The Myth of Mastery

Student gains, as if we are building robots ourselves out of our own posterity, missing the most important elements inherent in humanness: chaos and complexity.  So much in education rests upon the pillars of The Enlightenment, to the extent that it's cliche to say.  With the hard science, along with our great industrialized heritage, students are measured, tracked for progress, and never understood.  Understanding them doesn't register as high on the list of importance as tracking.

Data collection has replaced the need, also the incentive, to get to know students face to face--their backgrounds, home life, and complex mental makeup.  Some of our students are terrifyingly misaligned and unprepared to face the challenges waiting.  Science grants us a Pyrrhic victory: teachers feel proud to have taught a student to bubble the correct response on a test, but does this demonstrate education--let alone mastery?  As technology replaces philosophy, the quest for truth, justice, and authentic love, we make a trade off.

Students who gain "knowledge" by semester's end, will have proudly stated he/she learned something.  But how quickly is the content forgotten?  The data make it seem as though students have learned, when really this cannot be proven by assessment.  It becomes a Russian doll complex--exactly, who is collecting data on the data?  Who assesses our assessments?  Who judges the judge?  These questions are not raised because science, in all its promised objective splendor, sees to it that no meddling is involved in the process of measurement.  The complexity of human interaction, the sheer misunderstandings of a growing, expanding, maturing mind, is given into the hands of first, science--and sooner than later, autobots.  In our solution-oriented status, we gladly give over the cognitive load of complex thinking to a system with its inherent flaws.  To a system that isn't measuring a child, but a shadow.      

One of the more humorous, and not readily discussed, aspects of data collection is when a student actually performs worse on a test than he/she did from a few weeks ago.  Do you mean the student actually got worse by sitting in my classroom, listening to my instruction that I worked year after year perfecting?  How could this be?  As teachers, we quickly search comfort in other students' scores.  "Ah, yes," we say with analytic glee, "here's a couple who I taught well."

Compressed Time

The idea of compressed time in the book present Present Shock is relevant in today's age, more than ever.  We live in a time in which more is expected to be accomplished in shorter periods.  The metaphor of the accordion hits the mark, illustrating this idea of a collapsing motion, an elasticity which has swung closed and perhaps will never fully swing back open.  However, moments of a time wide-open is ill-concieved in our cultural milieu, so much that it invites incredulity and often reproach.  In Americans' endorsement for a cradle-to-grave work ethic, we miss out on opportunities of self-examination and self-cultivation.  As Aristotle stated, "the unexamined life is a wasted one."  And hardly in our time is it known that the the more unlived life reflects back upon by one's old age, the more despair one feels.  In the swim, the torrent, the tsunami--in whatever horrendous metaphor one wishes to employ to characterizes, contextualize, and/ or ironize these feelings of doing little else than treading water, we must begin to find better ways of processing this wave.  It is incumbent on us to educate the youth, teaching them how to find solace in a rapidly changing environment without so much feeling like a survivor in the midst of something horrific.

Today, we lament the fact that students have the slightest notions of historical events like D-day, Pearl Harbor, the New Deal, The Great Depression, The Cold War, or even more recently, the dot.com bust or the housing bubble of 2008.  What we fail to recognize in today's world is the sheer explosive nature of the internet and what it has done to the requirements of a student in high school.  One could literally teach a class on history and begin with the Millenium, all in its anti-climactic splendor, and I guarantee you wouldn't finish a semester in history and do it much justice--such is the nature of a compressed time in which historical events are numerous, culturally-relevant, and key to understanding the where, when, why, and how of today's technologically, complex ecology.  I am not advocating to sweep the advancements of American civilization from the 17th-21st century under the rug; rather, I am highlighting the fact that in the rapid nature of change that has occurred, thanks to the internet age, has garnered massive compression in terms of time and space, the world within a snowflake metaphor.  And remember we are not just analyzing one single snowflake anymore; we're trying to shovel through the blizzard with a spoon.  Will the snowplow become synonomous with the rise of the machines?  

 

Thoughts

I have that childlike fervor again, trammeling through my mind again, a uniquely blended optimism for creativity that will, most likely in the next few minutes, slowly fade along with the morning.  I want to create something, but don't know what.  Lately, I found myself wanting to get into so many different subjects.

I want fall headfirst into futurist, techno, philosophical predictions of the internet age.
I saw a documentary on The Shining yesterday, and now I have this desire to study all of Kubrick's films, to study The Shining over and over again.
I want to dedicate myself to fitness, getting to a point of ultimate shape.
I want to find a drum set and start the band in the garage.  Why do I think Jayden will be perfect for this?  Cause he is math oriented.  Punk is easy to play.  We could do it. Just play some shitty punk music.  That's all.  That would make me happy.

