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As I’ve continued my Lenten discipline of giving up silence here on Gardner Writes, I’ve realized all along that I’d need to tell some stories, somehow, about my encounters with third rails. They include, but are not limited to, the following:

• scolding adults for playing with matches in a dormitory during a summer program
• expressing my serious doubts about whether there should include an entry for “God” in The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (to be sure, a microcosm of many other concerns I had during that project)
• trying to fix an Apple Talk network in a writing center computer lab (no, I wasn’t electrocuted–these are figurative third rails)
• accepting a promotion
• trying to figure out if a non-profit organization was actually chartered or not (multiple times) and trying to figure out why it was hard to get that information from the staff (multiple times)
• trying to encourage a “well-oiled machine” to become more of a site for innovation and program development
• getting a leadership certificate from a program designed for chairs of boards of directors for non-profit organizations
• leading an effort to revise a general education curriculum

There are others.

The point here is not that I’ve been unlucky. I’ve been very lucky, and very unlucky; on balance, the lucky breaks have been far more numerous. But touching the third rail is always a shock, and I seem to have an instinct for it (if “instinct” is defined as “moth-to-flame”). I know better now, but that’s not much use really, though I do try to forgive myself for all my blunders, and above all, for not knowing better at the time. All of that said, the things I tried to do, I believe I tried to do in good faith, and I believe they are things well worth trying to do. If I have grown skeptical about whether, finally, there is anything to be done … well, some days I’m more hopeful than others.

Milton once wrote that not everyone is fit to be a champion for the truth, and Johnny boy, I feel that, yes I do, and I’m not even sure it was the truth, though I tried to be discerning. On the other hand, as Jerry Garcia said, “Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.” So there’s that.

Always good news and bad news.

Good news: many of my students are doing top-notch work, and many of my students who aren’t quite to that level of accomplishment are nevertheless diligent and engaged and often very playful and insightful and inspiring. Every semester I get to watch those blooms emerge, try to encourage the flowering, and try to stay out of the way where that’s appropriate.

Bad news: some students will have that day of reckoning that will define how well they will do by the end of term. Some are in denial; some will stay that way. A few will give up, and a few of those will just ghost me. I try everything I can think of, short of knocking on their front doors. (That seems invasive and maybe even enabling, to me, and it’s out of the question in pandemic time, certainly.) Some have lives that are spinning, or have spun, out of control. For them, I often advise taking the term off if possible. Anything is better than losing time and money while digging oneself into an ever-deepening hole that no ladder can reach down into. At the same time, I always hope and I always encourage hope when it’s warranted–and it’s a tricky business indeed to know when to say “cut your losses.”

Part of the way school is structured today, however, works against the student’s own agency in these matters. There have always been parental pressures, financial pressures, life upheavals, and the sheer uncertainty of so much of what a college degree problem can entail. (Where else are you asked to devote time to study, to reflection, to reading and writing? These are not simply instrumental goods, but they can seem horribly beside the point when one has pressures and upheavals.) Now, however, I do see a change in the way coursework itself is understood by some of my students. Some, by no means all, maybe only a few, but a number that seems to be growing, expect that a course of study will have a prescribed bolus of work that may be completed on any schedule and turned in at any time–or rather, made up at any time. I get students near the end of term who’ve been running out of runway for weeks suddenly asking me if I have any extra credit work they can do. No, I reply: I have work for credit, and I’ve assigned it all along, with a design principle that holds that learning is not about filling my wheelbarrow with what I’ve asked them to bring to me. No, my learning design is curriculum writ small: these activities, in this order, with this duration or persistence or consistency, so that the learning is introduced, consolidated, extended, re-introduced re-consolidated, further extended, and brought into the realm of understanding, which Jerome Bruner defines as “going beyond the information given.”

When high schools put together “credit recovery” packets that allow students to be absent for weeks and then complete the class by plowing through a set of worksheets, the expectation generalizes, and some of my students think that’s what classwork or coursework is. (My skepticism about “competency-based learning” is largely liberal-arts driven, and particularly dubious about the worksheets, tests, and other means of assessing “competency.” But that’s another blog post.)

