Erik Simpson

Obsessively reading Ulysses

The Ulysses seminar read the first three episodes of the novel yesterday.  The students’ experience of the novel is largely structured by what we call obsessions: each student chooses a topic (from a list I hand around on the first day) to follow for the whole semester, tracing the treatment of the topic in Ulysses and in related criticism and theory.  The obsessions of this class include medicine, sports and competition, reproduction, and the unspoken.  Half of the students wrote blog posts about their obsessions in the Telemachiad, and their posts informed much of our discussion on Tuesday.

I started the session, however, by asking the class to join me in delving as deeply as we could into the first sentence of the book:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Goodness, that first word alone: stately.  One student pointed out that it can attach itself either to Buck Mulligan (in parallel to plump) or more narrowly to his current action.  Another noted that “stately” gives Buck a priestly air appropriate for the black mass he is about to begin.  Then we got to the political sense of “state” and thereby Buck’s stateliness as he represents the temptation of compromise to institutional authorities.  And the states of matter, with the lather he bears constituted by liquid and gas, a stable instability.  (And the crossing of states sets up the “cross” of the razor, which is probably has a mirroring surface, and the mirror, which, being broken, has cutting edges like the razor.  And on . . . .)

We did not linger long on the first sentence, as we needed to digest the rest of the Telemachiad and prepare for reading secondary materials later in the week, but that block of collective close reading was a delight.

Another note: along the way, we wondered whether the sporting sense of “Mulligan” (a do-over of a golf shot) was current when Joyce wrote.  According to OED, it was not.

Alas.  Consider the perfection of the word in Ulysses: the golf mulligan is a throwaway, an abortion, a disappointed bridge, a waste, an imposition of forgiveness into competition.  In this sense, the word reaches out to the hockey game and the pedagogical competitions of episode 2, to the midwives of episode 3, and to much else beyond.  Joyce didn’t mean for the word to work so well, but it’s a powerful, straight drive of a concept, one I don’t want to take back.

By Erik Simpson, ago

Grim, Shakespeare. Grim.

Getting ready to teach this sonnet yesterday, I realized that I was doing so during my fortieth winter. Yikes.

 
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tottered weed, of small worth held.
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies—
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days—
To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse”—
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
    This were to be new made when thou art old,
    And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.
By Erik Simpson, ago

The inheritance of classroom culture

A recent episode of This American Life includes the account of David MacLean, who loses his memory in India. It’s a terrific story for many reasons, and want to pick up on a detail that comes up along the way.

Having regained some of his memories and visited his family in Ohio, MacLean returns to his apartment in India.

I was alone, and lonelier than I thought I could be in a room filled with things that I had selected. There were books. I opened them and found my handwriting in the margins. Still nothing. I had read these books. And now I had to read them again. But why bother? If I lost my memory again, all that work would be futile.

I have a related feeling about undergraduate teaching, at the level of the class rather than of the individual. With greater and lesser degrees of tinkering, I use most of my syllabi at least twice, sometimes more. The first group of students and I spend a semester reading together, developing a slow-developing conversation in which we compile a set of shared readings of passages, understandings of how each person in the room reacts to texts, and so forth: a collective version of MacLean’s marginalia, some of it recorded (in papers, message board conversations, and so forth), most of it not.

The next group of students, however, inherits none of that classroom culture, and to me, starting the new class feels like forgetting. I appreciate the pleasures of discoveries that feel new; for example, I love watching class after class find their own ways of talking about the narration of Wuthering Heights as a function of Lockwood’s relationship to Ellen Dean. But must we forget everything a class has learned when the semester break comes? I wonder whether our courses can, like Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” recognize the wonder of “first looking” while also prizing the community implied by appreciating what has come before.

Our current practices enforce forgetting. Grinnell, for instance, is a Blackboard school; as far as I know, that software has no way to pass message board discussions from one group of students to another. Even if it could, institutional protections of student privacy would raise serious barriers to such sharing.

What, then, do I need to cultivate a new approach that allows both for new insight and for inherited classroom culture, that allows for the celebration of primary and secondary discovery?

My main answer is this: to be the teacher I want to be, I need to become a better computer programmer. I need to be able to create environments where students can record their learning, share it, build on it, structure it so that it welcomes and grows from the participation of their successors. I also need to work with institutional authorities to make good-faith sharing of academic thoughts easy for students and professors.

