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Today, Barack Obama gave the keynote address at my little alma mater’s commencement ceremony. I, of course, on my peculiar piece of English earth, could not attend. So my Victorianist and I wired ourselves into the webcast and prepared ourselves for a healthy dose of Hope, Audacity, and other such forms of inspiration.
He was, of course, inspiring. Aside from a bit of vaguely offensive stumping, his speech on the value of investing in small changes in the interest of creating bigger ones, was, yes, inspiring, luminous, et caetera.
But you know what? Michael S. Roth, my little alma mater’s new president, was more inspiring, more luminous. Michael Roth was the one who made me cry. Michael Roth was the one who made me proud to be an alumna of this institution, who reminded me why I value as deeply as I do the lessons that I learned there, who reminded me of the urgent need for me to take those lessons with me into the world.
His words, in part:
Being in the company of students as gifted and energetic as Wesleyan’s class of 2008, gives me faith that we may well be able to reject the status quo, to build a politics and a culture of hope and community rather than of fear and divisiveness. Your thoughtfulness and courage, your questioning and your exuberance keeps me from becoming cynical and pessimistic. If you engage in the serious politics of change, if you participate in the struggle for social justice and sustainable economic growth, I believe we can change course. Now, it would be easier for you to use your smarts, your sophisticated learning, to be funny and hip, to be smart and ironic. But you don’t have to take this path of least resistance. You have the moral and intellectual capacity to take the path of actually making real progressive change, of becoming productive idealists.
For many generations of students, Wesleyan University has stood for the opportunity to connect serious intellectual and aesthetic work with making a difference in the world. Wesleyan students have the talent, the capacity and the drive to create something new. This year’s graduates, like Wesleyan alumni before you, will contribute to shaping our culture in the future, because otherwise it will be shaped by people for whom creativity and change, freedom and equality, diversity and tolerance, are much too threatening. We are counting on you to help shape our culture, so that it will not be shaped by forces of oppression and violence.
Violence remains one of the sad, disturbing parts of our lives. It is the loud noise that keeps us from hearing the music of the world. Violence not only destroys meaning, but it has the potential to disrupt our very capacity to make future meaning. Wesleyan University resists that violence [...] As scholars and artists, as scientists and as writers, you also set an example against the de-meaning that is violence.
You will hear people tell you that the greatest protection against violence is surveillance, that greater security is developed with higher fences to keep out the foreigners, or that we must project violence on distant shores to keep our homes safe. DO NOT BELIEVE THESE MESSAGES. Please remember that your education stands in opposition to non-sense and cruelty; please recall your capacity to create when others around you call for destruction.
This “education” is an investment in the fate of the universe. I wonder, sometimes, what my choice to pursue a career in what we quaintly call “higher education” actually means. Today, Michael Roth reminded me that to be an educator, and to do it well, is to insert one’s entire being into the fabric of the universe and shake it as hard as one can.
That is what the best among faculty of my alma mater do every time they step into a classroom. That is what makes them shapers of the minds of a body of students known for their commitment to meaningful change. My fellow graduates are all, in one way or another, teachers. They teach every day of their lives. They are invested in transmitting their commitments and their passions. My alma mater is a community of committed teachers, and I am feeling very powerfully at this moment my connection to that community.
We don’t have to be rabble-rousers (though some of us are, and brilliantly). The material we teach doesn’t have to be “topical,” or whatever, for it to be useful. The men and women whose student I have been blessed to be have taught me many things in many ways, but all of them have taught me mindfulness. They have taught me to respect the complexity of the universe, and to engage it with all my intellectual might. They have taught me that this is what resistance means — that to engage, to refuse stasis, to create, is to shake the fabric of the universe.
That work will be mine to carry forward, one day — rather soon, really. I look forward to it more than I can possibly say. Today, a quirky young intellectual who by some miracle has got his hands on the presidency of my little alma mater reminded me that I owe it to myself to rise to the challenge of that work, and that I will be damned lucky if I can live up to the example my teachers have set me.
Still further reasons to be delighted that I am applying to grad program(me)s and never have to do the undergrad gig ever again. Small comforts.
