing nothing to oppose crumbling families, sexual promiscuity, rudeness, lack of self-control, selfishness, superficiality, waste, unwillingness to assume personal responsibility for things, apathy, timidity, bad taste, and so on. To the extent that each of us exhibits some or all of those characteristics, we really need to get over ourselves, and acquire a few choice virtues. Even a willingness to admit that there are such things as virtues and vices, and that people ought to try to support the one and root out the other would be a good start. And if other cultures have managed to hold on to some of the virtues that are less than common around here, perhaps we should take a closer look at what they are doing right (and, conversely, what we are doing wrong). If Muslims are really more modest, and Taoists are really more humble, then it would certainly behoove us to try to pay attention to that, and gain such modesty and humility for ourselves.

But I can't help thinking that Pearse is going about things the wrong way. some of those deep cultural roots he's always talking about go into the primal loves and loyalties of humanity - does he forget that Westerners have them as well? There's a sense in which a man must love a thing before he can reform it - otherwise he's only going to replace it, which is no good at all. To the extent that a terrorist, for instance, really hates the West, he is hardly likely to care if we reform - if we become more traditional and more moral - because he really does hate that we exist. He very likely hates the very things that we love, along with the things that we are ashamed of - that we believe in freedom and democracy, for instance. He may very well hate Israel because it exists, and would continue to hate it no matter what they did, short of ceasing to exist, or changing so drastically that they might as well have ceased to exist. Love and hate are spiritual things that may begin in this or that attribute, but end up going far beyond them. And so it is of enormous importance whether a person really hates a civilization, or whether he merely hates what it's doing at present, or feels threatened by it. To the extent that a man really hates a country or a civilization, in its essence, then there's really no more to be said by the targets of his wrath, other than perhaps to plan an adequate defense. In another case, if someone is really on the outside, with no love or loyalty, then it is well perhaps to take his suggestions, to the extent that they are reasonable, but beyond that, his opinion on the matter is hardly likely to matter much. But if he should really love his country, and want it to change because it's terrible when something beloved loses the full strength of its beauty - well then, perhaps there's hope after all, both for change, and to inspire others. I am reminded by something Chesterton said, in a chapter of Orthodoxy titled The Flag of the World:

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing -- say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

In sharp contrast to the warmth and dismay that comes from people who love a thing and want to see it change, is much of the rhetoric of Why the Rest Hates the West:

The truth is that we, in our hyperprosperity, may be able to live without meaning, faith, or purpose, filling our threescore year and ten with a variety of entertainments - but most of the world cannot. If economics is implicated in the conflict, it is mostly in an ironic sense: only an abundance of riches such as no previous generation has know could possibly console us for the emptiness of our lives, the absence of stable families and relationships, and the lack of any overarching purpose. And even within us, the pampered babies that populate the West, something - a rather big something - keeps rebelling against the hollowness of it all. But then our next consumer goodie comes along and keeps us happy and distracted for the next five minutes. Normal people (that is, the rest of the world), however, cannot exist without real meaning, without religion anchored in something deeper than existentialism and bland niceness, without a culture rooted deep in the soil of the place where they live. Yet it is these things that globalization threatens to demolish. And we wonder why they are angry? (Pearse, pg. 29)

Reading the above passage I cannot help but wonder: who does he know, and of what does he speak with love? I tend to think of my friends - many of them unexceptional middle-class Americans. They take their God and their country seriously, and are highly involved with their families, have nice but modest material holdings, and spend their time working, reading, cooking, sewing, going to church, praying, talking, and behaving basically as humans tend to when they're decently educated and not in desperate straits. Most of us could do better - we're too lazy, or tepid, or timid sometimes. We don't love actively enough, and think too much of ourselves. But I can't see the extravagant rhetoric quoted above reflected in anyone I can think of, whom I've ever actually met. It's like the Roman from earlier accusing the entire population of being as shockingly bad as the most decadent aristocrat. It's a distortion, and speaks of neither knowledge nor love.

In the end, I find that among the many alarming tendencies of the deeply flawed yet lovable culture of the West, one of the more prevalent is an enormous moral timidity. We can't say if we're doing rightly or not, so perhaps popular opinion will help. But if what we do is good, then it should hardly matter who hates us, and why, because people always oppose good things. People often oppose bad things as well, so opposition means little either way. Discriminating between right and wrong is difficult at any time or place within this fallen world, but especially so once the internal censor is locked onto "discrimination" at an enemy to be eradicated. A pervasive fear of judgmentalism paralyzes good judgment. Finally, confused and befuddled at not having any method of discernment at all, nobody to accuse of anything but ourselves, and even then, we can only find fault within a narrowly circumscribed range of possibilities, preferably having to do with disenfranchising someone who hates us. Pearse admits to all of the above. In fact, he goes out of his way to bring it up. Yet I cannot help but surmising that he's just as deep in the bog of political correctness as those he seeks to criticize (as he might agree, as he usually uses "we" and "us," including himself and his readers in the picture). Having noticed the problem, you'd think he'd try to climb out. Not yet. A little poetry would help clear the air. Or someone he admires. Or something worth dying for. Until then, we have, once again, another look at why the West hates the West, with a few observations of Islam thrown in. And a lot of conventional wisdom.

Focusing on the Exceptions

2007-03-27T12:40:00.000-07:00

The second point that I was remind of as I was reading The Uses of Diversity (Chesterton, 1932), is the trend within modernity of using the exceptions to define the norm. I see it a lot in education, and it's rather disconcerting, especially at first. There's a whole spectrum of academic potential represented within our student population. This ability is determined by the interaction of intelligence, upbringing, talent, and motivation, and ranges from those with brilliance and drive who will manage to learn no matter what we do, through the kids who are smart but lazy, or hard working but "learning disabled," and goes on toward the pole of those with severe mental disorders. Like in a bell curve, the vast majority are somewhere in the middle, and it was for them that the system of education was designed. It is an extremely inefficient system even for them, but becomes utterly impossible when all our time and energy is focused on what to do with the exceptions who don't even pretend to fit in.

In an effort to make the mess of education slightly less heinous for the exceptions, we therefore spend a lot of time talking about SEI, Universal Design, Differentiated Instruction, gifted programs, and other such things. What am I going to do when I end up with a blind child with no hands in my painting class? I end up asking. What if I get a young genius who already knows everything I have to teach? How extraordinarily silly! In this respect I am more silly than most, because I have a habit of taking people seriously, and trying to take what they say to their logical conclusions, both of which are fatal in Education. So I really do try to create a kind of universal design in my lessons that is universal, including those utterly unlike both myself and every other human I have ever known, who probably exist only in studies, and end up with a hideous abstraction of a lesson plan that is only universal in the sense that there is no being in Creation that would actually want or need to do it.

The Purpose of Art Education

2007-03-25T21:39:00.000-07:00

I was reading some essays by G K Chesterton this afternoon, mostly because that's what I do to unwind instead of TV or movies, and happened upon several observations that shed a bit of light on my current struggles with Education. I've been trying to get at them by sneaking up from behind, starting with implicit assumptions and the language of discourses - but that was really a very silly thing to be doing. Why anticipate difficulties people haven't even considered having yet, or manufacture disagreement in advance? Perhaps a bit more simplicity and clarity are in order at present.

My first moment of recognition came in an essay about why children should study history, and what the primary concerns of historians ought to be. Chesterton advances that children should learn, before anything else, history as a story, a romance; full of generous deeds, deplorable villains, honour, courage, tragedy, betrayal, humor, and everything else that makes human stories worthwhile. He overstates the case for older children and teens perhaps, but if I had to choose between teaching standards and teaching romance, the latter would win without question. And that got me thinking about teaching art as well, and why we do it. Why it's really essential for us, as humans, to know any of the humanities.

Dr Stephens says that art is fundamentally about the meaning behind the works themselves. She has a point, although a minor one: we can usually better appreciate works of art when we know what they are of, than if we don't. But that is not central, or at least not in the sense of knowing who made the thing, and why, and the prevailing social customs of the time, and the philosophical basis for rebelling against or conforming to those customs, and the "statements" that the works were making about or against the society in which they were made, and whether they could be considered art or not, and why. It's all probably helpful for philosophers and historians to be able to know all sorts of amusing and interesting human details; but it is not at the heart of things.

There are two primary things going on in learning art; making it oneself, and looking at great works done by others. Creativity, not in the vulgar sense of a compulsion to complete originality, but rather in the sense of active interest and variation, is considered by Christians to be one of the great gifts humanity was given asa facet of the image of God. Art is an opportunity to exercise that creativity, and practice control of it. It's fundamentally attractive the same way playing and singing are, and doing better is attractive as increasing our powers in any sphere often is.

Artists and great works are useful to study because they build up our understanding of and taste for Truth and, especially, Beauty. In modern society children are surrounded from their earliest years with the manipulations and cheap gimmicks of worldly culture, and have little opportunity to stop and look at that which is beautiful, timeless, and true. That is why we look at great art; it is the human response to the wonder of Creation. We need to develop an appropriate love for that beauty; feel that sense of wonder within our own souls; possess a taste for all that is worthwhile in the arts so that we can recognize it later, even in our own impoverished age.

St. Theophan in The Path to Salvation writes about surrounding children with holy things, and of immersing them in the hymns, icons, incense, candles, Psalms: the truth and beauty of the Church, so that it permeates their souls and if they wander off later in life, and get lost in the coarseness of the world, they still will never lose a taste for good things, and the thirst that accompanies it, and it may draw them back again. That is ideal, but most situations are not like that, and we must try to do what we can with what is possible. Those things which are true and beautiful resonate with our souls, in a way nothing else does, and sometimes only a few experiences with great art, literature, or music is enough to make us search our that quality of expression ever afterwards, and be always dissatisfied with lesser things. This awakening is one of the hopes of aesthetic education.

Modern art criticism language has made things convoluted and complicated, twisting our minds up in pretzels, and make them to dwell in soggy moors of the mind, caught in a dense fog. Phantoms flit about whispering promises that if we will just forget about the solid country of portraits, still lives, and other such real, teachable things, we will be granted the respect of academia as one of their own. And so we murmur their phrases and talk about aesthetic principles and critical thinking skills; we're going to teach cultural awareness, sensitivity, openness to new ideas, self-esteem, creativity, problem solving skills, philosophy, criticism, analytical thinking, reasoning, higher order thinking, and so much more. Drawing actual things simply because it's a human thing to do is watery gruel compared to these mysteries. The students will be mere parrots, living always with their lover-order thinking, and missing the meaning that lies behind all art. We are frightened into submission; how can we even consider doing that to our students? Surely not! and create lesson plans filled with long explanations of how we're going to teach children to analyze the influences of society and compare and contrast the values of disparate cultures. In short, we don't teach art at all, but rather amateur philosophy and the hopeless wanderings of thought that has long ceased to believe in anything eternal or absolute. And that is why art teachers must spend so many hours asking what art is. Because we so often repeat words without knowing their full strength of meaning that we have emptied the whole world of it's proper meaning and language. Until we learn to clear our own heads of these vapors, how are we to ever expect to teach others the true meaning and purpose of the world's art?

Universality

2007-03-12T19:32:00.000-07:00

I've begun a new article, and this is the introduction (or somewhere near it:

The most reasonable objection to what I have to say is simply that my knowledge of how people learn is based largely off of my own experience of how I and others who share many of the same taste and interests learn best, and is largely meta-cognative and anecdotal. "What is the ways in which we learn, or the things we need to learn are not universal?" a person may well ask. Is it not possible - perhaps even probable - that there are people in the world who learn in a manner utterly unlike myself, making most of my observations invalid? Perhaps I should conduct a study to find out, using only scientific observations governed by outward behavior. To this objection I answer thus: should there exist such people, who not only learn in ways utterly like myself, but cannot benefit from those I do know intimately enough to understand, then I have no right to teach them. Having no right to teach them, they have no obligation to believe anything I have to say. The same answer goes for those (and I know they exist) who's final goal is utterly unlike my own. I will concede that much to postmodern thought; they may well be right, and those goals and learning styles that are utterly unlike my own may be equally good. That does not mean that I should teach them in a manner that is closer to those different means and goals; quite the contrary. It means that they should not have to suffer the dissonance of learning from a person who is likely to prove utterly unintelligible to them in every way that really matters.

It is the job of a teacher to relay information and understanding to a group of students. We do that in a number of ways, usually hinging upon anticipating difficulties that may be had, and describing our subject in ways that overcome or bypass those difficulties. Often we can't know them in advance, and so must rely on the self-awareness of students, or, if they are young, trying various ways of communicating the same thing until one of them makes sense. The whole process hinges upon a sympathetic understanding between teacher and pupil, wherein each attempts to understand the other. With some people this is easier to do than others, although in many cases the difficulty pays off with learning not only a skill, but the outlook of another mind as well. Thus, sympathetic understanding is absolutely essential to good teaching. I might almost say that otherwise we might as well learn only from textbooks or videos, and do away with classroom teachers altogether, perhaps replacing them with some kind of crowd control specialist.

In the realm of the arts sympathetic understanding is, if possible, even more essential, because many of the things taught can be reasonably questioned, even by beginners. If you say that The Brothers Karamazov is trite and poorly written, while The Purpose Driven Life is deep and stylistically complex, and you have read both, then we quite simply have nothing to discuss. We could, I suppose, argue our cases anyway, and I probably would, for days and weeks even, because I haven't quite learned my lesson yet, but it would likely be a pointless exercise. At that point we could try one of two things - a reading course of everything that humanity has generally held to be great, and see if one of us changes our mind, or we could admit that our conceptions of reality are too much in opposition to maintain a teacher - student relationship. The former solution is rarely possible in practice. A similar situation occurred between myself and a professor of art education, and dragged on painfully for a year and a half of required classes in college. We disagreed, I think, on the nature of art, education, schooling, beauty, teaching, learning, children, thinking, authority, philosophy, aesthetics, history, culture, meaning, and everything else in all creation. Well, perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much. Interestingly enough, she is, by the standards of the College of Education, quite an excellent teacher. I spent three semesters attempting to reconcile our perspectives, failing miserably all the while. Only after several months of not having to take any art ed. classes have a few useful things begun to filter through my dissonance screen. I don't particularly want to do that to anyone else; it makes learning extremely difficult.

