A belated response, and some penultimate thoughts on this book.

When it comes to Steiner’s Lessons of the Masters, Oook is right on all counts, in my view. (Great set of Steiner aphorisms on Wikiquote, too–many thanks, oook, for the link.) To awe, regret, and irritation, though, I’ll add a feeling of immense satisfaction, in the sense that Steiner gets at the depths of the experience of teaching and learning in ways few writers do. I don’t know, but I wonder, whether some of the feeling of “stuck-ness” folks overtaking folks like Will Richardson comes from a nagging sense that much edu-chatter, to which I’ve added much chattering of my own, is fine so far as it goes but doesn’t go nearly far enough.

What does “far enough” mean? Is it a radical re-thinking of the entire enterprise, a la Illich? Is it an unwearying critique of meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss thinking, a la Stephen Downes? Is it patient, insightful, inspiring narratives of the teaching experience, a la Barbara Ganley or Steve Greenlaw?

Yes. Many times yes.

For me this morning, thinking about teaching and learning and Steiner’s magisterial survey of how those activities have been imagined and portrayed in human culture, “far enough” means also intensively, obsessively focused on relationship, charisma, passion, intensity, the fire in a teacher’s belly and the light in a student’s eyes. So far as I can tell, these are in some respects unfashionable thoughts, but I come to them via my own experience, not just as a teacher, but as a student. I hear again and again that we must not teach as we were taught. I recoil from that instruction. My students would be most fortunate if I could, indeed, teach as I was taught, for I had masterful teachers whom I struggle to channel in my own teaching every day.

I know I am not alone. Pick up a memoir, and look to see the teachers who changed the writer’s life, often with something entirely informal or even casual, like pinning an artwork onto a bulletin board. That’s how Robert Hughes saw his first De Chirico, back in his Catholic high school in Australia in the 1950’s. Of course that casual gesture was the overspill of his teacher’s active, questing mind, one that constantly left bread crumbs for his students, furnishing their experience with every succulent intellectual morsel in his cupboard. As the Richardsons once said of Milton’s poetry, the teacher obviously strove to surround his students with sense, to charge their environment with meaning, attention, passion, to make all moments potentially transformative.

That’s a high standard, but I’ve known teachers who could do it. I’ve seen it happen. I remember what it was like to be, not in “a” classroom, but in their classroom. Sometimes the air was so charged at the end of a class meeting that I could not imagine another teacher being bold enough to enter that space.

Steiner’s book is satisfying for me because it insists on the power of these human interactions as absolutely fundamental to a deep understanding of teaching and learning.

“[Leonard Bernstein] congratulating Nadia Boulanger, internationally celebrated teacher and musician, after she became the first woman to conduct the Orchestra in a full concert, February, 1962” (from “The Bernstein Years,” booklet included with the boxed set of Bernstein conducting the NY Philharmonic in Beethoven’s nine symphonies).

One of Steiner’s more haunting examples is that of Nadia Boulanger. I’m fascinated by larger-than-life personalities generally, and Boulanger has always been one of those who fascinated me most. (In fact, now might be a good time for me to seek out a biography–can anyone point me to a good one?) She taught a staggering array of the most important musicians of the twentieth century. Their chorus of praise for her was almost unanimous. Here’s what Steiner says about this master:

No one who has not been a Boulanger pupil can articulate what must have been the spell of her teaching. The dicta tend to be of monumental generality: ‘I don’t believe in the teaching of aesthestics unless it is combined with a personal interchange.” To her Radcliffe choristers: “Do not merely the best you can; do better than you can!” “May I have the power to exchange my best with your best.” Or, in 1945,: “The teacher is but the humus in the soil. The more you teach, the more you keep in contact with life and its positive results. All considered, I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and the beneficiary.” Ten years later: “When I teach, I throw out the seeds. I wait to see who grabs them … Those who do grab, those who do something with them, they are the ones who will survive. The rest, pfft!” And in the Musical Journal for May 1970: “One can never train a child carefully enough … we must do everything we can for the one who can do very much, and it is unfair to our human justice. But human justice is a small justice” (how Plato and Goethe would have agreed).

