I’ve always tried to make the beginnings of my class meetings special, to set the stage for the learning encounter that will follow. When classes are separated by 10 minutes and students linger after class (as I welcome and hope they will), that sometimes means that the teacher I follow or the teacher who follows me in that physical location doesn’t have time to get the stage set the way we’d like.
With my online class meetings, that’s not a problem–one of the things I’ve come to love about teaching online.
So I begin admitting students into the Zoom space only after I’ve shared a screen with the title slide for the day. I choose a background for the title slide to set the tone for the day, intellectually or emotionally or ideally both. I also play a song or two so there’s music playing as the students become present in the Zoom space. I start it all up two or three minutes (or more, depending on the length of the song) before the time scheduled for the meeting, so students enter the immersive world of our meeting with the world already in place. Then, once we’ve pretty much all gathered together (I often wait a minute or two past the meeting start time, because I know it can take a few seconds to join the Zoom space), I greet the students with some (hopefully) lively patter, a bit of an overview of the day’s work, maybe a weather report in my radio voice if I’m feeling daffy. Finally, to get us properly started, I ask all the students to wish each other good morning or good afternoon or happy Tuesday (again, depending on my mood, and theirs) into the chat.
So we’re all together in the world that preceded our arrival, and we’ve all sent good wishes to each other in a way that would never be possible in a physical co-location, and we’ve got some music in our minds and a bit of a daffy welcome from the prof. Then there’s often some class business, reminders, etc. And then, when I shift gears into the main lesson for the day, I say, “so if you’re ready for (whatever it is we’ll be doing), please type ‘ready” in the chat.’ Almost always, I’ll tell them what a thrill it is to see that beautiful cascade of readiness (and reaaaddddy!!!!! and woohoo let’s go!! and whatever they feel moved to type) pour down the chat window.
Thus, mutually strengthened for the work ahead, we enter the lesson together.
As a bonus, the title slides from each lesson become a dandy scrapbook, a little souvenir of each meeting. I’ve taken to using these as a montage sequence in the little farewell video I make for the last day of class, the day we each bring to the class a digital “farewell” gift.
Here’s a little gallery of some recent title slides. Looking back, I see some are more graphically effective than others, but they all get the job done, at least. And when I make my little farewell montage for the last day of class, a little movie I run in Zoom (typically with a little fair-use song as a soundtrack), these slides, along with screenshots of RamPage sites and avatars from our discussion Forum, are a reminder of the journey we’ve completed. I can say farewell and, with each student’s avatar onscreen at one point or another, I’m rolling the credits too.
It’s been bittersweet and a tremendous education reading Tom Woodward’s series of “Long Goodbye” posts following his departure from VCU’s ALT Lab for a new position at Middlebury College. I’m part of the story, in the early going anyway, so I can hardly pretend (and won’t try to pretend) I don’t have a personal connection to the ongoing narrative. But it’s also fascinating to read how Tom thinks about the work he’s done and the work he will now do in a new setting. It’s something like a memoir, something like a journal, something like a set of comments in an long piece of computer code. Maybe something like an operating manual, too, though Tom’s a fine teacher and understands that in the end no set of instructions offers simple answers to complex questions.
Tom was the one who taught me the phrase “low threshold, high ceiling” as a way to think about platforms and affordances that offered powerful results right away but could be extended, deepened, and refined into much more complex and sophisticated environments if one had the skills and interest to do so. I do think one can learn to want to want things, so skills and interest can be developed over time, but it’s a long journey and people learn at different rates. It’s just that I wish we could develop a consensus about the need for that journey and that learning, as we’ve obviously done for readig and writing.
It won’t surprise you to know that I think of language as the quintessential “low threshold, high ceiling” medium in our lives. It also won’t surprise you that I strongly believe that facility (or literacy or fluency, pick a word) with language uniquely empowers one not only to communicate effectively but also to imagine one’s own being, and that of others as well, more profoundly.
The alternative would be to have a phrase book in your pocket with 100 easy-to-use phrases that describe common needs and desires. For the rest, you’d have to point and grunt, gesticulate somehow, etc.
