Organizing Night School

A lot of this comes out of spending Thanksgiving with Joe and Mel in Cleveland, reading and talking through Leaves of Grass with Alex, listening to more podcasts from the Ezra Klein show someone at church put me onto. And as always, subbing in the public schools, just seeing train wreck after train wreck perpetrated with taxpayer dollars.

“I am the teacher of athletes...

...roughs and little children…”

-- Whitman, Leaves of Grass (section 47)

“I don’t think you help people by keeping them enslaved to something that is less than they are capable of doing and believing.”

-- Myles Horton, The Long Haul (p 184)

So far, we have been making lots of content and putting it out there without much concern for who might be listening. It could appeal to people like us: teachers and highly educated people looking for interesting discussions of great books and ideas for ways to teach them. So far, so good!

I want to propose that we think about gearing some future content to a broader audience, as well. My vision for this is two-fold:

That Night School be a place for young people to connect to learning in a way different from what they are getting in school, or on Khan Academy. Bringing together live discussion groups, where the discussion is on a level that respects their intelligence and is about topics that they want to learn about in order to do something about: diversity, climate, video games, etc.

That it also create spaces for adult education, for people who look back over their time in school and realize that they missed something important. Everyone from drop-outs to retirees, in almost every case, never read the great books, or didn’t appreciate them. They might also have some of the same topics, but also probably debt, health, technology, immigration...

Essentially, we make this a cosmic library, full of discussion rooms.

Further, that this embrace both the psychological and sociological levels of analysis, so to speak. The individual and the community.

Because let’s look at the kinds of issues we are facing: among kids, a dearth of play, and rising depression and anxiety, everything from attention deficit to suicide; among adults, a broken connection to the sense of adulthood, of purpose, of leadership, of history. We’re all wasting time on social media or cable news, depending on the generation, and we want to ask, how might that time be better spent?

So we can offer teachers big ideas, ways to learn and practice seminar and reading.

For kids who are bored with school, we can open new vistas onto those same big ideas.

For adults who missed some things that would enrich their lives, we can give them ways to recover them.

And it will be of their own volition. So we are there to listen to them, to try to provide guidance if they ask, to model the lifelong learning we delight in.

In terms of concrete next steps, I want us to keep on with what we’re doing, first. Next, we build our own understanding of the issues. Talk to people with different perspectives. Deepen our understanding of history. Read great books from other parts of the world, and those written by people of more diverse backgrounds. I think we’ll be too parochial in our thinking if we don’t engage with a wider range of thinkers, and talk more openly about struggling with that: more women, more LGBTQ people, more poor and working people, more people of other races and religious traditions. We can’t allow the great books to be the private reserve of the gentry; we have to show that they are the most marvelous public parks and botanic gardens.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken and Coming of Age, by Studs Terkel

Stories bring us together. We've known this forever. Nowadays, we are learning, they also drive us apart.

Where are the good stories these days? In other words, what's a good answer to the failings of public education and politics writ large?

Here is Studs Terkel's: talk to people. Listen to what they say. When someone tells their story and you listen, that is bringing together.

Studs Terkel's works are compendia of such stories, brought together and distilled. A prize-winning audio essay featuring survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki haunts and harrows; a conversation with Myles Horton and Rosa Parks opens a window onto already-legendary history; and books like Coming of Age and Will the Circle Be Unbroken amass and knit together hundreds of hours of recordings with people from all walks of life. Celebrities and common people alike show their humanity; they learn things they never knew about themselves, and we recognize ourselves in them. Replete with allusions to history and with different perspectives on well-worn stories, Studs' works have taught me more than almost anything else. A little outro music, for instance:

Ceterum censeo, social media is for the birds.

Scholarship Opportunity: Philip Pullman and Video Games

Isn't that 'scholarship opportunity' a delightfully ambiguous phrase? Is it an opportunity to get a scholarship, as people usually mean? Or is it a chance to do some original scholarship?

Both, I say!

Announcing the Belacqua Memorial Scholarship Fund.

(Is it named for the imaginary count and countess Lyra was told were her parents? For the indolent shade in Dante? For both, of course.)

The Memorial may be inspired by imaginary namesakes, but the Fund is real. I'll be contributing any pledges received through my podcasts and other online projects and matching them up to $100 per annum. The monies will be disbursed on a rolling basis to scholars whose work comes to my attention and furthers the study of the works of Philip Pullman and/or of Narrative and Mythology in Video Games.

A special thank you to Alexander Schmid, whose inaugural recurring donation to the Bookwarm Games podcast has inspired this endeavor. Huzzah!

Here are some links to get you started. I hope you enjoy!


https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5535590&live=1

http://sntjohnny.com/front/some-philip-pullman-interviews-with-excerpts/129.html

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-shed-where-god-died-20031213-gdhz09.html

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/aug/12/books.humanities

Labor Union/ Business Models

As it's November, I'll be taking part once again in the nanowrimo fun. My plan this year is to collaborate with some folks at Signum/Mythgard on a story idea of Corey Olsen's. It's called The Hoard, in homage to Tolkien. I'm working on my own writing meanwhile, too, of course, and other collaborative ventures of various sorts, of which a hodgepodge selection below--

Reading Studs Terkel has motivated me to try to find out if there is such a things as a substitute teachers' union. I'm waiting on a reply to some queries I sent out about it, but if there's not, I'm willing to take a shot at starting one up. The main thing a union could provide is a sense of the sub as a person, not just a number. Of course many of Studs' interlocutors also bemoan how unions have lost their way, but this one would be too new to have done so yet!

