It’s student quote time again.

In my ninth grade humanities class, we’re studying the forced migration of the Cherokees and other peoples in the first half of the nineteenth century. Today, during our break, I discovered one of my students perched on the edge of the large rolling trash can in the hallway, propelling herself down the corridor with a rather abstracted look on her face. I asked her why she was riding the garbage, and she said very earnestly, “I’m on the Trail of Tears!”

More Important Than The Differences Between Surrealist Revolution and Marxist Revolution

“Reading Test Dummies“

Surrealist Revolution vs. Marxist Revolution

“One of the fundamental theses of surrealism is, in fact, that there is no salvation. The advantage of revolution was not that it gives mankind happiness, ‘abominable material comfort.’ On the contrary, according to [Andre] Breton, it should purify and illuminate man’s tragic condition. World revolution and the terrible sacrifices it implies would only bring one advantage: ‘preventing the completely artificial precariousness of the social condition from screening the real precariousness of the human condition.’

[...]

“The surrealists were more different from Marx than were reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre, for example. The reactionaries made use of the tragedy of existence to reject revolution–in other words, to preserve a historical situation. The Marxists made use of it to justify revolution–in other words, to create another historical situation. Both make use of the human tragedy to further their pragmatic ends. But Breton made use of revolution to consummate the tragedy.” – Camus, The Rebel

A Definition of Pessimism

“Pierre Naville, in trying to find the denominator common to revolutionary action and surrealist action, localized it, with considerable penetration, in pessimism, meaning in ‘the intention of accompanying man to his downfall and of overlooking nothing that could ensure that his perdition might be useful.’” – Camus, The Rebel

Talk about education, says George Will,

“is usually solemnity without seriousness–the issuance of imperious commands to an unimpressed future.”

I like.

[I wrote this in an email yesterday.]

So I lost it and started sobbing in class yesterday, in front of all my students, and today I’m getting very solicitous treatment, which is something about which I’m ambivalent. I know that when students are “bad” on purpose it’s a mistake to let them see that it gets to me, but my students almost never torture me intentionally; they’re usually just utterly clueless about how immature they’re being. When that’s the case, as long as I keep my composure, they remain ignorant of the effects of their behavior, even (or especially) if I try to explain to them in measured words what is happening. Sometimes a very graphic illustration of the harm they are doing–i.e., a usually-calm teacher breaking down in tears (not anger; that’s not productive, I know)–is necessary to shock them into awareness. But the idea of a woman using tears to get what she wants is loathsome to me, even if the tears are genuine, even if they are unstoppable. A (male) friend of mine last year, another then-student-teacher, observed to me that his (female) mentor teacher seemed to exaggerate her feminine fickleness and vulnerability in order to manipulate her students: cried once a month or so like clockwork, said “I’m in a bad mood today, so be nice to me” and such things all the time, and just generally performed her emotions more than necessary. My friend asked me what I thought of that as a woman, and it seemed abhorrent to me, but I also understood, and continue to understand, the temptation of it. It’s difficult to tell when to respond to things as a teacher and when to respond as a person, I suppose.

Still Life with Discarded Slogan and Hubcap

Please help.

The school I teach at is applying for International Baccalaureate (IB) certification, which means we need to develop a curriculum with set boundaries but plenty of choice within those boundaries. For example, for world literature classes, IB has published a (quite extensive) list of pre-approved texts from all over the world, and we can choose any authors and poets we want as long as they appear on that list.

Our objective is a curriculum diverse in terms of the ethnicities, nationalities, languages, genders, classes, and concerns of the authors it represents. The problem is that most of us, myself included, are extremely well versed in Western European literature–and not much else.

I am one of two people responsible for finalizing and documenting the English curriculum, which means I have considerable power over what high school students at our school will read and study in the next several years. I don’t want to squander this opportunity to change things for the better, but I’m afraid that without your help I will.

If you can think of any author or text from any corner of the world that might appeal to high school students and deserves to be mandatory reading, please, please, let me know. I especially need poetry recommendations, but anything will be welcome. I am too ignorant to do this alone.

In Defense of Pathologizing the Loonies

[Every so often, I find myself in conversation with someone who reminds me of all the problems with pathologizing mental illness (with quotation marks around "illness"). I always want to agree with whoever it is, for his (this time it's a he)  is an attractive position--but all I can really say is that my life and sanity were saved when I ceased to be understood and began to be pathologized. I really don't know what I would have done if no one had ever come out and called me a nutcase (not quite in those words, I suppose), and I'm unspeakably grateful for the label and all it has given me. Anyway, below is what I wrote to my friend when the topic came up recently.]

 

All my life, I have had wonderful parents, understanding and loyal friends, excellent grades, a not loathsome appearance, enough money but not too much, and whatever other criteria of “the good life” one might name. In childhood I was shy but not pained; I read all the time and loved the world of books without neglecting the equally important one of friends and school and family and my violin. Academics were easy for me, but for the most part Iwasn’t bored, because I went to schools that recognized the excess of social capital bestowed on me by two overeducated parents (what some might call “intelligence”) and had the resources to challenge me and others like me.
 

All the same, I had glimpses of depression as early as sixth grade, and by the time I reached high school I could hardly see anything else. I kept my friends and I kept up my grades, but I lost my mind. I was not sad about anything in particular, and I did not wish my life were other than it was; I simply conceived of existence itself, in any form, as one big mistake. Obviously this led to suicidality, which scared my parents and me enough to send us, finally, to a doctor. I was offered counseling, but I concluded that I had nothing to say: no complaints, no problems, no stress–just undifferentiated nihilism. And so I was given pills.

 

I was afraid of the pills, of course, and I scorned them. I feared they would make me happy, and not in a good way (as an emo adolescent, I doubted that there was any good way to be happy); I had read Brave New World, and I wanted no part of its soma-induced complacency. But as much as I deified my own suffering, I prayed (to no one) for deliverance from it a thousand times a day, and so I took the pills. I wanted to.

 

The pills did not deaden my mind; they revived it. Within a week or two, I could function once more, and not as a robot but as a thinking, feeling being. They brought my emotions back into touch with life; they allowed me to feel sad when it made sense to feel sad and feel happy when it made sense to feel happy. They allowed me to think and theorize about my own mind and condition rather than sit in a continual crying stupor. They allowed me to find some things interesting and some boring, some beautiful and some abhorrent, rather than seeing beauty only in negation, which, after all, is nothing. Thus they gave me life.

 

My case is not everyone’s, of course. To overmedicate someone in need of other treatment is cruel and futile, just as it would have been cruel and futile to try to counsel me back to mental health by talking about my relationships with my parents, the stresses of high school, and so on. When psychiatric medications are used to deaden the mind, they are but slow-acting poisons. When they are used to pull the mind back from the brink of oblivion, however, they are lifesavers, and that is what they are for me.