When it's all written out, it doesn't seem that I have that much passion, but I think more than once, twice, three times a week that I am meant to do something artistic.

We were meant to create and share.  

 

Afternoon Slump

Around 1:00pm that I start to feel a certain lag in my day.  The afternoon is here.  The day is just about over, but it's not.

There is a final hurdle to cross, my 4th block.  Part of me thinks this is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy:  I am supposed to feel like this because...well, just because.

My grandfather used to take power naps like a narcoleptic.  When I was younger, my sisters and I would go up to my grandparents cabin and run wild.  My grandfather would slip into one of the bedrooms on the main floor, lay down above the covers on one of the most uncomfortable day beds, and pass out without a struggle, as if his body natural state was sleeping, and this transition needed no kind of coaxing for its return.  I'd watch him enter the bedroom, and then I'd peak into the room moments later to see a passed out grandpa, his chest rising and lowering beneath his faded flannel shirt.

Coffee is my weapon of choice, the antidote to an undertow of pessimism, intermingled with apathy.  I am beyond entering flow. That time has passed.

Unknown Elation

When did it start? This feeling of elation I am currently enjoying...this feeling I never want to go away.  How we cling to happiness more than ever when we experience it.  Isn't this what we understand, though, when we say "to have had an experience", that it must come to an end for it to qualify as one?

My experience of "good-feeling" I don't want to end, so my effort for today will be in trying to sustain this wave of happiness throughout the day.  I fear talking too much about it will somehow dilute or lessen its intensity.  Perhaps it is an effort to bolster it?  How much of our own happiness is the result of one's volition or simple fate without our agency involved?

I do not feel responsible for this feeling this morning.  I've done the same thing each morning for this whole year, so what changed?


But, what brought on my feelings, I do not know.  I first started feeling it after my second cup of coffee.  Did the the barista add an extra shot of espresso, accidentally?  I feel like my mind is on fire with focus and attention to detail.

I first felt this feeling of strong elation when I walked into Kroger this morning.  The signs for their markdown specials hanging from the building's ceiling were a vibrant red and yellow, almost radiating with purpose.  Intense, gorgeous.  Isn't this what most people are striving for in life?  An intense, deep, gorgeous relationship with the world in which one moves?   This is something I would like to feel on a normal basis.

But then again, for this experience to have such power, it must NOT happen all the time, nor for very long.  What are these short, bursts of beauty that break through on one's conscience.  Is this divine light, divine intervention, divine cross-talk between heaven and earth that I've chanced upon this morning?

I still feel fear in my interactions with others.  Fear hasn't altogether left me.  I JUST FEEL GOOD.

And it's this good feeling for which I have no rational explanation.

 

Standing Post

One of many duties I perform as a teacher is standing post at a designated area on our campus during one lunch period.  My job consists of one imperative: to make sure no student skips past me without a pass.  I've been doing this job since the beginning of January.  I have checked two passes. Both legitimate.  I have seen no potential skippers.  

Today irked me more than usual because it is only thirty degrees outside.  A dusting of snow has been falling throughout the day.  It is when I sit down on my watch bench for my lunch duty that I start to feel the creeping numbness work its way over my hands.  My nose is next.  My eyes water as I watch out for any adolescent who seems suspicious.  There are a total of five or six students outside to watch that are stupid enough to leave the hearth of the cafeteria.    

It is too cold.  Way too cold for me to be sitting out here.  But I manage by bringing a book and putting my hands in my coat pockets. I make it across two pages of reading before getting distracted.

And then the battle ensues.  The constant deliberations of the brain begin to ratchet up.  Do I leave my post because it is far too cold for someone in their right mind to stay longer?  Or, holding on to one's nobility, do I brace winter's frigid assault and rail against the logic of retreating to the warm confines of my classroom?

I listen to each defense lawyer in my brain with their assessments.  For the motion to leave, he is quick to point out the absurdity of the situation: no one can expect another to suffer to badly.  For the motion to stay, the lawyer boasts of lofty virtues like nobility, persistence, and commitment to one's duty.  All of these sound so grand on paper, in our times of prayer, but the morals of one sitting here in the miserable cold start to drift off.  

Who will even see me leave?  Who will even see if I stay and suffer?  Does my suffering warrant any good?  Will it enhance the school in any way?

And if I stay and suffer in the snowfall, isn't this just someone "doing what's right" anyways, leaving no real room for admiration?  

Our culture doesn't reward suffering as it once did.  One's suffering joins the ranks of almost everybody walking this earth.  Maybe this is because our culture socializes us to believe that suffering is meant for the shadows, seldom brought to light unless ushered out by only an intimate companion.  Suffering is one's own, and not for public display.

I ended my suffering by using the restroom for a longer time than usual.  After I was through, I walked back to my class just in time for my duty to end.  