I've also got some thoughts about hacking the teacher-certification racket. So far, compared to spending a year or two and twenty grand on a Masters in Teaching program locally, dropping 6K for the online program at teach-now.edu sounds pretty good. I really don't want another degree, but even the MA is only 13K! It certifies you in Arizona or DC, but different states have reciprocity agreements about transferring another state's certificate, so it should be possible to make it work. I'm still trying to find out more. If you know a better way to get a certificate, I'd love to hear it!

The best way I've found so far to get to do most of the things I want as a teacher has been to pick up a substitute certificate (most states only require a bachelor's degree, regardless of major, and a certain amount of paperwork), pay the bills that way, and spend my free time writing, collaborating, scheming, reading, and lately making podcasts--in short, actually teaching. There are the obvious drawbacks, though, and so I'm starting again to look into more alternatives.

Washington theoretically offers a route from substitute teaching to a full teacher's certificate, but so far I haven't been able to navigate that particular song and dance and jump those particular hoops, since my district hasn't yet cooperated in the program. 

WA teachers have also recently been the beneficiaries of the mixed blessing of salary raises, thanks to a long-awaited court decision hinging on the interpretation of the state constitution's language about funding for education. Getting a fatter paycheck-per-hour is well and good, but I've already seen several examples at different schools of a growing resistance to paying for a long-term sub, even in situations where the teacher is out long enough to need the support. Not surprisingly, no one seems to want to come out and say that's what's going on. 

On the other hand, transparency and trust are precisely what make Corey Olsen's projects work. They're funded by donations and run on the devotion of volunteers and a small staff and faculty, overseen by the charismatic president and a board, and golly if it doesn't look like, after years of determined work and planning, they're going to make the thing a real university!

Whereas Signum hopes to grant MA degrees and already offers a nonpareil community of learners and opportunities for personal enrichment, the public schools and brick-and-mortar universities, and the prospect of steady employment somewhere within them, confer certain more immediate incentives: social status, health benefits (insurance and health care being perhaps the only racket bigger and messier than schools and academia), leadership, and the chimera of choice within the massive bureaucracy. Cycling back into it, tilting at its windmills, reaching for that golden ring on its merry-go-round, the canned music playing, is tempting. 

Speaking openly about subbing--taking it seriously enough to bother to--is not wholly absent from the zeitgeist. In the perennial glut of publications about the woes of the education system, you'll come across some about substitute teachers: a critique of subs, a big book that came out not long ago. I have not read them, so I can't comment aside from noting that they exist.

I don't know, but would be interested to find out, if anyone yet has proposed or tried to bring to scale something like the business model I'm operating on: working as a substitute teacher so as to be able to fund and have time for online and extracurricular projects. To just explore this a little. 

First, you might reflect upon the sense in which school itself is a substitute, a surrogate, for a real community of learning. Public schools, and for many people college, are the closest thing we have to a unifying ritual or rite of passage; for many they stand in loco parentis quite literally, providing social workers and psychologists and role models wrapped into the person of the teacher. Increasingly, schools do not come free to students: in exchange for the massive tax expenditures on them, they collect enormous reams of standardized data from them. 

But technology, much as its driven the test craze, can also help recover all that time which is being funneled into testing. What schools are not teaching, there is still time and space to learn there. With internet and a device, it is possible for students to read practically anything. With basic literacy, the resources to become complete autodidacts are at their fingertips, so that socialization is not the only thing they are doing at school. The crucial thing is for them to choose to utilize their time that way, rather than simply playing on their phones. If they understand how dire their plight is, by high school they should be motivated to really learn for themselves and make up for the time that has been stolen from them; up until then, they can't be harmed too badly as long as they remain spirited and rebellious but stop short of actual violence. 

Essentially, this is the line of thinking that leads to my business model. If schools have become impossible to teach in, then what? Recognize that there are other ways!

Besides the personal enrichment that comes of learning at one's own pace and teaching outside the classroom--the same thing looked at from the student and the new teacher's standpoint, respectively--there's a strong economic argument, I think, to be made for this model. 

Here is the substitute's day: a commute, which varies but during which you can listen to music or podcasts or audio books, and ride your bike and get some exercise if that's an option; five or so hours in which there is either hands-on practice in classroom management and continual opportunities to hear from kids about their lives, or, if the work which has been left to do is silent study-type stuff, you have time to read and research on your own, or frequently there's some blend of the two during your day. The teacher for whom you're subbing likely has at least one free period, where you may have to cover another class which hasn't been filled, or else you'll have that uninterrupted time to read and write, or, if you know other staff in the building, you can go and observe a class taught by the best teacher in the school, learning from their best practices, and maybe even learning some content!--unless they have a free period, in which case you get to talk to them; you can, if you're ambitious, conduct interviews, recording your observations. There's endless potential for substitute teachers to conduct surveys and gather data and anecdotal stories, hearing arguments from different perspectives about any number of critical topics we have not yet begun to understand--I just write this blog, but some of it could one day be worked up for publication. 

As for how schools can save money, rather than taking potshots at subs, the obvious thing to do is to never buy another textbook or pay for another curriculum. The curriculum and professional development rackets are ones I'd dearly love to get into in some ways, but then I think I'd sooner see them undermined and finally jettisoned completely.

