As of this past Saturday, July 3rd, I have completed my first teaching assignment. This job was not one where I lead discussion groups on modal logic or an Introduction to Philosophy class filled with indifferent and frequently absentee freshmen, rather, it was a summer class filled with 19 rising 14-16 year-olds. These kids are also the top 25% of the top 1% of PSAT takers. In other words, these kids are crazy smart. If I were to ask for a better group of students to begin my teaching career with, I suggest that I could not find anyone else. Even now, after an exhausting 3 weeks of living off of too little sleep, too much caffeine, and ample amounts of sun, I miss them a lot and wish I got to see them next term.
I have often thought of the life of teaching as something one is called to and rarely, on my better days, I've thought of it as a gift. Every day I woke up here in Durham I was reminded that getting to share in the lives of students is one of the highest of blessings and that it should be treated as such. I was reminded at every turn that this shared life of the mind is not a right; it is a privilege. I get the privilege of discussing some of the most interesting and important ideas in the history of the world with some of the brightest and funniest people I have ever met. It is a gift, always a gift, and should be treated as such.
Shedding such sentimental thoughts for a while, I figure I ought to talk about how much these kids and this experience has transformed the way I think about education and about philosophy as a whole. The first thing I should say is that they love to re-name things. For example, we philosophers refer to Plato's ideal world as the intelligible world. My students, however, took to referring to it as "the ness world", as in "where chairness lives". They also became obsessed with two meme-like things. First, they loved to make the whale noises from the beginning of the Carl Sagan youtube song "A Still More Glorious Dawn". When the class would get quiet I could always count on somebody to throw in a "whoop!, uhhhh". Secondly, they loved loved loved Kant puns. I took to writing their names on a quasi-fictional "no-no list" for excessive Kant puns. I also took to having them bribe my exceptionally awesome TA Peter and me with epically awesome imagined things. Such bribes included a snowblower powerful enough to move the island from Lost to a different location and Immanuel Kant brought to the future and forced to wear Peter's ever-present teal running shorts and carrying crumbly cookies from our dinning commons (the very reward I promised to those kids who won games we played).
On a more serious note, these students drew from so many more sources than I had ever thought high school kids would know. I had one student who made a connection between the Heraclitean idea of time and Einstein's special and general Relativity. This same student wrote a fantastic paper on the way that synaesthesia effects human perception and in particular our conceptions of temporality. I had another student write a paper that would get an A in a college philosophy class and she was only 16. They were exceptionally bright kids, and I can't gush over how wonderful they were enough.
After about a week of working with them I began thinking about two things. First, how do I get back to such a great environment as the Duke East TIP campus? This environment is one where I had great bosses, great colleagues, and exceptional students. Who wouldn't want to work in such an environment? Secondly, how do I get to the kind of school where I can teach these kids in college? That's the harder question to work through than the first one because it entails rethinking my ideas concerning higher education. Do I enter the gates of the walled city in order to get to teach them? How much of their exceptional qualities are the result of economic advantages? What about those kids who can't afford to come to TIP but are still just as exceptional? It also might entail thinking how "East Jesus Nowhere" becomes a place for the best and brightest and what such a reimagining of higher ed might mean.
Finally, I'd like to say a word about a subtle reminder of the deficiencies of the academy in light of this amazing experience. At both BC and SIUC, the Philosophy Department seems cut off from other areas of the academy. It is very easy to get so wrapped up in my own discipline that it becomes the only think I can talk about. Yet here, amongst a sea of English and Literature grad students, I was reminded about what it means to collaborate with others. I was reminded that, just as was the case with Socrates, knowing myself and my discipline meant knowing my limits be they personal or philosophic. I got to talk with medievalist who discussed time and eternity in Augustine and Aquinas, modernists who talked about eschatology in popular culture, and played a lot of Tetris against some truly formidable English, Music, History, Economics, and Computer Science guys. Its very hard being an introvert and also being in an insular discipline. Not that philosophy is the only insular discipline, nor that the academy as a whole isn't insular. What I am trying to say is that a defensive stance is not always the best stance to take regarding other disciplines. In a wonderful conversation I had with a TA from UNC, we discussed how we look for different things in the great texts of Heidegger, Derrida, and Sartre. We talked about how hard it is to be taken seriously and to take others seriously in the graduate environment. We also agreed that such closed-off stances are foolish. Collaboration and experimentation was pushed here at TIP and I hope to bring such an attitude to my other environments be they academic or otherwise.