So I don’t know. But I’ll tell you: the thing about my courses that seems hardest for the students who’re used to delivering packets of coursework in this manner is my requirement that students post to our discussion forum and blog on our WordPress multisite platform: RamPages. This requirement is purely a class participation requirement. I do not grade the forum posts or the RamPages reflections individually. I have no expectation for length, and I’ve told students that they don’t need to spend more than fifteen minutes a day, if that, posting the forum. Maybe a half hour on the weekends for the RamPage reflection. But the amounts don’t seem to be the problem. It’s the character of what I’m requiring. What I am looking for–and I tell this to the students over and over–is consistency of participation in ways that are interesting, substantive, and relevant to the course. I tell them that I understand “relevant” very widely, though it’s a good idea to use the opportunities to post about what we’re discussing in class at least some of the time.

It’s the consistency throughout the semester that stumps the students who want to give me work instead of commit to a course of study. It’s the pure ungraded class participation with a very wide definition of what constitutes participation that seems most difficult, that moves against the grain. It feels as if they don’t want to be in a learning community, or don’t have any real, lived sense of what it means to commit to a course of study over the term. Even if it’s so easy to do so that the only way to fail is just to not show up at all.

I ponder these things. But I know this: when we do a course of study together, it’s a journey, an experience, a life, not a landfill.

See you tomorrow.

Today was not a terribly good day. I’m well, so far as I can tell, so that’s not it. I didn’t carry a ton of bricks around, at least not the kind you’d build a house with. I worked hard at some prep for tomorrow’s classes, some reading and Big Thinking and some video editing. Two scenes from Dog Day Afternoon, with each shot separated from the other so we can study the editing: the Leon sequence near the middle of the movie, and the climactic ending. (Mild enough not to be true spoilers, I promise.) I discovered that one student has not handed in the first reading exam. I wonder if emailing the student will work this time. It didn’t before, not really.

Maybe I’m just a bit toasty, a little fried. Maybe it’s almost a year since the last time I didn’t worry very much about an imminent viral threat. Almost a year since I ate at the local sublime Mexican restaurant just a couple of miles away, the one with great food but also, and now especially, a warm and friendly wait staff that always greeted us with extraordinary hospitality, the kind of welcome that would put a beautiful glow on a bad day and bring heaven itself to a rousing cadence after a good day. It all seems like a dream now.

I’ve had my ups and downs, but nothing like what many people have suffered. Still, the sense of futility laced with rage (and more bad swears than I’d want you to know about) keeps recurring. Two articles from the Atlantic help me mourn what the world has endured over the last year. They make me grateful, again, for the soul food that deep, honest, skillful writing can provide.

I’ve had so much trouble remembering certain things lately that Ellen Cushing’s “Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain” came as a relief. It seems that going blank is going around.

Sometimes I grasp at a word or a name. Sometimes I walk into the kitchen and find myself bewildered as to why I am there. (At one point during the writing of this article, I absentmindedly cleaned my glasses with nail-polish remover.) Other times, the forgetting feels like someone is taking a chisel to the bedrock of my brain, prying everything loose. I’ve started keeping a list of questions, remnants of a past life that I now need a beat or two to remember, if I can remember at all: What time do parties end? How tall is my boss? What does a bar smell like? Are babies heavy? Does my dentist have a mustache? On what street was the good sandwich place near work, the one that toasted its bread? How much does a movie popcorn cost? What do people talk about when they don’t have a global disaster to talk about all the time? You have to wear high heels the whole night? It’s more baffling than distressing, most of the time.

That little coda in the last sentence says it all. I’m so very glad Ms. Cushing wrote that article, in that way, for us, now. It’s a terrific article in both senses of that adjective, and there are some new TikTok videos I’ll be checking out when I recover a few of my cerebral wrinkles. I want to read Ms. Cushing’s article again. I don’t want to forget about it. I record it here, now, to help me remember.