To begin to dismantle the teacher-certification racket, I would advocate for having the substitute teaching profession blended with the pipeline for new teachers as a kind of apprenticeship program, learning on the job. Have student teachers on call as subs, who can do their coursework online and meet occasionally during evenings as a cohort, or with mentors during free periods; retain a list of retired teachers who can serve as mentors; and by all means include administrators, who need to see what actually goes on in the classroom once a week or so. 

For more drastic ideas, try these: no new buildings--refurbish empty big-box stores and vacant McMansions. Expand online offerings--which are mostly free, unless you pay for live discussion groups and tutoring, which would be well worth it, and much less expensive than the current system. Which gets back into the personal enrichment side. 

Like Peterson is reportedly doing, we can start by offering reading groups on classic and contemporary works. I'd also stress the importance of service and vocational options for students not interested in much reading and writing on texts, but still incorporating for them journal-keeping and journalistic or research writing, personal interviews and oral history projects. The human touch, the feeling tone, as it comes through in Studs Terkel's works, is the other side of the coin of critical thought, and there is no better way to coin it than by reading, writing, listening, speaking. Now we still have to give people a sense of history, of connection and relationship, as much as knowledge about it, which is easily looked up. We desperately need perspective and judgment, to discern and account for the bias inherent in news and history, to recognize the false and its intentions and thus glean a grain of truth even from the worst propaganda, just as much as we need to cultivate an appreciation for what is truly, awe-inspiringly great. 

Maybe none of this quite qualifies as a business plan. Once it's a little more developed it might take the form of a non-profit to allow teachers to take part in seminars on great books. In general outline, you'd supply a certificate of some sort and charge money, so that there is something tangible at stake and a certain level of commitment required. To offset the cost, though, large donors could be found to offer stipends for the cohorts of teachers--and to meet and discuss amongst themselves, much like the Touchstones executive seminars--and here we might do some arithmetic: why not an initial grant of a million dollars, by no means impossible if you know the right person; or to scale down a bit, start from the more reasonable $50K figure that would be enough to pay the initial expenses for the facilitators, so that if each teacher paid $100, that would be 500 teachers reached during the year, 25 groups of 20 at a time, or 50 of 10--and a portion of the cost could even be paid out to them, say $20, for their time and counting towards professional development, or as scholarships, which would still leave a salary fund of $40K. The trouble is finding someone willing to put up the money, and even if that’s only a question of having connections, then there’s the matter of being one among many who’ve probably had this idea, who are making this sort of proposal and wanting to get to do this for a living.

Talking about it again not too long ago with a friend, he invited me to start sending five emails a day to drum up donors and interest. Maybe I will; maybe you can help me by sharing this with just one or two other people you think might be interested. Much like with the incredulous marketing person Alex was talking to at the gym, who couldn't believe we've done nothing yet to market it, aside from social media, the idea of doing something with this beckons all around. Meanwhile we go along merrily producing content: proposing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the next side quest, still busily making episodes about Final Fantasy VII and Harry Potter, working on our night school, and so on...

For more along these lines, see Thoughts, Rooted, etc. If you or someone you know would like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you! Donations are accepted, but at this stage I'd really just like words: comments, questions, shares. Thank you for your time!

The Most Dangerous Game, and Another Better Game

Over the past few months I've tried to draw some connections between politics and theater, but more and more I'm thinking that the better analogy would be to games. Perhaps this is just because these days I tend to relate everything to games sooner or later :)

It's an old metaphor. Kipling displays it to great effect in Kim. But here's a way to describe the contemporary politics game: it's like that game people are always playing, where they lose if they remember they're playing--I lost the game!--only in this game, you score points by derailing conversations in a different way: by expressing indignation in such a way as to elicit indignation. The more the better, and perhaps it is cathartic if your indignations happen to line up, but perhaps it only starts a great wobbling and disintegration, like that bridge that collapsed from the little harmonious wobblings all piling up and amplifying each other in the wind. 

You keep your own score, of course, so you can decide if you prefer to get more points by aligning with others' indignation within echo chambers of ideology, or by cutting Sherman's marches across them, righteously pwning people who might think differently and at any rate express their outrage differently or even in direct opposition to yours. But in any case it seems to be about the most interesting game going right now to lots of people, pretty well overtaking Monday Night Football as the national sport. In the form of debates over the bias or appropriateness of the hugely popular CNN10 (formerly known as Student News), shown daily in schools all around the country, and much more evidently through the ever-evolving hallways of social media thronged by school-age kids, the game has already begun to be played at the little league level.

We can look back at still more gruesome entertainments, like Augustine's descriptions of gladiatorial contests and their effect on his friend Alypius, or the bear-baiting that used to be the entr'acte in Shakespeare's time, and recognize our own, more political and psychological gruesomeness, prefigured therein.

Whether by way of literary and historical perspective, or just out of simple humanity, let's play another, better game instead!

In this other game, we talk to people, whether they seem to agree or disagree with us, by asking them questions first, and asking ourselves inwardly or tacitly or aloud: why do you feel that way? Do you want to feel that way? Really? And then listening, with as much love and forgiveness as possible.

Because once indignation or anxiety or triggeredness or macro- or microaggression riles us up enough, it's bound to be painful rather than exhilarating or bonding or whatever thrill it is that it gives us, playing that game we were describing above. And once something is painful enough, we probably want to deal with it in a way that will be healthy, rather than pathological or sadistic. We should probably play this other game instead, listening to and building up selves and stories, whether through serious study or shared laughter, or both, rather than tearing ourselves and others to pieces. So we can say at the end of the game-play, "Oh, she's warm!" rather than exit, pursued by a bear.

