April 26--Purple Stride and Prom

I spent Saturday morning at the Purple Stride Walk to raise funds to combat pancreatic cancer. I joined this because Curt Ehrenstrom, Golden Apple Recipient and long time teacher at Mt. Carmel High School was stricken with this awful disease. Curt has not been able to participate in the events of Golden Apple during the last year because of his struggle with the disease and the effects of the treatment.  He has had a very tough year.  He has been missed by the other members of the Golden Apple Class of 2013.

Curt receiving the award from Gloria Harper and Dominic Belmonte

I did not know what to do to be of support to Curt. I have prayed for him and his family and tried to drop a note when I could. I did not know Curt before the Golden Apple Award but I felt some kinship with him because of the Fellowship. Perhaps a little more because he and I were the two teachers from Catholic schools. Curt and I know several people in common, including the late Fenwick swimming coach Dave Perry who died too young of cancer a few years ago.

When I discovered that Curt's sister Jane was putting a team together to walk in the Purple Stride event, that was my answer of how I could try to be of some small help.  Jane did an incredible job recruiting over 80 walkers from her family and from the Mt. Carmel community.  Her efforts helped to propel the team to second place in fundraising for pancreatic cancer. This made us an "Elite Team" with our own tent and plenty of scarves and beads. I am very grateful that I was able to raise over $600 and become one of the highest contributors on the team.  My gratitude goes to a number of members of the Golden Apple family, including Board Members, staff, and Fellow, who generously donated to the cause. It also extends to a student I taught in the late 1970's who is always a reminder of why I love to teach.  All of these wonderful benefactors allowed me to be a significant part of the team effort.

Pancreatic cancer is a terrible disease, in part because it is so hard to detect until it is advanced. The survival rate is not good and the treatment is debilitating.  I spent some time talking to one of Curt's brothers and he filled me in on what a tough time it has been.  He told me that it is not just a question of having a good day occasionally. Sometimes, it is a matter of having a good hour or so and then Curt will feel bad and tired and need to retire.

Curt's sister had initially thought he might be able to join us after the walk but his health was not up to that.  That was too bad. I know he would have enjoyed seeing everyone. He was sending text messages to his family in the hour or so before the walk began. That is a good indication of how much he would have liked to be part of things.

I feel as if I should draw some moral from all of this and I don't know what might be besides the obvious ones.  Curt's brother John said yesterday, rather wistfully, "Poor Curty. He was right at the peak of everything and he got hit with this."  I saw an interview with Curt where he said some people wonder if he says, "Why me?"  He said that he responds, "Why not me?"  The question of theodicy is at the center of the course I am taking in "Love and Evil."  I think most people make the assumption, at least I do, that life should proceed without trouble and suffering. We are surprised when illness, death, and tragedy intrude. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that pain and disappointment are part of the natural course of things.  This is not a painful world but there is pain in it.  Life was not made for suffering but there is suffering in life.

What defines us is the way we live this mystery.  I suppose saying how we respond to the suffering is the most accurate expression although it seems not to express the complexity of what it means to endure hardship. In this definition, Curt (Coach E everyone calls him) is a man of meaning, purpose, and nobility.  He has been badly struck down and has reacted with humor, grace, and dignity.  I am probably reading some of my own biases on to this story but I think that this illness has shown the qualities that made Curt a great teacher, a true Golden Apple teacher.  Perhaps there is also some grace to be found in his years of teaching in a faith-based school. In any case, it has been an honor to know Curt and it was my privilege to walk in Purple Stride in his honor.

In the evening, I changed gears completely and went to the Fenwick Junior Prom. I have not seen my students since the last day of third quarter--the day before I began the sabbatical.  There is not a lot to say here except how much I enjoyed greeting them all again.  One after another ran up to tell me how much he / she missed me.  I told them truthfully that I missed them very much too. I am enjoying the sabbatical very much and my classes at Northwestern are a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but I was reminded how much life and joy I get from my students.  The prom was fine.  I always hate thinking of myself as an old fogey but the music was unintelligible to me and deafeningly loud. Late in the evening, the DJ switched to Neil Diamond singing "Sweet Caroline."  I think Neil Diamond is pretty cheesy but the song was welcome.  The students don't dance much, even compared to a few years ago. Hundreds of them stood in a big clump and watched a few guys perform. When they did all dance, they seemed to just jump up and down. Old fogey time: I found myself wishing for a garage-rock band playing "Louie, Louie" and couples dancing the watusi.  But--it is not my prom, it is theirs.  While they all came with dates, they seemed to lose their partners as soon as they came in.  Most of the evening, the crowd was divided into groups of boys and groups of girls.  A few brave (or just in love) souls stayed coupled.  All of the girls discarded their shoes as soon as they entered. Another teacher notice one girl who still had her shoes on but that girl gave in to either peer pressure or sore feet and put hers against the wall after a bit.

19th Century Club was the site of the Junior Prom. The snow was gone though.

The school holds a separate Junior and Senior Prom. Even though this younger version is to be less formal, most of the boys wear tuxes and the girls have very fancy dresses (with no shoes.) There is no dinner, just some appetizers.  I think the kids go out to dinner after the dance, which they fled at 10:00.  About ten faculty members supervised from the fringe of the dance floor. The President, a Dominican in full white habit, got pulled onto the dance floor and gamely tried a few moves.  He should learn not to stand that close to the action.

The only other event at Fenwick that I am planning on attending during the sabbatical is graduation.  I will not teach these Juniors again, except for the one or two who might land in my Film class next year.  They are a wonderful group and I miss their discussions and insights.

April 24--Not Speaking the Same Language

Two small and not very important anecdotes about the failure of meaning. Both occurred at the Norris Student Center at Northwestern on this Thursday morning.

There are six computers in the southeast corner of the ground floor of the student center.  These are available for general use by students. To use one of the work stations, you sign on with your university "NetID," a useful code that allows you to access almost anything in the technological world at Northwestern.

I was finishing up a study guide this morning, getting ready for my class in "Love and Evil."  The student center is pretty empty in the morning.  It will fill up around lunch time.  I don't think college students get up and come to the dining area at an early hour.

A young woman came over to the computers in an obvious hurry.  Her backpack suggested to me that she might be on her way to a class. She had earbuds attached to an I Pod.  She went to one computer, then the next, punching a few keys on each.  Every computer failed her.  She worked down the three units across from me and then attempted to start up the two on the same side of the table as I was seated.  I thought it odd that only my computer was working. She was clearly frustrated.

After trying all of the computers, she asked me for help.