And the thing about striking out on a hard but rewarding journey of learning facility with language is that you’ll also be learning more about all the things language does (some of them will surprise you) and all the things it might do (which is where your voice comes in). That’s the meta-layer I prize very highly in all learning. You learn something and at the same time learn something about what it is to learn that thing, about the deeper implications of that thing, about why it matters and how it might be more deeply and beautifully experienced. You learn facility with language and the world turns into a more high-definition experience. I think the high-definition world awaits our facility with language and does not result from it, but we don’t have to engage in a debate about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to agree that there’s a unique richness of experience that one gains access to when one learns to read and write. And part of that richness is what happens when you’re able to share that experience with someone else, and they with you.
So when Tom puts this great image in his post, you might imagine where it takes my thoughts:
For me, having to work through the choices and complexity of something farther out to the right of that continuum means that one will learn not only how to make the Web do more intricate and sophisticated things, but also what “intricate” and “sophisticated” and “Web” mean in terms of this pervasive global light-speed telecommunications environment, a new medium. You learn how to speak Web without a phrase book. And because higher education never really made that leap of learning, and in many cases fought it, we have neither taught our students well nor set a good example ourselves regarding the most powerful communication medium our species has ever built, aside from writing and perhaps even language itself. And the real tragedy is that we might have, and we nearly did, somewhere around the dawn of the widespread Web in the mid-1990s.
I’m on record as saying the sweet spot is somewhere around that “domain of one’s own” area. I was challenged early on by folks who thought that asking people in general (let alone faculty) to run a server of their own was simply asking too much. Maybe that’s true. (I once gave a talk at a school that was running a Domain of One’s Own initiative, and as near as I could tell, only one of the faculty leaders actually had a domain of their own. Depressing but true.) But the core idea, then and now, was that until or unless people had to establish their own address on the Web, they would never feel at home there, and thus never feel empowered or responsible in the way that homeowners must perforce learn to be. To use Tom’s analogy, “you are in a rented apartment and you are not allowed to paint the walls. You can be evicted at any point for any reason and have no recourse.” But of course people want to be on the Web anyway, because we’re social and it’s fun and you can also do work on the Web. So we give ourselves to the landlords, where as it turns out, again quoting Tom, “You pay with your content and by giving them data.”
It is true that building a home on the World Wide Web with your own URL and your own server space can feel like terraforming Mars at first (I’ve been watching The Expanse lately), so maybe the best of all possible worlds, for now, is to have RamPages demonstrate, again and again, what’s possible, and thus extend the range of what’s desirable and imaginable. In that sense, RamPages is much more than a proof of concept. It passed that stage long ago. RamPages is the Zone of Proximal Development. And it is that in large part because Tom Woodward built it that way.
Everyone’s clamoring for critical thinking, bull**** detectors, methodologies for checking sources, increased media literacy, and the like. These are all laudable efforts, so far as they go, but the great paradox of our time is that exhortations to independent thought and cries of “do your own research” seem just about as likely to lead to crazy conspiracy theories as to fact and truth.
I have been thinking for several years about the idea of “dispositions,” the third term in the education trio of “knowledge, skills, and dispositions.” It’s the mysterious member of that set, but also I think the one that, more than reason itself, is the charioteer (to recall the famous analogy from Plato).
Today I ran across these words from George MacDonald, quoted in a delightful anthology of reviews and essays by C. S. Lewis (many of them not collected before, and new to me) called Image and Imagination. The quotation appears in a note, presumably by the volume’s editor, Walter Hooper, explaining a moment in Lewis’s encomium for W. P. Ker. Here’s the quotation, from MacDonald’s 1867 essay “The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture”:
The right teacher would have his pupil easy to please, but ill [that is, hard] to satisfy; ready to enjoy, unready to embrace; keen to discover beauty, slow to say, “Here I will dwell.”
Obviously the above is not an infallible prescription for sifting disinformation from fact and truth. This is perhaps the whole point. No single investigative or evaluative methodology will suffice, not a four- or five-step program for fact-checking, nor the practice of “interrogation” (what a terrifying word) as one seeks to know what’s real. No methodology will suffice, though many methods may be valuable. In the end, one also needs something like the rhythms MacDonald articulates. One needs a certain poised readiness as well as a certain practiced reluctance, and likewise, a practiced readiness and a poised reluctance. These are attitudinal or dispositional orientations, or commitments, or (one might even say) spiritual disciplines.