Gamecool Books: The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman

The Bookwarm Games project continues with its sister series, Gamecool Books. I'll alternate between series on games and books, and when I talk about books part of what I'll be doing is imagining how to adapt them as games.

I begin with The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman. New episodes will be released every Tuesday evening for the next 30 weeks or so. Generally, we'll be reading one chapter a week; every third or fourth episode I hope to have guests to speak to, and contributors are welcome to help with production, the imaginary adaptation, and support in the form of likes, comments, and questions. So if you'd like to be involved, let me know! Comment here or on the podcasts/videos, or contact me via the email in the about section of this page.

Here is the running list of audio and recommended readings for the course:

Week 1: Lyra and her Daemon
The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman, front matter and Chapter 1: The Decanter of Tokay
Books I-II of Paradise Lost, with Pullman's Introduction
"I have the feeling this all belongs to me," Pullman's autobiographical sketch

Week 2: A Picture of the Aurora
The Golden Compass Chapter 2: The Idea of North
Genesis 1-3, KJV
"Miss Goddard's Grave," an essay by Pullman

Week 3: Conversation with Sparrow Alden
Sparrow's page on Signum University
Sparrow's blog

Week 4: Let's Play Kids and Gobblers!
The Golden Compass Chapter 3: Lyra's Jordan
Songs of Innocence and Experience, by William Blake
Map of Lyra's Oxford

Week 5: The Smell of Glamour
The Golden Compass Chapter 4: The Alethiometer
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by William Blake
Pullman's illustrations for the chapter headings

Week 6: Conversation with Verlyn Flieger
Verlyn's page on Signum University
Verlyn's site

Week 7: In Your Own Home
The Golden Compass Chapter 5: The Cocktail Party
Pullman's "Isis Lecture," on education
His "Reading in the Borderlands" talk on readers, books, and illustrations

Week 8: Into that Dark Maze
The Golden Compass Chapter 6: The Throwing Nets
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass, by Lewis Carroll
Pullman's "Let's Write it in Red," "The Writing of Stories," and "Let's Pretend," essays in Daemon Voices

Week 9: Conversation with Gabriel Schenk
Gabriel's page on Signum University

Week 10: Don't Leave Anything Out
The Golden Compass Chapter 7: John Faa
Keats' Letter on Negative Capability
Pullman's "The Path through the Wood" in Daemon Voices
"The language of Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials,'" by Simon Horobin

Week 11: The Work You Have to Do
The Golden Compass Chapter 8: Frustration
"Leave the Libraries Alone," speech by Pullman
"Far from Narnia," article by Laura Miller
"Heat and Dust," interview by Huw Spanner
Interview on Textualities, by Jennie Renton

Week 12: You Oughter Stayed Below
The Golden Compass Chapter 9: The Spies
Clockwork, or All Wound Up
The alethiometer replica commissioned by Pullman and made by Tony Thompson, on display at the Bodleian

Week 13: Conversation with Mark Vernon
Mark's webpage
Mark's Guardian review of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
Understand Humanism, by Mark Vernon, with a foreword by Pullman

Week 14: What Question Would You Ask?
The Golden Compass Chapter 10: The Consul and the Bear
Lyra's Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North, by Philip Pullman
"Soft Beulah's Night," by Pullman (also subtitled "William Blake and Vision")

Week 15: Difficult Critters
The Golden Compass Chapter 11: Armor

His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman's Trilogy, edited by Millicent Lenz with Carole Scott
"Darkness Visible: An Interview with Philip Pullman," by Kerry Fried
Peril of the Pole board game included in Once Upon a Time in the North

Week 16: Conversation with Kevin Hensler
Kevin's page on Temple University

Week 17: Like Riding the Bear
The Golden Compass Chapter 12: The Lost Boy
"So She Went Into the Garden," Pullman's 2002 Arbuthnot Lecture (still trying to hunt this one down)
"I'm Quite Against a Sentimental Vision of Childhood," interview by Nicholas Tucker
"What Makes a Children's Classic? Daemons and Dual Audience..." by Susan R. Bobby

Week 18: Do You Want To See Proof?
The Golden Compass Chapter 13: Fencing
von Kleist, "On the Marionette Theatre"
Pullman's "Heinrich von Kleist: On the Marionette Theatre - Grace Lost and Regained," in Daemon Voices
"A word or two about myths," originally accompanying Karen Armstrong's Myths Series

Week 19: Conversation with Marek Oziewicz
Marek's page on UMN
Papers available on academia.edu

Week 20: Nice Place. Nice Peoples.
The Golden Compass Chapter 14: Bolvangar Lights
Pullman's talk on A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (audio)
Pullman's Introduction to the Folio Society edition of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (excerpt)

Week 21: ENTRY STRICTLY FORBIDDEN
The Golden Compass Chapter 15: The Daemon Cages
Gospels of Mark and John, in any red-letter edition
Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ, along with the Afterword included in the paperback edition and/or the related essay "How to Read The Good Man Jesus..."

