Teaching Portfolio.

If any of you are interesting in what the hell I have been doing instead of writing on this here blog, this is an extremely rudimentary teaching portfolio I have been putting together.

It ain’t great (yet), but it exists, which is more than can ever be said for perfect things which don’t.

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Core Bliss.

I had a somewhat disheartening morning. The students in my SI class were thoroughly disengaged today and that always bothers me. I try to make things interesting and also applicable beyond simply the writing of their English papers, but that is not always enough to hold the attention of 18-year-olds at 8 in the morning.

Otherwise though I had a busy but good day.

Just now I am sitting up late because I don’t have to wake up early tomorrow and so - because I find the world endlessly fascinating - I am reading about the theological differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims because I know that this is something important that I don’t know enough about. Finally I did what I often do and I went to my man John Green for clarification. If you don’t know John Green, he’s the guy that wrote The Fault in Our Stars, but don’t hold that against him. For years he and his brother have been making a video podcast thing called “Crash Course” where they quickly and succinctly explain history and politics and economics and literally anything else one might be curious about.

I watched the Crash Course take on Islam and politics and it was interesting, but because I am a glutton for punishment, I started reading the comments section. There are more than 8,000 comments and most of them are exactly as dumb as you might imagine, but one stood out as head and shoulders more incomprehensible than the rest. It was written by someone called Core Bliss, which I do not think is a real name. This is what Core Bliss had to say about the history of Islam and politics:

it's the internet on YouTube it's all baseless unless you where there at the event that we're talking about.. Muhammad F is talking about Rape in time when it happen all the time because people only usly lived to only 30 and claim it was 100 years or so.. I'm talking about the Evils of Human rule over another by force.. Faith in humanity has long been driven out by taxes for war or poor services...Lee I Think is calling out Despotism over the Rape ..Victim which is point less in our time because it still goes on slave trade brothels and in India, they marry kids very young .. it's like the age 18 over 16 year old argument in most places but the 9 year old is mind blowing to most 1st world people..   

In a strange and odd way, this made me feel so much better about my morning. My SI students may not always engage and they may not always laud me every day or throw roses down at my feet at the end of a class session (that has only happened a few times), but they are not Core Bliss. I think that all of us should feel better about ourselves because we are not Core Bliss.

If, by some weird series of internet coincidences, you are reading this and you actually are Core Bliss, please email me and I will come to your house and help you be less awful at - literally - everything.

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Post-Dystopian.

I am reading through a bunch of “free write” essays that I had my students do in class yesterday. They just finished reading 1984 and I basically asked them to imagine how they thought Orwell would view the world we live in today. I wanted them to start making connections between the book and their lives, is all.

Well one of my students, in the middle of his free-write - which he only had ten minutes to think about and write - seems to have coined the term “post-dystopian”. What an interesting concept.

Maybe somebody else has come up with this already, but if they have, I’ve never heard of it and I’m a very fancy guy.

Anyway, I’m very proud of this kid. Tomorrow I’m going to ask him what exactly he meant.

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How Trees Teach.

How Trees Teach;

A Hypothetical Pedagogical Dialogue

by james bezerra

EXTERIOR, NIGHT. A WILLOW TREE sits atop a single hill in an otherwise flat plain. The sky is speckled with the pinprick light of stars. The shape of a man can just barely be seen as he trudges up the side of the hill. He reaches the top and stands under the willow, panting. He the only teacher in the town’s one-room school house at the bottom of the hill. His name is CHATSWORTH and he sits down and gazes out over the plains.

CHATSWORTH (speaking to the WILLOW TREE): I come here to talk to you when I don’t know what to do. My students, today I don’t even know if I helped them at all. They all had their phones out. I can’t get them to put their phones away. I have asked them and they put them away for a little while, but by the next day, there they are again, the phones again.

WILLOW TREE: (The night breeze lifts the long wisps of the WILLOW TREE’s branches high into the air.)

CHATSWORTH: I know! That’s how I felt too. I never would have gotten away with that when I was in school. We used to respect the instructors. When your teacher said to sit your butt down and read, that’s exactly what you did.

WILLOW TREE: (The breeze slips away and the wisps sink back down and the tree seems to be shrugging.)

CHATSWORTH: Okay, that may not be exactly how it was. Selective memory comes with age, but still, we didn’t have the phones. They seem like such a distraction. I really do believe that if I could get them to put them away then I would really be able to teach them, you know? Teach them the way that I was taught. It worked well for me.