The other article is also about forgetting but even more about remembering, and being haunted by memory. It’s called “We Have to Grieve Our Last Good Days,” and it’s written by Julie Beck. Even the title calls to me, iambic tetrameter with a spondee at the end that’s both bracing and melancholy. The article makes it clear that even the lucky ones mourn and are worn away by this grief we share:

I find myself wanting to apologize whenever I show sadness. I’m incredibly lucky, and I know it. I’m not sick, I have a job, I live with a person I love whom I can touch. No one I know has died from the virus. I’ve lost nothing this year but the life I used to know. Which everyone else has lost, too.

But it’s too much, isn’t it? To carry this weight and politely pretend that it doesn’t make us stumble because others are carrying more? “What that does is set up a competition of whose loss is better and whose loss is worthy,” Devine said. “As if there is a finite amount of sadness in the world and you shouldn’t take more than your share.” She thinks that we can respect all the different losses people are experiencing without suggesting that they’re equal. “When we normalize and respect our own losses, that gives us the energy to respect other losses. When we’re stingy, that’s when we get into compassion warfare.” Those who’ve lost “more” resent those who’ve lost “less,” while those who’ve lost “less” may think they don’t have permission to mourn.

Our last times are losses, and they need to be grieved along with everything else. Boss suggested some kind of ritual: “Burn a candle; put a balloon in the air. Someone should be with you, or if they can’t be, tell them. The way we deal with grief is to share it with someone else. You dishonor it by not noticing it as a loss.” These small, private griefs add up: If we each lit a candle for each of our last times, the whole world would be on fire.

Many times during the last twelve months it’s seemed to me that the world is on fire, with a blaze that makes a mockery of candlelight. But there were terrors and injustices aplenty before. How is this different? Why has my brain turned to murk?

“Therapists told me that this grief can manifest in many ways we may not recognize as grief—anger, irritability, sleep disruption, anxiety, even digestive issues. And it can manifest as dwelling on the Last Good Day.”

Ms. Beck explains the concept of the Last Good Day in her beautiful essay. I commend it to you. In this season of Lent, the reminder that I come from dust, and to dust I shall return, feels less like a memento mori and more like the baseline I have to try to rise above each day.

See you tomorrow.

Building on this post:

I have a workflow for my synchronous Zoom sessions. It’s very much like a cinematic workflow–or at least the analogy is illuminating for me:

1. pre-production, in which I scout and gather the material, assemble my storyboards (my PPT slides), which in this case are also kind of a “script,” though I don’t write out what I’m going to say,
2. production, the live-in-the-studio synchronous session, with my PPT slides as a set of storyboards and my own riffing as what a director might do on location on the day of the shoot, guided by the storyboards
3. post-production, in which I take the Zoom recording, the “storyboards,” and the Zoom chat transcript and prepare them for “release,” i.e., posting to the LMS (yes, this part does involve an LMS, at least for now).

It occurred to me today, in large part because I read Jon Udell’s marvelous and re-inspiring back-to-the-future post, that when I do that post-production, it’s a little like what happens when a director and cast and crew look at what what used to be called “the dailies” or “the rushes,” the footage shot that day (or the prior day, back in photochemical times). It’s the raw footage that accumulates from a day’s work. It’s a way to assess what you’ve got, what you might need to redo, what you should plan to do next.

When I edit the Zoom sessions, then, and amass and prepare the associated materials for upload, I’m reviewing the “dailies’ from the day’s class meetings. And when I do that, I’m creating and encountering a massive feedback loop for myself, as I’m reviewing and revisiting the day’s teaching as well as the chat backchannel (sometimes so lively I can’t track it in real time) as well as all the things I thought I was going to do when I was in pre-production. As all that happens, I’m also casting my thoughts ahead to the next class, and already in my mind I’m drafting the continuity as well as the new materials for that next session.

It’s a much more mindful and continuous process than I can recall from pre-pandemic times, to the extent I can actually recall those times (it’s getting harder, as this article helps me understand). It’s a more immersive process. I also find that each day’s classes become more inspiring to prepare and also more exhausting to experience, though when I’m in the live session the adrenaline kicks in–and when the chat lights up during the session, I get very excited indeed. (The chat often responds to my excitement by becoming even more energetic–I love that.)