Week 22: Conversation with Lauren Shohet
Lauren's page

Week 23: As a Compass Needle is Drawn to the Pole
The Golden Compass Chapter 16: The Silver Guillotine
Ian Beck's Appendix materials in the Tenth Anniversary Edition
The Broken Bridge, by Pullman

Week 24: We Are Strong
The Golden Compass Chapter 17: The Witches
The Firework-Maker's Daughter, by Philip Pullman
with his essay, "The Firework-Maker's Daughter on Stage"

Week 25: Conversation with Maggie Parke
Maggie's page
Her profile on Signum

Week 26: We Can't Read the Darkness (or, Mayhem and Ructions)
The Golden Compass Chapter 18: Fog and Ice
"Magic Carpets," "Balloon Debate," and "Writing Fantasy Realistically" essays in Daemon Voices
The Scarecrow and his Servant, by Pullman
(or maybe The White Mercedes, aka The Butterfly Tattoo)

Week 27: True, Every Word
The Golden Compass Chapter 19: Captivity
"Poco a Poco," in Daemon Voices
I Was a Rat! and Count Karlstein, two more of Pullman's shorter books

Week 28: A Ritual Faithfully Followed
The Golden Compass Chapter 20: Mortal Combat
Pullman's essays "Epics," "As Clear as Water," and "Imaginary Friends," in Daemon Voices
Some of his retellings of Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm 

Week 29: Conversation with Leanna, aka Musical33, of HDM Fandom
His Dark Materials fandom wiki

Week 30: A Prisoner Acting Like a King
The Golden Compass Chapter 21: Lord Asriel's Welcome
"Dreaming of Spires" and "God and Dust" in Daemon Voices
Tony Watkins' interview with Pullman

Week 31: Beyond Sleep and Waking
The Golden Compass Chapter 22: Betrayal
"The Republic of Heaven," by Pullman
"On Fairy-stories," by JRR Tolkien

Week 32: Forms Among the Dust
The Golden Compass Chapter 23: The Bridge to the Stars
Entruckung [Transcendence], Stefan George
Schoenberg String Quartet no. 2

Week 33: Concluding Q&A on The Golden Compass
(With special attention to da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, and special thanks to the Bells and Mom and Dad)
Recorded live 4/30/19 on the Bookwarm Games Twitch channel

A rough transcript of the lectures can be found here.

If this were a real course, there'd be a writing component. For research, I'm working on an updated bibliography. I've also started reviewing the scholarly literature. And I submitted an essay of my own to a peer-reviewed journal, which was very exciting!

The project continues here with discussions of The Subtle Knife. Following which, more episodes about The Amber Spyglass. Forthcoming are more episodes about other aspects of Pullman's life and work. 

Droit du Seigneur: Henry IV, The Marriage of Figaro, and the Supreme Court

A quick search suggests at least one major publication has picked up on the historical parallel between the Kavanaugh controversy and the droit du seigneur, the practice of the feudal lord playing the part of the husband on the wedding night for anyone under his demesne.

From that evocative association, here are a few more examples of art imitating life, if politics and history are legitimately parts of life and not just distractions from it--viable alternatives to internet indignation and social media signalling:

On the theme of the supposed reformation of the young rake into an esteemed leader, what better time to revisit Shakespeare's Henry IV plays? Is Hal a lovable apotheosis of boys will be boys, or simply a bully? Is Falstaff's gleeful disregard for the truth reminiscent of Trump, or a powerful corrective for calcified order? We're meeting again at Bellwether next month to talk about Part 2, so join us if you're in the area!

On the effort to overcome historical privilege in the name of social progress and personal integrity, what better time to revisit Mozart's Marriage of Figaro? We recently had a chance to see this performed live in Spokane; I think it's remarkable that such a civilized pastime as attending the opera is still possible at all. It makes me think of the theater scene in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, too, which might even quote some of Hal's barbs at Falstaff. But key to the comical plot is the Count's willing suspension of the feudal droit, a generous promise he immediately plans to renege upon when the marriage of Figaro places the lovely Susanna at his seigneurial disposal. Hilarity ensues, and all ends well, but not without giving us the strong sense that it might well have gone otherwise, shorn of the magical atmosphere of Mozart's art.

Lastly, in Mimesis Auerbach reflects on Goethe's anxiety about the limiting effects of socio-economic position on his personal development as an artist, both in his letters and his Wilhelm Meister, who in turn reflects on Hamlet's potential and how it is twisted by his circumstances. Auerbach sums up the pinnacle of French theater, epitomized in Racine, as an attempt to show human beings at their utmost freedom, hence atop any socio-economic hierarchy, with the free play of their mighty passions supplying the drama. It makes me think that history itself, and the history of art which represents and shapes it, are the strongest counter-argument against the assertion of individual responsibility to the exclusion of any socio-economic considerations when elaborating one's philosophy, political or otherwise. For whenever those few human beings had the perfect freedom of their position granted them by the providence of high birth, they were as likely to squander it in debauchery and the old in-out as to lead their people to glorious victory in the fifth act.

Regardless of politics, though, may these great works bring perspective, consolation, and delight. And if it's all too heavy, try Maniac. There's a trial subplot there that seems relevant, though I haven't got far enough into it to be able to spoil it any further.