Plenty to argue with there, and yet for me there are home truths that burn in all these quotations. Agency, inspiration, dramatic and stealthy and oversize and subtle encounters with master and apprentice learners in highly charged contexts, a sense of occasion and a drive toward meaning: these may be monumentally general dicta, as Steiner observes, but they are too often overlooked in ed-talk. Without them, however, I hear tinkling gongs and clanging cymbals. I have no quarrel with second things like workforce preparation, credentialling, assessment, issues of scaling and sustainability and support. These are vital things. But they are, finally, always, second things. When they serve first things, the priorities are straight.

Steiner concludes his section on Boulanger with words that would likely provoke many howls of outrage among my colleagues, here and elsewhere, perhaps rightly so in some respects. I myself feel that social justice cannot be incompatible with recognizing excellence in human accomplishment–but of course, finding that compatibility can be a very fraught endeavor. Still, I want to close this post with Steiner’s assessment of Nadia Boulanger’s gifts:

Anecdotes illustrating Nadia Boulanger’s technical mastery abound. They tell of her ability to spot instantaneously the minutest error or oversight in a student’s performance; of her anger at any mode of compositional or executant bluff; of a memory beyond compare. One suspects, however, that the genius lay elsewhere, that it would have characterized whatever discipline she taught. Boulanger’s engagement in the act of teaching was absolute, “totalitarian” in the rarest sense. Her axiomatic insight that talent, that creativity are not subject to social justice underwrote not only her own elitisim but that of her students. She gave them the confidence to become what they were. This is a Master’s supreme donation. As Ned Rorem put it, Nadia Boulanger was quite simply “the greatest teacher since Socrates.”

I can readily understand how provocative or even repellent some of this description may appear. Yet I also wonder what positive things we can learn from it as we continue the conversation.

“May I have the power to exchange my best with your best.” I feel I should begin every class with these words. How small my efforts, how large my hopes!

into film studies.

Walter Korte, with whom I studied film as a graduate student at the University of Virginia.

I met Mr. Korte (all the professors are “Mr.” or “Ms.” at U.Va.; only the physicians are “doctors”) my second semester of graduate school, when I took his class in Film and Literature. I remember spending many hours alone in a storage room in Wilson Hall with a 16mm projector and a print of The Magnificent Ambersons; I watched those images over and over, my eyes wide open for what seemed to be the first time. The analytical vocabulary, the exquisite visual insightfulness, and most of all the committed love of cinema that Mr. Korte brought to every class session were deeply inspiring. I began to haunt the local repertory cinema (this was pre-video, my children). I began to go to each Wednesday’s “Filmwatchers” screenings at school. I started buying film books. In short, I became a cineaste, or at least a cineaste manque.

Mr. Korte introduced me to a world of films I’d never seen before–or never truly seen. Welles, Antonioni, Altman, Kubrick, Scorcese, Hawks, Brakhage, Bunuel, Visconti, Resnais, the list goes on. An unrepentant auteurist, Korte had his own pantheon a la Andrew Sarris, but he was always interested in the new, the fresh, the daring, and many times I saw him on a Monday morning in the grip of a movie he’d seen just that weekend. The man was simply besotted with film, which suited me just fine.

Best of all, Mr. Korte introduced me to the films of Errol Morris when he screened Gates of Heaven for our Film Aesthetics class in the fall of 1981. I later helped host Errol’s visit to the University of Mary Washington in 1997, just as he was finishing up Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. Thus the master’s lesson came full circle for the disciple.

For the last three years of my residence in graduate school, I was very happy and indeed extremely fortunate to share an office with this man. We used to talk for hours about everything having to do with movies. Those were golden moments for me. He let me have the run of his collection of cinema books, too. Even now, I will sometimes feel myself pining for those days. Though they were otherwise full of late-stage grad-student pre-dissertation angst, they were also full of discovery and intense conversations that continue to fuel my own work in film studies, both when I teach and when I write.

Read what Korte has to say about film here. You’ll understand my veneration for this teacher.

Thanks, Mr. Korte.