"Can I interrupt you?"  She pulled the sound buds out of her ears. "Do you know how to log on to these computers?"

The computers were not broken. She was just unsure how to sign on.  I explained.
"Press CTRL-ALT-DEL at the same time."

"I tried that and it didn't work."

She demonstrated for me by awkwardly putting her fingers on the control key, the ALT key, and....BACKSPACE.

"Delete," I told her.  "Not Backspace."

"They do the same thing," she responded.

"Not in this case. You need to press Delete."

"They do almost the same thing. The only difference is that you use Backspace when you are beyond a letter and want to go back.  Delete is when you are on a letter."

I told her I knew that to be true but it didn't apply in this case.  The keystrokes for logging in are specifically CTRL-ALT-DEL.  It actually has no relation to the function of deleting something, which is where you would find the similarity to backspacing.

"That seems strange," she said.  "Where is Delete? I never use it."

I pointed out the key.  Then I said, "My Chromebook doesn't have a Delete key. You always have to Backspace."

"I don't have a Chromebook," she said.

Shortly after this, I thought I might like a bottle of milk. I went to the Dunkin Donuts that was recently opened in the Norris Center.  I hear about this fast food stop all the time from the student docents who lead groups of prospective students through the student center. These well-scrubbed young people have a memorized patter about the food at the university.

"This is the Norris Center. You will spend a lot of time here.  It seems like everyone comes to the Norris Center. In fact, the slogan is 'Meet me at the Norris Center' so you see it really is the center of life here at Northwestern.  We have every kind of food here.  Northwestern was rated third in the nation in the quality of our food. We have a Subway but, since this is Northwestern, we call it "Norway." There is a Starbucks but we call it "Norbucks." The Dunkin Donuts just opened.  I think we should call it "Nunkin Nonuts" but I don't think anyone else agrees."

Who rates the food in colleges?

I asked the young woman at the Dunkin Donuts counter if they had milk and she answered that they did.  She then asked me if I wanted whole milk or skim.  I said skim and reached for some cash.

"We don't sell milk by itself."

This seemed odd but every company has policies.  I thought I would like a bagel and said I would take a multi-grain with the milk.

"We don't sell milk with bagels."

Really?

"What do you sell the milk with?

"Only coffee. If you want milk by itself, you have to go to the store."

You have probably solved this riddle, and much more quickly than I did. I was about to order a coffee just to get my bottle of milk when it occurred to me that she was talking about adding milk to the coffee as a kind of creamer.  I turned down the coffee.

"Do you want the bagel?"

A line was forming behind me.

April 21--Faces from the Northwestern Front

I have changed the names of these students.  Everything else is true, or at least as accurate as it can be from my observations.

Cade is a theater major.  I suppose he has been a theater major since he was ten years old.  The drama club provided him refuge and community.  He is active in every classroom discussion as a matter of habit.  Philosophy is personal to Cade and every subject is part of a narrative that stretches from one course to another. "We discussed that in my English class last quarter." He was raised Catholic but considers himself more spiritual now.  His favorite writer is Sondheim.

Uta is a doctoral student in history but she simply describes herself as a "medievalist."  This title begins a lot of sentences.  "As a medievalist, I think..." and "A medievalist might say..." She told the professor on the first day that she thought she might be the only medievalist in the class and that turned out to be the truth. She wears baggy trousers and orthopedic shoes.

Sarah smiles constantly, even when she is fiercely disagreeing.  The smile is permanent and it gets bigger when she talks.  And her eyes roll up, always looking away during a comment or statement. But she does disagree.  I suggested that the bible was full of transgressive behavior: the abnegation of primogeniture, adultery and murder, and rape of potential in-laws. She took this as an attack on Judaism and she became very animated and argued that "all of the world likes sordid stories." She cited soap operas and such as examples.  She seems too young to know what soap operas are.

Matthew describes himself as a neo-Kantian.  He wears a yarmulke on Friday. He does not like Derrida (solipsistic) or Barthes (in need of psychological help) or Benjamin (too obvious.)  He does like a number of what I take to be extremely rational philosophers. I have never heard of any of them. These philosophers are living because Matthew can say where each teaches.

Theresa is a Jewish Studies major even though she was raised Catholic. Her father is Jewish but her family followed the faith of her mother. She started undergrad as a religious studies major but narrowed into Jewish Studies in her graduate work. She is currently teaching Buddhism.

Beverly is a senior journalism major. She is not interested in working at a newspaper nor does she care much for new media. She has her heart set on television, specifically on doing the weather. She told me that she wants to be on camera because she "likes to get dressed up and all that." She is pretty sure that her training at Northwestern will help her to break in. She knows that she will need to start in a smaller market and is applying to stations now.

Completely random picture of some students I do not know. I got this from Google so the blog would have an image.

Devon is a senior in journalism as well. He sends texts from his phone (I think they are texts but it could be Facebook or perhaps more likely Snapchat or such) for an hour and a half during class.  The professor has asked him not to text during class but Devon seems not to hear her.  Once during every class period, he offers a short comment on the discussion topic.

Philip is a doctoral student in Gender Studies. When he talks about Bourdieu, it is to question what the sociologist says about queer theory. He will discuss Merleau-Ponty in terms of queer theory. His hair is almost shaved on the sides and is very long on top. He has piercings in his nose, eyebrows, and ears. When I discussed how habitus is shown in the films of John Ford, he sought me out after class and said that I made total sense.

Mary Kate has red hair that is pulled back. She wears serious glasses. She is a doctoral student in history.  After we have discussed a philosopher, Mary Kate always asks what the ideas mean for her work.  She usually seems satisfied with the answer.

There is a young woman who sits near me in the Norris Center every Tuesday and Thursday morning. I know she is a theater major because of the books she reads.  I knew the author of one the books she was studying (I mean I actually know him) and mentioned that to her.  She seemed impressed.  Now, every Tuesday and Thursday morning, she says hello to me. Last week, she brought a drink she had purchased from Dunkin Donuts over to the seating area. She misjudged the location of the table and dropped the drink. I got up to help her and she told me that she is always a klutz.

There is a woman with green tights who rides the same Metra train as me and goes to the same Starbucks before she goes on to her destination, which I assume to be the campus. She walks a little faster than I do and arrives at the Starbucks ordering line first.

David is an undergraduate. He has missed two of six classes, apparently because of illness. He always notifies the professor that he will be missing and she tells us.

Tavel works in the bookstore and I do not think he is a student. Every time I make a purchase, he asks me if I am a faculty member (I assume there is a discount involved.) I tell him no, that I am a student. That is fine with Tavel and he makes small talk while he rings out the purchase.