The main mark that I have nothing to teach that you are in a position to learn is if it is not possible either to agree or disagree with what I have to say; if you can't understand their use through a reasonable expenditure of imaginative sympathy; if, in short, I prove to be simply unintelligible at many points. A reader can simply stop, and say "my, what an annoying piece of writing; it actually resonates negatively." Students, on the other hand, don't have that luxury. They have to try to learn to guess what I'm up to. The Education School says that the solution is to be all things to all men, and acquire, somehow, the ability to extend imaginative sympathy to everyone, no matter how different. That's nice, but it's also impossible if the differences lie too near the core of our beings, so that even once we understand each other, it is still not impossible to agree, or even discuss, anything of importance without first taking 35 large steps back and starting over at the beginning each time. Or we could simply discuss facts and philosophies in the abstract. That would, perhaps, be a good solution, were it not impossible within the constraints of the world of Education.

That I have nothing to teach to those too distant to learn it may sound exclusive; a sin against Diversity, and in a way it is. In another way, however, it is as inclusive as it is possible to be while still maintaining enough definition and substance to make a content area worth teaching. To the extent that I have anything to teach at all, it must be learned within its own confines, and must be looked at on its own terms. We do not create our own reality. On the other hand, there are no national, ethnic, nor "socioeconomic" boundaries necessary to good thought. I have seen the same kind of thought in writings from every country and language, for those are not essential to the nature of human thought. So I stand by my method of discrimination, in the hope that it truly discriminates between what is essential, and leaves broad freedom on all things inessential. With that straightened out, I may be able to begin to understand what it is to teach.

Site Changes

2007-03-10T17:24:00.000-07:00

I made an e-portfolio (of sorts) to which I'm attaching this blog. Things shall be changing in the near future as a result.

Disposition #2

2007-01-31T03:31:00.001-07:00

Initiative:
Generate ideas
Exhibit curiosity
Positively contribute to problem solving and planning
Create value in learning contexts

Evaluation: What does the last point mean, and how is it related to initiative? Is it talking about dredging something good out of any and every opportunity that presents itself? That is a very difficult thing to do; someone bent on creating value, and not simply doing the tasks before him, will often find that a multitude of learning contexts that vehemently resist the effort. There are many things in “learning contexts” that will not bear rational thought. Most of the time people simply do what is expected and shrug off the dissonance, but if a person is chiefly interested in creating meaning and value, a dilemma presents itself: to chisel something of value out of the unyielding ground of cliches and nonsense posing as rational thought, or to find something else of value to do with his time, and contribute as little energy as possible to such unpromising prospects. The latter solution is a much more efficient use of time and energy, but is lacking in its response to the demands of duty.
I am reminded of a friend who told me about his classmates in high school from the gifted program: most of them had simply despaired of finding value in much of what was presented, and resigned themselves to having to wait until school was over to go learn things. One of them would study ancient Greek in science class, and my friend, upon learning that his English teacher didn’t actually read their essays, instead simply skimming them for a complex usage of English, started making up meaningless sentences like “in this piece of exposition I intend to deconstruct the meaning inherent in the textual context of the nihilistic dialectic” an hour before class. The lesson here is: a commitment to always looking for value in every learning context should not be undertaken lightly, lest it lead to despair of finding them in any; such a task sometimes necessitates more tenacity, faith, and hope than it is worth in the end.

Reflection: Initiative is something I’m generally pretty good at - sometimes to a fault. This week I was working on compiling all of my best lesson plans, essays, and professional growth measurements from the past year, as well as anticipating those for the upcoming semester, into an InDesign book with consistent visuals and font treatment. I then exported it as a PDF file with bookmarks, section introductions, an internally linked table of contents, and embedded fonts and images. I’m a bit of a control freak, despite not yet being competent enough yet in designing documents to justify it (like the drop-cap I above; I’m sure that’s probably just tacky, but I went “cool! I can make a nested list next to a swash drop-cap; I’ll do that!”). Said file is currently 46 pages long and growing, and I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m going to do with it. Of late I’ve also been independently researching schools, math stuff, the Scheme programming language, educational perspectives from thinkers I admire (Jacques Barzun is very good).

Goal: Direct my initiative in more positive, meaningful ways.

Family Dinners

2007-01-23T18:37:00.000-07:00

School assingment for English Immersion

Most of my childhood dinners were a traditional, consistent affair; my dad, whom we always called “Papa,” was a baker, and worked both day and night shifts, but tried to be home for semi-formal dinners every night. My brother and I would set the table, and sometimes help with dishes and a few other chores, and Mama would usually cook, although we liked Papa’s meals the best because that’s what he did for work - cooked and baked - and he was good at it. When everything was ready we would all go sit down together around our multi-purpose school/craft/dinner table, and talk about our day; we each had a regular place where we would sit which formed a half-circle around the table, with my dad, my mom, my older brother, then myself. My brother and I were homeschooled, and we would often talk about what we had been learning that day, especially the books we had been reading. Books were very important to my family, and every night my dad would read a story out loud to us after dinner, well past the age when we could have dome so for ourselves. I think we had pretty normal American dishes like macaroni & cheese, spaghetti with meat sauce, roast beef, pot roast, and baked chicken, or fun things like artichokes in garlic-butter sauce. On special occasions we had steak with baked potatoes and sauteed mushrooms. My grandfather on my father’s side had been an army cook overseas and then in Yuma, and my dad had learned from him the art of big roasts, gravies, and other such solid American fare. One year for school we investigated foods from other cultures and “ate our way around the world.”

Sometime during my teen years something changed in how we did dinner as a result of the combination of factors, including my dad changing jobs and being less available to have dinner with us all the time, my brother and I becoming picky and lethargic teens, and our nearly giving up the already losing battle to keep our dining table from being taken over by stuff. After that my brother would often just serve himself some food and then retire into his bedroom, not to emerge except to get seconds or thirds. The food was rather delicious; my mom’s best dishes were fried rice cooked in a big red wok, spaghetti with clams in garlic-butter sauce, and shredded-beef enchiladas made from left-over pot roast. My dad was into meat and potatoes, but in a gourmet, tasty sort of way, and made things like chicken breasts sauteed in butter-wine sauce, roast chicken with stuffing (or cornish game hens sometimes), and a multitude of roasts with gravy. The food and conversation were the main things; presentation was nominal or non-existant.

For big American holidays like Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving we would go over to my grandmother’s house and get together with all my uncles, aunts, and cousins on my mother’s side (she came from a family of five); everyone brought a special dish and the host or hostess would make a turkey, ham, or roast, and have a big buffet-style meal that lasted several hours. for Christmas we would buy Crackers and have to wear the crepe-paper crowns and share the silly jokes and toys at the table, sometime between dinner and dessert. My family is Scottish and Irish on both sides, and it shows in some of our meals; we would always celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by making corned beef boiled with cabbage and potatoes, for instance, or tea and shortbread biscuts.

My family is firmly intrenched in the values and practices of traditional, conservative America, and as such made a conscious choice as my brother and I were growing up to try to have dinners together every night without any television or radio on to distract us, and talk about stuff. My parents’ two great interests are literature and religion, and they brought both to the table every night. We would say a prayer before eating, and talked about books, ideas, and, as a teen, religion issues (we were Calvary Chapel and Evangelical by choice, but Anglican by temperament). My mother’s family was a blend of the cultures of Scottish and Mexican-Americans; her father had grown up with his three brothers in Nogales Arizona and had also possessed a love for all things literary and Southwest, preserving cultural traditions from both Mexico and the British Isles. We didn’t see my father’s family very much, so I can’t remember anything significant about dinners with them.

Probably the largest effect of the cultural values I learned eating with my immediate and extended family is a kind of unshakable confidence in people’s ability to love and be a part of diverse cultural traditions without loss. “...Love drives out all fear” in more arenas than just the religious. In teaching, that makes it very difficult for me to understand why there need be a conflict between loving and participating in a number of diverse cultures, or why we need worry about either cultural sensitivity or losing our own. That we almost always got together at Mexican restaurants for family get-togethers, made jokes in Spanish over turkey, mashed potatoes, and calibacitas, and generally evidenced a hearty love of all things Mexican, with some members going there on a frequent basis and interacting easily in both tongues was a gain with no loss attached. Knowing one language well is an accomplishment which can only be increased, never diminished, by the acquisition of a couple more. My great aunt and uncle lived in Greece for several decades, where he taught classics at the Parthanon, and they loved all things Greek... and American, Scottish, Irish, and Mexican; another great uncle studied and translated ancient Mayan, and when he retired studied Chinese and lived in New Orleans. But all of this cultural activity hinged on one thing which was implied though never directly stated: we must love a thing for itself, not for some vague notion of international cultural sensitivity. That led me to a lot of confusion when I started taking education classes: whereas my family rarely thought about multiculturalism, yet spread infectious enthusiasm for a number of things of worth from a number of cultures; classes did nearly the opposite and preached the wonders of multiculturalism without reference to more than one or two actual works that we could be excited about teaching. In place of all those loves and enthusiasms was a kind of fear, one which I hadn’t ever thought to anticipate: fear that students wouldn’t add to their culture in America, but lose it; fear that knowing good English wouldn’t enliven, but rather obliterate, their parent’s native tongue.

In answer to the questions posed my this assignment, therefore, my family’s cultural background and get-together’s around the dinner table do not lend themselves to analysis in the terms of power: gender roles, oppression, status, class, and so on easily. It would be possible, but completely antithetical to the spirit in which things were conducted and therefore something coming from outside, rather than inside those experiences. In education that spirit lends itself for looking for the difficulties and strengths of individual persons regaurdless of race, class, gender, etc - which is both a help and a handcap, depending on the situation. These things shaped my views and assumptions on power and oppression in one significant way: until there’s some specific injustice or difficulty created by those forces and unremediable by individual energy and attention, I won’t fret about them at all, because to do so is already to admit defeat in my primary goal: that individuals be treated as such, and that things run in harmony and love, with each person taking on whatever role, fulfilling whatever obligation, and offering whatever help will best benefit themselves and others.

Attention

2007-01-23T18:34:00.001-07:00

Rough draft: will be updated

Some things I've been noticing of late within both myself and the Christian community have gotten me thinking about the idea of molding ourselves to the Church, vs. the our church molding itself to us, and how that relates to Christian disciplines.

I'm not a very disciplined person - actually, I'm exceedingly sloppy most of the time in both thought and action. My church, on the other hand offers more opportunities to practice discipline and obedience than perhaps any other Christian community in existence. We fast from animal products, wine, oil, and other things as suggested like music and other entertainments twice a week, and for the 40 days of Great Lent as well as the 40 days proceeding Christmas, and at various and sundry other times; there are prayer rules of services, and public services three times a week, and every day for Holy Week, and are surrounded by internal and eternal rules and convictions on every side. The more I learn, the more difficult things seem to get. Services, and most of them are held standing, with no unnecessary movement and as much attention as we can manage. We are supposed not only to say particular prayers hundreds of times a day, but do so with compunction, with the "mind in the heart." In a very real sense, however, all this is actually less difficult than the freedom of protestantism; how that is, it is the purpose of this essay to explain.

My protestant friends must have much more advanced powers of concentration than I do. In high school, while they were having moving experiences, apparently of the power of God, I was having an internal monologue that went something like this: From the highest of highest of heights to the depths of the sea, Creation's revealing Your majesty; from the colors of fall to the fragrance of Spring, every creature unique in the song that it sings, all exclaiming: indescribable, un-containable You placed the stars in the sky, and you know them by name, You are amazing God... why on earth is there a laser light show going on? And isn't this all just a bit too much, really? Perhaps if I raise my hands like everyone else it'll be easier to mean this stuff; I feel like kneeling; I wonder if I'm allowed to kneel... *picture comes into mind of a heart painted over, written and re-written like ancient cave paintings* wow - I wonder if I could make a sculpture of that... *new song starts* Concentrate! Holy is the Lord, God Almighty, the Earth is full of His glory... *picture of the vision of Isiah* very beautiful; I miss that one time when the power went out... that praise was grammatically incorrect... Concentrate! This is hopeless... Lord have mercy!

And continues in like manner for the duration of the "worship time." Aside from frequent admonishments not to care what the person net to me thought of my singing, however, I never heard anyone else express like sentiments during my seven or so years as an Evangelical. I can't say if that's mostly because most people have a vastly easier time focusing on things, or that they're directing a different kind of attention toward the songs, or the inability to rouse sufficient attention is simply considered too personal or insignificant for discussion, but there it was. I have since learned that the majority of humans have a tendency toward this running commentary of the mind, but many just learn to deal with it better than I do. Mine is both unruly and persistent, but likewise makes no allowances for boredom. There is no show impressive enough that I do not have to tug my consciousness back from the rabbit trails it so loves to wander, and there is no reading dry enough to disrupt that same chasing and tugging. The only real difference is that if the speaker is entertaining enough I have to pull my mind back from musing on the cleverness thereof, and if it's dry, the mind has to be chased down in the land of make-believe or pre-occupations with friends, guys, re-hashings of conversations, and suchlike. But the same energy is needed in both cases, so I could hardly see how it was people complained about boringness, or praised entertainment; both are only opportunities for the imperfection already present in my worship to show.

