Philoillogica

Harper breathes easy, now that there's only ONE of them

Grit's lead over Tories slimmer: poll

(Now that's what I call a "teachable moment")

All you need

Abby: "I love you."

Sarah: "Oh yeah? Why?"

Abby: "I dunno.  I'm never really sure."

Sarah: "Why does everyone keep saying that?"

That Newfoundlander ritual's not all it's cracked up to be

Sucking a Fishermen's Friend could get you into trouble

If your name was 'Mint head Dingwall', wouldn't you?

Mint head Dingwall resigns, wants to clear his name

Latin Motto of the Day

Usus libri, non lectio prudentes facit.
   The use, not the reading, of a book makes men wise.

I'm teaching again for the first time in just over a year, which means that once a week I get to stare down a few dozen pairs of baleful eyes at an ungodly hour of the morning.  I stand there in my self-conscious blazer holding a coffee mug, and the students and I blearily regard each other under the mournful glare of the florescents, their pencils dutifully recording whatever nonsense I see fit to write on the board in my childish script.

Ostensibly I'm teaching "writing", but really what I'm teaching is the host of skills surrounding the writing process, like summary, explanation, extrapolation and grammar.  The students in my class are non-arts students, forced into my presence by departmental regulations demanding that they learn how to communicate effectively with each other.  It's my job to try to give them a handful of tools that they can use in their other courses, teaching them to self-edit and self-analyze because I can't always be there to give them a helping hand. 

But as far as these students are concerned, this writing class of mine is just one step on a path towards something else, a chore that needs to be performed before the fun can begin.  For all of its practicality, learning to write effectively at 8:30 in the morning is a hard sell to someone who signed up for kinesiology, or who has to rush out right at the end of class to learn how to stop arterial bleeding.  Commas cannot compete with comas; after all, soap operas never run plot lines centred around misplaced modifiers.  Nobody wakes up from a ten-year sleep to declare themselves an enemy of the passive voice.

And perhaps more than I should, I actually really enjoy the disgruntled atmosphere of this sort of jail classroom, because it forces me to be very conscious of what I think I'm doing as a teacher.  It's easy to teach literature - people who take literature classes generally like to read - and easier still to convey my own enthusiasm for literature to my students.  It's much harder to get anyone to care about the apostrophe at 8:30 in the morning after they've climbed a rather unforgiving hill only to realize that they've left their lab notes on the kitchen table.  And they need to care about that apostrophe in order to learn how to use it correctly - unless it's perceived as valuable, the lesson will just dissolve into the ether, lost beyond the margins of stuff that'll be on the test. 

And that's one of my options. I can teach like a money-changer, demanding x amount of work for y amount of grade, everything centred around the evaluated product.  I can feed into an essay-purchasing culture, a culture that commodifies the learning experience to the point of irrelevancy, enforcing the idea that learning is a host of facts to be parroted back at opportune moments. 

"Pay attention, class," I say, scratching things on the board.  "You will be tested on this."

And then I test them to evaluate what they've retained of my chicken scratchings.  The students get some numbers back that mean something, either allowing them to forgo similarly punitive experiences of learning writing in the future, or forcing them to additional ones as punishment for lessons unlearned.  I have the answers, and I transmit them.  My students are sponges, mopping up the learning that I spill all over the floor.  When the class is over, they wring out their learning and move on to soak up other things.

But I hate teaching this way.  It seems like such waste of everyone's time to learn things only because they will later be tested and evaluated.  Why bother with all that effort, if what is learned will only be forgotten?   

As I see it, in order to get my students to trust that I'm worth waking up and climbing for, I have to expend a lot of thought and energy into structuring a class that is worth their time.  I have to get them to trust that I'm going to offer them something that will not merely be forgotten in a year or two. 

On the way they'll exercise some skills, while I stand on the sidelines and cheer like a personal trainer, counting reps and slowly piling on extra weight, all the while saying "you can do this - don't let it beat you."  Afterwards, they may not like me, they may not necessarily remember why exactly they need to stretch before working out or what purpose proper hydration serves, but their muscles'll be that much stronger and their endurance that much longer.