WILLOW TREE: (A much more jagged breeze whips some of the wisps quickly up into the air, where they vibrate violently.)

CHATSWORTH: I know, I know. They live in a world that is unlike the one I grew up in, and that isn’t just age talking. They’re inundated with everything; ads and infotainment and even more ads. There must be a way to take what I have been taught and craft it to help them understand the world that they are going to have to survive in. It is likely a world that will require the same lessons, but new parables with which to teach them.

WILLOW TREE: (The wind releases the wisps and they settle back into place as they were earlier in the night.)

CHATSWORTH: You always seem to have the answers.

CHATSWORTH gets to his feet, pats the WILLOW TREE and begins to trot back down the hill, whistling as he goes.

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Places and Spaces.

I am posting these here just so that I can show them to my SI students on Monday. These are technically both representations of the San Fernando Valley, but note how they are different from each other and also different from the reality we experience day-to-day. Those differences can be understood to be the differences between a place and a space.

(Karla Klarin, Valley View, 1984)

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Eat a Bald Eagle why don't you?

So I am supposed to be studying for my big final. I take it tonight at 8pm. The class is Critical Theories of Literature. This class is to English students what Organic Chemistry is for my younger brother the chemistry major. This is the much-dreaded class that says, if you can’t do this, you do not belong here. It is the class that otherwise good English students end up taking two (or, I have heard, even three times).

It is basically the class that teaches you what every oh-so-important thinker has thought about the ways that we read, and how we determine meaning. It starts with the Greeks and moves right on along to the things that college professors were arguing about this morning.

It is, in short, a class about how cool academia thinks academia is.

That being said, it has been interesting. For instance, did you know that Queer Theory and Gay Studies are two totally different schools of thought? And that they are basically, diametrically opposed? Gay Studies says there have always been gay people and we can prove it with these texts! Queer Theory is more like, yeah there is totally some ambiguous sexual stuff going on in Billy Budd, but who the fuck knows what it is about?

Me? I’m just trying to get the grade and move on. When you really get into the English program, there are two types of people. There are the people who lean toward the theory side of things (these people seem to be Philosophy majors who switched to English. What? For the expanded employment potential?) and then there are the writers who are all like, “Why the hell do I have to take a theory class! I’m already totally an unrecognized genius!”

I am the latter, I guess.

Either way, we all have to learn what Jacques Lacan thought about The Purloined Letter.

Anyway, I guess my point, if ever there was one, is just that college is not HARD, not the way that real life is bone-crushingly, soul-killingly hard, but it can be difficult. And it is a different kind of stress. At work I get stressed because I deal with actual money that doesn’t belong to me and in that situation you are always one giant fuck-up away from getting fired. And people get fired for that stuff. In school, the stress isn’t as immediate, it is more ghostly. The train of thought is, “Oh god, if I fail Critical Theories of Literature then I won’t get into UCLA (everybody at CSUN wants to go to UCLA) and then I won’t be able to get a good teaching job and then I won’t get to stand in front of a class and act all smarty-pants and that is the only thing that will validate me as a person!”

Yeah.

I have a love/hate relationship with this whole culture of college. This grad student in one of my classes is constantly relating EVERYTHING back to Theory and I just want to scream at him, “NO ONE CARES WHAT HEGEL THINKS! NO ONE WILL EVER BE IMPRESSED THAT YOU CAN VOMIT UP GRAMSCI’S THEORY OF HEGEMONY!” I want to take him aside and be all like, “Look dude, you need to get away from school for a while. Go work on an oil drilling platform. Go get your heart broken. Go eat a bald eagle. Go do something else for the love of god.”

But I also understand that college is how you get your ticket punched.

And not for nothing, I realize that I’m being a bit of a hypocrite. After all, part of the reason I plan to go on to get an MFA is so that I can teach at the college level (though in my heart of hearts I still want to teach at community college, I think I owe that to myself, but we will see how that works out) and so I know that I can’t really have it both ways. Either I have to buy in to this academia thing or not and if I buy in I should probably stop bitching.

Thankfully, I still have a few years to straddle that one.

Anyway. I guess I have wasted enough time. I really do have to go study, because I have to pass this test, it is totally very super important, as I have explained.

I hope that as you read this you are lounging on a beach somewhere, sipping a fruity drink with a little umbrella in it and laughing at my problems. For the moment you can be my grounding. I’m counting on you to be all, “Oh, he is stressing out over a literature test. How cute.”
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