To amplify this problem, services, especially youth services, are frequently arranged as emotional progressions, with the music as the key to changes in emotional tone. So, in the course of a single service not only the content changes from praise to repentance, but so does the entire tone; the content of the soul of one attending to these songs. We'd have a happy, bouncy "welcome back" song, followed by some quieted devotional songs, and then a few words about repentance, and an emotionally-charged action accompanied by a song about the wretchedness from which we are being rescued; tears are shed, sins physically nailed to a cross, and then three songs of thanks and the volume and tempo rise until we're hopping and dancing in the isles. Perhaps with perfect attention I could tune my soul to resonate with such a progression, but otherwise it's hopelessly off-balance; I'm serious when I should be happy, cold when repentance is due, and quietly sad when rejoicing is in order; by the time it's all over I'm just miffed that I can't go off in silence and think about my sins for an hour or so. We're a very quick people here in America, it seems.

A couple of years ago, while I was trying to resonate with two completely different emotional themes of happy excitement and quiet devotion, I happened upon an Anthology of Prayer, and had a tiny epiphany. The most often included writer, St. Theophan the Recluse, begins not only by acknowledging the frustration of a constantly straying mind, but aims nearly all his advice at overcoming it to unite mind and heart in prayer. I couldn't do any of it well - I still can't - but the revelation that other people recognized this as universal and had ideas on overcoming it was thrilling, because he seemed to be talking about the very quality of attention I had nearly despaired of learning. At the same time he illumined something that is very often misrepresented and looked down upon, sometimes even by those who do it: the rote repetition (or iteration, as my friend would say) of prayers. How can a person be assigned to say 20 Our Father's without simply blasting through them with their mouth only, while the heard wanders about, gathering wool and following the trail of rabbits? Can any force or persuasion get the nous to stand there before God and mean something a thousand times, every time, with heart and soul and mind?

Orthodox services aren't the easiest things to follow with compunction. They were composed for a generally illiterate Church hundreds and sometimes thousands of years ago in foreign languages and distant lands; their structure is based upon an elaborate structure of repeating variations that change direction without warning, and are read, intoned, or chanted with little audible emotion and no musical accompaniment. Their way of saying that the wandering mind really must come back and attend is by just saying it: "wisdom: let us attend." Nearly everything is said and done standing, and services often go on for three hours (Matins and Liturgy). My attention span dwindles to that of a Jr. higher with ADD, and I find myself needing to drag it back again with frustrated chastisements every 5 seconds. Thought becomes layered, in part following the service, in part feeling pleased with itself for listening to the service, while another though chews out that second one for feeling pleased with itself and telling it to change it's ways, yet another commenting on the fact that my feet are tired and I haven't had breakfast, that pleased part getting puffed up by the fact that it doesn't mind not having breakfast, and then getting chewed out for being a conceited liar, while whatever consciousness is left comments on the nice incense, the oddity of my neighbor's bows, how the chanters are butchering a certain melody, and some other bit of mind or soul observes all this bickering and heaves a huge sigh, wondering why all those fractured thoughts can't just all get along and attend, and ventures a stray Jesus Prayer whenever an opportunity presents itself. All that happening in ten second cycles, like a swarm of gnats. Then the deacon says "Wisdom: let us attend," and all the thoughts go "huh? oh, that" and continue their debate. Come to think of it, it's hardly likely most people are quite as bad as that, but it runs along the same general principle for most.

There is something highly worrisome about the trend in modern churches to recommend trying to "shake things up" in our prayer lives as soon as we get into a bit of a rut and find it difficult to focus on our prayers and praises as we did at first. If the result of about 15 years of such distractions is a rock band and laser light show as someone simultaneously paints wine jars for the projector, and people write out their sins, I'd rather not think about what more shaking up will result in. We already have in our worship dancing, mosh pits, tears, laughter, and shouts; can we go on adding forever to avoid the discipline of willing attention? That's where iteration comes in - to bring our minds and souls back before we keeping going on and on forever, changing whenever a new distraction or fashion presents itself; making a tight loop that comes always back to Christ, the center of our faith.

The Jesus Prayer
Scripture commands us to "pray without ceasing," to which the believer must often reply "teach me to pray; pray thou thyself in me." When my mind's off wandering and arguing with itself, I'm probably not praying. If I am, it's a shamefully fractured and dissipated prayer, one that can do little but cry "Lord have mercy!" Mercy for my sins, my condition of falleness, the wounds I bear in soul and body, my darkness and lostness, and, even at this very moment, my inability to unite mind, soul, and heart in prayer even now, standing before the God of the universe. Mercy to forgive, to heal, and to unite. Feeling this, and seeing the disgraceful state most of our minds and hearts are in, the desert fathers of the Eastern Church came up with the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!" or more simply, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!" and repeated it, calling on God until the prayer ran through their minds and hearts, truly without ceasing; it woke them up in the morning, and was their last thought at night; comprised the rhythm of their breathing, their work, and whispered in the background of the prayers of the Hours. Scripture can also do this; some have succeeded in learning the Psalter and recite it by heart during nightly vigils, but it is much more difficult.

Lesson Planning

2006-12-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

See the Unit

My group decided that each of us be responsible for a lesson; all of them went quite well, and I'm not sure that I would want to pick one in particular as being the best, as each is good for different reasons. Mine was about making Lotus art books.

South Beaver

2006-12-07T17:57:00.000-07:00

Last time. Everyone was tired of it, and I only got four students, two of whom didn't want to do anything but talk about who to invite to an upcoming birthday party, and color pictures of the invitees. My energy was very low, and Allie didn't show up, neither of which helped - especially the former. Bleh. I'm pretty ready for the semester to be over.

Semester Reflection

2006-12-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

It is difficult this semester to express exactly what it is that I have learned, and much less whether that new understanding is positive or negative. Time and distance will have to unfold for awhile before the answer to that becomes anything but vague guesses. Undaunted, however, I shall try to make a start on filtering everything educational and otherwise that I've been doing battle with this semester and last.

As always I had my own grand project that I was attempting this semester, quite apart from, and all too often in opposition to, the official educational agenda of my classes. Being the slothful creature that I am, I didn't manage to do both, and did neither very well. Still, I may have learned some things worth understanding. The project of my own was simply trying to work out a question - is it possible to not make any compromises in meaning or quality of work and thought in the world of Education. I failed, of course, and that is hardly very interesting to relate. More worthwhile, perhaps, is a consideration of why I failed, and why it was almost inevitable. Is Dissonance inevitable and necessary? Why or why not?

Concretely, most of my dissonant thinking of late has stemmed from a fundamental conflict between how I think and how the realm of Education would have me think, and my stubborn preference for the former. It spreads further though. In modern society we are so seldom seriously expected to take thought, and it makes things difficult, because then very few people do take thought to the details of life, of what they're saying, and what it implies. I, of course, have been just as guilty as anyone, and more so, because I should have known better; but some things, I've found, can't bear thought. What am I to say? How shall I confess my failure to understand in the sense demanded - to flawlessly and smoothly replicate a way of thinking about things? Of course, that was only ever my own standard, but that doesn't say much - any standard that means anything becomes our own in the end anyway. I have nothing impressive or horrifying to show to explain how it was that simple assignments, things teachers presumably do almost every day, drove me to bitter weeping in the dark; to torrents of passionate words flung at anyone who would listen; to hating school; to failing classes I should have loved; that my writing has disintegrated past mediocrity; to having only dissonance and chaos to show for hundreds of hours of thought and study. No example that I can give will explain to those who don't know already. It all hinges upon taking thought, and what happens when we try to do so in areas that won't bear it. To systematize non-systems.

For a writing class last semester one of my stories was based on my experiences with Evangelical youth conferences - 1300 teens in a room, a rock band, perpetual sermons on why it's bad to do and think stuff it had never in my life occurred to me to think or do. In the course of the story, I wrote of the main character that she was "attempting to mean the song at hand," not the most elegant turn of phrase, to be sure, but perfectly straight-forward. Or so I thought, until I got back 25 copies from my classmates, all with that sentence underlined, asking what I had meant. Wasn't it self-evident? I wondered. Apparently not, so I tried to explain, but it's not a thing easily explainable, and eventually I shrugged, and gave up the attempt, supposing that I just wasn't very good at expressing certain things.

In a vast auditorium in Salt Lake City stood 1,300 teens and youth leaders, eyes closed and hands upraised, singing to the sappy chords of modern Christian rock:
People, we believe that
God is bigger than the air we breath, this world we leave.
And God will save the day, and all will say:
My glorious
My glorious
My glorious, My glorious, My glorious...

And on and on in that vein. There, among the crowd, I tried and tried to concentrate on what we were singing, and mean it. Discussing the story (slightly modified from actual experience), my classmates thought that was just a way of trying to blend in with the crowd - a kind of peer pressure, but that's not it. It's more like trying to tune the soul to resonate in harmony with its surroundings. Internal and external must be consistent, and I have generally supposed that if my reactions to something are in conflict with everyone around me, it's probably a fault in myself. So that's what I did, twice a week every week, and sometimes every day at things like the youth conference mentioned above, for probably five years. It rarely worked, and led to a lot of dissonance because I didn't believe in many of the things said and sung.

"Attempting to mean" things is what I always do, in nearly every situation, and explains a great deal of my frustration with school, various outreach events I've been part of, Evangelical "worship" events, postmodern thought, and other things besides. Someone recently suggested that not everyone aims for internal and external consistency, so I'll try to explain a bit more coherently.

There are different realms of meaning, and each requires an approach to thinking and responding to its content that is appropriate to itself. Most of those who speak so highly of "critical thinking skills" seem to forget this simple fact; there are some realms where Critical Thinking is appropriate, like philosophy or great novels, and some where it isn't, like most technical skills, and some that may bear thought, but doesn't demand it, and might be ruined if such thought is used wrongly. Art often falls into this last category. There are certain cues I use to determine what realm I'm dealing with so as to respond appropriately; I couldn't say exactly how I learned them, but I am more and more getting the impression that they're almost completely different than those used by many people, especially if they spent a lot of time in public school. How to determine what is better I have yet to find out; it's certainly not easy, since in modernity we no longer have any coherent cultural consensus on what is due to things, or on what constitutes the "ordinate affections." Be that as it may, I still try as best I can to conform myself to what I believe to be proper and just. In the case of the Evangelical songs, as they were about God and called "worship," the proper response seemed to be that of prayer: give all the attention of which the soul is capable, and mean it, to the best of my ability, with all my heart and soul, until it resonates through my whole being. It didn't work very well, not only because I'm dreadfully bad at maintaining that kind of attention (which is true), but because there was dissonance between intention and expression; between word, meaning, and Truth.

Some words are powerful enough to drag whatever they touch from one realm into another, among them "meaning," and everything that hints at demanding meaning or rationality. An art lesson, when that is all that's required, is one thing: it implies taking art, and making things. Not even creating in the proper sense, or not necessarily. Drawing, painting, sculpture; perspective, color, composition; these all belong to the realm of techniques that are mastered to give people the tools to make, perhaps create, works of truth and beauty. Any of them can be taught with no difficulty whatever, and have been taught so for millennia. Success or failure are gauged by a person's power to shape matter to show their vision of that beauty and truth effectively. Mastering techniques, developing sensitivity to the interplay between internal and external vision, learning to discern what is most essential, training the eye to look closely, and everything else necessary to become an effective artist is difficult, time consuming, often laborious, sometimes tedious, and involves a lot of groundwork at first that isn't particularly expressive. It is worth it, but that's small comfort while you're spending all your weekends throwing pots that collapse, fly off the wheel, or are too heavy to fire, and then cut must cut open all the good ones to measure their thickness. Still, all of that is hardly a mystery, and neither is finding appropriate ways to teach it to children, whether in the form of an impressionistic crayon drawing, their own pop-up book, watercolors of microscope slides from the local pond, a strange creature from their favorite book, or whatever.

Most people in the Education field, however, have a vague idea that looking at good works of art and making things are not lofty enough enterprises, and something must be added to make them more deep and meaningful. So we begin asking about meaning in the form of questions about a lesson's "Enduring Idea," "Essential Questions," "Rational," "Key Concepts," and "the meaning inherent in the work of art." Alright. But wait: in addition to History and Production (looking at and making art), we are responsible for Criticism and Aesthetics. Criticism can be weaseled out of by having critiques, which are rather enjoyable and helpful. What about Aesthetics? That is answering "what is art?" usually by looking at anything and everything and inquiring if it is art. It is the philosophy of Beauty become the philosophy of Art become some vague watered-down enquiry into the dissolution of a word.

All that, if taken seriously, pushes art teaching into the realm of philosophy. Which brings me back to looking for a response appropriate to the thing with which I am dealing. Teaching and learning Art, is it is usually meant, requires all the concrete disciplines of vision and technique mentioned above. History requires, in addition to familiarity with facts and periods, visual acuity, a sense of balance and relative importance, sensitivity to the frameworks of others that makes it possible to see their work from the inside, and the ability to choose only what is most important and can be understood by students with no previous knowledge of any of it. Criticism in described in four stages: Describe, Analyze, Interpret, and Judge. Description requires familiarity with a specialized vocabulary, and especially with the Elements and Principles of design, both of which we are blatantly forbidden to teach; Analysis is what I'm applying to Education at the moment, and is difficult, sticky, time consuming, and lends itself to all kinds of hang-ups and errors of not conducted properly; Interpretation depends upon a vast history of common visual literacy which cannot be gained by anything less than a sustained effort to "read" famous works of art from the past 2500 years; Judgment is the child of Discretion and the right to practice it can only be won through steeping in an environment permeated by greatness, submitting oneself to the demands of Truth and Beauty. Aesthetics, as Education means it, is nihilistic in nature because it assumes that any answer is as good as another as long as reasons are given. There is no Truth to which we must adhere.

