Nothing says I'm leader like acting like an ape

Don’t worry (or maybe you should) I’m not going to discuss the presidential campaign but am back to the classroom, ruminating about my students.

Last Friday I had the best discussions in my two freshman classes. (Best meaning, of this semester, not best as in, one of the best discussions of my life.) I had them read Paul Theroux’s “Being a Man”. I was hoping we could jump right in to talking about gender roles in the US and maybe even nurture verses nature when it comes to defining one’s sense of self in terms of sex. This didn’t happen. Instead, I had to start discussing sports. They perked right up and joined in, but through out class I showed my ignorance of the entire sports world. I kept saying linebacker, realized I was referring to the wrong position, and the only thing I could come up with was: the fat guys in front of the quarter back. Then I asked if any of them had seen the cover of Vogue which they thought was hilarious and the laughter only got worse when I called the basketball player Bronson James.

Anyway, during my second class’s discussion we started talking about leadership and the majority of the students were saying that men made better leaders. It was just in their nature. I pointed out that one of the soft-spoken female students who sits in the front of the class was the best leader in that room. Guys, when she speaks you listen, I said. You listen to her better than you do me. She waits her turn, speaks quietly, but speaks her mind and makes intelligent comments when she has them. Everyone stopped and chewed this idea over, but then one student argued furiously that I was wrong.

It was the female student I had pointed out. While all the other students could only agree with me, she was adamant that she was not a good leader. I really don’t like English at all, she said. That has nothing to do with being a good leader, I responded. No, I’ve been in college before and I’m coming back. I’ve already taken several speech courses so I can express myself. I’m married and have a kid, so I just have more experience than most of the other students in here. It’s not that I’m more intelligent, it’s just that I can form my ideas more quickly than most freshmen.

When I told a fellow professor about my student’s response he said, so she’s more articulate, more experienced and therefore more intelligent, and she finds it very easy to make people listen. What does she need to do go water board someone before she can become a leader?

Theroux makes a comment about how most little boys are encouraged to act like monkeys while most girls need to show off their pretty dress. I think we have a prime example of that here. Most of my male students tend to act more like monkeys than normal people. During that same discussion one of my male students announced he had to pee before getting up and leaving the classroom. As a society we are convinced that female leaders have to act tough and hard like our typical male leaders. But here I have a student who fits the stereotypical female personality and can command the classroom much more effectively than I can. Even so, it always tends to be the monkey in the front of the classroom who gets most of the attention.

Books, Blogs and Time

So, nothing bores me more than reading articles about whether the printed word is dying, books versus blogs, who reads and doesn't read novels blah blah blah. It is fascinating, though, when you take a step back from these kinds of arguments, just to *notice* how we're transitioning from one literacy to another, with all kinds of exciting possibilities.

And then, your mother ships you 180 pounds of books that had been sitting in her basement, mixed together with notebooks you'd forgot you'd written in, and takes you back in time.

Like a lot of people, I'm superstitious about throwing out books, even when they're damaged beyond readability. I volunteer at a used book store, and people are really upset if they suspect we might throw out their paperback with the torn cover and water damage, even if they know we can't possibly sell it.

So, one of the books in the box was James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. The price on the side is 60 cents and Alfred Kazin has a blurb on the back. The cover is missing as are all the pages up to 15. I remember reading this book more than ten years ago - as it often happens after that period, I don't remember much about the plot but I remember being overwhelmed by its beauty and sadness, and I remember wanting to go to Paris.

On page 16, I read this:

I began, perhaps, to be lonely that summer and began, that summer, the flight which has brought me to this darkening window.

And yet - when one begins to search for that crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds oneself pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors. My flight may, indeed, have begun that summer - which does not tell me where to find the germ of the dilemma which resolved itself, that summer, into flight. Of course, it was somewhere before me, locked in that reflection I am watching in the window as the night comes down outside. It is trapped in the room with me, always has been, and always will be, and it is yet more foreign to me than those foreign hills outside.

Two new updates

Update 1: Our next issue will be purple.

Update 2: The Purple Issue will be up during the first of May. Our cut-off date for this reading period will by April 15th, so send us your submissions.

End of Updates

The cruelty of students

My original intention of the blog was to talk about publishing and online journal business. (Speaking of which we are now listed on New Pages. Be sure to tell all your friends.) But, every time I sit down I seem to feel the need to talk about my students. I guess I feel or hope that the purpose of this journal is to fight against the mentalities I see in them.

* * *

So, over the weekend I gave my students an assignment to come up with a "dangerous idea". The assignment was given after having them read and discuss several essays off of the Edge Foundations website where scientists, professors, and researchers answered the same question.
We read one about basing government on empathy, another about how we are all genetically inclined to murder, and other's about science, religion, and psychology. I thought it might be interesting to see what the students came up with.

Some students did a really good job. One suggested that we should all walk around naked. Then we couldn't create these false images of what the human body should look like and people wouldn't feel the need to spend so much money on clothes. Another said we should use the tax dollars in place to bulid the border fence and, instead, invest in Mexican companies and support their government's social programs. Some students just had observations, saying we should pay more attention to our telepathic abilities or what if we didn't have a history of violence and racism? But a good number of students, maybe a quarter of the ones who actually did the assignment, were just cruel. Several railed agianst the jail system, saying that prisoners should have no rights or privelges, that prison is just like living in the world except you can't leave. (I teach in a prison. Believe me, that is not the case.) Another said that we should take all the non-violent criminals and make them fight in Iraq. If they can prove themselves as loyal and patriotic then they don't have to finish their sentence.

The worst one, though, was the student who didn't have the guts to bring up the idea in class. During class the student said the dangerous idea was to put normal looking people on TV instead of beautiful people. Her paper was about how all government funding for the poor and homeless was a waist because they didn't appreciate the money enough.

