None of my words this time

Goethe lived in that brief span of history when the level of technology already gave life a certain measure of comfort but when an educated person could still understand all the devices he used. Goethe knew how and with what materials his house had been constructed, he knew why his oil lamp gave off light, he knew the principle of the telescope when he and Bettina looked at Jupiter; and while he himself could not perform surgery, he was present at several operations, and when he was sick he could converse with the doctor in the vocabulary of an expert. The world of technical objects was completely open and intelligible to him. This was Goethe’s great moment at the center of European history, a moment that brings on a pang of nostalgic regret in the heart of someone trapped in a jerking, dancing elevator.

Beethoven’s work begins where Goethe’s center ends. It is located in the moment when the world starts gradually losing its transparency, darkens, becomes more and more incomprehensible, rushes into the unknown, while man, betrayed by the world, escapes into his self, into his nostalgia, his dreams, his revolt, and lets himself be deafened by the voices inside him so that he no longer hears the voices outside. That cry from inside sounded to Goethe like an unbearable noise. Goethe hated noise. That’s a well-known fact. He couldn’t even bear the barking of a dog in a distant garden. It is said that he disliked music. That’s an error. What he disliked was the orchestra. He liked Bach because Bach still conceived of music as a transparent combination of independent voices, each of which could be distinguished. But in Beethoven’s symphonies the voices of individual instruments dissolve in an amalgam of clamor and lament. Goethe couldn’t bear the roar of an orchestra just as he couldn’t bear the loud laments of the soul. Bettina’s friends among the younger generation saw the divine Goethe stop up his ears and look at them with distaste. This they couldn’t forgive him, and they attacked him as an enemy of the soul, of revolt, and of feeling.

“Goethe lived in that brief span of history when the level of technology already gave life a certain measure of comfort but when an educated person could still understand all the devices he used. Goethe knew how and with what materials his house had been constructed, he knew why his oil lamp gave off light, he knew the principle of the telescope when he and Bettina looked at Jupiter; and while he himself could not perform surgery, he was present at several operations, and when he was sick he could converse with the doctor in the vocabulary of an expert. The world of technical objects was completely open and intelligible to him. This was Goethe’s great moment at the center of European history, a moment that brings on a pang of nostalgic regret in the heart of someone trapped in a jerking, dancing elevator.

“Beethoven’s work begins where Goethe’s center ends. It is located in the moment when the world starts gradually losing its transparency, darkens, becomes more and more incomprehensible, rushes into the unknown, while man, betrayed by the world, escapes into his self, into his nostalgia, his dreams, his revolt, and lets himself be deafened by the voices inside him so that he no longer hears the voices outside. That cry from inside sounded to Goethe like an unbearable noise. Goethe hated noise. That’s a well-known fact. He couldn’t even bear the barking of a dog in a distant garden. It is said that he disliked music. That’s an error. What he disliked was the orchestra. He liked Bach because Bach still conceived of music as a transparent combination of independent voices, each of which could be distinguished. But in Beethoven’s symphonies the voices of individual instruments dissolve in an amalgam of clamor and lament. Goethe couldn’t bear the roar of an orchestra just as he couldn’t bear the loud laments of the soul. Bettina’s friends among the younger generation saw the divine Goethe stop up his ears and look at them with distaste. This they couldn’t forgive him, and they attacked him as an enemy of the soul, of revolt, and of feeling.” – Kundera, Immortality

Nooo

This makes me angry.

in most instances, depression should not be thought of as a disorder at all. In an article recently published in Psychological Review, we argue that depression is in fact an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits.

So what could be so useful about depression? Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.

“In most instances, depression should not be thought of as a disorder at all. In an article recently published in Psychological Review, we argue that depression is in fact an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits.

“So what could be so useful about depression? Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.”

No. For two reasons:

1. Depression often has no relation whatsoever to problems. Mine at first onset, for example, built such a wall between myself and my life that nothing, good or bad (and my life was very good as lives go, and I would have admitted that), affected my emotions. Existence qua existence seemed a mistake, and for that reason no other mistakes or evils were even possible. Why would I devote myself to solving “problems”? I didn’t even have any, except for the depression itself, and I knew it.