There but for the grace of God go I

A twenty second report on the evening news: https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/spokane-county/substitute-teacher-dies-at-shaw-middle-school-after-suffering-cardiac-event/293-600513231 

From the Scar to the Stocking: Mimesis, by Erich Auerbach

Another in the series of distillations of major intellectual works from the fields of science and literature--my pace of reading's slowed significantly with school starting up again, and I'll be giving shorter shrift to quotations than I might have liked, but the project of reading and synthesis is endlessly beckoning, and so I'm proceeding as best I can--

Mimesis, by Erich Auerbach, traces the realistic portrayal of human life through the whole of western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf. Instead of an exhaustive historical or philological survey, Auerbach provides a series of close readings of substantial, representative passages from the wide sweep of writing under his masterful purview. They are given in the original languages and then followed (in most cases) by English renderings in Trask's excellent translation, so the amateur Romance language-learner is richly challenged and rewarded by the author's patient explications and illuminating arguments, solidly grounded in the texts, which are allowed to stand on their own as well as being contextualized and brought into conversation with one another across the centuries.

Auerbach asks a seemingly simple question, as he explains in the Epilogue. What would it mean to pursue 'the category of "realistic works of serious style and character"'? His aim is not to define realism--perhaps this is why he leaves the abstract until the end--but through literature to grasp reality, and to reflect at some length on the greatest expressions of human experience.

The subject of this book, the interpretation of reality through literary representation or 'imitation,' has occupied me for a long time. My original starting point was Plato's discussion in book 10 of the Republic--mimesis ranking third after truth--in conjunction with Dante's assertion that in the Commedia he presented true reality...I came to realize that the revolution early in the nineteenth century against the classical doctrine of levels of style could not possibly have been the first of its kid. The barriers which the romanticists and the contemporary realists tore down had been erected only toward the end of the sixteenth century and during the seventeenth by the advocates of a rigorous imitation of antique literature. Before that time, both during the Middle Ages and on through the Renaissance, a serious realism had existed. It had been possible in literature as well as in the visual arts to represent the most everyday phenomena of reality in a serious and significant context...And it had long been clear to me how this medieval conception of art had evolved, and when and how the first break with the classical theory had come about. It was the story of Christ, with its ruthless mixture of everyday reality and the highest and most sublime tragedy... (554)

Once he's sharpened up his interpretative focus, however, Auerbach begins his study not with Plato but with Homer's Odyssey, contrasting it not with Dante or the Gospels but with Genesis. His opening chapter--surely one of the most brilliant essays on literature ever written, justifying by itself all the years of dogged teaching and grading of writing by all the teachers and magisters ludi down through the ages, sufficient to warm the cockles of their heart ad infinitum and make up for every piece of evasion, procrastination, and brazen bullshit perpetrated by their pupils come essay-writing time--poses the question of the serious realistic representation of ordinary life with reference to two great moments: Euryclea's discovery of Odysseus by his scar, and Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. Analyzing the very different styles of the two works, and their effects and ramifications for the reader's view of the world, Auerbach proceeds to trace the development of the influence of each of these dominant threads, the Classical and the Judeo-Christian, through an array of famous authors and texts, as well as in more obscure ones. Along with their consummation in Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, we read of the developments of these themes in Roman satire and history, in the church fathers, in medieval romances and mystery plays; the ribald Rabelais appears alongside the didactic Antoine de la Sale; the droll Voltaire is juxtaposed with the frank Saint-Simon; romantics, historists, and realists brandish their words, and finally we come full circle with a comparison of the stream of consciousness and kaleidoscopic perspectives of Proust, Woolf, Joyce, which recall the narrative clarity of the Odyssey leaping over breaks in time, or the voice of eternity speaking through the everyday in the Bible. Proust's petite madeleine in Swann's Way and Woolf's enigmatic Mrs Ramsay, measuring out a stocking against her son's leg in To the Lighthouse, become the counterparts to Odysseus' wounding by the boar and Abraham's proving his faith on Mount Moriah.

Auerbach leaves American authors out of consideration, suggesting that he considers the West to be bounded by the Old World, and whatever cross-fertilization has taken place in the New, as well as across the rest of the globe, to be outside the limits of his study. He highlights the works of the Spanish Golden Age and the Russian giants Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as ones he would have liked to touch upon, along with early German realism, the lights of antiquity, the scraps of the early Middle Ages. In the closing envoy, he bids his book, as complete as he could make it, farewell:

May it contribute to bringing together again those whose love for our western history has serenely persevered.

It is a fitting echo to the epigraph from Marvell:

Had we but world enough and time...

The tantalizing suggestion of these pages, first to last, is that figures of immortal significance still walk among us, but that we have all but unlearned the words with which to understand them. First and last, the themes of fleeting time for love and of fragmentation of even the deepest love, is opposed by patient study of the fruits of that love. Ultimately, then, I take the tone to be one of hope and generosity. In itself, Mimesis exemplifies the serious treatment of representations, which may well be the first step out of the cave and into the light, the yearning for which shines through even the clumsiest of them.

Worst Teacher of the Year: Notes for an Acceptance Speech

Hooray once more for Spokane producing this year's Teacher of the Year, but say: Is there an award for worst teacher of the year, worst schedule, worst school? If there wasn't before, I might claim the inaugural recognition. Somewhere, a student goes from class to class with teacher after teacher nearly as bad as me (and maybe I'm one of them). And whatever the worst school is, I would guess it's a middle school (and maybe it's the one where I find myself).

How did things come to this pass? In a word: cupidity.

As the remarkably still-relevant local press has been reporting, the state of Washington recently coughed up millions of dollars for funding public education, which the state's teacher's union promptly pounced upon for teacher pay raises. All very well so far.

Then a couple of weeks ago the conscientious if somewhat haughty substitute teacher you see before you received a welcome email: the first opportunity of the year to work at the same placement for potentially weeks on end, for a teacher out with a broken bone.