They are also difficult and exhausting. But in a polarized culture in which hostilities are always one interrogation away from erupting into war, or worse, I think MacDonald’s blend of cautious hospitality and wise forbearance is worth considering as a valuable approach to many things, literary criticism as well as friendship and yes, one’s disposition as one reads or views or hears the latest piece of persuasion.
“15 months, 98 sessions, and some 8,000 takes”: that’s the tally Zachary Woolfe offers in his recent New York Times profile of harpsichordist Scott Ross, who would have turned 70 on March 1 this year. Those marathon figures describe one mammoth recording project: the complete sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. Ross achieved his goal with the release of a 34 CD set of these recordings in 1988. The set was reissued in 2014 by Warner Classics. An artist I had a long conversation with in the fall of 2019 spoke to me of her love for Scarlatti, which led me to Lucas DeBargue’s great piano performances of Scarlatti. Soon I learned that DeBarque’s Scarlatti was by his own admission heavily influenced by Scott Ross , whose performances DeBarque calls “without compare” and “definitive.”
I found the 2014 Ross collection for a very reasonable price, and Christmas 2019 revealed this treasure, ready for the listening, beneath our family’s Christmas tree.
I’m a little sad when I think of that 2019 Christmas. It was the last Christmas we celebrated with my father-in-law, who passed away about a month later. It was also the last time my whole family could be together, as Christmas 2020 was in pandemic time, and the very first time we did not celebrate with our children Ian and Jenny–at least, not in the same physical location. (I am very grateful to Zoom for the reunion we did have.)
Reading the article on Scott Ross, I feel something has come full circle, and I have hope despite the long chill fingers of despair and isolation that seem to have had us all in their grip for so long. Woolfe ends his article with Ross’s words from an interview just before he died, and I am reminded that even one so impatient as I may nevertheless endure what must yet be:
“I have a quality — a vice, perhaps,” he says. “It’s called perseverance, which isn’t the same thing as patience. Patience I don’t possess, but perseverance? You’re talking to someone who recorded 555 Scarlatti sonatas. Well, that didn’t require any patience. I have no patience for anything whatsoever.”
I do believe Barker would chuckle at the title. I hope so. Sandy Paton’s liner notes for Horton Barker, Traditional Singer paint a vivid portrait of Barker’s keen inventive mind:
There’s no stopping him — Horton Barker, sightless since childhood as the result of an accident, Horton Barker is filled with an irrepressible sense of humor.
Even the cane he uses to help him find his way about is given a name and a personality. “I’ll just hitch ‘Old Morgan’ here on the doorknob while we eat. ” “Old Morgan” does considerably more than let Horton know when he’s approaching
a step or an obstacle. He listens to the echo of the tapping metal tip and can surprise you with what it tells him. For instance, he told me when we were passing a car parked fifteen feet or more to one side of our path. As a boy, he would jump off of a cliff into eighty feet of water and then swim back to the base of the cliff, locating it by the echo of a clicking noise made with his tongue.
I wrote yesterday about listening to this recording. Today I’ve been musing over another strong delight: Sandy Paton’s lively, empathetic prose. So I decided to find out a few things about Sandy Paton … and discovered twoobituaries (both in English newspapers) that described an artist of enormous talent whose devotion to folk music led him through a life of what I can only call great philanthropic value–a life characterized by the love of humanity.
Turns out Caroline Paton was herself a folksinger of no small accomplishment. She and Sandy concertized frequently and put out several records themselves, though it seems Sandy was always a little reluctant to use his own label to release family recordings.
As a student of language and a lover of words, I’ve been looking through some of the liner notes (which Folkways has wisely made available as free downloads) to the Folk-Legacy Records releases. The notes to the Sandy and Caroline Paton albums are a kind of episodic memoir, sometimes combining the written voices of Sandy and Caroline in a way hardly less fascinating and pleasing than their voices lifted together in song.