2. When depression does arise as a response to problems in life, as it has for me more recently, it does not lead to analysis of those problems. For most psychologists, “rumination”–a classic symptom of depression and other mental illnesses, yes–refers precisely to non-analytical thought, the kind that goes in circles forever without rationality, without progress, without hope. Ruminating involves reviewing a problem over and over, enlarging it, inspecting it, articulating it, admiring it, losing oneself in it–but not solving it. All the psychologists and psychiatrists I’ve ever known–those who have treated me as well as professors in college–have opposed rumination to analysis clearly and starkly.

“Depression is nature’s way of telling you that you’ve got complex social problems that the mind is intent on solving.”

Bunk. Most depressed minds aren’t intent on anything. They’re not even functioning.

“Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression.”

The latter suggestion is benign if useless (you can’t avoid problems; you can only control the way you react to them), but the former is just irresponsible.

“It is also essential, in instances where there is resistance to discussing ruminations, that the therapist try to identify and dismantle those barriers.”

Therapy should break down barriers to discussing ruminations, yes–in order to break down the ruminations themselves, not to glorify them.

Theories like this are just more of the old Romantic sadness-worship, this time disguised as modern science.

Progressive?

I’ve been seeing psychiatrists and psychologists for almost a decade now, always in a part of a clinic set aside for mental health (my favorite term) or mental hygiene (makes me feel like I need to swab out my synapses with Q-tips) or behavioral health (makes me feel like I need a straitjacket). Walking down the hall toward that Department, or pushing the elevator button for the floor it’s on, is always something of an experience. Yes, it makes me self-conscious: I try to project an aura of normalcy (texting a friend is always good), and when I get to the waiting room I scrutinize my fellow crazies, trying to figure out what’s wrong with them, assuming they’re doing the same to me.

But none of this causes me any real discomfort anymore; reflexes are triggered, yes, but the situation is more amusing than anything else, and part of me is always hoping that people see me, best of all people I know, so that I can show everyone how proudly functional a mentally ill person can be.

That’s why I’m ambivalent about how my current doctor’s office handles mental health. There, no visible Department exists. I check in at the front desk like everyone else, but instead of simply going to the appropriate waiting room and sitting down, I am told to walk into Internal Medicine and “ask for Norma.” When I do, the receptionist there simply says, “Okay, you’re all set” and tells me to sit with the others until my name is called.

Norma is the one who answers when you call the mental health department, which does exist on the place’s website at least. Her desk is deep in the labyrinth of hallways behind the Internal Medicine waiting room, which also houses all the psychologists’ and psychiatrists’ offices. I never need to talk to her when I’m there for an appointment; her name is simply a code for “I’m here to see a shrink, not for anything to do with internal medicine.”

I appreciate how much easier this makes it for people fearful of being stigmatized to get help. But it also makes it that much harder to get rid of the stigma altogether. I’d rather strut than sneak into the loony ward.

More of the same

My school’s faculty and staff had a retreat today. There was a meeting room full of couches and armchairs, free wireless internet, a continental breakfast, a buffet lunch, lobster for dinner, unlimited coffee and snacks, canoeing and other activities, and optional hotel rooms for all of us.

Meanwhile, the school owns precisely one working digital projector (and three broken ones).

Can we please stop pretending?

This is not what I and the author of the article quoted below mean by “treating teachers professionally.”

Vicious cycle: 10. Children: -52. Good game, all.

“‘They are essentially firing me,’ Keiler told me, ‘because they do not understand their own rules and procedures, which of course are idiotic in the first instance, but at least they should know them. . . .This is typical of the thoroughly unprofessional way teachers are treated despite all the blather about professionalism, and also indicative of the cemented, regimented and unenlightened concept of teaching that is so engrained in the education establishment.’”

Here’s the article.

It’s true that teachers often aren’t treated like professionals. It’s also true that they often fail to act like professionals. Yay.