Rene speaks heavily accented English. I think his first language is French and he looks as if he might be Algerian. I have a brother-in-law who is Algerian so I have developed a pretty good eye for the nationality. My brother-in-law is, in actuality, Berber but the distinction is not a great one.  It took me a while to recognize that when Rene spoke of meadow pond-ee, he was referring to Merleau-Ponty.

Annie asks thoughtful and provocative questions. Last week she asked whether Merleau-Ponty could conceive of a restrained body because her own sense of being gendered female involved a a set of constraints.  I am always interested in her questions but I don't think she ever gets answers.

April 19 Celebration of Excellence

This morning was the Golden Apple Celebration of Excellence recognizing the 32 finalists who are being considered as recipients of the Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Education.  It was a marvelous brunch held at the Marriott O'Hare with entertainment by the Joliet West Jazz Ensemble, directed by Golden Apple Fellow Kevin Carroll.  In this very amateurish photo, the finalists and their principals are lining up on the far side of the banquet hall to be introduced.  The photographers in the foreground are snapping shots of the teachers as they receive their plaques.

Dominic Belmonte, the CEO of the Golden Apple Foundation, gave the keynote address.  He talked about how, for many of the critics of education in America, the problem with our educational system is the teachers.  If we could only get better teachers / get rid of bad teachers / get teachers to work harder / get teachers to use newer methods / get teachers to use older methods, the problems of education would disappear.  This approach manages to ignore the effects of poverty, racism, under-funding, corporate profiteering, political meddling, and gross inequity.  It allows many Americans to say to themselves that we, as a society, do not have a problem.  If those teachers would only do their jobs, all would be well.

Dominic pointed out that it feels as if everyone is an expert on how to teach.  We would not give a doctor advice on how to doctor, or a mechanic a talking-to about how to repair a car, or--well you get the idea--but we all went to school and many of us are pretty certain that we know the best way to educate young people.  For many people, that "right way" is to return to some good old days that probably never really existed. I met someone not long ago who explained to me that, when he was in school, "teachers talked and students listened."  If we went back to that format, test scores would certainly increase.  I was thinking about asking him if he walked to school and back, ten miles and up hill both ways, but I held my sarcasm.

There are some myths that form many of these opinions about teachers and teaching.  It might be worth doing some reality checking on these ideas.

Myth #1: Teachers are just not as good today as the old-timers were.  Nonsense. The profession is full of teachers with vast knowledge of their subjects, highly-formed and practiced pedagogy, innovative and exciting methods, and a deep commitment to young people. Add to this technological capabilities unknown even ten years ago and you get some of the best teachers ever to work in classrooms. Ever.  If you are not sure, look up the 32 finalists for this year's Golden Apple.  I have seen these teachers and read about their classrooms.  They are incredible educators.

Myth #2: Anyone with intelligence and good subject material knowledge can teach.  Good teaching takes a special set of gifts and specialized training.  If you are not sure of this, check the classroom of a young teacher who is misplaced in the profession.  I can think of a young man who was known to be brilliant in his content area, both when he was in high school and in college. After he graduated from college, he was uncertain what do do and so he picked up a teaching position in a private school that was able to work around his lack of certification. He had never considered teaching but he needed a job and this seemed like a good fit given his knowledge of the subject.  Everyone knew he was floundering, the students knew, the school knew.  This is a very smart guy and it may well be that, should he get some training and earn some experience, he will find his way and become an excellent teacher.  Knowing content is not enough to teach. 

Myth #3: Tenure makes teachers lazy and ineffective. Tenure is not the enemy.  Tenure is not a guarantee of lifetime employment.  Tenure is a guarantee of due process for teachers who have earned some measure of stability.  It would be wonderful to report that school administrations act fairly and responsibly toward teachers all of the time.  Unfortunately, that has not always been the case.  In most cases, some of the best teachers in a school are mature, developed educators who have committed many years to students and to their practice.  If there are bad teachers in a building, it is because administrations have failed to institute adequate assessment and evaluation practices and to promote beneficial professional development.  No matter what you hear, it is not "impossible" to fire a teacher.  It happens all the time.  If the administration has reason and follows reasonable procedure, bad teachers should be removed.  But even more than that, good teachers should be nurtured and developed.

Thanks Mark Larson for this photo of the Celebration of Excellence.

I could go on and on but the point is, I hope, made.  There are good teachers, lots of them.  There are many great teachers and Golden Apple has been a leader in recognizing their excellence.  We need to develop even better teachers and the Golden Apple Scholars programs is leading the way on how to do this.  We will not improve education by adding more and more mechanistic testing that primarily profits corporations and satisfies the blustering of politicians.  We will improve the future of our young people through education by increasing the opportunities and experiences afforded them and by supporting the development and growth of great teachers.

On a personal note, it seems almost inconceivable that it was a year ago that I was a finalist at the Celebration of Excellence.  I remember how excited and overwhelmed I felt at the event.  I was hopeful of being included among the recipients but, I admit now, I had no idea of what entering Golden Apple really meant.  This has been one of the great experiences of my life, and it continues to give me opportunities to grow and expand.

My congratulations to the finalists and thanks to Gloria Harper and all of the staff at Golden Apple for putting this great event together.  Thanks also to the Board and the Koldykes for all you do for teaching and for students.

Here is a link to the full story about the finalists.

April 17 and American Literature

I have not spoken much about my class at National Louis University.  This term, I am teaching American Literature: 1900-1945.  Even though I am on sabbatical from my high school teaching, I decided I wanted to keep this class.  It meets once a week, on Wednesday evenings.  The course is a survey of the modernists in American Literature.  We began with The Great Gatsby and will be going on to The Sun Also Rises, and later Their Eyes Were Watching God. This past week, we spent time reading and reflecting on some of the great poets: Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Carl Sandburg, ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound. And we studied T.S. Eliot. I know that Eliot ends up in a lot of British Literature classes but he is from St. Louis, and frankly in the age of the Lost Generation who could tell what was American and what was not.  Besides, I love teaching Eliot.  Let's recall that I named my cat Eliot. Enough said.

I chose to have the students read "The Love Story of J. Alfred Prufrock."  I know that many students read this in high school.  Even though my students at National Louis and smart and eager, they have not had very deep literary backgrounds in high school.  None of them had read Prufrock.  It seemed like a good place to start.  They read the poem at home along with a very large packet of other poetry. When I started the discussion in class, Melissa set the tone.

"I don't know about that poem," she said. "It was really long and I kind of got lost."