A sample, from the liner notes to their first album for Folk-Legacy, Sandy and Caroline Paton, released in 1966:
BIOGRAPHICAL DATA For those of you who don’t know· us who buy this album “cold”, so to speak – I guess we ought to write something about who we are and how we got this way. Now, I’m usually the one who gets paid for writing notes around here, but, in the past nine years, I’ve gradually begun to get it through my head that it’s an unwise husband who presumes to speak for his wife. I have, therefore, asked Caroline to tell you about herself:
“I grew up in Whiting, Indiana, an industrial suburb of Chicago. Two poets who grew up there, David Wagoner and Jim Hazard, have sometimes turned their critical gaze upon their old home town, and the resulting poems describe Whiting better than I can. I understand that David’s poem, “A Valedictory to Standard Oil of Indiana,” published in the New Yorker (January 1, 1966), caused quite a sensation back home. He now lives in Washington State, and Jim is living in Wisconsin, so it seems that Whiting is the kind of place one might prefer to contemplate from a distance.
“I am the eldest of four children in a closely-knit family. Although my mother has been ill for many years, we had a wonderful family life. This was largely due to the hard work and remarkable temperament of my father, Reuben A. Swenson. He has been a research chemist at American Oil (the new name for Standard Oil) ever since he finished college, and for years he came home from work to start dinner and put clothes in the washer. Dad had to be both parents to the four of us; he is of hearty Swedish-American stock, and had energy and patience equal to the task. He felt that household responsibilities should not keep us from our schoolwork or extra-curricular activities, and he gave us the freedom to develop many interests.
“I first became interested in folk music at summer camps where I was a counselor, and by the time I started college this interest was well-established. After two years at Oberlin I transferred to the University of Chicago, where I got a B.A. I also took off six months from school to go to a work camp in Europe under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee….”
And on it goes, for pages, wry and insightful and sincere and often hilarious. Even the jacket notes are that way, written by Lee Haggerty about the “shotgun” he had to buy to persuade Sandy to make the record.
Here’s a little more, as Sandy describes the song notes that follow his introduction:
THE SONGS
(Caroline and I collaborated on the following notes, but I have an incorrigible tendency to write in the first person, singular, which explains the occasional shift from “we” to “I” and back again. I (we) hope this won’t be too disconcerting.)
And this from Caroline to introduce “Dry Bed,” one of the Patons’ most-requested songs in concert:
Side I; Band 7. I WOKE UP IN A DRY BED
Here is positive proof, as if any were needed, that the great Woody Guthrie could write a song about anything. Please note that the correct title is simply “Dry Bed”,
something we neglected to do before sending the jacket copy off to the printer. Marjorie Guthrie Cooper told us that Woody wrote this song for Arlo, his son, sometime before 1952, when it was first published by Ludlow Music, Inc. The changes we have made in the text evolved, quite by accident, over the years we have been singing the song. We apologize for them, and strongly urge that the listener learn the correct text, which may be found in Folk Sing, edited by Herbert Haufrecht and published by Hollis Music, Inc., in 1959 (reprinted in 1961).
I woke up in a dry bed; Mommy, come see.
I woke up in a dry bed; Daddy, I did.
I woke up in a dry bed, dry feet and a dry head;
I am a big boy now.
Hey, look at my dry bed;
Come feel my dry bed.
My bed’s all dry, dry;
I’m a big boy.
The entire recording, we learn from Sandy, was made in the dead of night:
The recording sessions were held at night, out of absolute necessity. Ours is a ten-party telephone line, but our neighbors are mostly farmers, which means that no one uses it after ten P.M. Our two boys are naturally noisy, and my Malemutes are inclined to join in on choruses at unpredictable times, so we had to wait until all were asleep before we could record without danger of interruption. These sessions proved to be both grueling and hilarious. For instance, Caroline and I once decided that we had taken a particular song too fast and very carefully recorded it again. Timing the two takes later, we discovered that the difference between them was exactly one second out of a total of two hundred and seventy. I’m not even sure, now, which one we ended up using, but I do know that the second run-through sure seemed a lot slower than the first. Often we would get takes that I considered acceptable, at least, and Caroline would find something wrong with them, and vice versa. At last, we both realized that we were agonizing over the “infinity complex” that frequently plagues artists of all kinds. Under its influence, a man can go on working on the same painting for years and never consider it finished; there is always one little detail that needs reworking. This is the compulsion to perfection that can keep paintings hanging indefinitely in an artist’s studio, novels in manuscript form, or whittle huge blocks of well-seasoned walnut into elaborately carved toothpicks. It’s a damnable disease.
