Fore

I've made a point of not linking to other sites or pasting other people's writing here because I wanted this to be all or nearly all my original work. But in the past few days, I've run across two quite powerful uses of historic perspective as argument, and I'm sticking them here in hopes that they fuel more reasoning of this kind. Critical thinking has far more to do with simply refusing to forget, refusing to give in to the manipulations of those who try to force forgetfulness, than it might seem.

Example #1:

"You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.
You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials
to dictate energy policy.
You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.
You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.
You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.
You didn't get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war.
You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.
You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.
You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.
You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.
You didn't get mad when we gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich.
You didn't get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.
You finally got mad when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with you, but helping other Americans...oh hell no."

Example #2:

Democrats: "We need health care reform"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Give us a majority and we'll do it better"
Democrats: "Done, you have majority of both houses"

12 years later, health care is irrefutably worse in every respect for every single person in the United States
Democrats: "We need health care reform"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Americans are tired of partisan politics!"
Democrats: "OK, let's compromise"
Republicans: "OK, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done. Time to end debate"
Republicans: "Too liberal, we need more debate, we will filibuster to prevent you from voting"
Democrats: "OK, we'll vote--sorry guys, debate is ended. It's time to vote on the bill"
Republicans: "Too liberal, we vote no"
Democrats: "OK, it passed anyway--sorry guys."

One month later

Republicans: "Wait--wait, OK, we have less of a minority now so we can filibuster forever."
Democrats: "Sorry, the bill already passed, we need it to pass the House now"
Republicans: "But we have enough to filibuster"
Democrats: "Sorry, the bill already passed, we need it to pass the House now"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You haven't listened to our ideas! You've shut us out of this whole process!"
Democrats: "Sorry, show us your proposal"
Republicans: "Smaller government"
Democrats: "That's not very specific"
Republicans: "OK, here's our detailed proposal--It's our common-sense ideas we spent 12 years not enacting"
Democrats: "OK, we'll add a bunch more of your ideas"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You included all these back-room deals"
Democrats: "OK, we'll get rid of the back-room deals"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You're using obscure procedural tricks to eliminate the back-room deals!"
Democrats: "No, we're using reconciliation, which both parties have used dozens of times for much larger bills"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You're pressuring Congressmen to vote for your bill! Scandal!"
Democrats: "It's called 'whipping', it's been done since 1789"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Can't you see the American people don't want this?"
Democrats: "This bill is mildly unpopular (40-50%), doing nothing (your proposal) is extraordinarily unpopular (4-6%)"
Republicans: "We need to start over! We need to start over!"
Democrats: "We should really consider voting--"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Start over! Clean slate! Common-sense! America!"

Use your brain. And never forget that one of the chief functions of your brain is to house your memory!

FYS

Last summer, I was appointed lead instructor of First Year Seminar. FYS is a class for incoming first-year students; any of you from SFA would recognize it as SFA 101. We made a few changes last fall, and we saw bits of progress in how well the class does what it's supposed to, but we're making more radical changes for the fall 2010 term. I'm posting them here in hopes of getting comments and suggestions from anyone who reads these notes. In no particular order:

