What do you know?

I've been pondering this question lately. Knowledge, unlike physical stuff, accumulates without taking up any space--and is, therefore, easy to forget about. I would like to believe, that is, that it is just forgotten about and not actually lost. But I know that is a dream.

As I approach my semi-significant birthday (or that year in which I have to accept, once and for all, that I am an adult :(), I can't help but think back to how I have spent my 20s. What have I been doing? By and large, the answer is easy: I have been sitting in class. So I thought it would be fun if, over the next week or so, I reminisced a bit about my educational history. With ten years of class sitting behind me, I should know a lot of stuff, right? I wish. Really, knowledge accumulation is on my mind lately because I am feeling that tinge of conscience that says: You should be pretty good at this by now... so what's the problem?

In 1997 (I know this is a bit more than 10 years ago, but this is where it starts) I enrolled at Pima Community College in Tucson. That first semester in school, I don't recall exactly what my plan was--or if I even had one. I just knew that I needed to take some general courses and so I enrolled in some general courses. I took Writing 101, Western Civ 101, and Sociology 101. My writing instructor was a very quiet woman--and though I did well in the class, I wasn't particularly inspired--certainly I didn't think: "I think this is what I would like to do as a part of my own career." Western Civ was taken as a part of a history or liberal arts requirement. The class was simple. All I remember of the instructor was that he was he looked like Ed Rooney from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and said the word "modernity" a lot. I enrolled in sociology because my dad's BA and MS (MA?) were in Sociology and I kind of considered myself a chip off that block, so maybe I would be into it. My instructor was a part-time teacher, full-time biker, often wore leather to class (oh--and don't forget the Harley doo-rag) and had a long bushy beard. I remember that when he spoke, I thought that the stuff he said was smart. His biker-ness gave him a certain down to earth approach to teaching that I liked.

But I remember nothing knowledge-wise from that first semester. I would wager that I forgot it all the moment that the final test was done. Granted, my mind was on other things. Second semester wasn't much different. Writing 102 also failed to make much of an imprint on me, I took Western Civ 102 from the same instructor for the easy A and also took an intro to guitar class so that I could get some practical knowledge to go along with the self-taught stuff. Again, nothing really stuck. I read Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" for the first of what would be dozens of times and wrote a final paper comparing my favorite Bradbury novels, Something Wicked this Way Comes and Dandelion Wine.

This first year is significant for a number of reasons, though. First--it represents one of the sad truths about post-secondary education: most of it doesn't sink in, is taken just to pass, and is quickly discarded. At least it was for me, but I have a hunch that I am not alone. Granted, I was at a community college. My instructors were likely underpaid adjunct faculty. None of them were really trained to inspire or guide students in one particular direction or another. Student apathy mixed with good ol' 18-year-old ignorance and garnished, perhaps, with consumer culture ideologies makes education another thing to be purchased, used, and then discarded. Knowledge gathering is barely on the radar and therefore is rarely, at first (if ever), a priority. It is ironic that I am now on the other side of the desk, so to speak. I teach students with similar ideologies. Most are in my 103 an 104 classes just to pass-- to check it off--and why shouldn't they? Why should I expect them to be any different than I was? Because this is a major university and that was just a community college? I don't like that argument. But still, in a culture where education is consumed instead of accumulated and guarded, introduction classes are the most disposable of all, are they not? And while I now realize the importance of the knowledge to be gained in the introductory course--indeed, I am a practitioner of it, my students likely don't/won't/can't.

So part of me wants to blame this consumerism ideology on my difficulty with accumulating or "laying up in store" the knowledge that I desire and now need to be successful in my field. I know it is more complicated than that... but its got me wondering about how I might subvert the tendency as I approach my own students and teaching. Can they be taught to care more about what they know? I don't know.

Stay tuned for the next chapter: "Two Associates Degrees, or How to Waste your Time Expensively with Little to Nothing to Show for It"

revisted

The previous post has been hanging ominously at that top of this blog for a few weeks now. I have thought about writing something else just so the announcement of stupidity is subordinated by something else. But I can't help but continue to muse, unhappily on the topic. I do this for a few reasons. The first of which has to do with that feeling again being present today as I sat at the back of my grammar class. How can I feel so lost after sitting in the same class for 3 months with people around me who really seem to have caught on? What makes me different from them? So I can feel sorry for myself about this for a while, and I do.

But then I have to think about it from another perspective: How many students will I teach in the future who will be feeling this same way? Are we a majority or a minority? I think that (due to the same people always speaking up in class) that we have to be at least a small majority. I guess what I am saying is that as long as I don't let the "feeling of stupid" keep me from pressing ahead (which it, sadly, has done at times), then I have to remember the feeling—those of us on the cusp of knowledge, indeed, those of us who feel the chasm, are those who are the most humble and therefore the most teachable.

From time to time

Intimidation in advanced Literature classes is inevitable. There are always plenty of smarty-pants' as well as genuinely smart people in the class that seem to know more about the subject than I do. Or at least understand the discourse enough to sound articulate when they talk about the literature. I can usually combat this tendency with either becoming a smarty-pants myself, or by actually learning the subject well enough to make meaningful contributions to the academic discussion going on. I am having trouble doing so in my Milton class. If you have read Milton you know that he is prolific, complicated and very dense. My professor, a Harvard man, is a smart guy--and I took the class more because of his reputation than because of a Miltonist impulse. So far, just feel dumb. I don’t feel like I am among friends, and there are probably 50 people in my class, so shining brightly enough to encourage my instructor's praise will be a challenge.
*
Dr. Blasingame wrote me a nice letter of recommendation yesterday for a scholarship. He also mentioned that he knows some publishers in Utah, one of which is very famous, whom he said he would be willing to submit a finished manuscript from me. He has been such a great support to my budding interests in really all things literary. It’s got me thinking again about my short story series about my San Francisco mission experience. He mentioned that in order to submit something to these dudes, I would have to have a finished product...something at least 300 pages. I maybe have 25. Probably not even that, but still, I have started thinking about that again. I would like to significantly expand this work. I think that I will take a creative non-fiction class this summer, in fact I would really like to try to make the project part of my summer activities, among GREing, and finalizing where will be applying to grad school.
Anyway, I really have only written about two areas of the mission (the Mission and Palo Alto), and neither with a whole lot of detail. There is a ton of stuff that I could explore:
Petaluma, Marin, Foster City, the Sunset—let alone the some of the substories: Crabtree, Mclane, Hall, The Great Fall, etc. So anyway, encouragement sure is nice. From time to time.