There are twenty-three single-spaced pages of this stuff. Lyrics, certainly, but primarily notes, writing so full of character that it amounts to a third layer of accompaniment for the guitar and singing.
Sandy Paton passed away in July, 2009. Caroline Paton passed away almost a decade later, in March, 2019. Her obituary led me to this short video from 1975, a moving portrait of the Patons’ life and work together:
And for a lagniappe, to bring us back to Horton Barker, here’s something quite astonishing: an Artificial Intelligence-based musical video remix of Barker’s “Wondrous Love.” From the French composer Benoit Carré. Perhaps not to all tastes, but that it even exists is a wonder to me. (And I freely confess I find it weirdly compelling, an uncanny representation of part of how I feel when I listen to the original recording.)
Every now and then I hear a voice that makes me grateful for embodiment itself, dangerous and disappointing as this mortal vessel can be sometimes. Early September 2019, just a few weeks before embodiment turned treacherous as the pandemic took hold, I heard such a voice.
I was watching Festival, a documentary about the Newport Folk Festival. I’m not often enthusiastic about the folk music revival of the 1960s, but this film was different somehow. Perhaps it was the sheer variety of folk and their musics. Perhaps it was the folksong “clinic” Bob Dylan turned up for, before he had become Bob Dylan. Without a doubt, it was hearing Son House talk about the blues, and hearing Mike Bloomfield talk about Son House. I’d say it was impossible to top those voices. Anytime I hear Son House sing, I hear the music of the spheres.
There was, though, and to my surprise, an equally revelatory moment, when a blind Appalachian singer named Horton Barker stepped up to sing “Pretty Sally.” It was a very brief moment, only an excerpt, but I knew instantly I had heard something bright with meaning. I knew I had been changed.
Months passed, and I kept thinking about Horton Barker. For Christmas 2020, I ordered the original Smithsonian Folkways album from a Discogs seller. It’s in near-mint condition, still in its shrink wrap, its stout jacket and apparently mimeographed typewritten booklet perfectly intact. And for those who don’t have turntables, the album is available as a custom CD and as a digital download from the Folkways site.
Yesterday I put the record on and listened to the first two tracks, “Wayfaring Stranger” and ‘Wondrous Love.”
Then I had to stop. My cheeks were wet with tears and I needed to process what I had just experienced. In his blindness, with a pure tenor voice and an Appalachian accent much like the ones I heard growing up and still hear in my voice today, Horton Barker sings each song as if he wrote it himself, mingling luminous intensity and joyful exuberance, with the precise aim of striking my soul with glory, as this music has evidently struck his.
People speak idly of “technology.” Yesterday I visited the dead. Or was it rather a visitation from a life beyond life, lifting me from the grave, raising me so I, too, can sing on?
A brief howl from me, of ever-naive outrage, over the damagingly sloppy vocabulary that seems to grow like kudzu. Perhaps “metastasize” would be a better word than “grow.” Perhaps read “defiantly misleading” for “damagingly sloppy.”
In what follows, I’m talking about post-secondary education. Elementary and secondary education are different. I get that.
You’ll have noticed that in post-secondary education, “remote” learning is a word that’s come to distinguish online-because-the-pandemic-makes-us-be-online from the modality formerly known as “online learning.” I guess “online learning,” by contrast, means a permanent, baked-in revenue-generating dream modality for running robo-courses–I mean, course “templates” that are endlessly replicated at low cost to the institution, with low-paid labor to produce, tend, and propagate the replications. Oh.
Yet many “remote” educators are learning to use the new medium effectively, in ways that don’t mean isolation or alienation. Some had been working in that medium quite successfully for many years.
You’ll have noticed that the-non-remote-classes-in-physical-rooms are now referred to as “in-person” classes, as in this sentence from a recent hortatory email:
“[Our university’s] return to in-person learning is so very important for our students’ well-being and academic success.”
But there’s nothing for me to return to, as all my online classes are in-person classes. That’s me on the Zoom, live and in-person. Those are my students on the Zoom, in the chat, on the discussion forum, on their RamPage sites. We’re all there in-person.