I thought I couldn’t stand Kundera, but:

“She said to herself: when once the onslaught of ugliness became completely unbearable, she would go to a florist and buy a forget-me-not, a single forget-me-not, a slender stalk with miniature blue flowers. She would go out into the street holding the flower before her eyes, staring at it tenaciously so as to see only that single beautiful blue point, to see it as the last thing she wanted to preserve for herself from a world she had ceased to love. She would walk like that through the streets of Paris, she would soon become a familiar sight, children would run after her, laugh at her, throw things at her, and all Paris would call her the crazy woman with the forget-me-not…” - Immortality

It’s not only the dream of beauty; it’s also the dream of unabashed Otherness, I think.

I’m putting my classroom up for adoption!

Reading Foucault

It always makes me feel like huge metal arms are clanking bits of machinery into place all around me.

Old News

One reason this blog ran dry for a while was that I had kind of an eventful spring. I haven’t written about it here yet, but today I’m ruminating about it more than usual, and I thought posting a brief version of the story might help get it out of my head. And I think it’s safe to talk about now.

That said, I don’t exactly feel like going through all the details again, so I’m going to quote a passage from an email I wrote to one friend soon after the events and keep reusing in various contexts (like this one) when I don’t want to remember too much.

“I was sexually assaulted by a student, but I didn’t do anything about it immediately, and then when I told my roommate (and best friend) about it she said my failure to respond appropriately constituted sexual abuse of a minor, said she would report me to child services if I didn’t report myself, and kicked me out of our apartment because living with me now would be like living with her father (who sexually abused her repeatedly when she was six) all over again. I called child services and told them what had happened, and they said there was nothing to report unless I wanted to press assault charges against the student (I didn’t because I did blame myself for paralyzed passivity if not for–it’s too horrible to type again–for what my roommate accused me of), but I guess my roommate didn’t believe me because she called them again and got them to investigate. That took a week, during which time I had to stay “home” (at another friend’s place) from school because I was allegedly a monster and a criminal. I thought I was going to lose my job and my license (and possibly go to jail), and I was researching everything from Ph.D. programs to waitressing jobs on Craigslist. But child services listened to me, and they also talked with the student, who not only denied everything but also is twice my weight and strong enough to lift me off the ground with one hand (he did it once) and has a history of bullying and physical intimidation of others of both sexes, all of which made me look pretty innocent, and my principal had my back the whole way, so they cleared me of everything in the end. And I found a studio downtown from which I can walk to work that costs no more than what I was paying before, and I discovered that I really like having my own place. So it turned out well, except that I lost the best friend I ever had plus at least one mutual friend and I think daily about how she said I’m like her father.”

[Update: I'm not in that studio anymore, because my boyfriend, whom I met in the middle of all this turmoil and who did much to help me through it, asked me to move in with him a couple of months ago. Yay.]

I’m not sure how I feel about making this blog so personal–I wanted it to be disembodied thoughts–but I guess this is just one post.

I want

ALL these shirts.

“We are not used to feeling consistently defeated and systematically undervalued.”

Like me, Sarah Fine went from Ivy League superstar to urban public school teacher. She lasted for four years, but now she’s leaving, and her article in the Washington Post explains why.

“In their book ‘Millennials Rising: the Next Great Generation,’ sociologists Neil Howe and William Strauss characterize the members of my generation as ‘engaged,’ ‘upbeat’ and ‘achievement-oriented.’ This is why we become teachers. We seek to challenge ourselves, and we excel at pursuing our goals. Howe and Strauss go so far as to call us a ‘hero generation.’ Our engagement also explains why we are leaving the classroom. We are not used to feeling consistently defeated and systemically undervalued.”

“‘I want to be able to do big things and be recognized for them,’ [a friend] says. ‘In the world we live in, teaching doesn’t cut it.’”

I’m so glad someone else wrote this article for me.

Back-to-School “Shopping”

My boyfriend has a stash of old office supplies; he brings them home when they’re no longer needed at his workplace. I then scavenge among them for things that are still usable so I can bring them in to my classroom, because my workplace doesn’t even have the bare necessities.

He works for a nonprofit. I work for a nonprofit. I don’t get it.

