The Freshman Phenomenon

In the wake of that last, rather depressing, entry, I add this. If you've ever thought that college wasn't haven't the eye-opening effect on your life that you'd hope it would--as if anybody really wants their eyes opened--rest assured that you're not alone.
This article suggests that most students don't undergo much awakening in their first year of college. It also indicates that at least one professor has pretty much given up on trying to make that awakening take place. That's the spirit, Prof!

You're an Imposter!

Do you ever walk into a classroom and feel like a fraud? As if everyone else is immensely smarter and more capable than you? As if at any moment some member of the academic truth squad will walk in the door and quietly escort you away?
When I started teaching, I used to joke, as I left the classroom, "That's another day without being found out!" Now, some twenty years later, I realize that they're not going to catch on to me, so please keep my secret safe!
Apparently these feelings are nothing new or rare. The simple fact is that you probably are competent enough and that everyone has these sorts of self doubts. Some people, however, do a better job of hiding them. Here's an article that explores this phenomenon. Maybe it'll make you feel better . . . or worse.

A Different Point of View on Politics

Sometimes you have to see things from a different perspective to fully understand them. That's why I'm grateful to this journalist from Minsk, Belarus, for an outsider's take on the American presidential race:

From Belaruskija Naviny (translated by
the Belarus Information Agency):
Minsk (BIA) 1 February, 2008-- In America,
there are not strong leaders like Aleksandr Grigorevich Lukashenko, who come
into power, and stay in the power. The only president in American history
to have held on his power more than two terms was Franklin Roosevelt. And
he was cripple! He stayed long because of war-time situation, not
strength.
But every four years, the parties make their best effort.
This year, because of failed war in Iraq and weak leadership of George W. Bush,
the American people are going in for politics like never before in their
history. Participation in the political life of the country is up 32% from
its historic low in 2004. This upswing is most notable among the young-people of
America, many of whom have at long last removed their walkman headphones to
"tune in" to their nation's future.
What choices are the Republican
and Democratic parties offering them?At this present, the Republican ("Grand
Old") Party has three candidates in competition: the Christian retail-store
magnate and "healthy life-style" advocate Mike Huckabee, whose business
practices were subjected to critique already in American independent cinema
production "I Heart Huckabee" (2005); Mitt Romney, governor of State Utah and
elder of Mormon church, which until Lukashenko's bold measure against foreign
missionary-activity was responsible for the common sight on the streets of
Grodno and Brest and Vitebsk of clean and polite young Americans, speaking
Belarusian like mother tongue, and promoting their heretical sect to our
villagers like we were pagan Indians; and finally, John McCain, senator of City
Phoenix and number-one opponent of current president George W. Bush within
Republican party.
The Democrats have now only two candidates who stand to
chance against this powerful phalanx: Barack Obama, senator of City Chicago and
nephew of Saddam Hussein; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, organizer of popular
solidarity-building women's breakfasts for discussion of hair-hygiene and of
place of woman in American politics, and only official wife of number-one enemy
of Serbs and all Slavic peoples, Bill Clinton.

Fiction Detectives--Groundhog Day

I ran across this bit of wisdom on the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. It reminded me of the bits of detective work that I often encourage my fiction students to pursue. Sometimes this sort of deduction is a pointless way to spend your mental energy--like my colleague Bob who railed about Sam and Frodo walking the wrong direction at the end of one of the Lord of the Rings movies--but sometimes such an exercise can reveal significant information about the story--or the film--that you would not have uncovered in any other way.
The significance of Bill Murray's movie? I'm not sure there is any, but you never know.

The Case Against Anger

If you're reading this, then you must be a networked-type person, an interconnected, blogosphere-dwelling, online-flourishing sort of a human. If not, then what on earth are you doing here?
As a person in the bridge generation between those who struggle famously to integrate computers and the web into their lives (like my mother) and those for whom Web 2.0 is their blood type (like my daughter), I have a love-hate relationship with all of the forces of connection and social networking. Similarly, I am both drawn to and repelled by the hasty rhetoric, political, artistic, religious, etc. that swirls around so many websites.
Cultural critic Lee Siegel has written a book, Against the Machine, in which the negatives of the Internet society are explored. What I find just as interesting as Siegel's anti-net argument, however, are the words of John Lanchester, who reviewed the book in the New York Times. Lanchester points out the frequent anger that lies beneath a great deal of Internet discussion as well as in the pages of Siegel's book.
Anger, I would suggest, rarely does the work that we hope it will do, either in public life, private life, or, for the purposes of this post, in the education world. Anger can be a great motivator, but it must be carefully controlled if its motivation is going to lead to genuine accomplishment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/books/review/Lanchester-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

Pictures Don't Lie . . . Or Do They

Some forty years ago during the notorious Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War, photographer Eddie Adams took a horrific shot that became an emblem of all that was wrong with the war. In the photo, a South Vietnamese general is shooting a captured Viet Cong prisoner in the head. That photo, while "true," doesn't tell the whole story. It doesn't tell about the American soldiers that this prisoner had just killed. More significantly, it doesn't tell about the carnage, chaos, and confusion swirling throughout South Vietnam in those days. It doesn't tell about the many, many executions being performed by invading North Vietnamese troops during those same days. Forty years later, even the photographer has issues with his work, for which he won a Pulitzer.

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera.
Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe
them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only
half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were
the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called
bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?"

I mention this not to suggest that we all play revisionist historians. That war was a long time ago, probably long before you were born, unless you're one of the oldest of my students. Instead I share this in hopes that all of us will take pains to realize that evidence does not always speak as authoritatively as we think it does. Because photos and other sources can lie--or at least tell a partial and misleading truth--we must be constantly vigilant.

One Sheet Wonders

In looking for a permanent site to link for the Hirshorn Modern Art Gallery contest in which artists could use only one piece of paper, I found this trio of intriguing artistic projects. Still, the one-sheet wonders top the bill in my book.