The life philosophic as well as the life academic is a gift and it ought to be treated as such. After just a single month, this is the best summer I've had in years and I'm so thankful for the opportunity to be a participant in such a great program. I told my kids that this is not a summer-survival job but this is a dream fulfillment job. I rarely say truer things than that.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Niche Culture, Niche Values or 1001 words on being misunderstood
What happens when niche-culture becomes the herald for niche-values? Don’t get me wrong, in many ways niche-culture—that transformation of the ways in which popular culture disseminates amongst various peoples allowing more obscure and previously overlooked elements to be given attention—has done wonderful things and represents something great. The fact that I am no longer bound culturally to my own geographic location is the kind of freedom lovers of art in all its forms have longed for. It used to be that if you lived in a town where the DJs sucked, your cultural choices were, as it were, screwed. But the internet (amongst other innovations) allowed us—we, the viewers, observers, hearers, and patrons—to explore the oddest, weirdest stuff we wanted. And some of us do. But something else ends up happening.
We human beings have, what I like to call, a tendency towards sedimentation. In other words, we take something that is new or odd or different and over time we transform it into something familiar, understandable, and limited. Its not that this process is good or bad either, it simply happens. What’s more is that we still think that it is innovative (and niche’s still might be but on a smaller scale) when in reality, what has happened is that rules have been established, parameters marked off, and horizons set in place. What is possible creatively, what is determined as legitimate, what determines legitimacy, all of this takes place within the rules of the niche. So there are limits to what is possible to be done in any given niche even though we don’t want to admit to those limits because, for the most part, admitting that there are limits is forbidden in a great number of (I say this with some irony) dominant niches.
What I find more interesting than the way that niche-culture has transformed popular culture is the ways in which it has transformed our social spaces. We have become participants in a multitude of different conversations each with their own rules. Its not that we weren’t participating in conversations before—no, it’s that the number of conversations has grown exponentially. Furthermore, the amount of information that is distributed amongst these conversations has become so plentiful that the overlap between conversations becomes difficult. And oftentimes, we confuse the conversations.
Confusing the conversation has less to do with confusing information, as it has to do with confusing the value of that information. As I said earlier, each niche has its own conversation rules or logic internal to it. And these conversation logics are based not entirely on reason so much as they are based on values. Specifically, each logic might be said to have a value or number of values that are esteemed more important than others. So people can be conversing with one another regarding the same information but, because of different niches or logics, they can never be talking about the same thing.
Moreover, we are able to participate in multiple conversations. This means that we can be participants in cultural niches whose values are in conflict with one another and not even realize it. It’s often an enigma as to how people can behave one way in a certain social setting and drastically different in another. One way of explaining this might be to say that they are participants in conversations that are operating under completely different sets of values. Such difference in behavior makes sense within the specific context because the logic aligned to the context demands behaviors that, from another perspective, are contradictory.
There’s a tendency amongst graduate students to feel disconnected from their peers who are not toiling away in libraries or cramped offices. You become so accustomed to specific conversation logics that you can have a hard time talking about things that you care a great deal about with people who are not within your specific niche. This happens even between people in different departments. Just ask my friend Kate how hard it is for the two of us, both graduate students in the humanities, to be on the same page about anything concerning our academic interests. It is perhaps because we are able to converse in another niche that we share that we are able to communicate.
The feeling of disconnection can take the form of feeling left behind by one’s peers or misunderstood because the niche that becomes dominant in one’s friends is not the same as that of our own. This happens to me all the time. I can devote a great deal of effort to work and thought within one specific niche but that niche is not as dominant or popular as the niche that my friends and peers participate in. This can result in a sense of pressure to adhere to the values esteemed by other niches even if such niches don’t question their own internal logic. This pressure is, I think, similarly felt by those who have graduated from college but have yet to obtain the kind of job they’d like, have yet to be in a longstanding partnership, etc.
