It Is Dark Inside the Wolf

February 10, 2023

How much of my preoccupation with the Woes of Saint Xavier is ego, how much is a need for justice, how much is simply a nagging thought that we’re close to a better way, and, with a little tweaking and compromise, we can find solutions that create a win-win? 

I need to be suspicious of the “ego” part. I suspect I can be vindictive and passive aggressive. I want satisfaction, and my appreciation of the intrigue of a long-game payback gives me pause. Nursing one’s wounds is necessary for recovery and survival. But watering and tending the garden of one’s grievances is the wrong path. It is self-destructive, at least in life, despite how satisfying it can be in stories and imagination.

This week’s reading in class of Margaret Atwood’s The Testatments is relevant here. The novel is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which was written a lifetime ago in the early 1980s. Atwood explains that she had no plans to write a sequel, but then 32 years later, propelled undoubtedly by developments in American politics and social movements, and The Handmaid’s Tale TV series, she found herself desirous of creating a sequel. The problem, she explained in “The Writing of The Testaments,” was that she had lost the narrative voice of the original. Always a student/teacher of creative processes, Atwood explains that there are ways of continuing the story in such a case—for example, by shifting the perspective or by starting in the middle. She uses “Little Red Riding Hood” as an illustration, which could have started, “It was dark inside the wolf.” And so, we’re on a different track, with different narrative possibilities.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the wolf was the repressive society of Gilead—and that story does in fact begin in medias res in that dark place. The Testaments, it turns out, also begins inside the wolf—but here the wolf is Aunt Lydia, one of the founders/collaborators/subversives of the repressive Gileadean society. Atwood’s novel takes us into and through the psychology and history of that wolf—and the story provides rich, detailed portraiture of the proverb, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” My satisfaction and sympathy with Atwood’s depiction of this very cold dish worries me a bit, as I feel stirrings for similar satisfactions in connection with the wrongs that have been done to me and mine.

Is SXU’s situation a problem of local significance—one employer’s bad behavior—or is it reflective of a larger, world turning moment? Grappling with that question is one of my challenges. As I look on in shock and horror, maybe I just need to take a breath and recognize: sic transit gloria mundi, don’t take it personally, ‘twas always thus, it’s bad all around, two steps forward, one step back, there’s still some hope…. But how much comfort and hope can there be in recognizing the scale of the problem is the whole world, rather than just the place where I work?

I’m trying to grow up a bit about my expectations. Here’s what I’ve recently discovered about how I’ve approached life through my youth and adulthood up until recently: I’ve been waiting for the “end of history”—in the sense that we will have arrived, through progressiveness, reform, and enlightenment, to a time beyond—not all human frailties—but some of the big ones, at least, like (extreme) racism, sexism, and bigotry (or at least the more obvious bigotries). Atwood’s essay cited above (“The Writing of The Testaments”) helped me perceive my bias. She said she was leery of the phrase “on the wrong side of history.” The phrase suggests that history pronounces judgment and advances on, in a more or less settled way, and posterity situates itself on the correct side. But in her explanation that “history is simply human beings doing stuff,” she spotlights how random and impermanent and potentially backsliding history can be. “It winds around, it reverses, very much depending on the circumstances.”

Enter Donald Trump. He unveiled to me (and others) just how so many “solved” problems of the past have not at all been solved, but still are there, lurking, seeking out their point of entry into the fray. With Trump, we’ve learned that the term “backsliding” is too much of an understatement. What would the term be for the dissolution of entities that we had, more or less, reified into existential absolutes—democracy as the American form of government, for instance?

At SXU, the reifications that have been dissolved for me are, in a nutshell, the values of higher education: the assumption that higher education is a worthy pursuit in and of itself; the view that higher education improves standards of living and the significance of living. All these things can go away. All these things are going away. The process of going away takes with it the hopes I had had in colleagues to stand up for education. Too many of us have been insecure about the value of higher education’s “product” in comparison to other products—be they technologies, skills, professional credentials, or new careers churned up by the market, or supposedly so, in programs deemed as “in demand.” Never mind that the criteria for measuring demand are specious, drawing on bad data, bad projections, bad assumptions.