In sum, more of a ramble today, for which my apologies. But I wanted to get some of these ideas down, even in rough shape. (My blog posts are also “dailies” of a kind, I guess.) I recall Alan Kay’s maxim that we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us. I find the cinematic stages of my own experiments in online teaching have begun to do the same to me. It doesn’t feel like a rut at all–at least, not yet. Instead, it feels like I’m comprehending my own efforts better than I have to now. At the same time, I’m using my comprehension immersively, in a strange but rewarding loop, inhabiting my own cognition and creativity in a deeper and more extensive way.

All very meta, and sometimes more than a little exhausting. Also, exciting. Now showing on the Gardo Cinematech: Thought Vectors In Concept Space: A Teaching-Learning Odyssey. Now In Imax.

I’m delighted to share this piece with you, published today in Campus Technology online. Mary Grush has done several of these Q&A pieces with me, and I’m always very grateful for the opportunity. Mary has a particular way of asking questions that are invitational. She listens carefully to what I have to say, then asks follow-on questions that start to shape and focus my responses, just the way a good teacher can begin to elicit work from the student that’s sharper and more interesting the longer the questions continue. The result is better than anything I would have accomplished without that leading.

When Mary and I discussed the article, we remembered that it had been about ten years since our first conversation. Where has that time gone? In this case, for me it’s gone into a marvelously reciprocal relationship with a very gifted editor. Working with Mary has been one of the great delights of my post-2003 career–the career that took me by surprise. Perhaps the career that’s not yet quite done.

Thank you, Mary.

https://soundcloud.com/lschwart/mixolyread-into-e-drone?in=lschwart/sets/aurika

Live at the Visual Art Studio, September 6, 2019. Robin McLeod electric guitar, Louis Schwartz amplified acoustic guitar, Gardner Campbell bass, Dave Ellis percussion. Composition and recording: Louis Schwartz. Mastering: Gardner Campbell.

To date my only gig with Aurika. The regular bass player returned for the next months’ gigs, and just when it looked like a sub-spot might come my way again, it was pandemic time.

I have vivid memories of playing this night. The venue was small and the four of us were pretty tightly assembled in the corner next to the shop window that looks out on Broad Street, just a few blocks down from VCU. When you’re that close together, listening is not just listening, and getting the feel of a jam is not just a metaphor.

About 5:36 into the track something starts to happen. I heard something in Louis’ playing, a little arc of a plaintive melody. A little yearning moment. Robin was mirroring the arc in a descant. Dave started to leave more space for the melodies, focusing on the backbeat, and then did a quick little fill. And that’s when I knew, I felt it: I will help to shape this moment, now.

5:48. I start to go up chromatically, higher and higher, with more rapid notes. And as I do this, I hear that we have all heard what I have heard, and that we all know, right then, that we will shape this moment, now. Hammering ostinatos in the guitars, crushing tight chords, percussion focusing and reinforcing what I’m doing, up we go, and I hear it again: I will help to shape the end of this moment.

I play three long descending notes as Robin and Louis trill on either end of the hinged moment. Dave hears exactly what I’m doing, moves from one more measure of flurried notes to a strong and final

One

Two

Three….

Then a pickup eighth note and we’re back in.

6:12-6:13 or so, and the moment is done. Robin’s trills ascend and we follow.

I remember this moment happening. I remember the decisions I made, and when I made them, and yet it also sounds to me now as if my decisions were coming from somewhere else. It’s not just that we were all playing together, all listening together. I feel as if we all heard one thing, and by playing along, we transcribed what we heard into what we played. That seems a very fanciful description–very woo-woo, as I read it now. But you tell me: how can I have been there, and done that, and remember doing that, yet feel such a mystery about the agency of it all?

It was indeed an ecstasy, a standing beside myself.

I hope you can hear at least a little of that as you listen.

To Louis, Robin, Dave, to the Visual Art Studio, and to a warm September evening on Broad Street in Richmond, Virginia: my thanks. May we meet again in the aftertimes.

Let’s back up a couple of days, and review the last sentence of this comment. The words are Alan Levine’s.