Very, very behind in my blogging. I’d love to say I’m a slow blogger a la Barbara Ganley, particularly given her extraordinary results to show for it (please, read and savor this post as soon as you can), but for me, alas, it’s either fast blogging or no blogging at all. Too many internal filters, I suppose, and I can’t give them time to get their tentacles (yes, my filters have tentacles–don’t yours?) wrapped too tightly.

So last week’s news, today. Last Wednesday and Thursday, UMW was honored to have a young South African author and filmmaker on our campus, Nokuthula Mazibuko. Wednesday she showed her recent documentary on the mid-70’s Soweto uprising, The Spirit of No Surrender. Thursday she read from her new novella, Spring Offensive. The latter is available as a free download from her website, http://www.thulacreative.co.za. Interestingly, Nokuthula has published this novella under a Creative Commons license that allows derivative works. She invites others to tell their stories as well.

I found her visit, indeed her very presence, stirring in ways that are difficult for me to describe. There was an openness along with a tremendous sophistication, a sense of wonder along with a sense of the weight and importance of history. Her laughter sounded like bells. She sang for us as part of the reading. She told us stories of great loss and misery, but in a way that seemed to make anger or outrage, however necessary and appropriate, a lesser response. The greater response, and the theme she returned to again and again, was the basic human desire to be free.

In one of our conversations, Nokuthula told me she recognized her agenda (her word) of unity, trust, and community-building emphasized similarities instead of differences, and was thus controversial in some sectors of the conversation, here and in her native land. She is a very mature thinker and does not offer simple panaceas or naive idealism. But she does, very stubbornly and almost matter-of-factly (as Serena notes extremely well–thank you), insist on idealism, hope, and connectedness. She insists on our common humanity. To experience her firm and clear-eyed hope in the midst of such fraught and uncertain times as we live in was tremendously inspiring to me. In fact, it took my breath away. She made me feel welcome. But I’m in my home territory, you say. True enough, and yet I never felt more welcome here, as myself, than I did in her presence. Something to mull over, that.

I will follow this young artist’s work with keen interest. Thank you, Nokuthula, for sharing your work and world with us.

God bless the person who thought up trackbacks/pingbacks. Dave Ferguson at Dave’s Whiteboard just linked in, and of course I went over to click around. That’s how how I found this gem, new to me:

To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, odd topics that catch your interest are dancing lessons from God.

That explains it.

Bryan’s got some fascinating thoughts on what he’s calling Third Life, which he imagines as potentially a set of interoperable virtual worlds that would be a kind of 3D, persistent, avatar-driven, immersive Web 2.0 (a crude reduction, but this is a draft for me too). There’s a lot to chew on here, but before I lose the moment I want to think about two of Bryan’s ideas.

One is that Third Life should have different entries for different people.

There should be different entrance points for new people with varying backgrounds and interests: the educators’ gate, the gamer portal, the adult club entrance.

On the surface, this is an attractive idea, particularly given the grotesqueries of Orientation Island and the subsequent Welcome Center in Second Life, but I wonder about the loss of richness when there are no necessary points of shared experience. For example, all ed folks in Second Life, and many outside of education, love to moan about the Welcome Center, and I’d say that this shared experience is nontrivial. (Indeed, in the wake of Chris Dede’s talk at ELI 2007, I’m wondering if we can ever with confidence call any moment of shared experience trivial, especially when it comes to learning.) I’m also uneasy for reasons I can’t quite pin down about the idea of an adult club entrance for some new people. Would we build a dedicated Internet porn client for those folks who just want to cut to the chase without having to use a browser that might, alas, access the news as well as porn? The analogy’s not strong, but perhaps it clarifies things for me a bit.

The second is a genuinely provocative question that I’m already enjoying: what are the offline components of (the experience of) persistent virtual worlds? I think our usual cognitive patterns fall into a rhythm of engagement in the sense-stream and a disengagement in which, in some respects, we take ourselves offline. Paradoxically, “offline” in our waking world suggests contemplation and cognitive virtualization (whoops, just went to Bermuda for a moment there, as Steve Martin used to joke during his stand-up routine), while “online” means engaging with sensory input and conversation and so on, whereas these terms might well have opposite meanings inside a virtual world. That interesting mirror-state or alienation effect is something I’ve tried to work through in my ideas of metaphor and play within virtual worlds.