Undeniably, what is happening at SXU is transpiring on a broader stage. Across the country and world, there are hard questions being asked about the value of a traditional education organized around foundations in the humanities and liberal arts. Mixed in with the elegiac reflections that arise in me are other considerations with their own disturbances—e.g., personal nostalgias that bespeak my privilege and perhaps invite harsher scrutiny. Part of my grief, I confess, involves the loss of ease that comes from a shared recognition of privilege and value—to titles (hearing “Dr. Bonadonna” still causes a flutter in my soul), to academic routines, to assumptions of authority and value. Nonetheless, a large part of the grief, undoubtedly, does stem from the ugliness of transformation in this specific institution.

I’ve seen friends make peace—through retirement, through job switching, through capitulation. It does seem that the administration’s strategy is to clean house of anyone with a memory or a grievance, the two go hand in hand. I suppose it’s possible that a new entire staff could adapt and progress more productively than aggrieved old timers—and so, maybe the intensity of what I’m feeling is just a case of “my ox is the one being gored”—and so that’s why I’m in such a state.

I walk through the halls, and I have brief and lament-filled conversations with each colleague I encounter. There’s the shaking of the head. I’m thanked for my efforts. We commiserate in our futility. In my office, I get the emails from any of several back-channel faculty groups—planning future actions, or offering new tidbits of offenses, or strategizing about next steps. I write in my blog about the depression that I feel; I hear professions of depression from others. It’s heartbreaking.

We seem to have gone to a place beyond “morale.” A few years ago, some of my most respected advisors told me to stop framing SXU’s challenges in terms of a morale problem. All agreed morale was bad, but my advisors preferred a different way of framing our needs and visions. Today, our morale has not improved, and that term continues to fail to describe our reality, but in a new way. Perhaps we are too depleted to have a morale problem. If morale falls in a forest and there’s no one there, does it make a sound? The absence of so many who have left, and the planned absence of so many who have informed us of their plans to leave, creates an emptiness and pain that might better be addressed as a form of grief. The climate is one of hopelessness and loneliness. There’s bitterness and anger and disbelief too. There are twinges of the old fight here and there, but most are putting their head down in whatever salvageable way they can, and trying to move forward, somehow, with a will to survive, or just persist, but in a short-term manner.

Through it all, the pragmatist in me maintains there’s another way, a middle ground. Maybe. I want to reach out to my adversaries and try rapprochement—if only for mutually self-serving goals and ends. But dialogue has failed in formal and informal ways, and the power of the adversaries has been consolidated. I and many others have become hardened in our perspective of the other side’s autocratic, power-oriented stance and modus operandi. I have trouble letting go of foregone conclusions and despair—though I’m not convinced I can’t, however dark it is inside this wolf.

The stories of some of the victims—faculty and staff who have been pushed out or mistreated through punitive and harsh economic measures—fill me with sadness. I think of a staff colleague, described recently on Facebook as “one in a million,” and I see the impacts and the heartlessness of this institution in simply stepping over her and ignoring her in the face of mistreatment.

I am in agony over the consequences of the inexorable march upon which SXU, in a kind of Menippean satire, has embarked. I can give to students, but only so much. Ultimately, it’s they who are mistreated, as it always comes down to the student experience. The deprivations of resources and care inevitably lead to disengagement and failure and loss—of them, and all of us.

Pedagogical Uses of Social Networking Systems

The Context: The following entry was written in response to a colleague’s question to the general faculty about the possibilities of using social networking systems like Myspace and Facebook in teaching:

I could envision lessons and activities that explore or study various aspects of social networking, but as far as actually using a social network environment to host class work, I tend to agree with my colleague Laurence: “there are some web platforms that may be better left to non-academic uses.” The social networks are where the “kids” hang out; there seems something invasive about “going there” as a class—kinda like bringing a class, uninvited, to someone’s party; it could work out okay, but it’s just . . . weird).