• We've already changed it from a once-a-week class that runs all fifteen weeks to a twice-a-week class, Tuesday-Thursday, that runs only eight weeks. The plan is that we'll cover college survival on one of those days, say Tuesday, and then on Thursday the class will mutually tackle a book, movie, or other text. Tentatively, I plan to have my class watch Gattaca and then carry out a series of in-depth discussions on it. One of my colleagues plans to spend the eight weeks talking about comic strips and editorial cartoons, and having students bring different ones for discussion each Thursday.
• One complaint we've had hammered into us is that we've been guilty of talking down to the incoming first-years and conveying the impression that we don't think they're ready to be adults. So, instead of devoting entire class meetings to things like study skills, doing laundry, getting enough sleep, etc., what I tentatively want to do is track down concrete ideas like spaced repetition and resources like Anki, give a five minute PSA for such things in class, and then leave the burden on the students to do something about them.
• The Tuesday class needs to become a lot less about generic college survival, and a lot more about knowledge specific to Northwest Christian University. We've talked about making a list of four or five topics on which new students need information, and then letting the students in the class add another two or three, subject to our approval. We would then make those topics available for sign-up, and students would do a group project consisting of interviewing members of the campus community, video-recording their answers, and editing the highlights into a short primer on the subject. Examples: campus safety, campus traditions, etc. For each topic, we would get to name one person as an "expert" whose advice had to be included (For campus safety, Jocelyn Hubbs? For campus traditions, Carla Aydelott?) but beyond that, students would get to do it themselves.
• One topic that we might handle with that model, or that we might turn into a class topic, is how to find one's way around Eugene, which is an extremely confusing town to the newly arrived. We tend to have a fair number of Eugene natives in any particular section, but we could turn that to an advantage by enlisting them to come ready to help explain the town's layout, and to talk about at least one out-of-the-way place in Eugene that it's worthwhile to know how to find.
• Similarly, we've talked about having the advisor for each academic major talk on camera for no more than a minute and a half about that academic field, and then have them choose one of their outstanding majors to talk for another minute and a half about what it's like to take those classes, study that material, etc. That would make up most of our comprehensive coverage of the majors on campus. We'd still do the majors fair, but for that we'd run an informal contest among the faculty for the most creative way of getting and keeping students' attention.
• We plan to move class out of the classroom as often as possible. Last fall, my section took one class meeting and went for a walk around the neighborhood, including our campus and the neighboring University of Oregon campus, and they said they got a lot out of it and enjoyed it immensely.
• One change we implemented last fall, which I'm very happy about, is that each section is taught by a three-person team: a faculty member, a staff member, and an outstanding undergraduate student. One idea I have for this fall is to set aside one day when the faculty and staff instructor won't come, and label it "What students know that faculty and staff are better off not knowing." The student instructor could decide what to cover, what to explain, and also could take any questions from the first-years that they're not comfortable asking if a faculty or staff member is in the room.
• One assignment we've discussed is to send each first-year out to visit something within walking distance of campus, and then write (or record) a review highlighting the details that might be easily overlooked, both good and bad. This could include restaurants, shops, etc. but could also include entirely free attractions like Alton Baker Park or the first Friday at Jordan Schnitzer Museum.

Right now, the word we get from the students who take the class isn't positive. They complain about having to take it and tell one another it's a waste of time. Now, a little of this negative feeling, I admit, I disregard: I think of it as something similar to complaining about cafeteria food, or how strict one's parents are, both of which people routinely exaggerate because doing otherwise is uncool. But I do think we could do better than we're doing, and I am anxious to get any feedback anyone's willing to offer. If you have ideas for other improvements, or topics that ought to be addressed, please do comment and say so.

Last, if you want to continue to be part of this discussion after I yank the plug on my Facebook for the final month of school, you can find this post on my blog, along with most of the rest of my Facebook notes. I only write on the blog sporadically, but it does stay up and updated even when I'm not on Facebook. And I'll probably solicit feedback again just as soon as I'm back on in May, so as ideas occur to you, do please nail them down so you can set me up in a few weeks.

Foreigners

As with most matters that aren't blazingly obvious, there are good arguments for and against the Health Care bill that is now law. I've lived more than three quarters of my life in Texas, so I have a long list of friends who are very politically conservative, and I've known in my life intelligent conservatives who could marshal evidence and reasoning in a most impressive fashion to sell their side of a controversy.

I will note, in revving up to make my point, that one of my favorite advisees has a fascination with the national debt, and has accurately pegged its root cause as the runaway growth of non-discretionary spending, much of which comes in the form of entitlements. In that sense, the fact that the Health Care bill widens access to Medicaid is a fairly compelling argument against it, and one I take seriously. It's not a simple "Oh mercy, it spends a lot of money" argument, because none of the people who make that argument show any interest at all in restraining spending on their own priorities. It's an argument that an identifiable root cause of a major systemic threat is made more robust by this bill. It's a good argument, and I wish I'd heard more about it in the run-up to the bill's passage.

I didn't. Instead, I heard a lot of garbage.

Example #1 of garbage: the bill is unconstitutional. This is, to put it charitably, asinine. Congress has the power to levy taxes and charge the IRS with collecting them, and that's exactly how the mandate in this bill will work. The Republican attorneys general who are challenging the bill are pouring their states' taxpayer dollars down a rathole. I'm sure they'll make a lot of voters happy by doing so, since it'll create the illusion that their side is at least attempting to strike a blow against tyranny, but those resources will go absolutely nowhere: they won't educate or make safer a single human being, and they will not change the law.

Example #2 of garbage: the bill will result in the diversion of people's money to fund abortions over their objections. No it won't. Every possible safeguard has been written in to wall off money from abortion unless people knowingly spend their funds for such coverage. The Catholic Health Association and more than fifty thousand nuns are satisfied with those protections. The drumbeat of complaints about abortion funding reminds me of a story one of my students told a few weeks back about an acquaintance who had attempted suicide dozens of times, because she thought it was the only way she could get her parents' attention. Ending abortion is no longer a serious agenda item for the Republican Party; when's the last time you heard any new developments on the Human Life Amendment first proposed during the Reagan Administration? Instead, it's a fire alarm they pull whenever they want to bring things to a halt.