Most of the learning spaces I’ve been in provide very poorly, if at all, for the supposed magic of being co-located. A state-mandated prison-spec windowless classroom has less character than a well-lighted Zoom conference. A lectern with a touch-pad control for a projector-and-screen combo is much less flexible and, I’d argue, conveys much less human connection and warmth than I can when I share a screen on Zoom during a synchronous class, or see my students there, not in front of a white sheet of reflective material, but in the medium with me, lighting up the chat, sharing links, sharing the simple camaraderie of a hearty “good morning” as class begins.
I’d say we need better terms than “in-person” and “face-to-face”–especially the latter, if we’re still masked when we walk into those arid rooms again, as it’s likely we will be. Truthfully, we’ve needed better terms for a long time. Or have the wrong terms proved, well, somehow useful for the bottom line, whatever it might be?
<deep breath>
What of myself do I bring to the encounter? What of my students’ selves do I ask that they bring to the encounter? Those questions have been renewed for me during this terrible yet revelatory time.
As Bob Dylan once sang (and Jimi Hendrix sang even better), “So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”
Blog networks can make for great distributed conversations. They’re like time-lapse videos of the distributed conversations taking place, much more slowly, between books in a library.
Sometimes you may even find yourself talking to yourselves, as the distributed conversation enters a wormhole and emerges into liminal spaces where some part of you still speaks on the threshold, even now, even though you long ago crossed that threshold into sorrow and willed forgetfulness. Isolation.
This morning I got an alert via email:
I wrote and published “Conjectures, Dilemmas, Hospitality, Humility” on February 14, 2014, on a Valentines Day seven years and several selves ago. I was VCU’s Vice Provost for Learning Innovation and Student Success then, as well as Dean of VCU’s University College, a bona fide degree-granted academic unit (we conferred the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies degree–about which more later). I had just learned that the provost who’d hired me, Dr. Bev Warren, was going to Kent State University to become their president. That knowledge was the first of several revelations that would culminate in my “stepping down” from my position, as the saying goes, two years and two months later.
Clocks are always ticking somewhere, even if you can’t hear them.
Rewind.
Later on February 14, 2014, my friend and former colleague Andy Rush linked to my post on his blog (the wittily named And He Blogs). It’s a fascinating post that I missed at the time.
Timeline confusing? To recap: today (February 24, 2021) I received the “pingback” about the link Andy had made seven years ago to my 2014 post. Today I read Andy’s post from seven years ago, for the first time. And today I re-read my own post, the one Andy linked to, for the second time.
It’s always strange to re-read my own writing, especially on a blog I’ve kept for nearly seventeen years, one that came into being to record my explorations of a new medium and a new role–at the time, July 2004, I was Assistant Vice-President for Teaching and Learning Technologies at the newly-named University of Mary Washington, formerly Mary Washington College.
It’s fine to say that titles don’t matter. In many ways, that’s true. But it’s what the titles point to that matters. The responsibilities. The budget (if you’re lucky). The team you can assemble, encourage, wrangle (sometimes), get of out the way of (if they’re the right team). The team you can lead. The work you can help shepherd, nourish, bring into being.
And it’s the self that responds to the role, that may indeed fully emerge only in response to the role, that echoes down the years to me now. That’s the was-me that still is-me, sure, but only in this Lenten season am I once more determined to bring that self home and respect its claims on me. Today, a message from an earlier self inspires this post to my current and future selves.
We often talk about what we would say to our younger selves, given the perspective of the years, the learnings, the wounds, and perhaps the wisdom we have gained. Today, through the vagaries of a slow-moving pingback that reached me seven self-light-years later, I say to the Gardo of February 14, 2014: come home. Teach me again.
Last fall I was privileged to teach a fiction-into-film adaptation course that studied just one work of fiction: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I’ve taught Little Women as a case study in adaptation for many years, but always as part of several case studies in a course, never as the sole focus. Last fall, it was Little Women and only Little Women, so there was more time to analyze the novel in detail as well as to analyze the four main sound-era film adaptations (1933, 1949, 1994, 2019) and a couple of TV adaptations as well (a BBC production from 1970, and a US television production from 1978). We were very fortunate to have W. W. Norton & Company’s beautiful and reasonably priced The Annotated Little Women as our textbook–and to have the senior editor at Norton, Ms. Amy Cherry–come to class via Zoom one day to talk to my students about book publishing, Little Women, and careers in editing and production. Special thanks are due to the world’s greatest publishing sales rep, Ms. Mary Helen Willet, who encouraged me all the way and connected me with Ms. Cherry.