“The Functional Inversion of the Disciplines”

“At first, they were expected to neutralize dangers, to fix useless or disturbed populations, to avoid the inconveniences of over-large assemblies; now they were being asked to play a positive role, for they were becoming able to do so, to increase the possible utility of individuals. Military discipline is no longer a mere means of preventing looting, desertion or failure to obey orders among the troops . . . discipline increases the skill of each individual, coordinates these skills, accelerates movements, increases fire power, broadens the fronts of attack without reducing their vigour, increases the capacity for resistance, etc.” – Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Many of the teachers I work with (not all–a few are wonderful) never got the memo, I think. Some of them spend so much time and effort confiscating cell phones and locking kids out of the classroom when they show up 30 seconds late that they never actually get around to teaching. The function of discipline in education is to enable learning (now), dumbasses.

(I know Foucault’s ultimate point is going to be that this was the beginning of an ominous shift, not a beneficial one, but you get my point.)

Rubber Band Metaphors and Other Things

“Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle. ‘To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection of a small number of objects’: this was the problem to which the architecture of temples, theatres and circuses responded. . . . The modern age poses the opposite problem: ‘To procure for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a whole multitude.” – Foucault, Discipline and Punish

I’m always suspicious of but still intrigued by too-clean oppositions like these. They seem to be good starting, if not ending, points for trains of thought. (Though I guess on railroads every starting point is also an ending point, so that metaphor snaps if you stretch it too far. And oh dear, now we’ve got a metaphor for a metaphor. A metametaphor? I’ll stop now.)

By the way, the title of Society of the Spectacle referred to the modern life that Foucault says is the anti-spectacle, didn’t it? It would probably be worth it to go back and figure out the relationship between the two authors’ concepts of spectacle–but I probably won’t.

This blog is much less

“political” than it was before Obama was elected president.

I have become complacent. Hell, I hardly read the news anymore.

A democracy perhaps functions better the more scared and angry its people are.

Whine

I’ve spent only one year teaching in an urban public school system, and already I’m beginning to take the conditions for granted. Only in conversations with people outside the system do I realize the absurdities.

“Oh no, of course we don’t have first aid kits in our classrooms.”

“Oh, but the nurse is never actually in the building, you see.”

“Counselors? They’re only there some days. If a kid expresses homicidality or suicidality, I take her into my class and teach with one hand on her arm.”

“That’s a great teaching idea, but I’d need a working projector or computer lab, or at least a library, for that.”

“But most of my students don’t have the internet at home, so I can’t give that assignment, sorry.”

“Order books? No, I just buy a copy for myself and photocopy it all. Yes, it demoralizes the students, but…”

“Get reimbursed? Well, when I spent $1000 on a conference trip it took three rounds of filling out forms and six months to get reimbursed, and even then it wouldn’t have happened without panicked last-minute phone calls. $100 of school supplies aren’t worth the trouble.”

“You see, we don’t have air conditioning, or windows that stay open, and what with the mice–”

“No, our students don’t have–” … “don’t have–” … “don’t have–”

It makes things awkward, and it gets repetitive. And I don’t like being that angry, especially since it’s hard to dissociate anger on the students’ behalf from anger on my own behalf, and the latter seems unjustified because, after all, I chose to do this (and I’m overprivileged anyway).

Wait a Minute

Did it always say “posted . . . on the August 5th” and such under my titles? On THE August 5th? I am confused.

Bullshit

I just read Harry Frankfurt’s little tract On Bullshit. Its basic thesis is that bullshit is characterized by an utter lack of concern with whether what one is saying is true or not (as opposed to lies, which stand in deliberate opposition to the truth). That makes sense to me, at least for now. At one point, though, in order to avoid digressing too much, he decided to “leave as a problem for the reader” the question of why (and I would ad if to cover all logical bases) we consider being lied to more of an affront than being bullshitted (bullshat?) (to?). I might need to think about that one.

What “Don’t Take It Personally” Means

I don’t know that I’d ever be able to do this in the context of a romantic relationship. (I think I’ve been called upon and failed to do so in the past.) But what the author describes is EXACTLY the way I’ve learned I have to manage my relationships with students. And I think my (still fledgling) ability to execute these tactics in the classroom will grow to help me in other areas of life, too.

xkcd’s Tribute to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Little Prince