That alone is is enough to make me despair of the project, but we must not forget all the ways in which meaning must still be sorted and categorized. The work of art must be dissected to provide easily stated Meanings that lead to neat and orderly Essential Questions, and be Rationalized for administrators. Students must create their own art which expresses themselves while adhering to the meaning inherent in the artwork they're studying, while avoiding all religious meanings in favor of safer subjects like "society influences art." All this must relate to everyone, from every background, with any disability or intelligence level, must be intrinsically interesting, and target every learning style. Finally, I must do justice to great artists in a way commiserate with the value of their works, and be completely truthful, while stumbling about under this load. I'm getting tired just thinking about it!

Difficulty, however, is not a valid reason to refuse a project. So I heave a huge sigh, and try to keep my balance: take a great work of art, try to find its meaning, look for a project that adheres to that meaning, fill in all the silly and complicated bits of Lesson Summary form, make a good and exciting presentation, and everything else. It doesn't work - my brain twists itself up into pretzels, and I moan with a sense of impossibility and failure. The real reasons, I think, are twofold: I disagree with the basic aims the kind of art teaching described above, and even those who teach its use, and write books in its defense, do not seem to mean what they say in any true sense. I've already hinted at my reasons for disagreeing, but to sum them up: a) abstract meaning of the sort expected is inappropriate for teaching to children, whether they respond positively (as my professor says they often do), or not. b) most of the concern with ascribing our own meanings, the obsession with asking what art is, and the lack of interest in technique, beauty, or truth, are nihilistic tendencies that I disagree with most fervently. c) while pretending to cover every aspect of art, the mind-bending rules of this form of art education force teachers to completely ignore most of the meanings of most of the art in the world's history, those which express faith and religion, because it's so difficult to "replicate the meaning" of such works in the faith-free zone of public education. d) the reality of teaching and learning with children (or anyone else not hanging on my every word) simply can't handle all this complicated, top-heavy, elaborate, "meaningful" stuff. the attempt results in trying to map something very difficult onto a scale that can't handle it. e) my values suggest that it is a greater thing to express something outside oneself through the filter of one's own self; everyone else disagrees. I hold that "meaning" as it's seen in the educational world is not higher than Beauty, or even competence; everyone else disagrees. d) Relevance. More on that later.

It's important to know what it is you're asking of people, on the off chance they take you seriously. The most difficult thing for me to grasp, in any but the most superficial sense of intellectually assenting to the possibility, is that people say things that sound real, feel true and possible, have something solid and understandable in their creation, and are meaningless withal. It would not be exaggerating too badly to say that I possess by inclination most of the qualities that Education declares to be our duty to foster in students under our charge. Critical thinking? I will spend days and tears trying to determine the reasonableness of an assumption held by 90% of the modern West, picking at it's foundations to see where it came from, why, and if it should have ever done so. Essential questions? Why else would my everlasting refrain against Evangelical thought be that there were so many of the most important questions that they never even think to ask, much less answer. Linking across disciplines of study? every discipline is linked completely, and throws light upon every other, for I have rarely had to deal with compartmentalization in anything, thought least of all. Meaning? What about the compulsive need for the cosmos and everything in it to shine with meaning until every aspect reflects the final meaning given it at Creation? High standards have been driving me near insanity whenever I come within ten yards of some fake Educator spouting nonsense that neither he nor anyone else cared about in the first place. Even relevance is important enough in it's way - I try my best to see how anything I come across might say something about humanity, or demand change in myself. They want students to take responsibility for their own learning? There I am, charging off on a quest to find out about something no professor ever threatened to ask about in a thousand years, just because it seemed worth knowing.

Still, I am probably the worst student in either of my art education classes this semester, and not only because of my obvious imbalance in holding all of the above qualities in precarious balance, or my selective sloth in their completion.

Museum Visit

2006-11-17T22:25:00.000-07:00

*sigh* I've had better semesters.

Christina and Ethan, my "protegee team" apparently stopped doing art ed. stuff without bothering to inform me. There aren't very many really interesting blogs to read, and none are updated on a regular basis. I'm really, really bad at elementary lessons with meaning - I'm having quite an unjustifiable amount of difficulty making only a single lesson plan. Some things, I'm finding, bare thought better than others, usually in direct proportion to the clarity and depth of the ideas involved. Art has so little clarity just now its thought-bearing capacity is approaching zero, and it's not for lack of trying. We need to make a real effort to moor everything back into specifics or I fear every-thing's just going to gradually fade into non-being.

Speaking of which, the reason this post, which I stuck in my blog in advance to record how my museum visit went, is just a rambling bit of frustration, is because the South Beaver after school program (FACTS?) is tending towards non-being as well. A friend and I showed up at the school at 1:15, and went upstairs to check in with Angela. She looked kinda tired in all senses of the word, and said that pretty much none of the kids had permissions slips because they were tired of visiting Old Main and asked their parents not to send them, so the visit was cancelled. She said that I could still teach a lesson if I wanted to, to whoever bothered to show up. Most of the stuff I can teach off the top of my head is for at least sixth grade, or younger kids if they have a lot of interest and attention to spare. Friday afternoons is not a good time to test people's ability to focus, I'd probably only get a couple of kids anyway, and my friend had stuff to do, so I declined the opportunity. Probably not the most professional choice, but that's what happened. I like the idea of having this collaborative pre-practicum thing, but perhaps, as Susan suggested, there's a better way to do it.

Strange Loops, Formal Systems, and Aesthetic Computing

2006-11-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

Originally posted to Art Ed Forum

With all the talk about interdisciplinary connections in the arts, you may find it satisfying to know that some of them are coming back to meet us half-way. Take, for example, the recent interest taken in Aesthetic Computing in the fields of math and computer science. Apparently they're catching on to the fact that the average person really can't see the elegance inherent in the act of computation, but can see beauty in a fractal pattern laid out in front of them, and only have incredibly vague notions (if any at all) of how and if the two things are related. A similar theme is apparent in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Tesselations, fugues, Islamic tiling, mobius strips, Gödel's Theorem, Strange Loops, and paradoxes of both logic and vision are all part of the same kind of thing, and art and mathematics aren't as far separated as people often suppose - something which both Escher and many of the surrealists attempted to explore in their work to great effect, and which mathematicians in turn are trying to make more understandable to the public who don't find such things readily intelligible.

I am of divided mind, however, regarding how this new interest could be used in the field of education. On the one hand, it's all really fascinating stuff, and powerful enough to get many of the arts people interested in math, and visa-versa, as well as be a basis for the creation of beautifully integrated cross-curriculum projects, increasing understanding for all involved. On the other hand, if, say, the math, computer science, and design departments at a high school were to get together on an "aesthetic computing" project in the wrong way, then it could mean even more confusion and dislike. What the "wrong way" would be is, in my opinion, adopting anything - really anything at all - as a gimmick. Unfortunately, the more cross-curricular an undertaking becomes, and the more people are involved, the more opportunities seem to arise for gimmick-hood to flourish. On the one hand, it's incredibly compelling to find out that the continuous staircase seen in Ascending and Descending by M C Escher is an instance of the same concept as Bach's ever rising Canon (Canon Curcularis per Tonos from The Musical Offering), and is echoed in Gödel's Theorem. Insights like that, when set forth clearly and interestingly (preferably with amusing acrostic dialogues based upon musical forms between Achilles and the Tortoise from Zeno's famous proof of the impossibility of motion) off enough interest to get literature people (like me) to learn recursive computational definitions for no particular reason - and also brings much of the use of algebraic functions into the light. But there's a great possibility that discretion would be used badly, and rather than using cool and interesting ideas or meanings as a springboard for getting into the real work of slogging through equations, playing fugues, or creating beautiful and mind-bending works of art, we would just dabble - pre-posterism, as Barzun would say.

Two outcomes, then, seem likely as a result of including Aesthetic Computation or brilliantly connected works, dependent on both presentation and reception. On the one hand, a student could look at the awesomeness of seemingly unconnected disciplines and be inspired to fill in the vast holes he saw in his present knowledge, whether that meant training his ear to subtle variations of pitch and tone so as the not only know, but hear all the amazing stuff going on; brush up his algebra so as to be able to read formal systems of thought based on algebraic functions, or practice drawing with precision so as to have the power to show impossible worlds and visual paradoxes to dazzle the eye. On the other hand, however, he could react by thinking that the greater knowledge of dazzling concepts and high ideas was sufficient, and the lower unnecessary, and grow impatient with laying foundations and scaffolding when the end result is so close and seems so tantalizing and so very unrelated to learning to shade or finding the value of x.

Meaning and Misunderstanding

2006-11-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article by Roger Kimball this morning wherein he was interviewed about his recent book, The Rape of the Masters (2004) and themes of art and culture.

BC: Mr. Kimball, let me begin by asking you a question about your latest book. In about a month’s time, The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art will be released. Is it safe to say that much of your narrative involves the way in which the giants of western civilization are denigrated in the academy due to their inability to meet the sensitivity standards of race and gender?

RK: Well, that’s part of the story. The Rape of the Masters is fundamentally about how academic art historians have traduced the study of art and art history. Political Correctness, as the subtitle suggests, is an important leitmotif, but the book casts a pretty wide net. There are basically two ways of ruining the experience of art. One is by means of what I call spurious aggrandizement -- pretending that the British artists Gilbert and George, for example, create works that rival the Isenheim Altarpiece, as one critic assured us. The other approach moves in the opposite direction. Instead of elevating the mediocre or meretricious, you denigrate the accomplished and besmirch the sublime. This can be done from any number of ideological perspectives -- Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, racist, etc. -- but the crucial thing is to translate the work into foreign ideological territory before getting down to business. A picture of a Tahitian women by Gauguin is really the expression of the artist’s misogynistic impulses, a painting by Rubens of a drunken Silenus is really an allegory of anal rape, an abstraction by Mark Rothko is really about the Annunciation...very different interpretative gambits, all have the effect of directing attention away from the work itself onto the preoccupations of the interpreter. Since the interpretations in question are being practiced by academics, it is not surprising that what results is a series of exercises in one or another for political correctness, but at a deeper level the real tragedy is the fact the student’s direct encounter with the work of art is rendered all but impossible.

Dissonance

2006-11-07T00:44:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's just projection on my part, but reading everyone's class blogs of late has been bringing to my attention what seems an increasing plague of frustration, annoyance, dissonance, and lack of clarity and precision of thought. My mind is full of mud and cobwebs, and keeps babbling about inane things and questions that no modern really believes can be answered; it ties itself up in knots so bad that I end up dazed and wishing it would just shut up. It's extremely difficult to get outside myself, and introspection is turning increasingly toward the perpetual circle that Chesterton describes as madness or the case where "everything is possibility and nothing is necessity" that Kierkergaard names despair. I can't do art, can't seem to learn anything of substance, sleep for no apparent reason, can't make even a single lesson plan that I'm satisfied with, can't seem to research anything, nor even finish a book, even one that I love; can't get all these educational requirements or bits and pieces of postmodern jargon out of my head, but they won't submit to living harmoniously with the rest of the contents of my mind or soul. It's fundamentally alright of course; there's still God and all shall be well; but still wasteful and aggravating.

I exaggerate of course, but don't think I'm the only person here who feels this way, at least to a degree. A clue that I'm not too far out there in my thinking is that Dr Stephens felt it necessary to reassure everyone that a high level of confusion, frustration, dissonance, and stressed busyness is a normal part of starting out teaching. Perhaps so: I haven't had enough experience to judge yet, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable personally.

Among other causes that I won't go into here lies one that has been showing itself to a greater and greater extent over the past few months. There is a marked difference in how something comes to be known between whether it has been learned for its own sake, either out of use or interest, or in order to try to teach it to others. It's not the same thing at all; the proportion and weight of things ends up dreadfully skewed. At least that has been my experience. It's all very well to learn something and then teach what I know; it's something altogether different, however, to try to research enough to teach what I not only know nothing whatever about, but that my mind actively rejects. Holding two opposing ideas simultaneously for any reason other than to compare them and decide on their relative value is not really constructive and "critical" thought as the textbook (Children and Their Art) suggests, but rather an unpleasant and destructive case of dissonance. Such has been the case with teaching meaning in works of art.

In art, what I know well enough to teach is quite simple: I know how to make things. I'm quite good at it: craftsmanship, color, texture, design, and harmony I have down. Find something specific, metalworking let's say, and I'll learn a decent proficiency very well. Art history I'm working on, and before I started trying to try figuring out how to teach I knew not what, I had quite a decent grasp of it, especially certain areas. I've made a pretty good start in learning Northern Renaissance, Baroque, Gothic, Byzantine, early through medieval Russian, and classical art. Religious symbolism I can point out without a qualm - that's what I've studied and know. Most of art history I'm sure could be picked up if I had a decent book or professor and a wee bit of direction.

Even the realms of knowledge I don't particularly care for could be picked up without too much trouble if they would simply form themselves into concrete elements and not this amorphous broth I've been swimming in of late. Aesthetics, for instance, can be traced through the great philosophers and even theologians to its birth as a discrete study around the time of the Enlightenment. There are books that can be read, quotes to be quoted. But I, of course, am too lazy and muddled to strike out on my own in search of exactly what those books are, who wrote them, and why they are important, much less read them, and I somehow doubt anyone would appreciate it if I did. We start too late, when the reaction against those thinkers was already in full flower, and know the rejection before any clear picture is put forth of what has been rejected. So I have an unformed notion that art is about truth and beauty, while another person has an equally unformed notion that it's really about intentionality and self-expression. I counter with a muddy supposition that using self-expression as a criterion of art is a very modern thing, and therefore should really be looked into more systematically than it yet has been. It's like trying to make pots out of regular mud, or work out an equation without knowing the order of operations wherein I'm expected to divide by zero. There's little chance of going back and learning things right when everything continues progressing forward, and I've never really figured out what it was I missed out on in the first place. What I largely missed out on was, in fact, a goodly amount of training in postmodern thinking, and as I tend to look at all that with terror and dislike, another way is really in order.