Aside from the question of how to use social networking tools in one’s teaching, I think the bigger pedagogical issue here has to do with broad matters of communication and rhetoric brought to the fore by the social networking phenomenon. Many media reports have sounded the alarm bell about the dangers kids expose themselves to in putting too much of their lives out there on the Web. We’ve long known of the danger of the Internet in terms of predators and children. Now, however, with young adults voluntarily publishing information about themselves (photos of drinking exploits at parties, for instance), the dangers have shifted somewhat from those involving personal safety to those involving professional liabilities (in presenting personal info that might make an individual less attractive to a potential employer, school admissions office, etc.).

What’s our role as educators in all this? Rather than foment the concern, I’d prefer educators show leadership and wisdom on this issue.

Specifically, I think educators—at all levels—should teach communicators (all students) the principles and practices of “effective communication.” Myspace/Facebook/etc. is giving us a marvelous “teachable moment.” I think we should take the lead and promote the study—and perhaps even the use of—social networking technologies (even if we don’t use such tools in our teaching). We should support and coach the responsible use of such technologies. In essence we should teach students how “to Myspace”—or at least help them build awareness of the range of communicative/social/personal/professional issues involved in putting one’s oar into the deep and sometimes turbulent waters of public discourse.

I make this proposal, in part, in response to the strong and growing move to curtail and control social networking—especially in high school environments. I’ve heard several reports by our student teachers and first-year teachers about (understandably) skittish administrators whose first impulse in such dangerous situations is one of censorship. It’s ironic; in higher ed, our goal is to stimulate discussion and critical thinking; we often lament our students’ inabilities in this regard—but, to be blunt, so much of the goal in earlier schooling centers on keeping the lid on “inappropriate” communication and critique; is it any wonder the kids come to us communicatively straight-jacketed?

But anyway, thanks for initiating this stimulating discussion [on the faculty listserv]. I see many ways the issues involved “connect.” I’m encouraged to think how a more open attitude about communication possibilities can empower us (the collective “us,” as scholars, as society’s experts in various types of communication)—and play to our strengths in terms of our potential leadership. Conversely, such openness may expose us to new situations where we will learn from our students. Some of us welcome such dynamics while others may be less comfortable with them.

In any event, whenever new technologies are involved, there will undoubtedly be “unexpected by-products.” I have a positive example of such a by-product from one of our student teachers last semester. The incident involved a student teacher who used Myspace to collect and share information about a high school student in her class who had died in a car accident over the Christmas break. The student teacher was able to gather many compelling artifacts from the student’s Myspace site. The student was a poet and artist. The student teacher was able to put together a soundtrack of music from the student’s favorite music, and create a slide show of words and images to celebrate the student’s life and help her classmates through the rough, early stages of grief.

I think there are various ways we in higher education can show leadership in “teaching how-to-Myspace” (if I may be excused using “Myspace” as a verb), but it starts with an open attitude and a confidence in/realization of our credentials to be the leaders. . . .

The Word Spy – defensive pessimism

Well, it turns out there is a word for it–this strategy of control, which leads to an ironic optimism:

The Word Spy – defensive pessimism

“A strategy that anticipates a negative outcome and then takes steps to avoid that outcome….”

Intriguing how this strategy reduces anxiety for some and increases it for others…. There’s the real lesson: the absence of an objective signification for any term, situation, strategy….

This term is a good fit for my “toolbox” approach to teaching. An important tool, here, for all those melancholy, back-door optimists.

Also: What uses could a dictionary like Word Spy be put to in teaching vocabulary in schools? Is there any way high schoolers could perceive and enjoy the fun of a dictionary like this (dedicated to neologisms), where the play and vitality and lability of language is uppermost….

Dealing with attendance issues in student teaching

A star student, now at the start of student teaching, writes:

I do want to ask advice about some of the issues that have surprised me. The first issue is attendance. Unfortunately, the lower-level classes [at my school] tend to have poor attendance. This makes it difficult for me and the class on many levels. Obviously, these students are missing precious class time, and they fall behind for the simple fact that they do not get to partake in the class discussions, notes, etc. Furthermore, these students tend to disrupt the flow of class with their constant questions that, while certainly necessary for their academic development, frustrate the other students because we end up covering the same issues over and over again (this becomes a compounded problem when several students are absent on the same day but return to school on different days). Additionally, the attendance problems make it difficult for me to do much group work with the students.