The others agreed that Prufrock had been their least favorite, except perhaps for the poems of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.  They liked "This is Just to Say" and several loved "I Carry Your Heart."  Sandburg had several fans.

"I don't know," Ashley added. "I don't think I understood it."

And so we began deconstructing Prufrock.  I did not go front to back. Instead I started with his self-description of whether he is Hamlet or the Fool.  The students were willing to answer specific questions about the text but, when I came to more general issues about the poem, they felt uneasy and decided silence was prudence.

We worked slowly through issues.  Who is the narrator talking to?  I reassured them that critics disagree and urged them to stake a claim on a position.  How old is Prufrock?  We looked for phrases that would support or negate our answers.

I tried to get them to go with me into the "half-deserted streets" but I could see them setting into an old and tedious position.  This was just like beating up a poem in high school, their faces seemed to say.  They answered questions but only grudgingly.  The life seemed to be fleeing from the classroom.

Occasionally there was a spark.  Maxine had talked about Sandburg's "Fog" earlier in the evening.  We compared the cats that became smoke in the air.  The yellowness of the fog excited some reaction.  Everyone found it slimy and disgusting.

Some references such as the connection of "there will be time" to Ecclesiastes got hands writing in notebooks.  I think it seemed like the kind of sound academic information one would like to save.

And then Prufrock wondered, "Do I dare?"  And something broke lose.  Ashley talked about knowing these kinds of boys who stood on the sidelines and just fantasized about approaching the girls.  It made Maxine wonder about his age again.  Perhaps he was in his twenties, past childhood but not yet clear on how to become a man. Taylor agreed.  "I think he's creepy."

Andy, twenty years in the military and returned to college to try and get a job in criminal justice, entered here. "This is all new to me.  I never read a poem like this.  But I wonder about the arms.  The bare arms."

That is what Taylor had meant.  She thought Prufrock was creeping on the women. I think so too.

And the conversation started to fly.  The bored looks were gone.  The class went back to find more clues that would tell us who he is talking to (they still thought himself.)

I wondered if we might be too tough on poor Prufrock.  Does he deserve some of our sympathy? The class said no; they were still thinking him a creeper until the last lines. For some reason, the singing mermaids brought them a bit around to Prufrock's side.  Maybe it was the comb-over that got them feeling for him.

One student did an impression of the women who come and go, talking of Michelangelo.

Another thought that, in the Hamlet section, Prufrock spoke with an awful lot of learning and intelligence for the nobody he paints himself to be.

The class was very amused by the rhymes: peach, each, beach.

And then we began to wonder about Prufrock and Gatsby, Prufrock and Nick. How is Tom the opposite of Prufrock?

I had allocated an hour and fifteen minutes for discussion of Prufrock.  We tore through that and finally had to stop to fit a final assignment in.

Today in the Golden Apple seminar, we talked about the New 3 R's that Bill Gates suggested: relationship, relevance, and rigor.  There were some questions raised about what is meant by relevance.  To me, relevance is when a poem (even one that is one hundred years old) finds a home with students who are new to reading modernist poetry.  It is when Eliot speaks loudly.  It is when we judge Prufrock, and pity him, and wish him better, and know he will descend the stairs.  It is when we can sit together and realize that we will not find the overwhelming question, much less be able to answer it.  It is when we tell each other things that we would not have said had we known we would return from that place.

Indeed, there will be time.

April 16 and Spoken Word

Wednesday is office day again leaving me a chance to get an entry ready.  This morning has been filled with trying to read Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  I will admit that I am struggling to get through the French phenomenologist.  I can see that there are words on the page and they appear to form sentences. What happens after that is uncertain.

Also spent some time trying to finish the final draft of the Golden Apple Site Observation report and preparing for tonight's American Literature class.  The internet modem got fried two days ago which slowed things down a bit but a very able AT&T repair man came by this morning and it is up and running again.

I am continuing to read Courage to Teach and making new discoveries on almost every page.  Some of the ideas from Parker Palmer came alive last night.  My friend Stephen asked me to attend the Spoken Word Spring Showcase at Oak Park River Forest High School.  A little more than seventy students participated in group poetry presentations and read individual works of their own composition.  What I saw connected to the ideas in Courage to Teach.

Palmer talks about the assumptions we (teachers mostly but others) make about students.  He suggests that we are fearful of our classes, which causes separation and disconnection, and that this fear comes from the assumptions we make.  One that he mentions is that the students are brain-dead.  They sit in front of us, the belief goes, without thought or interest.  Palmer notes, and those of us who have been around education long enough recognize, how often often we hear descriptions like this: "Kids today don't care," "Students aren't able to concentrate because of video games," "This class is really lazy." And so on.  Palmer wonders why the students who seem brain-dead while they are sitting in our classes come to life as soon as they pass the threshold of the classroom and reengage with their friends in the halls. 

He suggests that they are not brain-dead; they are afraid.  They might be afraid because they live in uncertain circumstances, with divorce, unemployment, addiction, or death. They might be afraid because everything they have heard and learned has told them that they are not worthy of love and acceptance.  They may worry about being bad at school, too fat, too tall, or too shy.  They may be afraid because we have built an educational system built on fear.

I heard many of these fears expressed with painful honesty (and often artistic grace) at the poetry fest last night.  I heard a young lady tell how she had learned that "a girl is nothing but a statue made of skin."  A young man told how his "grades were sagging like his pants."  One girl described the pain of an incestuous attack.  Others told the pain of love gone bad, of drugs that took over, of parents who were absent, of pain, and of loneliness.  The general theme of the evening was "I forgive."  Much of the audience spent the evening in tears as we heard the pain that needed to be forgiven.

We also saw that these seventy plus young people were not brain-dead.  They were alive and questioning and bristling with occasional anger and frequent pain. One young lady, a graduating senior, related to us how she had never succeeded in school.  She said she had "all of the learning disabilities."  Nothing ever seemed to make sense.  She talked about her personal birth through poetry and writing and how it brought her out of the shadows of loneliness and failure.

I think I have mentioned already that Palmer claims that "good teaching is based in identity and integrity."  That is what was on display at OPRF High School last night.  The young poets had the courage to go looking for their own identities and were generous enough to share what they had found with the audience and with each other.  They had the integrity and wholeness to look without flinching at what had caused them pain and to find with their poetry teammates the ability to forgive.

Thanks to Stephen, OPRF, and all the Spoken Word Poets for a great evening of love, honesty, and art.