If we want to counter the unhappy outcome of turning ourselves into brains in vats, at least those of us who can afford to do that because we live in a prosperous society (rapaciously so, I’m ashamed to say), it will be vital that we work out the relationship of offline and online, of virtual and real, in all their manifestations. I think that virtual worlds, particularly in the metaview that Bryan’s ideas about Third Life suggest, can offer us a parable or symbol or allegory of our very cognitive existence in the physical world, and may enable more complex conceptual understandings of what that existence means–and what we might effect thereby. A wiki world that enables richer imaginings, and thus better solutions. An incubator world, a sandbox, a bootstrapping augmentation laboratory.

Not many surprises there, I suppose. It is interesting, though, to see how high a “Beth” score I received–nearly as high as my “Amy.” As a friend of mine likes to say, “muse, reader.”

Many thanks to B&B for the link to the quiz. Deeply fun.

I just logged on to Second Life, mostly to see if a new client was ready for download (they’re the kings of iterative development at Linden Labs), when I saw this “tip” appear as the stream filled the cache:

“Ever get stuck in an embarrassing dance loop?”

Well, yes, though most of my dates were pretty forgiving, if I recall correctly. Now, of course, I just click on “Tools” and “Stop All Animations.”

Life is so much simpler in its Second iteration.

Jim “Bava Tuesdays” Groom must have his police scanner on, for he spotted my upgrade to WordPress 2.1 mere minutes after I’d finished. Uncanny fellow.

All looks fine so far. Whatever they did with the SQL back end worked like a charm: everything is much faster and more responsive now. I did have some trouble getting the tabbed editor to show up. I went to the WP forum and found several threads detailing this problem, with plenty of suggestions to try. In my case, it turns out that the Plain Text Paste plug-in (another gift from J. Groom) broke the new feature. Thankfully, the PTP author has already upgraded the plug-in to be compatible with WP 2.1. Open source responsiveness at its finest.

Always a happy day when a WP upgrade goes well. Kudos to the entire WordPress team for the extraordinary work they continue to do.

Welcome new functionality for the virtual camera in Second Life: ALT-CTL now allows the camera to crane-up/tilt-down and crane-down/tilt-up. Much more interesting angles are now possible.

Sometimes I wonder: what would it be like if I blogged almost everything?

Today, then, I’d blog about a Milton seminar class in which I did most of the talking and ended rather dispirited, only to find via the class syllabus wiki that one very attentive student had not only taken it all in but transformed it into a leap forward in her own thinking by making a sharp, essential connection with another class she’s taking. (Some say that can’t happen when a teacher did most of the talking–but I’m not sure I believe that anymore, myself.) I’d blog about the Introduction to Literary Studies class that considered Judith Butler’s arguments in “Gender Trouble” about gender and sex as a Saussurean play of signs, and how they agreed and protested and fumed and laughed and gritted their teeth, and began talking to each other very intensely about how the very idea of meaning becomes tenuous in all sorts of ways. I’d blog about the Larissa Macfarquar (sp?) piece in the New Yorker about the couple who have tried to unite philosophy and neuroscience, and how I want to share that article with those students to keep ’em thinking. I’d blog about the detailed conversation I had this afternoon with a colleague who wanted to know what I knew about Hopkins and sprung rhythm, and to talk about her research on a contemporary poet who may have been working the same vein. I’d blog about fifteen other things rattling around in my head in addition to the music I hear almost constantly in there as well. I’d leave out many things, but I’d at least capture all the interesting stuff (interesting to me) in all its variety; I’d capture my “input” fascinations that ramp up so powerfully at times, especially if the times are propitious….

What would it be like to pour it all forth and hold back nothing? Not to lay bare one’s private life–I’m not terribly interested in that–but to lay bare one’s internal del.icio.us, to serve up one’s own cognitive gumbo in all its stew and savor.

I wonder.

Here’s a reading I did a couple of weeks ago for UMW’s “Thursday Poems” series. The lyrics are by Robert Herrick. You may recognize some of them. I felt rusty and not quite all the way on my game, but there may be some moments to enjoy here. I hope so.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (13.7MB)