How can I incorporate group work without then penalizing the students who were absent (and without driving myself crazy trying to remember make-up assignments to equal the missed group work)? I’m not as concerned about doing group with with the regular-level class (and later on, the honors classes I will pick up the last week in Sept.) But for this Skills class, it poses a problem for me. The attendance also makes it hard for me to establish routine in the classroom. I have been enlightened by the teachings of Harry Wong, and his explanation and reasoning for procedures/routines can’t be beat. Yet, I’m facing an uphill battle just trying to catch everyone up on missed work while still teaching the planned lessons. And if that isn’t bad enough, we still have a lot of new students entering the classes each day (I had 3 new students in one class period today! FYI, school started on Aug 29).

Your attendance situation gets me thinking in a couple ways. I don’t have any slam-dunk answers, but a few possibilities. I think you have to look for organizational structures that enable individuals at all different points of project completion to work at their own level and pace. You need a clear communication of weekly or daily assignments (on the board each day, or on a weekly handout you could give to students and refer them to). I think if you could make personal responsibility a part of the grade, you might be able to reward productive behavior, and perhaps give the non-achievers a clearer route by which they can earn credit. I think you need to focus fiercely on keeping things positive, giving students as much a way to EARN points for cooperative behavior as possible. You need to communicate relentlessly about all the routes to success in the class. And even when you’re feeling extremely disappointed, you have to bring a positive, upbeat message to the group. As Machiavelli says, praise in public, censure in private. (Of course, sometimes you’ll have to raise hell with them, but that strong spice must be used sparingly. Love them more than you scold them, and even if you find you have to kill them, make sure you do so with kindness rather than with anger.)

As you know, I would advocate as much a workshop approach as possible, where you could counsel kids one-on-one as much as possible (thus not worry about wasting whole-class time catching up the kids needing catching-up). Also, I would advocate the set-up of as much “IEP-type” instruction as possible. (Richard Kent advocates the use of “People Plans” instead of “Lesson Plans”). Can you set up workshop so students are working towards individual goals as much as, if not more than, whole-group or small-group projects? Think of approaching that fragmented group in terms of developing “IEPs” for all of them. How would that change things? (I know things like your lesson plans, mandated curricula, and cooperating teachers might not make these approaches easy or obviously implementable….)

Also: these kids obviously don’t have a stake in class. How could they develop one? Can you ask them? Can you negotiate with them? Can you lay out YOUR absolutes (what are they?)–and then find places to respond to THEIR needs/desires? I’m not suggesting you become a pushover (I don’t think that would happen); you could be very firm, and yet very open and flexible with them. I think you need to meet them halfway on some issues…. What ways are you using to find out their attitudes, feelings, difficulties, obstacles, and struggles? In what ways can you adjust on the basis of what you discover?

This could be your experimental class. You are not having these issues with other groups. Why not communicate to this group their “special” status? They’re your project class: puff them up to be your great success story. Pull out all the stops. Use psychological warfare. Make it personal, and do confide in them how well they are doing when they are doing well–and always SEE THEM to be doing well…. (Is that fighting dirty? All’s fair in love, war, and trouble classes….)

We bloggers all pay homage to Winston Weathers

From page 44 of An Alternate Style: Options in Composition:

I, for example, try to capture each day some of the moods/events/thoughts/insights that I have experienced—and though some of my “material” may benefit from a Grammar A articulation, a good deal of it would be robbed of its vitality and immediacy if I did not write it down in Grammar B. Much of my journal writing is creative—not “arty,” not the creative of “creative writing class”—but the creative of immediate unhampered recollection, expression, outpouring—and that creative confrontation of the days of my life more freely comes into existence through Grammar B verbalization than through Grammar A verbalization. That’s what my psyche tells me at least. And I am willing to go along with it.