April 14--A Reading Day is a Dangerous Thing

Monday is office day. Today, that has meant some time on the National Louis Adjunct Faculty Course (not as bad as it sounds,) rewriting the draft from the Golden Apple Site Observation, and reading Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of Self.

Brison is a philosopher who teaches at Dartmouth. In 1990, she was taking a walk in southern France.  She was attacked by a stranger, raped, beaten, and left for dead in a ditch.  This book is both the personal story of her recovery and a philosophical exploration of the nature of trauma.  In her journey, Brison opens up the nature of self. Using the perspective of feminist philosophy as a beginning point, she explores narrative, memory, autonomy and community.  This book is for the Love and Evil class.  I got about halfway through it today and will finish on Wednesday.

I also read the first few chapters of Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer. We are using this as one of our texts in the Golden Apple Education Seminar.  Palmer gives words to something that I have been feeling for a while. On page 10, "Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher."  There are some things that I know go very well in my classroom.  I know they succeed largely because my students tell me what they have learned from the experience.  One of the best parts of my classroom is the nature of the discussions that we have.  The students are candid, inquisitive, supportive of each other, open to new ideas, and careful about their listening.  I have tried to think about the techniques that I use to create these discussions.  I have also even taught several seminars about how to lead discussions.  I have never been satisfied with my explanations. What's more I have observed other teachers trying to use my techniques with only limited success (at best.)  I think I have technique (and some amount of theory) but I don't think that technique or theory are creating the conditions for learning in my discussions.  The idea I got from Palmer is this: the success in my classroom comes from the identity and integrity that I attempt to bring and that my students are, in the main, willing to bring to the dialogue.  I think my classroom is hard for another teacher to recreate because he / she should not be recreating it. He / she should be creating a classroom that flows directly from his / her own identity and integrity.  Palmer explains (on page 24) that we need "to look for a way to teach that (is) more integral to (our) own nature(s)."  When we know what our own natures are as teachers, we can find the techniques that will help them along.

I have been outspoken that teachers ought not lecture.  I have cited the research that shows the low effectiveness of lecture as a method of learning and reminded listeners to how badly bored most of us are during endless lectures. Despite this, two or three of the most effective teachers I have ever experienced lectured constantly, and brilliantly.  They were men of unrivaled scholarship and great intellectual ingenuity.  Their lectures invited me into a world as imaginative and stimulating as a good book. They were, in fact, true to their natures and I found them to be hugely influential.

I find that, especially in the last few years, I am bored listening to myself in the classroom.  I sound too pat, too rehearsed to myself. On the other hand, I am endlessly interesting in hearing the stories of my students and in reacting to those tales with my own experiences and reflections.  I further find that, for me personally, I learn better when I carefully and closely read a text than when it is explained to me.  As a result of these realizations, I have been condensing my lecture material to talks no longer than seven minutes (the students timed me this year and I never exceeded the seven minute limit.)  It tires me to repeatedly deliver these talks and multiple sections is the nature of high school. So I recorded them with good visuals and post the lectures on the website--all seven minutes of them.  I use study guides and other techniques to aid the students with reading the text.  This is almost always done in class rather than as a homework assignment.  In a better and more rigorous world, students in eleventh grade might all go home and read carefully about ethical theory but, in this world, they do best when guided and prodded. Then I work hard to think about what the questions are that have uncertain answers. Best of all is when I can think of questions I cannot answer.  Using these, we spend days and days discussing, telling stories, posing questions, making connections.  It all fits the restlessness I feel about repeating things and the boredom I experience if I know what the outcome of the class will be.  It also seems to create the conditions for many of the students to do some very deep learning about ethics and morality.

It doesn't seem as if we ever cover all of the material I plan. That seems fine to me.  If a discussion is good and new questions are coming up, I will stay with it for a week.  If a new topic seems important, I will veer away from the plan.  I realize that I have much greater liberty in this than many teachers.  The nature of my disciplines, Theology, Film, and to a great extent English--certainly Creative Writing, do not have the same need to cover all the chapters that I would suspect Biology has.  In addition, I teach in a private school which does not observe the same obsession with Common Cores and standardized tests that some schools seem to suffer from.  My students are generally motivated and willing to go with me when we wonder about what utilitarianism has to say about the latest GM auto recall, but not all of them are and I am always pleased to see how some young men and women who do not care so much for school enter into the conversations.

So Palmer's book is encouraging me to think about identity and integrity.  He talks about what makes these up in detail and I will plan to reflect more on those ideas as we go along.

Also on the reading today is The Sun Also Rises, which is what I will retire to now.  I will begin teaching Hemingway next week for the National Louis Modernist American Literature class. This week they are considering the poetry of the modernist period.  In the meantime, it is great fun to get reacquainted with Jake and Brett.

April 12 and Eating Animals

My plan was to only blog on weekdays during the sabbatical and today is Saturday, but I missed Thursday because of the heavy reading schedule.  My Catholic yearning for completeness suggested that I might add a note today.  That is good because I am thinking about a book we discussed in the Love and Evil seminar: Eating Animals by Jonathan Foer.

This book was published in 2009 and became a little extra famous because of Natalie Portman who was quoted as saying about it, "Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals changed me from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist."  My Creative Writing MFA friends will recognize it as an example of Creative Non-Fiction, or perhaps even more accurately New Journalism.  Foer uses the birth of his son as a jumping off point for an investigation of what we might eat ethically.  He uses a range of devices including letters, interviews, and narrative to explore the world of factory farming and cruelty toward animals.  The book is a good read and I can understand how Natalie Portman might have found it a call to action.

The question in my mind is one that Foer fails to solve, I think.  He advocates for eating with care. This involves, among other things, using more local and humane meat producers and creating a personal ethic of use and waste.  But can we step back a little farther?  Fundamentally,  can we eat animals ethically at all? And if we can, on what basis?

Those of a biblical disposition usually cite Genesis and the passage the gives man "dominion" over animals.  You will have to forgive me if I find that pretty flimsy authority. I don't accept the Pentateuch's prohibition against homosexuality or its endorsement of polygamy so I don't see why I should take this bit of poetry to be governing law on the slaughter of creatures.

Others note that all throughout nature, animals kill other animals and eat them.  I love the line from Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: "The history of the world, my sweet, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat!"

OK, but there is a lot of stuff that animals do that we find morally repulsive.  If to be human is, in some sense, to aspire to be moral then than aspiration ought to include animals as well.

Catholic theologians might tell you that humans have a soul and animals do not?  Why is that?  How do we know that?  Is a soul part of loving and being loved?  If so, I am pretty sure that Saul and Alice (the two resident Chihuahuas at my house) have souls.  This anthropocentrism just is not selling well, at least to me.