Now, the calculation which entered into my mind was a far simpler one than that animating the teachers' union--if I work the same job 20 consecutive days, my pay roughly doubles. Middle school is not my favorite, and I knew this would be a particularly difficult school, but the decision was simple. Mercenary gain outweighed any other considerations.

For a week or so all went well enough. It was still early in the school year, and the students were not sure yet who I was. Despite being responsible for only three periods a day, I was there over half time and thus being paid a full day rate, until the 20-day policy should become retroactive and my cup start to runneth over. Then one morning I arrived to hear some troubling news: the time-sheets would be adjusted to show just .5 days, with the other .1 entered somewhere else as "supplemental pay." Thus, even once I got to the magical twentieth day, my hourly boost would only result in a slightly higher amount of money per day than if I had been working random jobs here and there, which would have been much less stressful.

The administrator in charge, the sub dispatcher, explained that this shift in policy had come about due to the teachers' raise. Suddenly, because as a long-term sub I would be paid according to experience and educational attainment an hourly salary, like any non-substitute teacher, my take-home pay would sharply decrease! I heard from the custodians that they--the district admin--were going to let go of veteran staff and not rehire, so as to prevent shortfalls in the future budget. But the immediate consequence of the squeeze on me was a wave of cynicism. The scales dropped from my eyes. Here is what I beheld:

The disastrous scene at the high school already mentioned, at which I was present only because I was now available to take half-day morning jobs so as to fill up my newly-jiggered time-sheet.

Then on my bike ride up to the middle school, I wondered how much of that money would go towards the union's continued lawsuits against charter schools in WA. How much to early-release days for collaboration time every other week. To walking the fine line between breaking students of their disrespect and bending to their sweetness--all the time spent on refocusing and behavior contracts and social faux pas rather than actual instruction or practice, a vanishingly small part of any class period. How this balance is reversed whenever students are allowed to play sports or games. How long it will be before flipping the school day means not just swapping in-class time from instruction, which can be delivered just as well via video, to practice and coaching, but until academics become the extracurricular and athletics the ostensible focus. Until public schools, like universities, openly devote their resources toward producing winning teams and top players, rather than to teaching. Following the market forces to their natural endpoint: to LeBron James funding schools, just as to Gates funding Khan Academy...

The raucous class in the Spanish room the period before I started drove me out from my borrowed desk to an empty chair down the hall of the third floor mezzanine. I sat there typing some of this on my phone as kids downstairs played with the elevator. Its door opened, no one going in or coming out, and closed again.

The mezzanine--love that word--wraps around the cavernous library, the one room in the school which is consistently quiet, mainly because it is generally empty. It takes up a huge amount of space and seems to pay two librarians full-time to preside over this vast emptiness. I figured out how to get my school laptop connected to the printer there, only to be passive-aggressively scolded by one of them for printing out copies of black-and-white images, causing the expensive toner to run low.

Those copies, then, mostly turn into cuttings and crumplings to be thrown gleefully around the room while the images are supposed to be getting pasted into the students' interactive notebooks, often as complex flipbooks and foldables designed to engage those kinesthetic and spatial learners who, as I've said, will be mostly throwing things at each other instead. It becomes a daily purgatory for the few students who do listen and take down the minimal notes of actual Spanish into their notebooks, and for me. Deeply humbling, to daily ask for attention to teach the words with which to understand the world anew, and be ignored, I tell you what.

Taking their four or five phrases and questions, all we had managed to copy down together, the class was supposed to put together a comic strip of a conversation in Spanish. Here I should have showed them, I realized while listening to Art Spiegelman deliver his talk at Gonzaga that night, a sample of a finished comic. Having deprived them of Peanuts, I'm just as hopeless as the English teacher who deprived her class of the Adoration of the Magi.

One great thing the author of Maus said: wasting time like he had to do before the internet, he used to look up words. He showed a definition of comics from an old illustrated dictionary. It mentioned story, so he had looked that up next. Apparently, the two meanings of story--the narrative and the architectural--are deeply related. The story in a building comes from the same word, historia, as the stories we tell, and in that case it refers to the comics in stone and stained glass which used to wreath the houses of worship...

The opulence of the Gonzaga campus, blocks away from the chaos of the middle school. Its hum and buzz of elegant industry, beside our cacophony and squalor. There are flyers posted around the middle school about Gonzaga students coming to play basketball certain days after school. I hope that makes some kid's day.

Then there was the time the door to the classroom opened and admitted a student who had never before come to class, though he was on the roster. I fell over myself to give him our cutable handout of the day.

Somewhere between the private college and the public school, between homeschooling and truancy, between bending and breaking, there has to be a better way.

Overheard

"In the old days, people would be saving their pennies; these days--I was at the football game last week, and at the concessions stand you'd see people pay for something and then just throwing away change. And it's the same all around the halls, there's coins just lying there. People don’t think it’s worth their time to keep their change. It’s like, they don’t know what money is."

"What is money?"

"Money is money."

"I’m gonna be honest, I don’t know what Christmas is."

The same student had said this earlier, but was ignored in the free-for-all then. This time, when he repeated the evocative confession word for word, a few protested incredulously, but the teacher cut in again overtop of them, mistaking speaker for subject, summary for style, in a lesson on opening paragraphs of O. Henry’s 'Gift of the Magi' and Poe’s 'Cask of Amontillado.' In theory the lesson, read straight from the book, would have been covering style and symbol, incorporating earlier lessons on diction, syntax, imagery, and point of view. In practice it was a catastrophe, as you have it here.