While it's true enough that a teacher need not know everything, it really is important that she know enough to be able to converse intelligently in whatever subject she's teaching. I really can't without suffering a wave of confusion and the feeling that my head is going to explode. So how about taking a few steps back and another look at what's going on. There's a marked difference between having all the answers and having an answer. An answer is a starting place for further enquiry; something firm enough to use as a working definition and sturdy enough to stand questioning. When that answer hardens so much that it leaves no room for discretion it may be time for some serious re-examination and perhaps an upheaval, but even that is better than nothing at all. I speak of this primarily in relation to the perennial question: what is art? ART, it seems to me, is in desperate need of what the sciences would call a working definition. Something everyone can agree on as a point of departure, to be learned first. Only then does philosophy have the tools it needs to work on something better, bringing Discretion in when needed. It's a millennia old debate, and the best thing would probably be to read what has been said and trace the current of thought that brought us to the present. If that's too difficult, reading a decent book on the subject will do all that work for me. Then, when I know some of that, I can muse on where I fit in to the discourse, and help students do likewise. It's not something that can be skipped, however, nor picked up piecemeal as I go along. I'd give that at least a semester of intensive study, and would start with Plato on Beauty.

Do that, and there's a little hook cast into meaning. What about philosophy's brother, history, our window into the operation of ideas in time?

I took art history courses, of course, but only paid enough attention to get As, and nothing more. Northern Renaissance I learned well enough, and could teach Welsh diptych and triptychs with great confidence. It's rather a pity there's no call for the teaching of religious oil on panel paintings containing obsessive detail and conventional symbolism among elementary students. Otherwise, I'm mostly aware of tiny glimmers of understanding within vast bogs of ignorance, filled with hundreds of pools of dislike, which I am trying to not only navigate, but guide others through as well, in the dark holding a candle and ten lb. weight. I need a reading and viewing list to form some kind of map; some experience actually reading whatever I assign myself to cast a bit more light; some time and distance to help drain out the sogginess a bit, and a trip through without any followers to scout for quicksand.

I'll probably have more later, or even proofread that which is above; for now though, consider that there's about two years of work just in history and aesthetics, without even getting into actually making art, and that I'll be bunbing my nose up against trees of paint and marble at least until then.

Curriculum

2006-10-31T19:57:00.000-07:00

As I was reading The Little Schemer and attempting to study Russian I was also thinking about how things are taught and learned effectively. There are, I noticed, about 5 billion more efficient ways for the human mind to learn something than trying to cram flash-cards into one's brain, which tends to be an exercise in futility. Whenever I would actually get one lodged in there somehow, there's no saying if I could ever pull it out in any context other than "please define X exactly as it was on your flash-card," and who really wants to be able to do that? In high contrast is the method employed by The Little Schemer. I dislike math as much as the next art/literature/teaching person, and computer systems are a complete and utter mystery to me. I happen to love languages, etymologies, words, and scripts, all of which Russian has in plentiful supply. I'm taking a class in Russian, and would love to visit, while I would destroy all computers and go back to dip pens and handmade paper if I could. Nevertheless, there I was for the past several hours learning all about what a computer will do with the recurring function it was teaching me to write, and complaining to my friend about Russian.

But that's not really about curriculum, is it? Don't worry: I'm getting there.

As I was enjoying learning about how to define a recursive function for rember, firsts, and insertR and talking to a friend, it occurred to me for pretty much the first time: bad teaching can not only fail to teach (which is obvious), but can actually be destructive in the sense of making things more difficult for someone to learn than if they had simply picked up a decent book and taught themselves. It's a fairly great danger, and I would hate to be guilty of it. It doesn't even take that mismanagement; someone can be interesting, fun, and nice as a person, care about what they're teaching, and still drive people away from the very subject they try to teach. In my (admittedly limited) experience, the most common cause is primarily asking people to learn in a way that is antithetical to how they actually learn, and forbidding them from trying anything significantly different, adding failure to dislike and frustration.

Memorizing in the sense of simply learning things exactly is necessary and positive. I've memorized, in that sense, a goodly number of prayers, some poems, hundreds of songs, and all the millions of disparate elements of language, symbolism, and thought that any reasonably intelligent person would have by now. For my Art Ed classes, for instance, I've memorized the disciplines of DBAE (history, criticism [describe, analyze, interpret, judge], production, and aesthetics), and their working definitions, most of the Human Commonalities; for ceramics, the approximate temperatures that cones melt at, things like that. Shortly I'll know all sorts of things about creating recursive definitions. Some of those things may cause a certain amount of despair and angst, but one things I can say is that none of them cause the kind of despair that looks back on four years of classes, and sees no results other than a handful of half-remembered phrases, a slightly better grasp of English grammar, the ability to throw around terms like "past perfect participle," "declension," "conjugation," or "adjective-noun agreement" with ease and abandon. In that realm foreign languages are almost unique. That friend I was complaining to took four years of Italian before he finally just gave up and taught himself with a good dictionary, a book in Italian, and some basic guidelines on structure and sound. His friend took a similar amount of Spanish before giving up and teaching himself not only that, but Latin, Greek, and a working knowledge of most every major European language. Most Americans just despair of learning any language very well unless they happen to know people who speak it; we haven't the discipline or perseverance to learn them by pounding the flash-cards in with a hammer, nor the reasonableness to try anything more helpful.

I have this other friend who's taking a class in Java. He has nearly despaired of its usefulness because they teach that venerable language, created for constructing monumental projects collaboratively for large companies, and teach it to freshmen in the form of silly little programs and applets that do pretty much nothing but look nice, making use of a vast library of specialized terms created for another use altogether. Learning it has been likened to building the scaffolding for an immense tower, then hanging a single ornament at the top.

Not only do those subjected to such staggeringly inefficient methods fail to master whatever it was they set out to learn, but also acquire resentment (this is where "I just don't have a mathematical mind" comes from), a whole slew of bad habits, wast all kinds of time, and often enough go on to teach the next generation in like manner.

Getting back to the subject at hand

Which brings me to creating a curriculum. There are, as many of us have experienced, about ten billion ways to teach the average subject wrong. About half of those ways are worse for the student than not teaching it at all. There are quite a number of ways to teach rightly, but all of them require not only a good understanding of the facts and details of the subject at hand, but a good grasp of how people learn (usually born of experience) and an excellent sense of their subject as well. What I call "sense" here means not only a good working knowledge of things, but additionally an internal perspective of the proportion of things; how they effect each other and fit together harmoniously (or vehemently oppose each other). It is the parent of discretion in the area to which it applies, and is strongly connected to the perspective of time (history), but also requires a broad range of knowledge in contemporary matters as well. In art, for instance, it means knowing the cause and flow of styles, media, and themes through thousands of years, and across several continents, often from both the internal perspective of those who made the art, and an external perspective of modern and postmodern critique. Often it means relating specific artistic achievements to parallel philosophical, religious, or literature-based roots. Additionally, a good working knowledge of techniques, media, and current issues, debates, and changes, and their weight and shape in the light of history, are all important.

All that is needed to create a serious, academic, balanced, and systematic curriculum that spans multiple years. I, for one, am quite ready to admit not being even remotely qualified to do that yet. Perhaps in ten more years, but even so I doubt I have the motivation to do so. I'm rather lopsided, and far better at literature than art in many ways. My view it is strongly reactive against postmodernism and most of modernism; a fact which may be necessary, but is hardly conductive to creating a balanced approach to teaching those very subjects as they manifest themselves in art. I would need far more time and distance for that.

There are, however, a few people out there who have done it. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them could write such a curriculum with the scope in art that someone like, say, Jacques Barzun, has for history and teaching. It probably wouldn't look like the average modern textbook; if I had my way it would be straight text with chapters, headings, subheads, and body text, nicely bound. Perhaps there would be some color plates interspersed, it being art after all. It would cover how great artists have taught, as well as what, and when; history, but primarily the flow of things and what caused them; it would spend no more time on the present age than on at most the three centuries proceeding (my sense of weight and shape in history isn't yet well enough developed to give an exact account), and would be directed towards reasonably educated people, interested in educating themselves and others.

"But that's not a curriculum!"

Yes, I know, but it's a path - something to begin with. One thing I really don't get is why there is seemingly this constant need to reinvent everything in education. Also the apparent desire to duplicate everything and have more of everything than is needed. Do we really need 10 reasons to teach art? No: we need one good one (see my first post), and that doesn't even have to be complicated or impressive. Likewise, one really good curriculum is sufficient; three hundred is surely excessive in the extreme.

Recursion

2006-10-31T15:39:00.000-07:00

I was reading a book titled The Little Schemer this afternoon, because a friend recommended it (sort of), and the introduction claims to train the mind in recursive thought while teaching things necessary to begin learning Scheme, a subset of Lisp, a programming language. No, I don't program computers. I don't, in truth, have any desire to ever learn how to program computers, but recursion in definitions and teaching is quite an interesting concept, and worth looking into. The book starts out:

Is it true that this is an atom? atom

Yes, because it is a string of characters beginning in a letter

Is it true that this is an atom? Turkey

Yes, because it is a string of letters beginning in a letter.

Is it true that this is an atom? 1492

Yes, because it is a string of letters beginning in a character.

And goes on in like manner, working through progressively more complicated concepts as it goes. So if anyone ever asks me to (cons a l) where a is baklava, and l is (with (warm honey) ((sauce))), I'll be able to answer "why, (baklava with (warm honey)((sauce)))."

While I haven't gotten too far beyond that, I've also only had the book since Sunday afternoon, and haven't exactly been studying with rapt intensity.

But you probably aren't terribly interested in hearing about beginning concepts of Scheme, or you'd be looking at a website on that, not Art teaching. Well, the connection's going to take a while, so please (bare... bear... bier... ?) with me. Actually, I may never get there, but don't worry - it's good for you. First, recursion.

Even if you don't often hear about recursion, I'm sure you inferred something from its similarity to "recur," and that's a good place to start. "(1)To come back; to return again or repeatedly; to come again to mind. When any word has been used to signify an idea, the old idea will recur in the mind when the word is heard." Recursion is, basicially, the act of recurring: in the context I have been looking at above, however, it has a somewhat more limited meaning. For my purposes it can be seen as referring to "the act of defining something in terms of itself."

Think on that; I'll be back later.

Saturday Art Studio IV

2006-10-28T20:00:00.000-07:00

Today Elii was in charge of the lesson with an accordion story book and a hidden pages book to first and second grade children. The first (main) project was the accordion book; it was made with six pages that were each (something like) 4 1/4" x 11," each folded in half, taped together, and then accordion-folded into book form and glued into a cover. It's constructed so that the viewer can either view each two-page spread individually, or can unfold the entire book and see it as one continuous image.

In her example book, which she brought last week as well, Elii had drew the Amazon river as it makes its journey from the high mountain springs down to the sea; each spread has a different emphasis, such as the river's mountain origins, jungle creatures, most notably a jaguar stopping for a drink, and a little boy who makes a wee sailing boat and sends it down the river. One thing I found neat about her idea is how when it folds out everything flows together into one continuous narrative picture. The other example book, which Elii's son had made was a pirate story with pictures and text; it was pretty neat.

To introduce the activity Elii showed her example books and read the kids a story about two boys living a while back, and their respective trips to another town, one by train and the other on foot.

For anyone interested, Elii also had a hidden picture book that she had adapted from the Exquisite Corpse ones we had been considering making before. Instead of all the page sections having the possibility of interacting with any others, as with the Corpse, each page was self-contained, but little flaps could be pulled back to reveal another page underneath. I don't think anyone, including Elii, got quite that far though.

I thought it somewhat interesting what the kids did and didn't know about the conventions of bookmaking. For instance, some of them would remember to sign the cover with "written and illustrated by," but would have their book open from the left side rather than the right. Many of them were very interested in spelling and letters, which I suppose probably reflects an emphasis in first grade at school. Susan explained to several of the kids one-on-one about what needs to go into a story, and what every story should have. Were I to teach this lesson in a classroom I would probably either coordinate with the classroom teacher on a language and visual arts project, and have him or her teach how to write a story, keep it purely visual, or give a brief lesson on what goes into a story, and what a book needs to have. The kids had a lot of fun ideas, and definitely copied ideas off of each-other, especially at one table, where all three ended up doing horse stories somewhat like Black Beauty. I was especially interested in one child who decided not to do a story at all, but rather an informational book about science experiments and the workings of technology like car engines and hot air balloons. Many of the kids were starting to lose focus by the end of class though; I'm not sure what I'd do about it, other than perhaps have art for an hour twice rather than two hours once.

Saturday Art Studio III

2006-10-21T23:29:00.000-07:00

Yup, that's right: we passed the midway point of the Children's Art Program with week three: instructing kindergartners in the construction and decoration of accordion fold books with pockets. For a good description of how things went and some pictures, check out the respective blogs of Susan or Elii. Otherwise, it was pretty fun; today was my 20th birthday, so I ran out of class as soon as it was over to go hiking in Oak Creek Canyon with some friends, and they threw me a little tea party before we all went to vespers together. It was cool, but I was pretty distracted at the art program as well; too much so to gain many deep or meaningful insights.

Saturday Art Studio, Week II

2006-10-20T19:03:00.000-07:00

This week Susan was in charge and teaching on "movie books." I thought it went quite well, and spent the majority of class time wandering around the studio helping kids who seemed somewhat unclear about how to proceed, checking out cool books, and at the end I sat down with some of the kids and we made lotus books. It went well. Not too much to say else.