And also still another reason to wish that Columbia University would stop being its ridiculous self.
And furthermore, I’m so glad I resisted the Ivy Impulse. (Kudos to Brown for roundly – or is it flatly? – rejecting me.) I know many delightful people who are products thereof, but I think that’s in spite of, not thanks to, their alma maters.
Oh, and remember my post about high school? Yeah well at least I didn’t grow up here. Way to go, Greenwich — you’ve not only outstripped all your companions in the world of Big Fat Gaffs Made By Wealthy New England Suburban Schools, you’ve managed to completely miss the point on what “race” means. But don’t worry, we’re not disappointed — we didn’t have any expectations of you to begin with.
This reminds me of the time when my town, “New Eden,” re-zoned the elementary schools, simply on a numbers basis. There are three elementary schools, one of which is “in town” near the high and middle schools, a much smaller zone than the others, and also home to most of New Eden’s elderly and young singles, who don’t have school-going kids. So, simple fix: re-zone the school districts so that kids who would have gone to Uber-Wealthy School (UWS) in the leafy western end of town with its McMansions, its Aston Martins, and its coke-fuelled wife-swap parties (I’m not kidding) will now attend School of Moderate Affluence (SMA), in the southern/central part of town, with its sweet little cape houses and its Volvos and its charades-and-wine-fuelled gatherings of the Arts Guild. Even out the numbers. A no-brainer.
But ha! You have not counted on the Ladies of Western New Eden. A flurry of meetings, letters to the superintendent, histrionics at the School Board, and, best of all, letters to the editor of the town paper, testified to the bone-deep snobbery, classism, WASPism, and disregard for the meaningful points of primary education native to the parents of UWS. My personal favorite among the soundbytes that came out of this, from a UWS mother: “I do not want my children to be forced to go to school with children from single-parent and double-income households.” Double-income households, ladies and gentlemen of the jury!
I didn’t go to primary school in this town (we lived in the wide open spaces of the Northern Midwest way back when), but most of my high school friends did. And most of my high school friends were at the very top of our class. Guess what? Not a single one of them went to UWS. All but one went to SMA (that one went to Also Uber-Wealthy School, which was not mentioned in the scandal). In fact, not a single person in the top ten percent of our class went to UWS. The SMA kids got together and wrote an erudite, scathing satirical response to the Editorializing Ladies, which probably helped to keep the new zoning on the table and get it voted through by the School Board and by Town Hall. Oh, and nearly all of them went to top-tier colleges.
Does SMA’s success at pumping out little brainiacs mean that it’s a better school? Perhaps, perhaps not. Does it mean that the kids of “single-parent” and “double-income” households are more grounded, less materialistic, and better-attuned to reality, and therefore more likely to develop rigorous work ethics, to value their own work, and to appreciate their educations not as a gift to entitled children but as an opportunity to engage in something larger than themselves? You bet your ass.
This town, however, is in no danger of being in disaccord with segregation laws. Why? Because there are about, oh, five families of color here, not counting a slightly larger handful of families of East Asian descent. But tales of bussing, racial segregation that somehow happens anyway (surprise!), Asian jokes, anti-Semitism, and classism so rampant that kids who live in neighborhoods where houses go for only 500,000 bucks are taunted as “ghetto kids,” will have to wait for another day.
My parents sometimes express guilt at having caused me to attend high school in this alternate universe. And sure, it hurt adolescent me a bit, but nothing a few years of world travel and wonky adventures in the Petri Dish couldn’t cure. More importantly, it was also an opportunity to gaze into a world that few get to witness, and for that I am bizarrely grateful. An important lesson for any American gal: never underestimate the power of crazy, fabulously wealthy, church-going white people in large numbers. There is no better place to learn this lesson than in New Eden.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this NYT article about the pressure on young women to be hot, smart, accomplished polymaths, and to do it all “effortlessly,” in the exasperatedly sighing term of one of the young women interviewed. Further evidence that the college admissions process is slowly destroying, at least for the very privileged, what was once viewed as the glory of youth.
My father tossed me the paper this weekend, looked down at me over his specs as he ashed his cigarette: “Here. More food for the fire.”