I actually find Bentham somewhat persuasive in this case.  You will recall that Bentham locates morality in the two forces of pleasure and pain.  More pleasure for more people is right and more pain is wrong--utilitarianism.  Bentham reasons that, since it is observable that animals do experience pain (Darwin says the same,) then the principle of pleasure and pain holds and inflicting pain on an animal is wrong.  Bentham was true to his principles. He was a vegetarian.

Discussing this in class, most of the students felt that Foer advanced both sides of this argument and left it to the reader to choose (undergrads and high school students applaud anything that is left to their own opinions.)  I don't think this holds.  If one may assert either that killing of animals is wrong or that it might be permissible, the one has claimed that it is not absolutely wrong--only wrong under some circumstances.  In that case, vegetarianism has no moral claim per se.  It can only make derivative claims, for instance, that animal slaughter is unnecessarily cruel, or that feeding raising animals for food is ecologically irresponsible, or that some animals (pigs for example) have a high enough level of consciousness to warrant their inclusion with dogs and such.  Foer would, I think, endorse this as eating with care.

But that raises another ethical problem.  As Foer admits, all of the humane farms in the United States would not feed Staten Island.  What humane and local food is available is almost always more costly and less easily obtained.  Does this make ethical animal eating the privilege of the affluent?  Can there be an ethical stance that is only available to the advantaged?  Doesn't that fall of its own inconsistency?

As you might guess, the Thursday session of Love and Evil was a brisk discussion.  I am thinking very seriously about whether it is time for me to make some dietary changes (I mean besides cutting carbs and sugar and such.)  Would love to hear your comments.

April 11--A Nervous Day

I was very nervous about today.  I have been upset about it all week. In fact, the reason I didn't blog yesterday related to my concern about today.  Today, Friday, was the day I actually met the most challenging parts of my academic schedule at Northwestern and I was so anxious about it.  I spent all of last night reading, writing, and preparing. And being nervous.

Today I met with the two graduate classes in Religious Studies I am taking.  They are both made up entirely of doctoral students, a few in Jewish Studies, a great number in History, an English here, a Film Studies there.  Some Gender Studies are mixed in as well.  I met these classes last week but that was just the introductory session.  Today we were getting into the actual work of the courses.  I have been reading the assignments all week (many hundreds of pages.)  The books are different from what I most often read and I was having trouble getting my mind to shift into gear for more philosophical text.  I am posting some of the material in the side column of the blog but I can give you a quick flavor here.  I read Pierre Bourdieu, French anthropologist and theorist who suggests that social structures create habitus, a stable system of beliefs, values, expectations, and principles which guide and govern society.  Emile Durkheim, the father of modern ethnography writing about collective effervescence.  Essays about the nature of narrative, narrative and historiography, thick description as a methodology for interpreting culture, passages from 1st century Josephus and from the Talmud.  Then I joined an online forum where students casually threw terms around like "post-Kantian."  Finally, I prepared a presentation on Bourdieu to present to my class.

It was not that I felt overwhelmed.  I didn't.  I had scheduled the reading and writing out pretty carefully and by late last night I had worked my way through it.  I felt frightened.  Frightened because I didn't know if I understood what I was reading, and I suspected that all the other students did know exactly what they were studying.  Frightened because I knew I would be expected to participate in the seminars and I didn't know what to say.  Or I did know what I might say and I was certain it was stupid.  Frightened because I was unclear on the expectation of the professor for the presentation and I had no idea whether I was meeting the requirements or not.

I need to emphasize that this was not a little intellectual fear.  By this morning, I was convinced that my course selections had been a mistake.  I did not know how I would make it through the day.

On the train ride to Evanston, I spent some time thinking about what I was feeling.  That was when it occurred to me how often my students might feel something similar.  When the material is new and challenging, do they question their ability to learn it like I did?  Are they frightened because they think they will have to speak or write and they will not know what to say?  Are they concerned that what they might say will be heard as ignorant?  Do they make a try at an assignment but feel unsure whether it will be acceptable or not?  I am certain that many of them have a history that tells them "yes" to these questions.

I want to try and remember the anxiety that can come with a challenging class and the discomfort that accompanies new experiences of which we are unsure.

There is a happy ending here, in case you were wondering.  The classes were wonderful and I was not driven out or made the object of derision.  In fact, I enjoyed the conversation very much.  There were parts of the reading that I had not understood and the discussions helped those.  There were insights I had that added to the class.  The presentation surprised most of the class because I took an unusual path to it but it was well received.

I understand that much of this is my own insecurities.  I am far enough along in my intellectual and academic lives not to get upset about starting new courses.  I should be better adjusted.  I should be but I am not.  I do worry.  And I think some of my students worry as well.  It is all right for me.  The stakes here are not very high.  I am taking these courses for love and learning and, I I do poorly, nothing very big is lost.  But for many of my students, the stakes are higher.  They are learning to be learners.  And that is what they need teachers for.

April 9th Golden Apple Site Visit

It seems as if every day is something new on sabbatical.  Today, I was a part of the site visit for one of the Golden Apple finalists. (It feels as if the visit itself should be confidential while the selection process is going on so I am not including the name here or discussing the specifics of the school or the candidate.)  This was a great opportunity for me to get to know a wonderful teacher and to spend time at a school that is very different from where I teach. What I found was astonishing.  It should be filmed and played during the evening news for all Chicagoans to see.

I was visiting an elementary school, specifically eighth grade classes.  I was told by parents, students, and teachers that, only four years ago, the school was a disaster.  The principal explained to me that they had been running at 100 suspensions annually in the middle school years (that is now down to 18.) A parent said the halls were full of litter and the classrooms were in disrepair.  The auditorium was unusable because it had become a warehouse for books.  The school could not hold its eighth grade graduation there.  A different parent told me that, had I visited four years before, I would have found "gang-banging, drugs, and filth."  All of this was aggravated by tensions between Hispanic and African-American students and families.

Then the change came.  A new principal brought in a number of new teachers.  The curriculum was revamped and teaching teams were created.  One parent characterized the new administrator this way: "He listens to us but he doesn't try to kiss our asses."  Things began to turn around.  A student told me that, "Before, I never wanted to come to school or anything but now it seems like the teachers really care and I like to be here."

I observed two classes.  In both of them, students were engaged and eager to complete their project, a public service video about racial profiling.  The students were respectful, cooperative, and on task.  The teacher presented challenging material and the students discussed difficult issues.  Black and brown children worked together with no signs of tension.