My first, modest effort to create this effect involved The Transatlantic 1790s, a database-backed site created by a small group of students and me (they writing content, I writing code) in 2004. The following year, a seminar read some of those students’ work and contributed to the site’s bibliography as part of the work the class. That all went well enough to make me want to do more: with more skill and experience, I could routinely bring together the learning of students in multiple classes, and then the learning of others, to inspire the cultural evolution that stems from inherited thoughts.

What happens when a group of students can recall the work of previous students they may not have met? I look forward to finding out.

Note: this post is cross-posted at Teaching Romanticism.

By Erik Simpson, ago

Games and grading V: gambling on grades

This post is just a side note to my thinking about games and grades, but as I’m writing about that subject, I can’t resist noting that students can now place real-money bets on their own grades.

I won’t bother shooting the fish in the moral barrel on this subject. I will instead note that the implementation seems poorly calibrated and easy to beat. It also involves a low cap on initial bets, so students have little incentive to alter their grades materially to win the bets.

I wonder what the real game is: does the company let the students win easily on those low-dollar initial bets and then let their real prediction model take hold? (I’m thinking of the classic pool shark model.) As far as I can tell, that model explains the information in the article better than the company’s rhetoric.

By Erik Simpson, ago

Games and grading IV: the sports kind of games

I was listening today to Robert Laughlin on EconTalk. Laughlin makes a side point about higher education; the podcast summary sketches it like this: “Attending elite universities is not education—it’s access to the peer group. There’s a lot of truth to that. The actual education you get is pretty generic. If you were really diligent, you could open books and read it. What you are really selling is access to other students and to colleagues. Gateway to certain things—that’s what you charge for, can’t charge for knowledge.”

Economists often make arguments like this about higher education: the real value of elite education, they say, is access to peer group, or status signaling, or pure credentialing—almost anything other than what happens between faculty and students.

And to a large extent, I buy those arguments. I think they are incomplete, however, and their incompleteness comes to light when we think of applying the same logic to elite high school athletes. Would anyone say that an 18-year-old athlete would do just as well to study books and videos for a few years as to enter an elite college or professional program?

I suspect that nearly everyone would agree that highly skilled athletes need to seek out the handful of coaches who can and will help them develop their skills further.

To what extent are highly skilled 18-year-old writers or mathematicians or musicians in a similar position?

I don’t know exactly, of course, but I suspect that the present and future ability of elite colleges and universities to justify their existence and price tags depends on their success in making the case for that analogy—the case for higher education as a process of doing rather than knowing.

By Erik Simpson, ago

Games and grading III: Dan Pink and motivation

How can we know how to motivate students for different kinds of tasks?

One reason, perhaps the primary reason, that teachers explore connections between video games and education lies in their longing for students who display gamer-like motivation. What Shakespeare professor doesn’t want students as eager to construct Renaissance London as SimCity?

In his TEDTalk on motivation (a precursor to his recent book Drive), Dan Pink outlines some social scientific studies of motivation. Pink summarizes his argument in this short CNN piece:

In laboratory experiments and field studies, a band of psychologists, sociologists and economists have found that many carrot-and-stick motivators — the elements around which we build most of our businesses and many of our schools — can be effective, but that they work in only a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.

For enduring motivation, the science shows, a different approach is more effective. This approach draws not on our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but on what we might think of as our third drive: Our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

In particular, high performance — especially for the complex, conceptual tasks we’re increasingly doing on the job — depends far more on intrinsic motivators than on extrinsic ones.

If I want my students to focus on their own “complex, conceptual tasks,” I need to consider ways to activate their drive to “create new things,” and I want those things not only to be the occasional essay but also initiatives that shape the classroom experience fundamentally.

By Erik Simpson, ago

Games and Grading II: Dan Meyer

I present to you a games and grading post that is about neither games nor grading!

Dan Meyer gave a TEDTalk on his approach to secondary mathematics education: the talk is well worth watching, and it provides a good introduction to inquiry-based approaches to teaching.

I’ll return to Meyer’s talk as I continue this series of post, but for now, I’ll pick up on its literary side. Meyer quotes Deadwood creator David Milch, saying that bad television

creates an impatience, for example, with irresolution. And I’m doing what I can to tell those stories which engage those issues in ways that can engage the imagination so that people don’t feel threatened by it.

This is John Keats’s version of that sentiment:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason . . . .

I find repeatedly that writers on new media reinvent Keats’s wheel. Is Negative Capability the signature skill of the contemporary workplace?

By Erik Simpson, ago
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