Indeed. But an incensed feminist tirade would do no good here — anyone who reads this blog has either made the tirade hirself or knows exactly what I have to say about it all.
What struck me as strange, as I put down the article and looked down at my dog over my own specs, sighed and ashed my cigarette, was that the article emphasized the pressure itself, and not the objects of it. My own high school experience in a small, insular, white, ultra-wealthy New England suburb was mostly analogous to those of the young women interviewed by the NYT. But Esther puts it best: “How do you achieve and still be genuine?”
It was cool to be smart at my high school. Some of the most popular kids were at the top of my class, scored unfathomable scores on SAT’s, AP tests and the like, took all the hardest classes, and did a gazillion “extra-curriculars.” What was most definitely not cool, what the cool kids made abundantly clear was most definitely not cool, were my interests: art and leftism. It was important to do well in A.P. English, but totally weird to memorize that wacky Emily Dickinson poem — not to mention devoting an evening every week to editing the student literary magazine, CV-building extra-curricular activity though it may have been. It was important to score a five on the A.P. United States History examination, but it was totally weird to insist on asking questions about the deeply complicated gender politics of the temperance movement or why our textbook didn’t have room for more than a cursory glance at the roles of non-white people in the abolitionist movement.
Being a polymath came at the price of forsaking any genuine interests we might have had. With a very few exceptions — kids I admired very much indeed and who are now making wonderful people of themselves — mine was a high-school populated by iron-willed automatons who were nonetheless destined for some brand of success. All of us were anxious out of our brains about college and grades and meeting with approval from teachers and parents. Of course we were anxious — we were teenagers and that’s what teenagers do. And of course there was a lot of pressure on us: we were, so the story ran, the scions of a class of people who had, for better or for worse, made themselves Very Important by accruing a fuckton of cash, and we were therefore more or less likely to be running the world, just as our parents had done, within twenty years.
Luckily for everyone, I will not be running anything more earth-shattering than a neat little corner of an English department office somewhere. This is because I was convinced that the automaton-effect was fundamentally evil, that it was good and right to kick it in the grass reading Emily Dickinson and shout Leninist soundbytes at the school principal when he tore down the adverts for our fledgling GSA. I’m not patting myself on the back — those years were horrendous, and it was probably unwise to be quoting Lenin in any context. I was a complete idiot. What I am doing is pointing to the real danger — that the pressure on young privileged kids guides them to dangerous values. Numbers — grades, scores, class rank, a university’s U.S. News and World Report ranking — were the ultimate indicator of success. Our dynamism was fabricated — on paper, awards and an endless list of activities frequently disguised a void. We were not engaged with the world around us. Most of us did not know that there was a world around us, despite the best efforts of generous, conscientious educators.
I suppose the point towards which I’ve been meandering is that young people should be kicked and prodded, and that “pressure” is not in itself a bad thing. What we as future or current parents and educators, or simply as citizens of the world, should be concerned with is thinking critically about how, exactly, that kicking and prodding is structured, and to what goal it tends. What I learned in the Petri Dish was what it feels like to be constantly assailed by pressure — but this time it was the pressure to think critically, the pressure that told me that no matter how agonizingly I worked, no matter how well-developed were my ideas or my papers or my political inclinations, there would always be a challenge at the end, another problem that needed resolving, another question to be posed that would push me still farther.
I will never forget a moment in the office of — let’s call her Professor Revolutionary, when, in tears and at the end of my rope, I blurted out “But what you’re asking is impossible! It’s never enough for you, is it?!” She looked me in the eye and with her characteristic fierceness said, “No, Neophyte. But it’s got nothing to do with me. Nothing will ever be enough. Don’t let that paralyse you.” It was devastating. But she was right. When it comes to engaging with the world, nothing will ever be enough. And to learn that as a young person is a good thing. I’ve never felt intellectual, emotional, or political pressure like that put on me by Revolutionary — and no single person has ever had the impact on what my mother calls my “fierceness,” my refusal to accept things as they are, that Revolutionary had.
It’s not “pressure” that’s a problem. It’s the narrow categories into which elite schools “pressure” their students that need rethinking. The intensity of high school should be about what adolescence is about: railing against absolutely everything as wildly as possible. How do we get to that rethinking? I have no idea. But thanks to the intellectual pressure-cooker that was my world in the Petri Dish, I know better than to let it paralyse me.
