In my first semester as a new professor, much of my attention is going either to managing the load of papers, committees, and other work or else to syllabus development and lesson planning (and my enjoyment of the time spent in the classroom), but I’m also aware of some of the unique aspects of the extracurriculum here. Consider, as one such aspect, the way certain discipline concerns are managed:
I’m not sure what else to say other than the practice of videorecording, editing, and distributing this film stands in an extremely interesting relationship to the exercise of discipline depicted in the film. There’s something of the repurposing there that Jim Ridolfo has talked about in his investigations of “rhetorical velocity,” and that repurposing does interesting things with the relation between representation and power. Note to self: this bears further investigation, especially at an institution like mine.
I’ll say this: The students there have MARVELOUS taste in music! The speeding up of the film was clever as well.
Also, can you tell me anything about the context of the snow-shoveling?
Well, if you’re a cadet and you do something wrong that merits punishment, your cadet chain of command (which is wholly separate from the academic side) figures out how much punishment it’s worth, and walking hours is the least significant form of punishment. So if you repeatedly show up to history class obviously not having done the reading and the instructor thinks the fact that you’re implicitly disobeying direct orders to complete the homework is a problem, she might get in touch with your superior in the cadet chain of command. And your superior might decide you need to devote five hours of walking to consider how that time might be better spent reading for history class, and so you tally up hours to march in the quad — usually no more than two or three on weekday evenings, plus up to five on Saturdays.
Of course, good TAC officers hate inefficiency, so if it’s snowing and cadets are walking hours, give ’em snow shovels and have them help keep the quad clear.
Thank God it did not snow at Ft. Stewart. I could just imagine what SSG Johnson would of had us doing. “Milluh…Milluh! Get some shovels Milluh and clean my driveway.” Followed by the all too familiar cackle.
(sorry to those of you who have no clue what I’m saying…You’re better off for not knowing)
At least it wasn’t “beat on the brat” with a baseball bat, oh yeah! oh yeah! oo-ooh yeah! What happens if they are late to class too often because they’re editing videos?
Well, here, they aren’t late to class.
But yes, Bradley, it sounds like you’re asking about violence, and you’re right to do so. Students here train for violence and get college credit for courses like “combatives” where they learn how to take one another down. The training’s coed, and they’re provided with foam protective gear that’ll (supposedly) allow a 110-pound woman to spar full-force with a 300-pound linebacker without fear of injury. (The lesson that every boxer knows: if you’re going to throw a punch, the most important muscle is the quadricep in your thigh.)
I was talking to a friend about this the other day, and related a story someone had told me about how an intellectual critique of the way not to give an order had turned into a physical beating. Basically, the person who told me the story was in Ranger school, and one of the training cadre gave him numerous different contradictory orders — “Do this, take this objective, assault this objective, defend this perimeter, guard this convoy,” et cetera — and this person replied, “OK, which one of those orders do you want me to follow?” with the emphasis on how they were contradictory.
The cadre beat him up.