With the loss of a central and totally dominant mainstream culture niches have emerged. The values central to these niches must be explored and examined if we are to progress towards conversations full of meaning and not as much misunderstanding. Human connection is not devalued in this niche-culture of ours so much as it is distracted and disrupted. So, where is our transvaluation of all values now? Is it turning inward into smaller and smaller niches (a la Dwight Schrute’s creation of a 2nd life inside of the actual second life)? Can we even get past the limits of our own niches and actually communicate with others? Do we even want to?
I would certainly like to move beyond the limits of my own academically inclined niche or my obscure pop-culture niche but I make no promises. I do, however, hope to participate in meaningful cross-niche conversations beyond such pressures.
We human beings have, what I like to call, a tendency towards sedimentation. In other words, we take something that is new or odd or different and over time we transform it into something familiar, understandable, and limited. Its not that this process is good or bad either, it simply happens. What’s more is that we still think that it is innovative (and niche’s still might be but on a smaller scale) when in reality, what has happened is that rules have been established, parameters marked off, and horizons set in place. What is possible creatively, what is determined as legitimate, what determines legitimacy, all of this takes place within the rules of the niche. So there are limits to what is possible to be done in any given niche even though we don’t want to admit to those limits because, for the most part, admitting that there are limits is forbidden in a great number of (I say this with some irony) dominant niches.
What I find more interesting than the way that niche-culture has transformed popular culture is the ways in which it has transformed our social spaces. We have become participants in a multitude of different conversations each with their own rules. Its not that we weren’t participating in conversations before—no, it’s that the number of conversations has grown exponentially. Furthermore, the amount of information that is distributed amongst these conversations has become so plentiful that the overlap between conversations becomes difficult. And oftentimes, we confuse the conversations.
Confusing the conversation has less to do with confusing information, as it has to do with confusing the value of that information. As I said earlier, each niche has its own conversation rules or logic internal to it. And these conversation logics are based not entirely on reason so much as they are based on values. Specifically, each logic might be said to have a value or number of values that are esteemed more important than others. So people can be conversing with one another regarding the same information but, because of different niches or logics, they can never be talking about the same thing.
Moreover, we are able to participate in multiple conversations. This means that we can be participants in cultural niches whose values are in conflict with one another and not even realize it. It’s often an enigma as to how people can behave one way in a certain social setting and drastically different in another. One way of explaining this might be to say that they are participants in conversations that are operating under completely different sets of values. Such difference in behavior makes sense within the specific context because the logic aligned to the context demands behaviors that, from another perspective, are contradictory.
There’s a tendency amongst graduate students to feel disconnected from their peers who are not toiling away in libraries or cramped offices. You become so accustomed to specific conversation logics that you can have a hard time talking about things that you care a great deal about with people who are not within your specific niche. This happens even between people in different departments. Just ask my friend Kate how hard it is for the two of us, both graduate students in the humanities, to be on the same page about anything concerning our academic interests. It is perhaps because we are able to converse in another niche that we share that we are able to communicate.
The feeling of disconnection can take the form of feeling left behind by one’s peers or misunderstood because the niche that becomes dominant in one’s friends is not the same as that of our own. This happens to me all the time. I can devote a great deal of effort to work and thought within one specific niche but that niche is not as dominant or popular as the niche that my friends and peers participate in. This can result in a sense of pressure to adhere to the values esteemed by other niches even if such niches don’t question their own internal logic. This pressure is, I think, similarly felt by those who have graduated from college but have yet to obtain the kind of job they’d like, have yet to be in a longstanding partnership, etc.
With the loss of a central and totally dominant mainstream culture niches have emerged. The values central to these niches must be explored and examined if we are to progress towards conversations full of meaning and not as much misunderstanding. Human connection is not devalued in this niche-culture of ours so much as it is distracted and disrupted. So, where is our transvaluation of all values now? Is it turning inward into smaller and smaller niches (a la Dwight Schrute’s creation of a 2nd life inside of the actual second life)? Can we even get past the limits of our own niches and actually communicate with others? Do we even want to?
I would certainly like to move beyond the limits of my own academically inclined niche or my obscure pop-culture niche but I make no promises. I do, however, hope to participate in meaningful cross-niche conversations beyond such pressures.
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