I don't understand how these students can refuse so adamantly to step into another person's shoes. These students who go to a private university while receiving government loans and scholarships talk about how prisoners and the homeless guzzle up all the tax dollars. These students who smoke pot and drink under age consider every person in jail as evil and untrustworthy, and every homeless person lazy and stupid. These students talk about how illegeal immigrants and people on welfare don't appreicate enough the help they are given, yet these students don't show up to class half the time. Plus, a good number are taking the class over again because they failed it last semester. So who is it that doesn't appreciate the opportunities handed to them by the government?

Oh, and did I mention this is a Baptist university? While this won't suprise most people, it makes my job more frustrating. In the same breath that they condemn every person in prison, they discuss how God saved them from a life of sin. During the same half hour we discuss how illegal aliens don't belong in the country and shouldn't be allowed to use our hospitals, they talk about how the love of Christ has changed them forever.

While I may seem bitter at the moment, the fact is I'm actually quite opptimistic. I really believe that with one essay, one story, one moment when these students truely step outside themselves and see from another person's point of view, their whole lives will change. It won't be obvious or immediate, but when you look at the world from someone else's perspetive, just once, you can't help but do it again and again and again. Hopefully, this journal will keep offering up those perspectives.

Vibrant Gray grows!

The Vibrant Gray staff would like to welcome Jennifer Reimer, Javier Huerta, and Hillary Gravendyk, who will be joining Craig Perez on our poetry board.

Also, we would like to remind everyone that we are looking to get our next issue out by May, so get your submissions in by April.

Because 30 Rock is Kind of Smart

I was going to do another post where I do my advice from an editor thing, but I have a different subject on my mind that doesn’t have anything to do with writing or journals.

This semester I am teaching several sections of Rhet. and Comp. on two different campuses in central Texas. While my main objective is to teach these students how to write and communicate more effectively, I also try to include a good amount of discussion about the content of our reading.

During these discussions I come to one strange conclusion over and over again – I wish my students watched more TV. I know this sounds crazy. As an educator I am suppose to bemoan the perils of watching television and encourage my students to do nothing but read James Joyce. But I don’t. More often than not I find myself telling my students they should watch shows like The Office, Arrested Development, Weeds, The Wire (I know that Arrested Development is no longer on television but I love that show and feel it needs mentioning).

But haven’t we, as educators, won the fight if our students are no longer watching the dreaded boob tube? Not at all. From what I can tell the students have traded general TV watching for two things: videogames and reality television. Both males and females admit to playing a couple of hours worth of videogames a day, especially those that live in the dorms. My males generally watch ESPN and the girls watch Next Top Model (so do some of my males they just won’t admit it in the classroom).

Granted my main annoyance is that when I quote Scrubs or Friends or say: There a-loo-sions, Michael, my students have no idea what I am talking about. But beyond that, most of NBC’s shows throw in references to politics and current events, CSI had an episode about dog fighting when that scandal arose, and who knows how much they could learn by watching even one or two episodes of The Daily Show every week. I think we’ve entered into a culture where watching some amount of television is as important as reading the newspaper was twenty years ago. And I’m not talking about just news shows, but watching sitcoms and dramas to help us a gain a cultural context to the world we’re interacting with.

It just amazes me how much information is at my students’ finger tips, yet they have no clue what is going on outside of their own world. Sure, they’ve all seen the video of the kid in Japan get hit in the head with a skateboard, but they have no idea why we’re fighting in Iraq or even who the presidential candidates are. Maybe these are the typical ravings of a new teacher or maybe I just feel that I should be able to relate to my students a little better, but either way, I’m seriously thinking about assigning two hours of TV watching before class on Wednesday.

Fun at Chain Bookstores

So, I was in a certain chain bookstore to day. (I ain't naming names!) The universe must really be playing with me, because I did about five double-takes before confirming that, yes, I was looking at a Valentine's Day display that contained the following items:

1) The latest issue of a magazine that promised to make me "the sexiest brand on the market." Umm, no thanks - it's hard enough work just to be as sexy as I already am.

2) Lindt's chocolate. No problem there.

3) Sex Tips for Straight Women from Gay Men. Ok on this one too.

4) Why Men Love Bitches/Why Men Marry Bitches (guess they're a set) Interesting - they love *and* marry them, but for, like totally different reasons that demand two books!

5) The Feminine Mystique.

Yes, you knew this was headed somewhere: in between the chocolate and sex tips is a new edition of the feminist classic which helped catalyze one of the most important social movements of our century. I amused myself for the rest of the day trying to figure out if the higher-ups at said unnamed chain store were so clueless as to not recognize the hilarity of the pairing (feminine mystique . .. must be about how to be more feminine, right? to catch a man, duh) or if, as I liked to imagine, some mole was working on the inside, doing a kind of guerilla shelving. I'm in a good mood today, so I'm going with the later.

What does this have to do with Vibrant Gray? Well, not a lot. Except this: I was thinking about our mission statement in relation to conversations I've had with students over the years who don't understand what are wrong with cliches and generalizations. After all, if someone's said it a million times, it must be right, no? If some fancy pants weren't trying to make the world difficult, or make me see it as complex, or as gray, I could just live happily. And I tell them: I wish it were that way. I really wish you could tell people: do x, and you'll lose five pounds, and never age, and find true love. Self-help books thrive by telling people this, and people buy them, and then buy them again when they don't deliver, thinking this time it'll work. Even though, not being stupid, people know better, but desire is a powerful thing.

So, while a lot of teachers and writers do fetishize something called "complexity," and look for distinctions with out a difference, the real shades of gray, the real, simple fundamental questions like 'how can we be equal' are still out there. That means good writing is still out there too, no matter how many styles come and go, waiting to be written and read.