Some pictures:

South Beaver Elementary Outreach

On October 19 I went to S. Beaver Elementary again with Ethan, Christina, and Allie. Nothing terribly significant happened; we looked at some of Joe Sorren's artwork, especially the Verdant Gardens of Effie Laroux, discussed a couple of questions somewhat ineptly, and tried to have the kids make a collaborative mural thingey. Some of them got it, some didn't -- we did try. Note to self: prepare discussion questions in advance.

* * *

Just say NO to creating structured xml documents in InDesign

2006-10-13T11:24:00.000-07:00

Nevermind that it looks easy -- you'll be glad for it in the long run.

A Personal History

2006-10-09T19:00:00.000-07:00

(Or, how on earth did I end up an Art Education major?)

Since I requested that my protege team do some writing, it's only fair I do the same.

I have always enjoyed making things; when I was a little kid and my parents would take me to the lake to hang out and fish, I would find a little patch of mud and clay and make wee modeled birds with it. I I was homeschooled my my mother my entire life, but for one semester in 5th grade, so I never experienced a "standard" art classroom until college Instead, I played around with every kind of art supply I could get my hands on, took some classes with a family friend, and learned from my mom. My earliest art memory is painting watercolor "creek critters" sometime in elementary school, after a trip to Sabino Canyon stream to splash around and get microscope samples; they were basically circles with a bunch of lines sticking out to represent legs, but I had fun making them for weeks and weeks; my mom still has one displayed on her bookshelf at home. She's something of an artist herself, and would paint or scratch onto eggs, and a couple of times went to display them with her friend at state-wide shows. From her I got a propensity to be a master of all things crafty, and she always encouraged my artistic exploits, especially when in Jr. high (or thereabouts) I started participating in 4-H projects. At one point I was involved in sewing, quilting, leathercraft, scrapbooking, arts & crafts, photography, poultry, pigeon, rabbit, and cavy projects, as well as being club president and creating miniatures on my own. My father would (half) jokingly call it my "4-H career."

When I was 15 I started attending community college as an enrollee in Latin and 2-D design. Both went well, and I just kept taking art classes because they were cool. I eventually ended up having an Associate of Arts degree, and at 18 moved from Tucson to Flagstaff to pursue a degree that could use all the art credits I had accumulated. The only viable options were fine arts or art education, and I could far more readily see myself as a teacher than as a full-time artist, so I went with the latter. (My first choice would be liberal arts at a small, old-fashioned college of high repute, second English, and third history, but my tendency in that direction is just too vague to waste all those art credits, and I like this almost as well).

I suppose I will be an art teacher, at least for a while. Then... who knows. Get married, raise a family, get a masters of theological studies, teach English in Russia, paint icons, found an Orthodox commune in Iceland... well, probably not the last, though it'd be cool. Any of the above, or something else -- it's pretty hard to know at this point, but I'm pretty excited about whatever it is!

Of late I have been in a bit of an artistic and scholarly slump. I have the skills to do a lot of things fairly well, but don't have much momentum in any particular direction. For instance, I've sold art quilts (self portrait: far top, National Solar Observatory logo: right), ceramics (Art Can be Consuming), and had computer photo-manipulation images published as book covers (left), but only when I just happen to stumble upon an opportunity. As my father (and Kierkergaard) says, "everything is possibility, nothing is necessity." So nothing very interesting happens. Well, lots happens, but it's not related to Art. I dunno quite what to do... just keep plodding for now, I suppose.

About an Artist

Philosophy of Education

Artist's Statement: haha; no. See above if you want to know why.

Children's Art Program

2006-10-07T23:36:00.000-07:00

Today was the first day teaching the Children's Saturday Studio art program; on the whole it was hectic and not entirely organized, but a good time was had by all, and the kids kept busy and made fun books. I was on a team with Susan, and Elii, who's daughter was helping along with one of the ARE 200 students, and Mike, because there were so few kindergartners. My group had decided that each of us should be responsible for a different week, designing the lesson, doing most of the prep work, and teaching most of the class. This was my week, and I was doing Lotus books with little pop-up mouths, and pockets with wee little accordion books. The kids stayed busy pretty much the whole time, and most of them finished everything, although some decided to decorate their books other ways and skip the pop-up.

My teaching style is to teach students individually or in very small groups if I can possibly help it, so I was having a bit of difficulty when it came to teaching the entire class at once, which was sometimes necessary (and Susan kept suggesting I do more of). One thing that makes teaching a medium to large-sized group more difficult is that I have a squeaky little voice (I've been told that I could get a job doing voiceovers for animated children), which doesn't project well to either get kids attention or instruct from across the room, so Susan had to keep intervening so they'd know when to pay attention to some more instruction. I'm not really sure what to do about that for elementary grades, where at least some noise can hardly be helped. In high school I suppose I could just have everyone pretty close and quiet, and talk in a normal voice, and then spend a lot of time going around working one-on-one. From my experience in summer camp, if there are more than 20 students I think I'd need a whistle.

We had second and third graders, who are one off the larger groups, with about 20 kids. That wasn't a problem since we had six adults and a teen teaching or helping, but it would be an awfully daunting task to teach that many on my own!

I was wondering -- what are teachers supposed to do when they have one or two students who may have already done the the project they have planned for that day? Because on the one hand, it usually wouldn't be practical to change things too much for them, but I'd also feel kind of bad just having them do the exact same thing again. I was wondering because I had one kid who I've taught the book we were working on to before, but there were enough things added that it was still somewhat interesting for him.

After class I went down to the Ceramics complex for a shift tending the new train kiln. On the way I ran into quite a large high school marching band, complete with flag dancers and very large white feathers in their hats, walking down the road in formation , apparently headed to a northern Arizona band competition in the vicinity of the Dome. It was a somewhat surreal experience, just walking up and seeing all those uniforms, and especially the very prominent feathers.

They didn't really need me to help with the train, so I hung around, and unloaded part of the wood/wood soda kiln that had finished firing earlier this week. There was quite a lot of really nice stuff coming out both of those and off the older train kiln which was being unloaded at the same time. They're both going to be re-loaded tomorrow so that we can fire them again for the conference. I had signed up to fire the wood-soda kiln tonight, but since it's between firings, I'm off the hook. There seem to be a great many people there who actually seem to enjoy spending 10 hour days stoking fires, and I don't feel at all guilty for letting them do it instead of me, as that's not exactly my cup of tea.

Another shift at the kiln

2006-10-06T01:39:00.000-07:00

I had a stoke shift on the Tozan Anagama tonight from 8PM to midnight. For being as hot hot as it was (around cone 6 near the back, I think; single side stoke, and just beginning double side stoke when I left), things were very laid back because of the number of people around helping. For that I am most grateful, since I was very tired from quite a long school day. I'm hoping it's somewhat similar tomorrow morning since I have the 8AM shift on the Noborigama. The atmosphere was somewhat contradictory; I couldn't decide whether I was in Saruman's underground factories, or some warm and cheery woodland forge someone in a fairy tale might stumble upon. There was smoke and fire leaking out of every concievable crevice; raging from the top of smokestacks, escaping through stoke holes, raging in the doors, glaring from cracks. It was warm and bright too -- probably 68-70 degrees, and nearly a full moon, reflecting its light into a light cloud covering. All quite lovely and creepy and industrial and pre-industrial. One thing I found very striking, especially at night, was the brightness of the fire. In three of the kilns it almost couldn't be looked at without sunglasses, and one woman was even wearing a welding mask. When I think of fires, I tend to see their light as something secondary; they possess it, but only as something rather mild and tame, like a table lamp. This light was something else entirely: it was the Sun when it hides itself in a smokey haze. Brilliant and alarming, and better not apprehended directly.

Second South Beaver Visit

2006-10-05T00:50:00.000-07:00

Once again I could have been more prepared. It didn't help that I had only two days between my first and second time, but then again, I have spent the past month being fairly clueless about what I was planning, when I really should have been making some examples and some kind of lesson summary. We made double-sided Lotus books, mostly because it was something I was already fairly comfortable with, and had already done all the prep work for. Both the kids and helper/teachers seemed to have a pretty good time, and we were pretty busy until 5. I don't think anyone, including myself, had any very concrete idea what the books had to do with nature, or why we were teaching them, other than because they're fun. I had some vague connection in mind about the Lotus being a flower, and that they could use them as some kind of nature journal or some such. Like I said, more prep work doing research on art books, as well as an example of one showing nature themes, would have made things run smoother, and given the kids something more to think about.

Something else that bothered me somewhat was the extremely informal interactions both between the proteges in front of the class, and between us teachers and the students. There was a great deal of joking and banter going on, which was all right to an extent (fortunately the protégées ceased and desisted from their stripper jokes once the kids got there), but got somewhat carried away. We should try to project a slightly more formal tine next time, especially since the kids will be a few years younger. One thing that might help would be to have a 12 or so minute introduction, talk about an artist or style, have a brief demonstration for the whole class, and then get to work, instead of instructing in small chunks somewhat haphazardly like we have been doing. I also need to have more stuff to do to keep everyone occupied, including the protégées, so that they don't get bored and end up drawing beavers on the chalkboard; this time there wasn't enough work for everyone because we had four teachers, and only about nine students making a project that wasn't all that difficult.

A Blog of Your OwnPart four: for inspiration

2006-10-04T22:28:00.000-07:00

Looking for ideas? Not sure where to start? Try checking out some of these!

First: congratulations to those of you in Art Education courses who have actually been writing! There's something sad and dissapointing in hoping for and ecpecting to find some interesting insights about others, and instead seeing only a blank space waiting to be filled. Here are some people who are (more or less) keeping up on their blogwriting:

Erika -- Go check out the cool ink drawing of a lotus she did.

Susan -- She's been keeping a record of the challenges and lessons of teaching; there's some rather interesting stuff there. Plus, she got her protegees involved by inviting them to post there. Kudos!

Leigh, Angela, Steph, Alex, Angela, Anne, Jackie, Tara

Otherwise, I don't visit art blogs all that much, so I'd rather appreciate it if you'd leave a comment with one or two of your personal favorites. Here are some interesting ones on unrelated matters though.

ArmaVirumque, the New Criterion's weblog.

Why the Lucky Stiff. Go look at it; it's really odd, but rather interesting and addictive as well.

WitNit is another... erm... very interesting one.

Art Journal Blogs. Go on, take a look.

Wood Fire Diamante

2006-10-04T22:15:00.000-07:00

Fire
Swift, Bright
Dancing, Swirling, Melting
Furnace, Flare, Mud, Ash
Remaining, Hardening, Enduring
Stable, Brittle
Stone

Nogorigama Kiln Lighting

2006-10-04T21:46:00.000-07:00

The ceramics pre-conference firings officially started last night when everyone present (about 70 people) took part in lighting the Noborigama wood kiln (the really huge one that only gets fired every couple years), each person throwing in a piece of burning paper. right before the actual fire started they had a little ceremony, involving a platter with an apple, sea salt, and a bottle of Saki, and then a brief Shinto blessing, where everyone faced the kiln, bowed twice, clapped, then bowed again. It was pretty interesting.

I was on stoking duty for the Anagama this morning and arrived just as it was being lit; it was started as a little camp-fire on the door ledge, and gradually built up until it could be pushed into the kiln without danger of going out. Two bricks were removed from the bottom at that point to allow enough oxygen to be pulled in to keep the fire going steadily. After that, we just added a small log and some kindling about every 10 minutes, just enough to keep it going as a cheery little blaze of the marsh-mellow roasting variety.

Ceramic Artist Jason Hess

2006-10-02T22:53:00.000-07:00

For those of you who don't know, Jason Hess is a ceramics professor here at NAU, specializing in wood fire; he's been apparently been doing it for some 20 years. Besides being a pretty cool guy, he's the guy responsible for a great deal of the work that's gone into getting this conference together and running smoothly. Lately he's been making these non-functional, tall, corked bottles, several feet high, which he wood fires (as I recall they're tumble stacked) with a bunch of ash to get a very crusty, textured finish. Jason's prefers making pieces that are functional or nearly so to purely sculptural forms. I think they're awfully cool.

From one of his shows:

A desire to have objects that fulfill specific purposes inspires me to make functional pots. The infinite and elusive variety of texture and color attainable through the various making and firing processes that I use has generated an interest in the notion of presentation. I enjoy presenting my work so that a viewer might notice and appreciate subtle diversities in for and surface. By grouping similar forms of differing size and color I hope to compose a visually dynamic display, which invites the viewer to enjoy the tactile nature of each individual piece and how they relate to one another.

Question: what if I wanted to teach about artwork like his? How would I introduce it; under what banner of meaning? Since the interaction of texture, form, and function isn't really enough, if I understand the concept of the Enduring Idea correctly. Would it be "all of us produce and consume?" I'm haveing the same difficulty with many ceramic artists who are more focused on technique than message. How do we teach them?

Northern Arizona University International Wood Fire Conference

2006-10-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

For anyone who was unaware, NAU is sponsering a fairly important event next week (October 11-14), 20 + 1 Years of the Tozan Kilns, An International Wood Fire Conference, and are firing all the wood kilns this week to prepare and give conference participants a chance to experience a firing and experiment with their own ceramics pieces. It's going to be pretty exciting; watch for updates over the next couple of weeks. You may want to stop by the kiln site too, as there will be some evening slide presentations, demonstrations, and a whole lot of fire.

Decisions of Content: a reflection

2006-10-02T22:24:00.000-07:00

What kind of blog is it?

Phantastes' primary function is to share interesting facts, reflections, and lessons related to furthering the teaching and understanding of art and the artistic community, especially here at NAU.
Implications: I do not need to post icons on all the feast days, nor complain about all the annoyances brought about by the college of education. Unless the post in some way suggests improvement for the betterment of teaching and learning art, it ought to go.

What will it be about?