And one of the ways that I do this is by letting my students know what it is that I'm up to.  Teaching isn't something that I do to them, I don't "impart knowledge" or any such thing.  I just give them a variety of opportunities to learn about something that I happen to know a little about, and hopefully they'll take advantage of having me around.   

hunger

and then there are the days
when my mind is filled with the taste
of the flesh of another's thumb
and I could half fall in love with anyone
if only to feel the touch of somebody's hand
on the back of my neck

Or as I tell my female students, "Just spread your legs and fly"

According to Charmaine Yoest, we now live in a "get it over with" society, inundated by an "MTV sex culture" that devalues virginity.  Yoest is rightly fuming over the New York mother who pimped her 13-year-old daughter and her daughter's 14-year-old friend out for sex, first plying the girls with liquor before allegedly advising them to "have sex and get it over with."  Now this woman's behaviour is reprehensible (not to mention criminal), but Yoest's latest missive overlooks the demented mother in question to instead aim fiercely at vocal proponents of a woman's right to be more than just a frenzied, pokey lay:

We've spent the last several decades letting a sniggering, crude, crass, adolescent, Get It On approach to sexuality overtake our sexual mores.

Yeah, I'm talking about you, Wonkette.  And you, Amanda Marcotte.

Virginity, once respected and valued as a mark of self-discipline and self-respect, is now often viewed skeptically as a burden and an embarrassment.

This apparently, is a problem for Yoest, who believes that the attendant shame associated with loss of virginity is a good thing, and that self-discipline and self-respect are worthwhile only so long as they are dependent on a thin, breakable membrane.  The second girls start thinking that their bodies are theirs to be used for their own pleasure instead of fields to be plowed with the seed of a righteous man, we enter into "a sniggering, crude, crass, adolescent, Get It On approach to sexuality" that demands that mothers intoxicate their offspring to feed into a the patriarchal desire for vaginal bloodshed.  Didn't you get that memo?

But no, that doesn't really work, does it?  I thought that the notion of female virginity as a pure "mark of self-discipline and self-respect" was supposed to idolize womanly virtue or some shit, "protecting" women by making them prizes to be doled out in exchange for civilized male behaviour.  Women "gain the upper hand" by limiting male desire, giving their word to stop at third until the magic tying of the marriage knot and loosening of the chastity belt lets sexuality into their little worlds on Tuesday nights before The Daily Show comes on.  But the downside to letting women be the limiting factor on sexual encounters is that it necessarily requires that men are always the desiring party making demands on a limited supply.  Virginity becomes fetishized to the point where the hymen is worth more than the act itself - "popping a cherry" is a desirable experience to men not because it is enjoyable, but because it is rare.

We have a host of vocabulary for the first sexual act, all of it focused on the male perspective of conquest:  "He took her virginity"; "She gave himself to him".  Virginity is a tangible thing to lose or to be given away, and the words we use to talk about it always suggest that the female is one who does the giving and the losing. 

And this, I think, is what that hideously misguided New York mother was trying to point out with her "you might as well get it over with."  The value placed on virginity is a burden borne by young women - and by young women alone - at a time when their self-identity is most in question, when their vulnerability is greatest, and when their physiology makes them most desirable to the dominant male gaze.  A young woman cannot help the size of her breasts or her hips, can't help her stutter or her shyness, cannot help a host of characteristics about her self and body during this insecure time in her life, but she can control whether or not she is an even more valuable commodity in a paradigm of male exchange.  She can use her body for her own pleasure, and in so doing, remove the oppressive burden of safeguarding "female virtue" that society sees fit to place upon her.  So long as her value is determined by her unfamiliarity with a certain act, her value is dependent on maintaining that unfamiliarity - and she is continually vulnerable to having her inherent value stolen by rape.

What kind of message is that to send out to young women? "Your self-respect and self-discipline should be determined by your physical wholeness, your denial of self-pleasure and your implicit vulnerability to men.  These things are constantly under threat, so you must be vigilant, steadfast and worthy of the idolization placed upon you, otherwise you will become worthless coin in our female body economy."

Since Yoest is so fond of blaming mothers, I'll happily point out that this is hardly a worthy sentiment for a mother of three girls to espouse.

Hat tip to Amanda for the link.

 

Sure, but after you inhale, your boobs hurt

Abby: "...so if you want to grow pot, you plant birth control pills.  The female buds are the ones you smoke, so you want to grow more of those you need to release estrogen into the soil.  My mother told me that."

A note for the person who arrived here searching for 'kilts no underpants cocks skirts gays'

Hope I didn't disappoint you.

And that's what you call "character development"

Incredulous Poet: "...finish it for Monday.  What are you doing today?"

Sarah: "I'm off at a conference.  That's why I'm dressed so foppishly."

Incredulous Poet: <looks incredulous>

Sarah: "MORE foppish than usual, I mean."