Thanks to Pam’s comment on the previous post, I decided to get serious about creating audio files for my students. The only problem I had was figuring out how to get the LAME encoder to work with Audacity, but after solving that, I was able to record a brief story for my students. It was a response to a discussion of the role of women in traditional Vietnamese society. I only had to edit out one long silence. No doubt I’ll figure out more things to do, but I think this was a pretty decent start: Women in Vietnam: A Brief Anecdote.
Monthly Archives: May 2007
Teaching with Pixels: A Free Form Meditation
The second week (of eight) of my online course begins today. Things are going well both logistically and in terms of learning, I think. My own learning especially. There are fifteen students, though it looks like one may drop, & that feels like a good number for this sort of course online. When I teach Understanding Vietnam in a regular classroom I let the enrollment go as high as 75 students because I use a lot of movies & slides to supplement lectures and reading. But the fact is, in a regular classroom, a large percentage of students remain passive vessels, even when we have Q & A after a lecture. In the online course, where they are required to participate in discussion boards, the teaching seems much more direct. Also more detailed and responsive to particular students rather than responsive to the whole class or just the feeling in the room. The Blackboard software is beastly, often requiring both students & instructor to click five times when twice would be enough in a decent UI. What I really don’t like about Blackboard, though, is the way it forces me to chunk information up into discrete parcels & “deliver” them as units. The strength of the program is that it allows for extensive threaded discussions; I like the gradebook function, too, though it is not as well designed as the one in Turnitin’s system. Clearly, the heart of the course is going to be the discussion boards & the students who dive into them are going to benefit. I wish there were a smoother way to present the course material. The Blackboard look & feel is so ugly that I have resorted to uploading Powerpoint slides — I can at least do a little minimal design in that format. An there are some Flash tools that I’ve looked at that would be better, but what’s lacking is an over-all environment. Next time around, I’d rather use a WordPress weblog with pages for each unit, a running commentary on the blog, and a Turnitin link for papers & grades. In a small class, I’d set the blog up so that everyone could post, but my main content pages would be protected from editing. Well, this post has just been a random brain dump or initial reactions. I’m happy to be doing this because I think that with the right tools & the right expectations, students could be be very well served by online classes. I love the classroom & would never abandon it — well, I will retire at some point — but there is, weirdly, a directness of communication in the online course that I find invigorating. In the classroom — this will sound strange — I am easily intimidated by students. Perhaps I want to be liked too much. I tend to take a very loose attitude toward deadlines & requirements & probably, too, toward sufficiently critical thinking. I’m tougher in the online environment, though friendly & supportive. I hate pomposity & self-importance in anyone, but particularly in teachers. So the online teaching experience is going to influence my meat world teaching, I think. For the better. Online, the element of performance is reduced — replaced by . . . what? Some kind of more fully-conscious rhetorical encounter. At least on my part. As with any teaching situation, you can never really know what is getting across to students. As I’ve been writing this, I’ve had Kenneth Burke in the back of my mind, with his notion that drama is central to understanding. I understand the drama of the classroom — after twenty-five years I still get nervous before class — but I wonder what sort of drama I am now enacting through the Blackboard UI with my students & even as I am acting the drama, I am thinking about how the medium could be modified to make a better production. I need to think more systematically what I mean by “better” in that last sentence. There is a trope in American popular culture of the actor stuck in a limiting role, endlessly touring the same play through provincial towns (Derived from Eugene O’Neill’s father’s biography?) that is applicable to teaching. For me, hell would be playing Mortimer Brewster, or even Hamlet or Lear, every working day for the rest of my life. I’ve never taught the same course the same way twice in a row, but this online course is a fundamentally different kind of drama. I want to perform well, but I also want to see what I can take back to the traditional classroom. I am a perpetual beginner.
What We Allow
Began reading Richard Powers’ Operation Wandering Soul, finding the style a little excessive, a little faux-Pynchon & tedious, overwrought. And yet, I also feel a sense of regard for an artist letting it fly, rolling it out, playing language like a cheap guitar. And, self-consciously, I can’t help wondering as I read where my own verbal profligacy went.* I had it as a young man, though even as an undergraduate student of poetry, I was both drawn to & suspicious of the booming rhetoric of Yeats & Roethke, preferring Auden’s ironic reverb versions of the standard changes. And yet I love a good rhetorical turn, a fine punchline nailed down by a rhyme. I just don’t trust myself to employ these tools I love to see others using. Which has perhaps led me to write more dryly than I might have. To trust the intellect’s refinement & reduction over the heart’s extravagances. My own feelings are unruly & I have tended to use language to get them into order. Besides, emotion has gotten something of a bad name in American poetry after the abuses of Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, & even my master James Wright. Still, those are great poets whose language, at its best, was adequate to terrible experience. (It may be, yes, that these writers made the moral error of confusing life & art, of ramping up anxiety as if it were an aesthetic requirement.) In any case, we are all a little embarrassed by experience these days, aren’t we? As if it were not quite worthy of our language.
____________________________
*The connection between Powers’ prose & my concerns with my own style are probably entirely subjective, simply a prompt for a meditation.
John Banville’s Kepler
Just finished reading John Banville’s novel Kepler. I’ve had it lying around since sometime in the 1990s, when I bought it along with its companion Copernicus. I remember racing through Doctor Copernicus, but putting Kepler down after fifty pages. I picked it up again because I have been (vaguely) thinking about texts for my Imagining Science course next spring. I got through it this time, but the last third of the novel is a mess. Banville jumps around in time throughout the narrative, mixing Kepler’s memories into the chronology of the plot, & for most of the novel this technique works to create a subtle portrait of the proto-scientist. Almost exactly two-thirds of the way through the third-person narrative, Banville inserts a series of imagined letters from Kepler to significant figures in his life. The letters provide a psychologically & emotionally affecting first-person view of Kepler’s personality. It is after the series of letters that things go wrong with the narrative. Banville seems in a great hurry to finish & the jumble of chronological narrative & flashbacks becomes increasingly difficult to follow. These problems are compounded by an obscurantist overflow of 17th century European historical & religious detail. Still, the portrait of Kepler that emerges is subtle & difficult — Banville’s novel gives the reader a difficult & conflicted character, a man hanging between mysticism & science who is lively & self-aware in a nearly modern sense. Kepler, in Banville’s story, is also one of the geniuses of muttering & mumbling, always speaking to himself, or under his breath, or half-articulating second thoughts, a man both drawn to & terrified of political power — in this way fantastically modern. It is far too difficult & flawed a book to ask undergraduatges to read, but I’m glad I had another go at it.
Parataxis as Praxis
Does parataxis exist in a text if the whole text’s tactic is paratactic? Doesn’t parataxis depend on a context of syntaxis? Is the wholly paratactic poem poem possible & if it is, what is its context? The whole language? Those questions occurred to me while reading the most recent of Ray Davis’s accounts of his development as a reader of poetry. And in what way is parataxis not a “subjective lyric stance”? There is a problem of foregrounding here I don’t quite get, a field effect to understand. (There is also a spirited defense of Lowell & Wright to be made — perhaps it is only generational, I’ll be 56 next week — but that’s another branch of the American tree.)