Long day today, but a good day. As usual, I overplanned the class, but it went well. I always, always overplan, and always catch hell for it in evaluations, but with a semester-long writing course, it always seems to me like there’s more to do than there is time: I know it’s foolish to think that I’ll be The One who helps students learn how to write, but I figure I gotta do what I can, and to do otherwise would be to do students a disservice. (Anybody out there with a more Zen approach to instruction willing to convince me that students will learn what they learn at their own pace no matter how much one pushes? Part of what shapes my temperament, of course, is my time as Sergeant Ed and the Army’s ethic of train, train, and train some more, and then once you’re tired and can’t do it any longer, train some more: not that I act that way, but somewhere in my brain there’s the conviction that there’s always more that one can learn.) In any case, the students in my sections were enthusiastic today, and I think part of it might have actually been due to the shift in social configurations, which I try to do at least once in every hour-and-fifteen-minute class. Today it started with some initial writing on one’s own (Writer’s Notebook Entry Number Eight: If you could have any superpower, what would it be, and what would you use it for? Who would your arch-nemesis be? Freewrite for ten minutes) and then moved to a full-class discussion (we recently reconfigured our computer labs so that students can simply swivel their chairs and face the middle and have a discussion, which may be rather panoptic as far as the position of the teacher goes but is so much more pleasant than having the computers in rows) of the second essay assignment, and then to small group work doing generative writing (to be shared with the rest of the class as discussion notes that students might cite in later drafts) and finally to a few final minutes of individual writing building on that group work, with that individual writing to be continued for homework and used as the subject of Thursday’s work. So yeah, it sounds kinda frantic, but it was tight today, and it worked. I’m happy.
And ’cause it went well today, I had the energy when I got home to cook myself a nice meal with leftovers that’ll last a while. And I’m about to go off on a rant here, so I’ll acknowledge that it’s been a long time since I’ve volunteered at a kitchen, and it’s been a long time since I gave material help at a shelter rather than simply giving money to organizations that help hungry folks, so I’m guilty of the indictments that will soon follow. However: tonight was lamb rogan josh, though the sauce was mostly from a jar (well, doctored some with spices & such), plus baked paradise squash because it’s Fall and I can do it now, brush the inside with butter (if you’re going to cook with butter, you might as well go all the way and use the best stuff, since it’ll be bad for you no matter what: Land-O-Lakes unsalted is by far the best, clarifies the easiest, and has the least milk solids of any butter) and bake flat side down at 400 for 45 minutes and then turn the halves over, brush with a little more butter and sprinkle with cumin and pumpkin pie spice and red curry powder, and bake for five more minutes, and some brown rice, which I ruined as usual, since I’m completely unable to cook a decent pot of nice, fluffy rice, but it was OK despite the chewiness. And the squash was just so damn good, and the lamb was OK too.
And while I was cooking, I was listening to NPR, and tonight’s interview with Jonathan Lethem. I love Jonathan Lethem — for me, his writing is almost up there with Steve Erickson, approaching Pynchon-hood and Delillo-dom, but also incorporating John Crowley’s wonderful lightness of touch — and I’ve loved him since long before Motherless Brooklyn, snarfing early hardcover copies of Amnesia Moon and As She Climbed Across the Table, but his class myopia made me a little sad. (C’mon, you knew I would go there eventually, right?) And yet it was reassuring to hear how present class was in the interview: while I might disagree with the stance, the interview reinforced my conviction that class as a topic in American life is unavoidable, particularly in an age of growing economic inequality. Terry Gross invoked what she called the “hippie” transcendence of class, with which I immediately took issue: while the counterculture’s goals might have been a classless society, the movement got its start with the children of privilege who largely avoided conscription during the Vietnam war due to their economic status as college students. Let’s not whitewash history here. The countercultural transcendence of class is a symptom of Arnoldian vanguardism, and I think many who call themselves “liberal” (I am one) would do well to examine their notions of culture to see how close they stand to the privileged elitist snarl of folks like Hirsch and the Blooms. Or, to be more blunt about it: I can’t stand the folks here in Fat City who make sure you know how liberal they are by their buying habits, by the fact that they drive Saabs and make sure you know they recycle scrupulously and buy vegan and hemp and “fairly traded” emblems of missionary cultural consumerism. Hey, that’s great: you’ve successfully tamed political action into faux-liberal signification, thereby successfully defusing any possibility for radical social change into a lifestyle. Nice move. Go do your nails or something. Go buy a “question authority” bumper sticker. Or one of those “random moments of senseless beauty” ones. I love those. It’s great to see an ideology so unchallenging it can be expressed on the back of your car.
Sorry. Got a little sidetracked there. I was talking about Jonathan Lethem, and my disappointment with the interview. The worst part came when Lethem and Gross both somehow agreed to characterize going to public schools in New York as “lower class” or “working class”, which seemed to me to radically raise the class bar: is public education now not good enough for the so-called “middle class”? Is this not disgusting, both in its cavalier dismissal of any consideration of the “lower” or “working” classes and in its rather dim assumption that a private education will always be somehow better (have Terry or Jonathan looked at the pay scales for entry-level teachers in the private and public sectors, and do they understand the dynamics of teacher testing, qualification, and pay?) than a public education? This was only compounded by Lethem’s description of his school as a “classless” society. Here’s a tip, Jonathan: it looked “classless” because nobody there had to worry about material concerns. That’s the emblem of a classless society. In a capitalist context, what that means is that none of the kids had to worry about where their next meals were coming from. A classless society has obviated scarcity.
Though it may seem so from your privileged position, our society has not.
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