But the most rank example of argumentative garbage is this one: "In passing the bill, Obama, Pelosi and Reid ignored the will of the American people."

No they didn't.

I'm in favor of it. I'm an American.

I'll go further: the opponents of it are not as American as I am. I am a real American, and those who spearheaded opposition to it are anti-American.

To belong in this country, to be fully invested in what this country is about, you have to be willing to accept as legitimate the outcome of elections and votes even when you don't agree with them. If you only believe in democracy as long as your side wins, then you don't believe in it at all. And when you start responding to setbacks by encouraging threats and violence, then you're no different from the fifth rate tyrants in little kleptocracies scattered around the world and through the corridors of history.

One of the irreducible difficulties with democratic rule is the presence of a residue of people who are not interested in listening to reason, who are driven by fear and hatred and have absolutely zero-point-zero capacity to be persuaded by evidence or explanation. I make them sound pretty scary, but as Christ said of the poor, they'll always be with us. In fact, I think it's very important to accept them and take care of them, and to be keenly aware that they're still our neighbors and brothers and sisters. They're ours. Just because they're entirely demented doesn't make them unlovable, even though showing love to them certainly is not an uncomplicated pursuit.

But for God's sake, you surely don't want to put them in charge!

More and more, I see hatred and fear and irrationality being cultivated and choreographed for political gain, and that's turning a latent destructive force inside the system into a vein of power to try to run the system. It can't possibly work, and it will scorch the earth. But what chills me is the apparent satisfaction of those engineering the efforts with exactly that outcome: if they can't get the result they want, then let the earth be scorched. Either they will operate the levers of power, or they'll play Samson in the temple.

There are a few creeping signs that sane, wise, intelligent conservatives are waking up to how far their loudest voices have slipped in that direction, and efforts may be underway to rehabilitate American conservatism, to wean it off rage and enmity and restore it to engagement. It's certainly something I pray will happen. I would dearly love, as I've written in this blog a dozen times, to lose an argument with a conservative because they were just too good and made too much sense. It's happened before. But what I can't have any more of is making my argument to a brick wall, to the angry, implacable face of someone who has rejected me as an enemy because I disagree.

People who do that are not Americans. America is not about that. And I will not let them lay claim to it. It's not theirs; it's ours. And we won't let go of it. The sacrifices of our brave ancestors that they frequently lay claim to are not theirs to invoke: Americans have not died on battlefields, or been shot down in city streets, to protect the rights of the enraged to shut down deliberation and impose their will. They died to protect an experiment in bringing opposed political factions together in dialogue to decide together. That's worth defending at a price so high that it might astonish the ones who are spoiling for a fight.

They'd best beware.

Fun

Today, for whatever reason, I got to thinking up jump-rope rhymes.

Brian Kaelin
Parasailin’
Stole a smooch from Sarah Palin
Secret Service
Got all nervous
Started to holler “Saints preserve us!”

Kirsten Madsen
Yells “Egads!” ’n
Welcomes all the high school grads in
Fish week hoe down
Never slow down
Challenge her to a samba showdown

Steven Goetz’ll
Beat Steve Poetzl
In a race to eat a pretzel
Shove and push
Land on your tush
Pass out just like President Bush

Beacon Soccer
Off my rocker
I love you just like a stalker
Chew and chomp
Cheer and stomp
Name my kid Marcel Duchamp

In our chapel
There’s no lap pool
We baptize with Diet Snapple
Justifies
Old self dies
Just too bad it draws the flies

Doyle Srader
Ex-debater
Back when our mascot was “Crusader”
Spoke the truth
Chipped a tooth
Brought back the ghost of John Wilkes Booth

I must alert you
Here comes Virtue
Show some respect or they might hurt you
Sing real purty
Fight real dirty
Then eat a cupcake for dessert-y

Michael Bollen-
Baugh went strollin'
Met the PoPos out patrollin'
Fueled their ire
Opened fire
Now he sings in Heaven's choir

We've got a poetry contest coming up. I'm giving serious thought to entering these. What do you think of "Jumprope Variations" for a title?

Fobbing

So last fall, I had a student show up in class and attempt to hand me work that was a week past due. She identified what it was loudly enough for the class to hear, and I said "That was due a week ago," which they all knew, since they'd all turned it in. At the end of the term, three students put on my course evaluation the complaint that I had publicly embarrassed someone in front of the class. My mind flashed back to that day, and I thought I didn't embarrass her; she embarrassed herself!