Yes, they do. I keep thinking about these small acts, the good mornings and the readys and the proceeds and the one I asked them to do just yesterday in my film class: CUT! We were beginning the lesson on editing, which means we were going to learn about the most common way of joining two shots together: the cut. Turns out this powerful editing method is also nearly impossible to see, until you train your eyes–what my film students this term are calling their “film eyes”–to see them. (Any symbolic meaning there is purely intentional, but blame the universe, not me.)

I think about these small acts in at least two ways: filling the tapestry, and establishing ritual.

“Filling the tapestry” comes from Alfred Hitchcock, who spoke of this concept in an interview with Francois Truffaut. Truffaut had asked Hitchcock about a bystander in a particular shot, a woman at the side of the frame who was eating an apple. No lines, and no other action. Just eating an apple.

F. Truffaut: [Y]our pictures are very elaborate throughout….

A. Hitchcock: They’re elaborate in an oblique way; yes, they are.

F.T.: They’re so elaborate that it’s difficult to believe that these things just happen to be in your films. If so, they must be credited to a powerful cinematic instinct. Here’s another instance of what I mean: When [in I Confess] Montgomery Clift leaves the courtroom, he is surrounded by a hostile crowd of people in a lynching mood. And just behind Clift, next to Otto Keller’s lovely wife, who is obviously upset, we see a … woman eating an apple, and looking on with an expression of malevolent curiosity.

A.H. That’s absolutely right; I especially worked that woman in there; I even showed her how to eat that apple.

F.T. Well, what I’m trying to bring out is that these elaborate details are generally overlooked by the public because all the attention is focused on the major characters in the scene. Therefore, you put them in for your own satisfaction and, of course, for the sake of enriching the film.
A.H. Well, we have to do those things; we fill the whole tapestry, and that’s why people often feel they have to see the picture several times to take in all of these details. Even if some of them appear to be a waste of effort, they strengthen a picture. That’s why, when these films are reissued several years later, they stand up so well; they’re never out of date.

These small acts are a way of filling the tapestry. And of course by filling the tapestry, students begin to see that this required course, this course that fit their schedule, this course that they parachuted into willy-nilly and never thought for a moment would be anything other than coursework and a grade … might well be a tapestry. A tapestry that they have helped to fill.

The other way I have learned to think about these small acts is that they are rituals. Motifs. Reminders. The rituals locate us in time and space, especially for those moments in which we are together there. (For a synchronous Zoom meeting, we are certainly together in time and space even if we are not in the same physical room.) The rituals also give us a strong set of shared experiences that are not tasks so much as they are acknowledgments and preparations. Like a nod of recognition, or a smile at a neighbor as you go out to check the mailbox, or the greeting I used to give the folks at the pizza place where I’d get my lunchtime slice in the before-time, these are rituals. Some are small, and some are mighty. Some rituals transcend being, some concentrate being, and some do both. Rituals are both intimate and utterly transpersonal.

The key, as I have learned from my friend Louis, is kavanah. That’s the Hebrew word for ritual that’s fully inhabited, fully meant, and thus fully meaningful. Kavanah is the energy coursing through our good mornings and our readys and our intro music and our farewell gifts.

Do the students realize all of these things? I don’t speak about such things directly, or even hint at them much. I’m sure some of them never notice. I’m also sure some of them do … and I know for sure that I do. And if I’m the only one feeling the kavanah on a particular day, it’s still what I yearn to feel, because I know it makes me a better teacher.

So I ask for kavanah, and I seek to fill the tapestry, and I want us to do that together. I ask for a good morning. I require an avatar. And lately, I’ve come to insist that anyone who blogs in my courses must have a tagline for their blog site. We’re nearly at midterm, and there are still some students who have the default tagline on their RamPage: “Just another Rampages.us site.” I bet I’ve asked my students five or six times to change those taglines to something else. I’ve emailed them with instructions. I’ve been stern but kind, like Maria in The Sound of Music.

But the kids are alright. (I can call them “kids” at my age, can’t I? With affection, never with condescension. I often envy them, after all.) Many of them have already caught on. Many of them have learned from each other’s examples. And there’s time, plenty of time, for everyone to fill the tapestry. I won’t forget.