It was truly magical to spend the entire semester immersed in one novel and its many transformations into cinema and television. For me, and for most of the students, Alcott’s novel became a true companion, and each adaptation another chance to encounter Alcott’s vision or, inevitably, ways in which Alcott’s vision was altered or even traduced as it was prepared for yet another audience.
As is often the case, I am both thrilled and frustrated by the first time I teach a course. There’s an undeniable energy in that first attempt, and sometimes even the panicked moments yield surprising insights (and insightful surprises). The second time, of course, I have a chance to address my mistakes from the first time, which also trying hard not to fix something that was not in fact broken. You’ might think I could tell the difference pretty easily and consistently–but you’d think that only if you’ve never tried to teach a course.
Little Women is not a perfect book; those books don’t exist, of course. But it is, I think, a kind of foundation-book, an eerily powerful vision, a book full of love, full of compromises, full of contradictions, full of the strangest and most exhilarating and most powerful experience most of us will ever have: the experience of family.
I’ll be teaching the course later this year, this time as a summer course. To be honest, I can’t wait.
Here’s the course description:
ENGL 385 Fiction into Film: The Ongoing Legacy of Little Women
President Theodore Roosevelt said he “worshipped” Little Women. Simone de Beauvoir reported she “identified … passionately with Jo” and “shared her horror of sewing and housekeeping and her love of books.” Cynthia Ozick said she read Little Women “ten thousand” times. Barbara Kingsolver insisted, simply, “I, personally, am Jo March, and her author Louisa May Alcott had a whole new life to live for the sole pursuit of talking me out of it, she could not.” Camille Paglia, in a dissenting opinion, stated that “the whole thing is like a horror movie to me.”
And the most important statistic for our purposes in this course of study: Little Women has been adapted for film or television over 20 times, from 1917 to 2019.
It’s hard to think of another American novel, or of any novel at all, that has such a long and influential legacy in film and popular culture. Its author, Louisa May Alcott, dismissively referred to Little Women and its sequels as “moral pap for the young.” Yet the book is still read, and movies are still made of it, and each new adaptation teaches us something not only about strategies of literary adaptation but also, and crucially, something about the role of women in the cultural context in which Alcott lived and in which each of the adaptations was undertaken.
Together we’ll read and analyze Alcott’s novel—as art, as biography, as fantasy, as feminism, as livelihood—as well as its many adaptations, with an emphasis on the 1933, 1949, 1994, and 2019 cinematic adaptations. In addition to a final course project, we’ll use reflective blogs, a discussion forum, and online annotation to explore the literary, cinematic, and cultural phenomenon that is Little Women.
Here’s the course trailer I made for last fall’s offering. I hope you enjoy it.
Bulls***-sensitivity is the ability to distinguish pseudo-profound bulls*** sentences (e.g. “Your movement transforms universal observations”) from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new”). Although bulls***-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet been shown to predict any actual behavior. We therefore conducted a survey study with over a thousand participants from a general sample of the Swedish population and assessed participants’ bulls***-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven bulls*** sentences) and profoundness-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven genuinely profound sentences), and used these variables to predict two types of prosocial behavior (self-reported donations and a decision to volunteer for charity). Despite bulls***-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity being positively correlated with each other, logistic regression analyses showed that profoundness-receptivity had a positive association whereas bulls***-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior. These relations held up for the most part when controlling for potentially intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, time spent completing the survey, sex, age, level of education, and religiosity. The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.
[Redactions mine.]
My concern, which will surprise no one who knows me, is that I am not entirely sure that “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new” is genuinely profound. I don’t see much depth there. I agree with the sentiment, I think, but it’s banal. By contrast, if one doesn’t find the abstractions off-putting, “Your movement transforms universal observations” may have a certain teasing or enigmatic quality. It does for me. I’m not sure I’d end up thinking it genuinely profound, but at least I don’t hear the wheeze of cliché about it.
So am I more or less BS receptive, more or less prosocial? I don’t know. Also, I don’t live in Sweden, though I have visited there.