Now, I know the discreet way of handling such encounters: just tell the student "Hold on to that for now and let's talk after class." Usually I do that automatically. But this occasion was so very absurd that I had a hard time feeling much regret at not being my usual, careful self. It was the student's own words and volume that drew everyone's attention to her attempt to turn work in a week late. They all knew my policy was not to accept late work. What privacy did she have left after she got through attempting, publicly, to do something a roomful of people knew wasn't going to succeed? If she'd jumped out the window and tried to fly, would I have "embarrassed her publicly" if I'd said "Oh dear, she seems to have hit the ground?"

Paul Watzlawick, a Stanford professor of psychiatry, wrote a book in 1967, Pragmatics of Human Communication, in which he talked about how the parties to a communicative encounter punctuate the exchange differently. Each one perceives a different moment, act or utterance as the starting point, and then views what follows as set in motion by that precipitating event. When I teach it, I always recite this quip by Ogden Nash, paraphrased slightly: "He drinks because she nags, he thinks. She thinks she nags because he drinks. And neither will admit what's true, that he's a drunk and she's a shrew." Neither side sees themselves as the provocateur, but only as a helpless respondent.

I do know that I have to tread very cautiously when dealing with students, that I have to think carefully about every word, every facial expression, and the timing of all of it. I know that things which seem to me entirely innocent or forgettable can stir up all kinds of headache. But I also know that a particular type of student thrives in a very dysfunctional, rotten way in a climate of gentleness and discretion: the one who's learned to play the system. I've made it a practice to be blunt and abrupt in many situations just because I'm positive that a lot of students need exactly that: no leeway, no ambiguity, just a very sharp boundary.

Sometimes students bear an external locus of control, putting all the responsibility for their classroom experience on everyone except themselves, because they lack the help they need, or they're still overcoming past nightmares from teachers who have no business being in the profession. But some, I'm convinced, deliberately exercise that external locus, positively refusing to take ownership of how they feel, because that choice generates leverage against their professors, a way to take charge of the situation. As a strategy for changing the subject and moving the pressure off themselves, it can be very effective in the short term if the professor isn't ornery enough to put up some resistance to it.

So I do think this particular student did do more to embarrass herself than I did to cause her embarrassment. And I think at least two of her classmates offered misplaced sympathy, which made matters worse. It grieves me that she probably managed to insulate herself from the entire setback, to arrive at a decision that she did nothing wrong, that I just didn't do a good enough job of teaching her. That's tragic. Setbacks in classes can actually be good things if students take the feedback that what they're doing isn't getting the results they want, but when they satisfy themselves that the problem lies elsewhere, outside their control, that's when they set themselves up for repeated failure. If they can do it once, they pave the way to do it again and again, in all subsequent iterations of the lapse, and the older they grow in the pattern, the more stubbornly lodged it becomes, and the more sophisticated their rationalizations. I must admit, I'm not very optimistic about this one.

Watzlawick would say that all of the above is just my own punctuation of the encounter, but there comes a point where I push the squooshy academic "All knowledge is situated" stuff aside and say, she brought it on herself.

Fit

To begin with, I really love living in Eugene. Probably close to half my enjoyment of the past three years can be attributed to the climate, the culture, the politics, and the scenery. It's a wonderful place to live. Every time I leave town on a trip, it's not long at all before I wish I was back home. And yesterday afternoon, it hit me very suddenly what might explain that.

I'm adopted, in case you didn't know. My mother (not adopted mother; mother) told me that from the very beginning, when I was still too young to understand what it meant. There was never a painful sudden realization of anything, because she made sure that I was never unaware of it. Still, a few of the details didn't come out until I grew up enough that it occurred to me to ask the right questions. When I was in my early twenties, I finally asked for the first time, "Were my biological parents married?" She paused a long time before answering and said "They were both in graduate school, and they didn't think they could support a child and do that at the same time." And I said, "Come on, answer the question," and she finally admitted, "No, they weren't." For close to twenty years I've known that I'm illegitimate, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. It means that on the few occasions someone's called me a bastard, I've been able to answer "Yep!"

But yesterday, I put two and two together with two, two, and two, and came to a big realization. I was conceived by two graduate students who weren't married, during the Summer of Love. And not either edge of the Summer of Love, either: the smack dab center of it. If we define summer as June, July and August, which is quite reasonable, then my entry into the world bisected it precisely.

Summer of Love.

Unmarried biological parents.

Who were not only in college, but grad school.

Very, very likely I am the offspring of two hippies.

Now, the only hitch in my theory is that this all happened in Texas. Texas was not exactly a hippie-magnet. Dallas has its Bohemian neighborhoods, but they're a bit put on. It's hard to imagine a VW bus with a gun rack, and a banner reading "War ain't healthy for buckeroos and other living critters," but maybe. At any rate, if I've got that much concentrated hippie in my DNA, then is it any surprise that I've found such a snug spot in Eugene?

What's far more surprising is that I survived thirty years in Texas without getting myself lynched.