As I lounge in my living room surrounded by half-made bingo games and markers and half-graded stacks of papers and nauseatingly cheery books on primary education, I mull over the critique of the Education Nationale that’s been building in my bewildered brain since my first trip to Mazamet’s Inspection in late September. I’m also trying to work out a lesson plan for my second group of CE2’s that will incorporate some of wild little Axel’s energy so that I don’t have to yell at him any more.
I am opposed to the overdiagnosis of these things in the States, but Axel is the clearest case of ADHD, or something closely resembling it, that I’ve ever encountered. He is incapable of sitting still for more than two minutes together. He can’t stop talking – at his most “well-behaved,” he mumbles along, repeating whatever I’m saying, and at his most “ill-behaved” he shouts at his classmates when they respond incorrectly to questions, or yells out whatever’s just been written on the board – or anything else that comes into his head, for that matter. He can’t give an answer without standing up and fidgeting, and if he gets it right he has to do a little dance and sing or maybe rap for a moment. If he doesn’t have something in his hands, he drums incessantly – and loudly – on his table-top. For all that, he’s one of the best English-learners I have. But there are no structures in place at his school to help him learn, no counselor or special education teacher to give him some individual attention. His teachers think he’s just a pain in the ass (and he can be), wilfully disobedient, a problem. They have been trained to believe that all students must fit a single mold of “obedience.” All students must learn at the same pace, in the same manner, with the same study habits and classroom comportment, right down to the uniform French handwriting rigorously imposed on them from a young age.
Axel’s teachers are unwilling to break their molds to help him, and I am entirely unequipped to do so. He disrupts my class, but I can’t stick him with the standard punishment – sending him to the directrice for scolding – because I don’t believe that it’s his fault if he feels the need to act out against a system that wants to turn him into an automaton. But I also can’t allow his antics to interrupt the learning of his classmates. So I am trying to build my lesson plans around him. I just don’t know how.
In my university classes in Paris three years ago I got a glimpse of the way French children are formed by the French education system. The students took notes in at least two colors (black or blue for writing, red for underlining and marking new sections), using a ruler to underline and to create headings, formatting their record of the lecture in a perfect outline with precise indentations. My indiscriminate scrawling scandalized them. “Comment tu pourras lire tout ça, après? Comment tu vas étudier?” Because, of course, the goal of “studying” was to memorize my notes and then spew them back in a paper or on an exam. My classmates did not raise their hands except, occasionally, to ask the professor – timidly – to repeat or clarify part of her lecture. When I interrupted to express a difference of opinion, or ask whether the professor’s argument would hold up if we brought such-and-such into consideration, my fellow students turned to stare at me in wonder.
The – otherwise spunky, fun, and sometimes interesting – robots who surrounded me in my classes in Paris were, I insist, made that way by the overabundance of discipline and structure imposed on all French students from an early age. It’s wearing on Axel, resilience of mohawk and devilish grin notwithstanding, and it makes my job doubly difficult.
But not impossible. Today I had a great deal of success with those CE2’s, and Axel in particular. The cheap, quick-fix, poor-pedagogy approach: measured balance of carrot (you can color at the end of class if you’re good!) and stick (one more warning, next time I’ll set you lines!). Combined with the thoughtful progressive teacher approach: a smiling “Axel! Si tu restes calme et si tu fais bien attention pendant cinq minutes, tu pourras venir devant la classe pour guider le jeu!”, followed by hearty congratulations on his feat, and then another five minutes. When he quietly celebrated his victories, I let it slide. When he got a little out of hand, I made an “easy-there” gesture and politely said, “Axel, please?” And then he remembered and snapped back into his funny, concentrated Good Boy pose. If he lets me, someday I’ll take a picture – the look on his face when he’s trying to be good is worth my entire day.
A little success today, in one of my most difficult spots, makes me hope for more. And hope, too, that my kids are strong enough not to let these schools suck their souls out of them. I think they are, or will be. And I want to help them, and hope I’m learning how.