Art and teaching. Often teaching art. Passing along discoveries and lessons in art, as well as questions that may be of concern to a wider audience than myself only.

Who is your target audience?

Anyone interested in teaching or broadening their understand of the visual arts, especially fellow NAU students.

A Blog of Your Own: a tutorial Part Three: content

2006-10-02T20:43:00.000-07:00

This is the most important part of your blog: what are you going to write? How often? With what audience in mind? If you have your own method of sorting through these kinds of decisions, I congratulate you, and look forward to perusing your blog this semester. If not, read on for some suggestions.

What kind of blog will it be?
It would be most efficient to determine this before you start writing, as doing so will save you time, energy, and the sorrow of deleting some well-liked posts. How personal do you want it to be? Are you going to post on every topic you are interested in, a couple, or only one? Will your tine be one of discovering, sharing, teaching, or a combination?

What will it be about?
Making and teaching art would be a good bet, since this is a class blog. I am always sorely tempted to add other random stuff I find to be interesting, without relating it to either art or teaching. It's a bad habit that I rather need to get over though; start out right; don't post anything that your target audience will not want to read.

Who is your target audience?
Is it your close family and friends? If so talking about details of your life such as how you're enjoying school, who you've been hanging out with, and the party you almost crashed last weekend may be in order. Your fellow student? Then perhaps things you've discovered about teaching or making art would be best. Someone you hope will stumble upon it one day? Then write whatever you want as long as it's interesting, entertaining, and updated often to keep them coming back.

After answering these questions, you will probably have a pretty decent idea what your blog is all about, and why you're writing it (well, you have to, but that's never a good enough reason). Now it's time to start writing. Here are a few tips:

Write often. Two to three times a week would be ideal. If I, as a reader, were to find your blog, and consider it interesting, one of the first things I'd want to know is whether you were still writing on it. There are few things more annoying than checking up on dead websites. So I'd look to see when your last good post was: two days is very promising, while two weeks is not.

I do try to read people's blogs, and many of them do discourage return visits for this very reason. Finding a new article by someone I like reading is like getting a present, but there's only so much waiting and hoping one can do without finally just getting frustrated and leaving.

Focus in on something. Unless you're a great writer who can enchant and amuse on whatever topic your golden pen should land at the moment (and there are only about three of these in the world), people are going to want to know what you're writing about, and that you keep up on it. If your focus is art education, go look for interesting or unusual bits of info about it and share them.

Link generously. Run across something worth sharing? People may want to learn more, and certainly want to know where it came from and that it's legitimate. Think of frequent linking as the references and citations of the blogosphere, and see to it that you're not either plagiarizing or perpetuating hearsay and myths.

Post pictures. They're interesting and free. Why tell when you can show? People like to see what you're talking about, especially in the arts.

Still don't have anything to write about? Try some of these:

* What news is coming out of the art world? Why is it important?

* Have a project of your own? Post a picture, and say how it's made!

* How did your practicum time go? What did you learn?

* Find a website dedicated to an artist you just love, who we may not know yet. Describe why his or her work is important, and how it may be taught.

* Go to a gallery or museum lately? Say something about it.

* Report on an art-based community event (see my chalk-a-lot post)

* Is something confusing you? Driving you nuts? Write it out; poke about for an answer (you may even get some useful replies).

* Why is art important to you? What have been your experiences with it? Why is it worth teaching?

* Start gathering ideas for a philosophy of education and post a first draft.

A Blog of Your Own: a tutorial Part Two: A bit of useful code

2006-10-02T20:17:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of tags you'll want to memorize if you're planning on posting things online much at all. Remove all spaces from the visible tags to make them work.

Bold: < b>your text< /b>

Underline: < u>your text< /u>

Italics:< i>your text< /i>

< center>Center< /center>

< div align=right>Align right (or left, or justify)< /div>

< a href="http://website-url">Link< /a>

Image: do one of two things. If the image is on your computer, and of an accepted file type, press the tiny little button directly above your text box while writing. It has a wee little mountain on it. Do as the instructions instruct. If the image is already online, get the url, and place them between image tages like this:
< img src="http://image url">

To get an image that links somewhere, simply enclose the < img src="___"> within < a href="___">

A Blog of Your Own: a tutorial Part One: setting it up

2006-10-02T20:00:00.000-07:00

ARE 200 presentation

Note: this tutorial begins with the assumption you already have a Blogger account. If not, you must register before proceeding.

	Go to your dashboard (start page after login); it should show any and all blogs you are part of. Click "create blog" (it's in the middle).
	You will now be at the "name your blog" page. Do what the instructions tell you: name it whatever you want, preferably something appealing that gives a clue to the theme or content you intend to add. The address could be your name, the blog's title, or anything else easily remembered. Verify the word, and press "continue."

No one will be able to see your blog until you write your first post. Please do so, even if it's just "this is my first post" -- you can always delete it later. Now is a good time to spend a few minutes arranging your personal settings: click the "settings" button in the top menu bar. give your blog a description if you like; read the options and determine which settings are best for you. After pushing "save," go through the other settings pages and see if there are any that need modification. Congratulations; your blog is now online.

First South Beaver Visit

2006-10-02T18:40:00.000-07:00

Today was my first time teaching at South Beaver Elementary, or any school for that matter. I should have been somewhat more prepared; I'll have to work on that for the future. Christian, her friend, and, another ARE 200 student (Emily?) were there, and it was pretty fun. We had K-2 for about 40 minutes, then 5th for another half hour. After a brief introduction and a look at the pop-up Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Sharks and Other Sea Monsters, the kids made little beaky mouth things and coil pop-ups. Since we didn't know ahead of time we would be teaching 5th as well (were we supposed to?), they did the same thing. It wasn't very deep or meaningful (I'm not too good at that yet on the shorter lessons), but a good time was had by all, I think. Ancient sea creatures and things with beaks are in fact vaguely a part of nature, and therefore within our "theme." We'll be back on Thursday to do some more stuff with the 5th and 6th graders, and I'm rather looking forward to it. Christina's working on some kind of beaver in a box activity.

On a Perception of Time

2006-09-16T21:29:00.000-07:00

An odd thing has been happening this semester. I have somehow managed to lose what little ability to manage time I once had. I wonder if it has anything to do with the very tentative nature of deadlines in school, but believe it is something more as well. I'm only taking four classes, and am not working, don't have a mass of friends, and belong to three clubs, in which I am only lightly active. Yet I seem to be behind already, even if only in perception. Look at my schedule, and it's not that intimidating: no classes on Fridays, or before 1:50 on Mondays or Wednesdays. And I'm not all that lazy -- I don't watch TV, or even movies, and have hardly even been reading novels of late. So what happened?

I wonder if it's possible to research the perception of time. It would be fascinating if we could. Spending twelve years in a school system where one's expected to live in 50 minute sections punctuated by electronic bells and 10 minutes to get settled must lead to quite interesting time perception. What about other systems; that of medieval villages, for instance, where time is determined by the church bells ringing out the "hours of prayer," or cultures where there has been little reason to have an exact time system at all? A friend was pointing out last semester that it is mostly a Western phenomenon to have to keep such careful track of our time, and have so many places to get to at exactly the right moment. Is that so?

I was homeschooled until I was sixteen, when I started junior college. Even then I was primarily homeschooled, and took only two or three classes. In that atmosphere the sense of time was somewhat mixed; whenever we had to be somewhere for a meeting or event, we would try to be there exactly on time, but we did not have to be anywhere in particular very often. Consequently, my perception of having a lot of time on my hands means about four days with absolutely nothing to do. Then I'd pick up a book and read it, simply because it was there and looked interesting, staying up 'till three in the morning, and getting up at noon, simply because there was no reason not to.

Time was often organized into chunks like that, even after I started taking college courses; I had an independent study (bad idea!) anthropology class with only one deadline: the last day of the semester; I more or less forgot about it until the last week of the semester, and then spent every waking moment working on it. I got an A, which hardly discouraged the behavior. I was heavily involved in 4-H during jr. high and high school, where we had only one deadline for the entire year: the county fair. I would go to classes quite unprepared, shuffle around, and be very nearly useless for three months, then figure out what I wanted to do, make a list of projects, and fuss with that for another month, while messing around with little side projects. Then I would forget about school and work very hard on projects for about two months, get a drawer-full of purple ribbons, congratulation, sighs or relief from the project leaders, take a brief breath, scramble toward finals week in school (about three weeks later), spend five hour stretches writing essays, turn them in (with no guarantee they were on time), and collapse into a worthless heap to begin the process over again during summer school.

Even without "The Fair," the process worked reasonably well last fall: I knew what needed doing, how long it would take me to do it, and when the deadlines were, which was not very often. For things with short deadlines, I would procrastinate on a small scale as well, writing weekly responses for an English Education class, for instance, the morning that it was due. It may not be a masterpiece, but I can, in fact, produce a seven page paper about a local church, six page paper on my personal reading history, a teapot, an educational essay, and study for a psychology final during a month of dabbling and a week of writing with relatively little negative impact. I cannot, however, produce art at the same time, or even desire to do so.

I am quite a lousy juggler.

Then the Spring semester struck: seven classes, and LENT. There was a class wherein all I had to do for the entire semester was take some open book quizzes and write three short (2-3 pg.) essays, and I got a C because I didn't write the last essay. this is a three page essay, and about as difficult. I was utterly clobbered, not so much by having too much to do, as with having no concentration to do it with. Here's an interesting habit home-schoolers are especially prone to: considering what they're studying outside of classes to be of a great deal more importance than what we are supposed to be doing inside classes. It is actually a normal human trait, but the difference is, we can still be good students and have it in great magnitude. I certainly do. So I "do" school, and study whatever seems beneficial at the time; I always have about seven subjects going on: last spring it was more like ten. Which is where Lent comes in. For those who haven't ever participated in it, or only marginally, Lent is the 40 days before Holy Week, which is the week leading up to Easter. If you happen to be passionately in love with the Church (as I was and am) it also involves four services a week (one to two and a half hours), a fairly strict fast, church get-togethers right and left, and 14 services the last week, leading up to a middle-of-the-night Pascha service the night before Easter. That was three weeks before finals. Add an extra Bible study, informal book club (Ladder of Divine Ascent), and an overnight trip to a monastery south of Phoenix, and you're almost there. The last ingredient is a largish dose of dissonance: Ladder of Divine Ascent, for instance, says not to trust our intellect, and not to concern ourselves with worldly knowledge. The prayers want to unite mind and spirit in continual prayer: for those who haven't tried, it is very difficult to pray and think about technology in the classroom at the same time; they just don't mesh very well.

It took me the entire three months of summer to sort through my art education classes from last semester. I could probably actually write those papers now; I have written some of them, and have thought through most of the rest, although I admittedly still have no idea why Shakespeare is so important; I choose to see that more as a character flaw than as a lack of attention to the class.

So now I'm at this new semester. Every class is very interesting, and every class demands full attention (now!), and so do services, and various writers, and English grammar (I hope I haven't butchered it too badly by not proofreading this entry), and a whole slew of unrelated demands that life sends to us all. No wonder most of my friends in high school tended to answer "how are you?" with "stressed out!" I'm not quite there yet, but for so few classes, there certainly seems to be a lot that needs doing!

Lotus Books

2006-09-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

One of the lessons my group plans on teaching for the Children's Art Program. If it works out well, I may do it at South Beaver as well.

The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

2006-09-14T06:00:00.001-07:00

As You were voluntarily raised upon the cross for our sake,
Grant mercy to those who are called by Your Name, O Christ God;
Make all Orthodox Christians glad by Your power,
Granting them victories over their adversaries,
By bestowing on them the Invincible trophy, Your weapon of Peace.

Yeah, that's why I was very, very late for class...

More on Taskstream

2006-09-12T00:07:00.000-07:00

This is pretty interesting: there may be no room for individual creativity in Taskstream portfolios, but there seems to be plenty scope for education professors to impose rigid requirments on us. I found a Secondary BS Ed required portfolio. Oh how I am brimming with enthusiasm for next semester.

At least there can be no confusion on what they want from us.

Taskstream

2006-09-11T23:10:00.000-07:00

I've been checking out Task-stream, to see how it works, and test if it would be helpful for making art lesson plans. On the one hand, it does a good job of holding the user's hand through the lesson planning process, giving suggestions, letting them click through standards menus, easily upload attachments, and giving descriptions for each segment of the lesson plan. But then again, it holds the user's hand and babies them through making the units and lessons, without having the more advanced options that someone who is already a teacher would need. For instance, there are several nice lesson or unit plan templates, which can be linked together to make a nicely navigable whole. There's only one problem -- students don't have the ability to make our own templates. I can't say, for instance, that I want a "essential question" category added to the standard NAU format, which is most inconvenient.

The same problem pops up in other Task-stream features. It is not possible, for instance (unless I'm missing something really obvious), to edit the portfolio or web-page templates in CSS or HTML, and give them a bit of personality. They are the epitome of cookie-cutterism.

An example of a portfolio. Yes, that's pretty much how it has to look.

Here's a lesson plan (don't look at it too carefully!).

They are in desperate need of something in between the teaching for dummies approach that seems to be going on now, and requiring that everyone be able to program all those features themselves. A customizable portfolio template that allows at least as much freedom as blogspot would be a nice start. And wouldn't it be cool to have a matching blog, portfolio, and website?

Feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos

2006-09-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

Thy birth, O Mother of God and Virgin, hath declared joy to all the Universe: for from thee arose the Son of Righteousness, Christ our God: who brake the curse and gave the blessing, who abolished death and bestowed on us the life which is eternal.