When I arrived before the bell, the teacher betrayed apathy toward my presence and disgust with the class, mustering the dregs of resentment against the para I was subbing for.

"I'm here for so-and-so," I said, "--or rather, she's in the BI room while covering for the teacher who's out today while I cover for her. So just let me know how I can help."

"Oh, she doesn't do anything, just sits there on her phone." It's what she had been doing when I talked to her in the BI room; I got the sense she was the softball coach, and might be doing something related to that important job.

I made a non-committal sound of commiseration, looking around the classroom, and repeated my intention to do something to help the teacher if she would only say what that might be.

"I don't even know which kids she's assigned to work with, since no one has bothered to tell me." An appealing glance to another para who had come in; they conferred briefly. "She mostly hangs out on that side of the room. If you see kids off-task or whatever...just stand over by them if you see they’re being a jerk."

Between the dull workbook and this husk of a teacher, the lesson was seemingly designed not only to be incomprehensible, but to drive anyone away from ever stepping into an English class or picking up a book again. The entry task invited students to write about a symbol in their culture and its importance. No guidance was given, aside from the example of the american flag.

The lesson proper began with a description of the two textbooks/workbooks and their provenance. Evidently the slim one they had been using was a pilot curriculum specially provided for this fortunate school, whereas they would now be using the thick normal one from here on out. I could weep to imagine how much all these books and the hours spent by pseudo-experts in compiling and marketing them must have cost. The students' eyes glazed over.

Then suddenly the teacher was saying to copy the definitions of literary terms from the pages' sidebars into some section of their notebooks--another lengthy sidebar, which the teacher totally ignored, dealt with using semicolons--but giving no time or explicit direction to do so, she moved straight into the instructions for reading. These bid the students circle imagery which stood out to them and underline sentence fragments. Providing an inadequate explanation of both terms, though the class was plainly confused, the teacher went about reading aloud the first passage without any context, reading or rather mumbling expressively but with no feel for the rhythm of the prose, giving no vocabulary helps for words or phrases actually appearing in the passage, such as ‘imputation of parsimony,’ but pretending the definitions of those literary terms were copied down and thus understood--or proceeding with indifference to the students’ understanding.

It would have been the simplest thing in the world to use the projector to show a painting of the Adoration of the Magi, or to show a Carnival scene, to at least begin to take seriously the lacunae in the students' comprehension preventing them from encountering these stories, and to enrich their pathetic day of school.

The closest she came to addressing any of this was her anecdote about the football game, and implying that they all wanted the newest iphone for Christmas, despite protestations to the contrary: I don't know what Christmas is (completely earnest); or, (only half-mocking) No, I want Jesus’ love.

The heathen tried again, attempting to speak more in the teacher's vein: "Look, think of it like this: how much do you pay for gas?"

He was ignored again. The next step in the lesson, having plowed through the reading, was for students to write a few sentences imitating one of the opening paragraphs, taking into consideration all that stuff they had just learned about style.

No one knew what to write about. The other para took dictation from one perversely cheerful boy:

"My dog was old and fat! She fell down the stairs..."

With the removal of X, who had already gone on a break once, walking the halls with his minder, and kept kicking his desk legs, trying to give random fist bumps, the teacher seemingly gave up following the book. She handed out blank sheets of lined paper to everyone, and the lesson abruptly shifted to a two paragraph essay on classroom behavior--meaning 10 sentences.

And the student who had walked in late and couldn’t find his Springboard text/workbook, and so proceeded to break and then to throw the pieces of a broken mechanical pencil, slinging insults across the room at his friends, was the first one finished, having found the book in his backpack all along. The teacher plainly disliked him, did not deign to praise his work, and he grew frustrated. Sentences and fragments, scolding, shushing, sullen silence, heads down--is that how to teach writing, much less any enjoyment in writing?

Ms Y speaks: "We live in a world of political correctness, right or wrong--rethink how you talk about your buddy, no joking around, because if someone takes offense, even if that's not what you think you meant--look, this school has got a Zero Tolerance Policy--anything perceived as bullying, harassment, derogatory statements, mandatory reporting, so just about everybody would be suspended for something you've said in here. You can’t hit delete, just don’t hit send--you never know what devices are capturing all this stuff--saying or doing something inappropriate on the job will get you fired. Learn now, because you're in high school now, you're not going back to 5th or 6th grade...Nobody knows what they do in middle school. Not much. You have not made one inch of progress, if you were not nice then, you're probably not nice now. Nice and respectful will get you anywhere. There was this kid from the South I taught once, he was the most obnoxious but everything was "Yes, Ma'am." I said you don't have to call me ma'am. "Ma'am," he said, "I'm from the South, and we call everyone "sir" or 'ma'am." He was obnoxious, but his politeness smoothed all that over. Other places might fit your personality better--we don’t want you to leave..."

"What if the customer is rude?"

"The customer is always right. If you're a waiter and there’s no tip, you know you sucked..."

All this was picked up by students and satirized immediately, demonstrating a fair grasp of spoken style, at least. The angry boy shifted some desks that were askew and said, "Yes, ma'am," when the teacher told him to get back in his seat until the bell.

--To be continued with some notes on the rest of that day, up at the middle school that afternoon and then at Gonzaga for the Art Spiegelman talk that evening. As an alternative, here's our discussion of what a better lesson would look like, taking "The Raven" as an example.