I was told by the principal that he had created a set of forums that addressed issues of race directly.  He allowed that some people had bristled at some of the questions raised but felt that, in the main, the school had grown in tolerance and understanding.

I spent time with a social studies teacher, a math teacher, an English instructor, and a special ed teacher.  The four of them were bright, enthusiastic, and committed to the education of the young people in their building.  They work well together in active collaboration.  People who have been around schools enough know that there is a certain "smell" to a school that will tell you whether learning is going on.  This school had that good smell.

I was especially impressed with the poise and articulation of the young people.  One young man was asked to escort me to the rest room.  I asked his name and he asked mine.  Then he asked me "what profession" I was in (his words.)  I told him I am an educator.  He then asked what my major was in college.  As we reached our destination, he told me that he thought it was important to get a lot of schooling.

In the meeting with students about the candidate, I asked them if they knew any reasons why this teacher should not be named a Golden Apple Winner.  One young man turned my question and asked if there were any reason why I might not vote to give her the prize.  I think this boy was born for a career in sales or the law.

News media and some politicians would like to have us believe that our urban schools are full of apathetic teachers and misbehaving children.  It simply is not true.  Even in the midst of difficult funding and management situations, there are valiant and talented professionals creating wonderful learning communities.  And there are young people who are dreaming big, beautiful dreams and working hard to make those dreams come true.

One young woman (an eighth grader) told me, "They used to just talk to us about finishing eighth grade or maybe staying in high school but now they (the teachers) talk to us about finishing college. Where we come from, not too many people believe in us, but these teachers really do."

That young lady has applied to attend Jones College Prep, a very selective school in the South Loop.  She told me that it would be the best to get her into college.  "I need to get some place," she told me. Her mother was the victim a home invasion and was shot three times.  "I am going to get my mother and my brother and me some place else."

She will of course and some part of the reason will be the amazing teachers and administrators who believed in her in eighth grade.  And I got to see just a little bit of it.  What a treasure.

April 8th in the morning at the Norris Center

I have just one class today (Love and Evil.) Because of the train schedule, I arrive at campus well before the class time.  I like that.  It gives me a chance to go to the student center in Norris building, get some coffee, and spend some time reading.  The earlier schedule also avoids the stress of rushing to get to class on time.  I am really trying to eliminate things that look like stress

On the train this morning, I was remembering the Golden Apple journey that has brought me to this place and special time.  The beginning of the selection should probably be marked in January of 2013 when I received a letter telling me that I had been nominated for recognition by the Golden Apple Foundation.  The envelope included a certificate which is still hanging on our refrigerator.  I have no idea who nominated me for the honor so, rather than appreciating one person, I am grateful to a great number of parents, students, and colleagues who have been supportive.  In the last weeks of January, I wrote the essays and gathered the recommendations that were required to advance the Golden Apple process.  It was a busy time.  I was auditioning the spring musical, getting ready to take the chess team to the state tournament, and completing the final manuscript for my MFA.  Despite the demands of school, I really worked at trying to give a picture of my teaching and my classrooms in the answers I sent to Golden Apple.

The original certificate from when I was nominated, still hanging on the refrigerator.

Then I put it out of my mind.  Along with rehearsals and writing, I was also moderating the literary magazine and teaching three preparations.  I had plenty to do.

In March, a letter arrived telling me that I had been named a finalist.  I was stunned. And thrilled.  I remember being apprehensive about even mentioning it to anyone.  I was afraid that I would bring down a curse if I announced this good fortune.  The letter told me that were 32 finalists and there would be 10 recipients. Even an English major like me can do that math. I was happy with the recognition and tried my best not to build up my expectations too much. I kept telling myself that it was an honor to be a finalist.

There is a prayer that is recited at the Seder meal of Passover.  A litany describing the great works of God is recited and, at the end of each line, the family says "dayenu."  This is Hebrew for "it would have been enough."  It expresses satisfaction with the grace that God has bestowed.  I repeated "dayenu" a number of times in the weeks after I was told that I was a finalist.  I thought back to the decades when I didn't know if I would ever have a chance to teach again.  I reflected on the joy I had found in the classroom.  To each of these, I said "dayenu."

This prayer from Passover kept running through my head as I thought about being a finalist.

I was contacted by the leader of the site observation team in the last weeks of March.  With his guidance, we arranged for the Golden Apple team to observe three classes and meet with students, parents, administrators, and colleagues.  Because of their schedule commitments, the team needed to come on a Tuesday.  My History and Theory of Film class did not meet on Tuesdays and they were disappointed that they would not be included.  With the gracious cooperation of a science teacher who would normally meet them for a lab on that day, they volunteered to hold an extra class so the Golden Apple team could get the full experience of my teaching day. That class was one more addition to the growing list of people and events I would be grateful for.

The first class on the morning of the observation was Creative Writing.  The students in that class had written ten-minute plays and were work-shopping them.  The creative writing students were a joyful bunch.  They loved each other and loved working on their writing together.  The two observers (one of whom was a theater professor from Northwestern University, the other a retired elementary school principal) were treated to a high-spirited romp through two short plays.  It was a happy beginning to the day.

Moral Theology followed just five minutes after Creative Writing and the mood shifted from playfulness to thoughtful reflectiveness.  The students were seated in an informal circle. That is almost always the case in my class, which is based on group discussion.  The topic for the day was end of life and the ethical dilemmas that families face when loved ones are dying.  The students wrestled with the very painful moral questions seriously and respectfully.  One incident from that morning stays in my mind.

In the discussion group. The students claim that when I get excited, I get off the chair and stoop.

A young lady told about her uncle who was terminally ill.  He had the opportunity to donate his organs but only if they were harvested soon, before degeneration took place.  He decided to end his life early to allow the organs to be transplanted.  Not only Catholics find this to be a morally questionable decision. The teaching of the Church teaching would forbid it even for what seems like a good result.  The girl was clearly uncomfortable with how we might react to her uncle's action.  After she told the story, she asked me whether I thought he was wrong.  The room was absolutely silent.

Rather than respond to her question, I asked her what she thought about her uncle.  

In a voice just above a whisper, she said, "I think he's a hero."  I glanced around the room. There were tears in many of eyes, including mine.

After theology, the film class met.  We had been studying Werner Herzog's "Aguirre or the Wrath of God."  The topic for this session was the anti-hero in film and the assignment was to pick a film clip that showed what the student considered to be an "anti-hero."  I remember that we spent a considerable amount of class time discussing Eva Marie Saint's character in "North by Northwest," a film we had studied a month or so before.  The conversation veered into questions of gender and how the idea of hero / anti-hero changes when the character is a woman.

Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest.  It was a favorite of the film class.

The team then moved on to talk to the groups I had assembled.  I was not included in these. Finally, around three o'clock, they returned for a final interview with me.  It was an intense but joyful day.  The team left and the waiting began.

A few weeks later, I attended the "Ceremony of Excellence."  This was a lovely breakfast which honored all of the finalists.  My wife and the president of the high school joined me.  Each of the finalists was introduced and many pictures were taken.  I was surprised to find that another finalist was a woman with whom I took all of my certification classes at National Louis.  She is an excellent teacher in the Chicago Public Schools.

All 32 of the finalists at the Ceremony of Excellence. I have a particularly dazed look.

And then there was more waiting that stretched into May.  The musical opened and closed. The literary magazine was published.  I finished the final manuscript and annotated bibliography for my writing degree.  My classes began to wind down.

It is now the beginning of May and I received word that the announcements of the recipients would be made in the following week.  Winners are notified when a group from the Golden Apple arrives unannounced at the teacher's classroom. Fr. Joe Ekpo of our staff had been named a winner six years earlier and I had managed the media portion of the announcement so I was familiar with the process.  The Chicago Tribune reported that winners would be named on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  As it would turn out, they had one detail wrong.

Monday and Tuesday came and went and no one appeared at my classroom.  I was doing my best to keep my expectations in check and my mood under control. Every day, articles ran in the newspapers about teachers who had been named to the final ten.  Governor Quinn presented one award. Mayor Emanuel was there for another.

When Wednesday passed and there was no word, I believed that I had not been included among the recipients.  I went home that evening and sat on the porch.  I could no longer hide my disappointment. My wife suggested dinner or a walk.  I preferred to sulk. By late Wednesday evening, I had recovered some control of my mood and was getting back to feeling grateful for being included as a finalist.

On Thursday morning, I taught Creative Writing and then started Moral Theology.  About ten minutes into the class, the principal appeared at the door of my classroom and said, "You have visitors."  A huge crowd entered.  There were officials from Golden Apple, news reporters, photographers, and--in the back--my wife and daughter.  The first thought that occurred to me was that my wife had known about this during the last few days as I pouted at the feeling of not having won.

My Moral Theology class as the presentation of the Golden Apple is being made.

The presentation was a blur.  Several people from Golden Apple said a few things and I stammered out some words.  I have since seen a video of the presentation and am surprised that I made more sense than I thought.

So selection was over and I was now a Golden Apple fellow.  The journey was just beginning and I will tell more of that in another posting.  There is still a year to go to get to this campus in Evanston.

April 7th is Study Day

Monday is office day for me, time to get as much reading and writing done for the week as I can.  I had a lengthy study session on Saturday as well so I am getting close to being ready for classes.  I will be on campus on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.  This week, I am out on Wednesday doing a site observation visit for Golden Apple (joyful duty.)

I read two books this past weekend.  The first was Creation and Fall by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer has been an enduring interest for me for forty years.  I first read The Cost of Discipleship when I was in my twenties.  Sometime after that I read Letters and Papers from Prison.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Most readers are probably aware of his story.  Bonhoeffer was already well known by the 1930's because of his theological writings.  He studied with Niebuhr and developed a great affection for the African-American worship experience in Harlem.  When the Nazis assumed power in Germany, Bonhoeffer returned to his homeland and became a leading figure in the anti-Nazi movement.  He was implicated in a plot to assassinate Hitler, imprisoned, and executed in the weeks before the Allied victory.  

Creation and Fall is made up of two lectures he gave in 1932.  This mostly prayerful meditation on Genesis seems to me more of an exhortation to return to faith in the Word of God than to be an effort to break much new ground theologically.  The most interesting theme is Bonhoeffer's assertion that creation is only fully understood in terms of the resurrection.  This Christocentric approach differs markedly from last week's reading from Levenson with its focus on El Shaddai and his creative struggle with Leviathan.

Also this weekend, I plowed through Outline of a Theory of Practice (Pierre Bourdieu 1972).  Bourdieu is proposing a theoretical framework for sociologists and anthropologists that will eliminate the subject-object duality.  His central idea is that of habitus, the "systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them" (The Logic of Practice 1990).  What intrigued about this is the connection to Aristotle, and then to Aquinas.  Aristotle describes hexis, a structure of the mind characterized by dispositions, taste, and sensibilities. Hexis was translated into Latin as habitus, the term that Aquinas uses and identifies with virtue. Aquinas defines virtue several different ways but the most useful general definition he gives is "a virtue is a habit that disposes an agent to perform its proper operation or movement.”  I think Bourdieu would be partly happy with this, insofar as the habitus "disposes an agent to perform."  Bourdieu would say that the principles of habitus are "generative."  I think were Aquinas (and Aristotle) differ from Bourdieu is that they do not seem the same collective embodiment of habitus that he claims.  The difference may come from the fact that Bourdieu is studying social structures and thus is inclined toward the communal.  There may be a deeper reason though.  Because of his roots in Weber and Marx, Bourdieu understands structures to be the products of culture and history where Aquinas will see dispositions and virtue as coming from the reason an faith of the individual.  Despite this difference, I think there chance for some profitable work in seeing Bourdieu in terms of St. Thomas.  

Pierre Bourdieu

In a wild swing away from the German theologian and French anthropologist, I also needed to prepare for my unity on Modernist American Poetry in the National Louis class.  We will still be discussing The Great Gatsby this week but I needed to prepare the packet of poems and study questions.  I have decided to include (after much internal debate):

• Carl Sandburg--we live in Chicago after all so Chicago Poems and some of the WWI poems.
• Langston Hughes--several selections but I included "a dream deferred" because of the new production of Raisin in the Sun.
• Gertrude Stein--"Susie Abado" and a few others.
• T.S. Eliot (do we consider him American or British?)  I went with Prufrock although I wish I could discuss The Waste Land in terms of Gatsby.
• Wallace Stevens--The Snow Man
• ee cummings--In Just-- and a few others.
• Marianne Moore--Poetry
• William Carlos Williams--Just to Say
• Ezra Pound--Villanelle: Psychological Hour

It seems like I am forgetting someone I included but it is of no great consequence.  There were so many others who could have (and should have) been added but I had reached the number of pages I might reasonably assign.  I hope my readers who object will feel free to add on names.

Next to read is "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Foer.  I am trying to make sure that Alice and Saul do not see the title of this essay.  It would upset them.  Back to Northwestern tomorrow for a class in "Love and Evil."