Chalk-a-lot

2006-09-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

I spent five hours today drawing in chalk on my own (pictured here) and others' alloted bit of concrete at the downtown park today. My friend from church reserved a bunch of spaces and told me that I must come and draw. It was a lot of fun; there was quite a mix of ages, and it was especially popular as a family activity. Chalk was provided free of charge. The chalk art was judged near the end (the event went from 10AM to 4PM), and prizes awarded. It's an annual event, and quite a positive one; everyone I talked to enjoyed the event quite a lot, and many had been there for several years in a row.

My Philosophy of Education

2006-09-02T01:53:00.000-07:00

And he hath put in his heart that he may teach, both he, and Aholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. Them hath he filled with wisdom of heart, to work all manner of work, of the engraver, and of the cunning workman, and of the embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, in scarlet, and in fine linen, and of the weaver, even of them that do any work, and of those that devise cunning work. --Exodus 35:33-35

Each man is responsible for educating himself. It is a creative act; that of creating a Self, nurturing a mind, forming an intellect. A slow growth, and rarely realized in full. How many would dare say of himself: "I am an educated man" upon leaving a school or college? Education relies on taking what we can from teachers, from books, from life, and leaving the rest where we find it. We build up knowledge, slowly and patiently; or in sudden bursts of illumination Somewhere along the way it blossoms into understanding, and occasionally completes itself in wisdom. This is education.

To say that I educate would be presumption. I teach. Teaching is an art, a performance, often a battle. It is the contact of two minds, one eager to impart knowledge or skill, the other, often grudgingly, struggling to receive. Tactics and methods can shift constantly -- they are not really important. What is important is the thing taught, and the mind struggling to understand. The Subject must be worth that struggle, even if the student cannot yet grasp why, as subjects are skills or disciplines, rarely immediately "relevant." It must be something real, teachable. None of the possibly desirable effects that may or may not come with time: self-esteem, critical thinking, sensitivity, cultural awareness, or self-expression.

My subject is Art. It is drawing, painting, sculpting, weaving. It is also seeing, trying to truly see, great works; Beauty and Truth made visible, tactile, by minds and hands in the image of God the Creator. Art can infect with joy or sorrow, a sense of the world as order or chaos, peace or striving. It is in the nature of things that appreciation of great art cannot be given directly, but only found, if not by inspiration, then through careful attention and diligent labor. So too with the cultivation of a Self that is worth expressing. Often, the more we try to get to the sublime in art by shortcuts, the more obscure and muddled everything becomes, and the less we believe that it is possible to create anything higher than a social commentary, or a reflection of cultural stereotypes and oppressions.

I avoid teaching what cannot be taught, though it be lofty, in favor of that which can, however humble. Students paint still lifes of fruits and flowers, carefully measure out cities in two-point perspective, memorize the principles of design, do watercolors of light and shadow, throw ceramic pots, and draw each other's portraits. They look at paintings and drawings great artists, quite often dead European men, but others as well. Any art that can inspire admiration, wonder, or joy, instruct or enlighten, justified by its own worth without concern of the "overlooked minority" of its creator. I support creativity without constant pressure; expression without self-obsession. We work with humility, with a firm grounding in the possible; that creation cannot be demanded, only fostered -- that Beauty can manifest itself on the student's canvas as well. For those who are willing, an education is possible.

Education Speak

2006-09-01T12:32:00.000-07:00

Over the summer I was reading a number of books that will undoubtedly come back to haunt me next semester when I'm trying to muddle through all my College of Education requirements in SITE. One was Begin Here, and another was Less Than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell, calling himself "The Underground Grammarian." I was reminded a bit of the latter when reading through the student teaching application form a couple of days ago, and came upon these questions:

* Clearly document your need to go out-of-state

* Describe your role as a future teacher.

* Describe your classroom management plan.

* Describe how to build a satisfying and productive relationship within the learning community.

So, what's wrong with them? Nothing in any real sense; they ask fairly common questions of a sort we have been trained to understand and answer intelligently throughout our studies in education. And yet there is a problem here. The problem is that it is necessary for one who has a good grasp of English, but very little of the rather heavily modified talk of Education to first translate the questions into standard English, write a response, and then translate that response back into English. This procedure makes quite a lot of sense when the uninitiated are talking about technical matters of advanced philosophy, the sciences, or trying to write in a foreign language, but it's mostly just a waste of thought and time to do so when speaking of ordinary things in ordinary life, for which there are already ways of talking that say the same thing, not only just as well, but often even better.

It goes a bit like this:

"Clearly document your need to go out-of-state"

I don't need to go out of state. I certainly can't document that non-need. What kinds of documents could anyone come up with to prove they need to teach out of state? Perhaps they have an ailing grandmother in Wyoming whom they must care for, or she'll die? Or they must move to Seattle to live with their sister because they have no money, and can't work and teach at the same time? Maybe it really means:

Clearly document that it would be beneficial for you to go out-of-state

Again, what kind of documentation? Perhaps it is really:

Clearly explain why it would be beneficial for you to go out-of-state

Ah! I can do that! And so I begin writing my letter.

Or, as another example:

"Describe how to build a satisfying and productive relationship within the learning community."

I don't even know where to start, so I ask my father, who is a teacher. He says: "satisfying relationship--means you don't bitch and complain and whine as so many teachers---and people in general actually, but especially teachers--do....that is my guess and I am sticking with it"

Ok, I reason, so it wants to know that I would be "professional." That I would cooperate with other teachers, talk to them about subjects of mutual interest, be cordial, helpful, give and ask help or advice, and that sort of thing. I remember from past experience that a "learning community" in this context really means a school. So, they want to know something like:

Describe how you would contribute to the positive interaction between those in the school

My, that's clumsy! And it's still passive, which many respected people say to avoid in this kind of situation.

How about the old fashioned:

How would you contribute to useful interaction among those in the school?

I'm still not sure if that's anything like what they meant, but it has to be close enough, because it's the only one I can answer coherently. The answer is something like this:

"By living virtuously." Now I get to begin translating it back.

At the Start of a New Year

2006-09-01T11:36:00.000-07:00

It was quite an interesting first week of school, with a few surprises; intriguing, daunting, and exciting. I must admit to not being particularly scared by the agenda before us -- I had cheated and read all Pam's syllabi a couple of weeks ago, with some hope of knowing what I was getting into (and whether it would be prudent to take every class I could get away with, like last semester). The inclusion of actually teaching real children is wonderful, both for experience, and as an incentive for making practicable lesson plans.

I'm also really excited for Ceramics class; especially the International Wood Fire Conference we're hosting this year. It should be pretty awesome. As far as I can tell, the ceramics department, or at least the upper level courses, function primarily on good will. No one knows what is required to get a good grade, and very few people seem to care, or at least they don't ask too much. For wood fire, for instance, we are to write our own contract, with no guidlines other than "you need to make a lot of work." Then people come in to work at the lab at odd times, just because it needs to get done. It's almost like real life -- something to be appreciated in a college program. From my contract:

For the majority of my work this semester I would like to create a set of serving dishes, pots, plates, lamps, and other ceramic vessels that would be amusing and fun to serve with, eat out of, or look at. My inspiration is all the Greek get-togethers and pot lucks I've been hanging out at, where everyone is very hospitable and great cooks, but also always talking and laughing about that and other such traits. So I want to make a set that is functional and enjoyable to use, but not too earnest or even elegant. Towards that end, the shapes will be mostly rounded, organic, a little squat, even, and I want each to have a bit of a personality -- like, an oil lamp may have some feathers ruffled against the cold and dark, and little claw feet. Sort of fairy-tale like.

I'm looking for surfaces to be fairly smooth (not a lot of crustiness), light to medium brown ash, primarily unglazed going in. I also very much liked the surfaces I got from the wood/soda firing last time (glossy, cream to grey), and plan on trying that again.

Jacques Barzun: Verbal Inflation vs. the Art of the Possible

2006-08-15T12:31:00.000-07:00

I've been spending a goodly amount of time of late reading books by Jacques Barzun, particularly Teacher in America (1945) and Begin Here: the Forgotten conditions of teaching and learning (1991). He is most refreshing.

Forget EDUCATION. Education is a result, a slow growth, and hard to judge. Let us talk rather about Teaching and learning, a joint activity that can be provided for, though as a nation we have lost the knack of it. They blame falls on the public schools, but they deserve half the blame. The other half belongs to the people at large,

In suggesting what he believes some of those "thought cliches" to be, Barzun speaks most strongly against the multiplication of jargon in education, citing lofty goals and objectives that, while laudable, ignore limitations of the actual classroom: "Some years ago, a new school superintendent in the South-west calculated that by state authority he must find room in the high school curriculum for about 200 subjects... Legislatures are ever ready to add requirements that sound worthy or useful. Few survive in practice, but enough are attempted to make a mockery of the idea of schooling (Begin Here, pg. 50)." Barzun's 1978 speech to the NAEA, titled Occupational Disease: Verbal Inflation deals with another variation on that theme. After describing the confusion, lack of substantial content, and lack of community support afflicting schools across the country, he continues:

How did the American people, the practical people who created the public school and made it work, get to such a pass? The answer is: inflation -- not monetary inflation, but intellectual, emotional, social, egotistical inflation. For the last fifty years, American Education has pursued a policy of overstatement about its role and substance; it has lived by continual exaggeration of what it is and what it can do. The medium naturally is words, words misunderstood and misapplied -- it is verbal inflation...

On the particular subject of our concern, look critically at what is said in current discussions of art for the schools. Here is a short list of the aims: to develop aesthetic potential -- what is that but vague and pretentious talk? to transmit the cultural heritage -- how can this possibly be done in one course? to supply an outlet for self-expression -- this is impossible until technique is mastered; to give a chance of success to non-verbal minds -- good, but success in which art and to what degree? to enlarge the understanding of Man -- does that really come out of modeling clay or playing in the band? to master a system of symbols -- this may do for reading music, but not for painting or any form of design; to fill out the outline of history, which is incomplete without art -- that implies art history, not art in practice; to acquaint the child with foreign cultures -- that would mean comparing styles after much familiarity with one's own; to show than not everything is quantifiable -- this can be done while teaching English composition, American history, or any foreign language; to enhance achievement in other subjects -- why use art for this purpose instead of pep pills or free hamburgers? to counterbalance utilitarian subjects -- who says that playing drums or drawing cans of tomato soup can't be utilitarian? ...

It is all inflation. It inflates the plausible or possible into the miraculous. And remember that this collection of vague, vacuous, lofty, unexamined phrases is not taken from as many plans expressing different hopes. One document contains eighteen such purposes, all to be gone after and realized by any one school program. Other programs list six or eight of these wonder cures. None connect any slogan or objective with any particular activity recognizable as teaching art. What the fatal gap means is that art -- the most concrete, tangible, sensuous business in the world -- art becomes an abstraction, a great white cloud showering on us by magic six or ten or eighteen golden benefits...

There do not have to be eighteen reasons to justify art in the school. One is enough. Let it be put this way: "Art is an important part of our culture. It corresponds to a deep instinct in man; hence it is enjoyable. We therefore teach its rudiments." (Begin Here, pg. 105, 106)

Another culprit, in Barzun's view, is what he calls "pre-posterism:" the sin of putting the cart before the horse, or of mistaking a desirable end for the means of its own achievement. Most commonly the "look-say" method of learning reading is given: educators recognized that practiced readers do not sound out every letter, but rather see each word as a complete unit allowing them greater speed and fluency. To reach this state more quickly and naturally, teachers should therefore introduce students to the "shape" of words, and memorize each as a complete unit. The new method proved no less unnatural, and a good deal less versatile than that of phonics and alphabet, the result of putting the last stage of reading first.

As one who has spent the greater part of his life teaching and learning, a scholar of history, and well educated in literature and art (among his other notable works are From Dawn to Decadence and Simple and Direct: a Rhetoric for Writers), Barzun speaks from conviction born of long experience in the art of education. He speaks more harshly than may be called for, and perhaps pushes his arguments against the educational establishment somewhat farther than might be expected, but those points are very much worth making. It's similar to that of others who ask for "back to basics," a return to great books, or "essential schools:" education is perpetually getting bogged down in new hopes, goals and methods, while teachers forget the "one thing needful," and those going into the field struggle to find a center of teachable knowledge amongst a burden of methods, techniques, research, standards, objectives; ways to be more fair, multi-cultural, sensitive, exciting, relevant. But sometimes it's hard to remember that all these things are simply the necessary conditions to carry on with our real task: teaching something. Something concrete and teachable. Teaching drawing, painting, sculpture; cubism, dada, surrealism, pop, renaissance, baroque, postmodernism. Not perfectly or completely, for it takes a lifetime to master just a handful of such skills or specialties, but broadly and with interest in subject and student.

All real teaching and learning involves particularities that are difficult to come by without actual students or courses: "everything is possibility, nothing is necessity," and as a potential teacher it is grating to talk a great deal about theory, and very little about concrete realities -- objects at best, but if it must be aesthetics, then let it at least be particular philosophers, saying things that can be quoted and analyzed. Tolstoy's What is Art? is worth any number of discussions on "intentionality," even if one disagrees with what he says (as I do). Of course I make things much more difficult on myself than necessary, for I take things very literally -- and fail to manage even a single lesson plan that lives up to all the goals cited above and to my own desire as well -- that of making something well, with good crafts[person]ship, and of seeing cultures from the inside. It may be possible, but is hardly something I know enough to undertake a synthesis of in my own mind, let alone attempt to teach to others. Which is why I like Barzun so much -- something need not be neglectful to be straightforward and concrete; it is not needful to twist the mind into knots to produce a decent curriculum, and there is something between the impossibly intricate lesson plans of college and the lazy ones of burnt-out teachers instructing students in the finer points of mechanical copying, or the joys of holiday hand-turkeys. For another time: what does such a plan, something possible for my mind (bright, but hopelessly puzzled and confounded by even the most seemingly elementary of educational techniques)? I'll see what can be done.