Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2001 February

# 10 Feb 2001, 03:22AM GMT+5:30: The right question: I experienced a truly transcendent moment the other day while teaching, and I'd like to share it with you.

(In the CD slot right now: Frisbie, "The Subversive Sounds of Love." Playing the first track, "Let's Get Started.")

Yesterday was class meeting number four -- the second session of the second week. I love having two hours a week to discuss stuff -- the last class I taught had only one. (All right, so they're Berkeley hours, 50 minutes, but still, it's twice as much. I wish my political science classes had two hours a week of discussion, not one.) There's so much interesting stuff to talk about, and I can choose the subjects, shape the discourse.

Yesterday while writing the lesson plan, I experienced a problem I don't think I'd ever had so bad: teacher's block. What should be the milestones in our first discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness? I knew where I wanted to start, but what destination would be most useful, and what route would cover the most interesting scenery? Le Guin (through the Foretellers), Simon Stow, and Steve Weber have all powerfully raised my consciousness of the importance of asking the right question.

I already knew that I wanted to mention a thing that Le Guin says in her introduction:

Yes, indeed the people in it [the book] are androgynous, but that doesn't mean that I'm predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I'm merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and though-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are.

So: where is she right? When are we "already" androgynous? Where does, and where doesn't, gender affect us? I also wanted to ask them whether the world of Gethen repelled or attracted them, and discuss ways that gender and biology affects our institutions.

So I finally came up with some concrete details and examples, both in the book and in real life, that we could productively discuss. For example, since each individual Gethenian is sexually inactive most of the time, Earth's sex-drive-based advertising campaigns wouldn't exist there. Also, even though Gethenians don't generally do things based on sex drive, the first country we see on Gethen has a monarchy, a hierarchy, and Gethenians use the institution of shifgrethor in devious power plays. (Don't ask me what shifgrethor is -- read the book or look it up; I can't explain it adequately.)

So the lesson plan got written, and a few hours later I entered 235 Dwinelle, grungy and very student-looking. I'd meant to go home before class and change into teachery-y clothes and exchange my student-signifying backpack for the teacher-signifying portfolio bag. I saw the students -- my students -- with The Left Hand of Darkness on their desks.

[Lengthy Aside: By the way, I get a kick out of the fact that these students were carrying and reading a book simply because I had assigned it. I know, that's kind of a power trip. So sue me, I'm an insecure little dictator. A "desperate little despot," as a teacher at my old high school once wrote:

So good night and good living and good life and get along
And farewell, and be happy and be sure you sing the song
That allows you to be something ... you've been nothing for so long
You desperate little despot ... des spot light's yours.

But that, though it's from "The Pope Pong Song," page 80 of Tiger Pause 1996 from Tokay High School, is beside the point.

Wait a sec -- I guess I've always felt this way. A poem from the same literary magazine, two pages back, by me:

To Buddha
God sits at the desk now
Marking papers red
Subbing for our teacher
Struck this morning dead
God is wearing earrings
White streaks in her hair
If I want to get in AP
Saffron I must wear

It's sophomoric, what you would expect of a high school sophomore, which is what I was. But teaching-as-power has been a theme with me for longer than a year. Perhaps that's because school was, it seemed to the younger me, the one place where I excelled. And if academics are your sports, then teachers are the coaches and referees. They make you and break you.]

I did the administrative things. I took attendance and I dealt with a new student who wanted to enroll. We started talking about the book -- what shifgrethor was, and who thought the world of Gethen was possibly "neat," and who was wary.

And then I asked -- "How are we 'already' androgynous? Where does gender not affect us?" I may have said different words.

And the moment was electric. I looked around the room. Every student -- I think, I hope -- was staring, gazing, not blankly, but thinking, for a second, two, three --

I had asked something they hadn't asked themselves before, and they were sifting their experiences, seeking, seeing with new eyes, forming new synapses, making connections --

And two or three voices called out at once, bursting with the enthusiasm of discovery. On the rowing team. In Wu Shu. Over the internet. And we made connections, categories...

The rest of the lesson went well. Animated discussion ensued about the traditional powers that women have, and what Gethen is like, and why the cold climate is important. I set up my next lesson, about the Self and the Other in Darkness. As with all good lesson plans, mine proved to be the skeleton, not the flesh; the map, not the territory (apoogies to John Chapman).

Le Guin writes in that same introduction:

Finally, when we're done with it, we may find -- if it's a good novel -- that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hand to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

I can't say, either, how I was changed, or what my students learned from Friday's class. But I saw something happen in that moment yesterday, when my question lingered unanswered in the air, and it gave me a high so strong, so clear, that I never wanted to come down.