I didn't skip altogether.  I wanted a slice of virtue to my name.  I'm ok with just a slice.  The whole pie makes one too haughty. 

  

        

Jasmine's Dream

A strong wind blows passed as we walk back to our classes from lunch.  A former female student, huddled in a mass of males, and keeping my pace yells out, "Mr. Standing, the virgin Mary came to me in my dreams last night and she told me that there will be snow tomorrow."  She means to say school will be cancelled.  I smile and say, "Oh yeah?"  I keep walking and she turns to the left to enter a building.  I am alone again, walking in a mixture of bundled teens.

I walk on and think about the possibility of what dreams mean, what the Virgin Mary has meant to so many people for so long, how wish fulfillment is a way to understand the complex concoctions of interwoven narratives the brain actively builds during lights out.   All my wondering keeps me awake and alert through the day.  One must consider the smartest people in the world are prone to an unimaginable absorption of ideas.  They fail to see how we could ever abandon an idea.  For them, there is no such thing as case closed--which is the complexity of what drives so many mad in the end.  Even out of irreducible trouble, we define it as "irreducible" and then go on to eat dinner with family, talking about our days and the weather.

A mind's ability to focus and attend to detail for prolonged periods of time is paramount to success.  Tenacity.  Glue.  Velcro.  Effort.  Mental attention is built through practice.  Our mind's only able to concentrate for as long as we let it.  We are the rulers of our mind's focus, though our cognitive function greatly diminishes through different episodes of sleeplessness or chemical imbalance.  

I want to carry Jasmine's Virgin Mary's story further than I have.  In my college days, I quickly wrote it off as foolish talk, automatically concluding the impossibility of a Virgin Mary, the unlikely reality that dreams are somehow instructions from the unconscious, or preconscious, brain to somehow benefit one's waking world experience.  In my rationality-trumps-irrationality mindset, I would have been humored by the idea that snow predictions concerned the Virgin Mary so much that she felt it necessary to enlighten Jasmine last night during REM sleep.  

But as I get older, my ideas of the world are in constant question, my natural beliefs always undermined by something willing to put up a fight to what I accept at common knowledge.  I don't listen to myself as much as I used to.  I want to believe Jasmine and her dream, despite my immediate desire to laugh it off for its absurdity.  I want to believe that her dream of the Virgin Mary has great potential for understanding Jasmine as a human being, for appreciating the simple fact that she feels ok disclosing something so intimate as a dream and her predictions and her hopes, to a former teacher who walks alongside her in the windy February afternoon.  From the inside to the outside, Jasmine encounters, acts with and against, the world in which she occupies by the simple gesture of revealing what her mind so craftfully conveyed using the same medium that's been with man for millennia.    

Science teaches the cold hard facts, but the lessons of what to and how to appreciate those immutable physics of our universe are seldom attained by discovers.  Appreciation is bias.  But it is our appreciation for things in and of this world that is part and parcel of what constitutes humanity.  

      

I am 31

Remind me to never work on a birthday again.

I feel awkward being here.  On my birthday.  I feel like people have to do things for me, say happy birthday, buy and sign a card, bring in cupcakes.  And I don't like it.

I don't know why I don't like it.  I feel like it just doesn't matter.  This is just another day.  There is work to be done, students to teach, life to enjoy.  I take every day the same way.  I try to enjoy it the best I can.  Just because it is my birthday, I don't enjoy it any more than just another day.

Accomplishment is the greatest source of pride that I know.  Let me write something, let me teach something worthy, let me get recognized for a good deed or a good lesson--but please, a recognition of a day of birth doesn't feel that right to me.  It makes me feel all silly.

And I am supposed to say thank you and talk about what my plans are.  But, if it is someone else's birthday, I fall into the same trap.  I am the one asking them everything, telling them that they need to enjoy their birthday.  Haha.  Why is it so weird for me then.  I even tried to psych myself out, and I tried to tell myself to act "political", to act, act, and act.  Maybe this is why the Standings fail at certain things: we are horrible actors.  We seek truth, and when we can detect a false note, we are quick to alert the crowds of it, most times at our folly.  We look like the particular one, the nit-picky ninny.

I have learned that every day is amazing, that life is the greatest gift.  That people make this life wonderful.  I have learned that meaning is the basis of everything, whether fabricated, or felt deep in one's bones.  Meaning is what people wake up in the morning for, go outside, and greet the day.  Depression is linked to a loss of meaning, to a loss of finding the significance in daily life.  This is why depressive people have so many problems: it is a fixation on the lack of meaning, which is causally linked to this unmitigating emotion of one's pointlessness.

But we must remember, in the famous words of Irvin Yalom, a man whose ideas influenced my thinking more than any other's, that "if nothing matters, then it should NOT matter that nothing matters"