Poll: Do you want to read more of brainwane's teaching experiences?

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/2/10/15221/3922

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Feb 2001, 09:37AM: I taught, I will listen -- (im)perfective: I had two relatively good teaching sessions this week. Not outstanding, but okay.

Tomorrow I expected to help a friend move, but now it's postponed. Instead, I guess, I'll clean and do work.

In the evening, I'll attend an a cappella competition. I went to this event last year, and loved it. I'm a sucker for certain types of music -- voice, acoustic guitar, and flute, I think. (Note that the UC Men's Octet won first place in the ICCA last year. And that they, along with the other a cappella singers who perform near Sather Gate near noon on some weekndays, are -- in my opinion -- the only real celebrities at Cal.)

I'm thinking of putting my lesson plans up on the web, linked to my syllabus. But are they worth it? As well, if I let anyone and everyone see my little schemes, then I'd be showing everyone how the levers get pulled, and the man behind the curtain would seem exactly as flawed and dirty as he is, and lose all his glamor.

Poll: Put lesson plans on web?

Yes, after the session in question
Yes, all of them, from the start
No
Other; will explain in comment

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/2/16/21372/6572

# 17 Feb 2001, 08:01AM: Can you count on me?: Saw "You Can Count on Me" today, alone (odnoy in Russian, I think) and I'd like to talk a bit about it. It's great, subtle and sharp, and -- as in the best of art -- as a multipart mirror, showed me parts of myself in a new light.

It's a drama, mostly, and focuses on the relationship between two grown siblings. Mark Ruffalo plays the brother; Laura Linney ("Meryl" in "The Truman Show," I think), the sister. They lead rather different lives, and conflict arises.

It's also very good. Linney was recently well-deservedly nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress. I think Ruffalo deserves a nod, too, and I don't think he got one. Oh, well. The dialogue reveals as much by silences and undertones as by speech; indirection and intelligent editing reveal a trust in the audience's intelligence. And the story forced me to consider how I am like or unlike each member of the matched pair, brother and sister.

SPOILERS AHEAD

This much you may know from the trailers/ads/reviews that give away stuff from the first twenty minutes: Laura Linney's character, Samantha, was abducted by aliens, and Ruffalo is an FBI agent-- No, wait. She is the mysteriously-disappeared twin sister of a phone company employee -- Argh, that's "VR5".

You see, this movie here has no big special effects -- maybe none at all. It's just about ordinary people's lives. When they were young, Samantha and Terry's (Ruffalo's) parents died in a car crash. She's the older one, I'm pretty sure. Now, she still lives in the same small town, a single mother of one young boy, working steadily at a bank. Terry, on the other hand, is a smooth-talking drifter, and has come back home more for cash than for family bonding.

Samantha is an older child, I think--she's so responsible, pushes herself so hard. And Terry leaves other people to clean up his literal and figurative messes. His irresponsibility and impulses to move on, to lose himself, and his flat-out lying to tell people what the want to hear -- Clintonesque, only with less of the charm, thanks to his failed attempts at sincerity. Yet there are times when he IS magic, when he really is a good guy. It's just that he doesn't care to keep up the act when he's not in the mood. He can make lots of excuses, the angry blame-flames of the early-disillusioned.

And Samantha's child is quiet and withdrawn. The kind of withdrawn that I get during conflict with people I love.

Samantha always seems wound too tight, always harried, during breakfast or after sex or whatever. And she feels as though she is always responsible, and she has always had to be the responsible one and it breaks some mechanism in her to find that bad things have happened to ones she loves, because *it's her fault.*

And so she seems more sympathetic to me, most of the time, and yet Terry has something, too. I wouldn't want to be angry all the time, like him, but he's intelligent, and questioning, even if he lets these qualities flow out through destructive and self-destructive channels. He says that he's not looking for anything in his drifting, just trying to get on with it (I think that's how he says it).

Would spontanaeity be such a bad thing? Some things can force you to plan, but what can REALLY force someone to be spontaneous? YOu can never stop someone from making plans. The only way to force spontaneity is to change someone's circumstances all the time, to make previous plans null and void, and force her to react to new conditions. But if that happens enough, she gets dull, withdrawn, passively accepting her reality like a rat in a maze.

I imagine.

As quiet and withdrawn as the kid in the movie.

Unless she can do something about it. Unless she can escape the maze.

Poll: "You Can Count On Me"

Haven't seen it
Saw it and liked it
Saw it and disliked it
Other; I'll comment below, really I will

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/2/17/20150/2472