cold discipline for solo travellers
From the category archives:
While others who work in higher education use their twitter feeds for insightful and wry remarks about pedagogy and inquiry, mine — as even a cursory glance at the weekly archives here stored reveals — is largely a repository for anecdotes about puppies, pregnancy and coffee breaks. I don’t make too many apologies for this, since my internet presence is largely recreational and Twitter itself a valuable locus of relationships and conversations for me: the last year of happy days with @Ghetsuhm and @MeganWegan is just one example.
At the moment, however, I feel as if I am necessarily talking in asides, analogies and ciphers as the restructuring of my workplace moves into my own area of work and my union and teaching roles converge. I am not of a mind to put at risk my professionalism by talking in specifics here, although a search of the education archive on the Stuff webpages should reveal for those who are interested a little of what is going on, and on what, in my union role, I am frequently asked to comment.
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While I surrendered my ego, you fed yours;
All my fantasies died when you said yours;
I have dangled my pride to forget yours;
Will my mind be at ease when you get yours?
We’ll find out soon enough.
The music I am enjoying the most at the moment is written and performed by my peers, or by people contemporary in their time with how old I am now. This is not new (witness my trawling of the collected Gram Parsons in 2002, for example). It’s nonetheless within this framework that I say that Phrazes for the Young is for me a delight from start to finish, an album of lovingly detailed pastiches performed with the mixture of brio and diffidence that I think defines those of us who came into our thirties midway through the 2000s.
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A little over ten years ago, I arrived home from abroad with the exciting knowledge that the puppy I had chosen before leaving would soon be old enough to come and live with me. In that brief interim I did a lot of shopping, choosing pet toys, food bowls and a crate to double as a bed. I went the round of the pet stores; none of these things were inexpensive. Some survived our first six months together while others were chewed to bits or broken. I learned a lot, too, about the utility that dogs bring to objects of all kinds: a cardboard tube could bring young Arthur as much enjoyment as a brand-name chew toy. (I also learned to keep my laundry basket above floor level, after more than one occasion on which he raced through the living room, a bra flown aloft from his jaw as if the pennant of a winning team.)
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The enrolment requirements for doctoral students have tightened all over the country since I was such a one. My more-than-four years spent spelunking in various imaginative destinations productive and less so was made possible by generous funding, an indulgent supervisor and a postgraduate office that would not, in my experience, scrutinise what students were doing too closely unless their supervisor(s) abandoned their support. (The vulnerabilities of students working within a system are not the subject of this post). This left me free, in the time-honoured fashion of the humanities, to follow research hunches until such a time as I had an argument that hung together. Not everyone I worked alongside was so fortunate; some did the former without achieving the latter.
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Over at The Hand Mirror, Julie raises the question of what a citizen’s to do when encountering personal questions about one’s fertility, pregnancy, and family plans more generally, and the general social judginess and boundary-crossing such queries often evoke.
At five months pregnant, I am somewhat in the thick of such experiences myself; hence using my own webpages rather than posting a comment on-site to consider the matter. My impression has been that conversations around fertility and natality fall into two broad general groups.
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This spring-and-summer pregnancy is already twice the length of its winter predecessor, and as different, thereby, as two things of the same kind can be. Not least among these differences was the way in which we passed the first eleven weeks in a kind hopeful lockdown, wary to put too much pressure on the future to carry hope that might yet be redundant again.
The brain, the spine, the beating heart that was our gift before Christmas opened the door to a different kind of experience, territory as unknown as the very notion of being pregnant was the first time around. The tremendous good fortune whereby my morning sickness (a most inadequate moniker) receded by New Year has given me back my old ability to think about anything other than how terrible I feel (and the accompanying certainty that nobody understands or cares sufficiently) and something of a hopeful forward-gaze.
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As someone who does neither gardening nor baking, it surprises me the extent to which I enjoy reading online about the gardening and baking of others, particularly since in the past I would have berated myself for my lack of competence and enthusiasm, respectively, in both areas. (I put this down to something like the general settling of life that has come out of being married, with our mown-lawn harmony and store-bought treats.)
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I honed my essay writing and editing skills on Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare and Katharine Susannah Pritchard at a time when I didn’t expect to use them for anything except the most esoteric of pursuits. My explanation to my students of these skills’ value has never pushed much beyond these boundaries, except to say that if you are well-trained in writing and editing, you can turn your hand to most writing tasks, including those of future employers that you can’t imagine yet. The primary function for me, however, of the ability to write and edit has been for my own enjoyment, with the latter, more recently, also for sale in the service of others’ work. [Hustler's aside: my business welcomes your recommendations and referrals].
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Little monkey, tono ano
5 April, 2010
in commentatrix, in Aotearoa, teaching & learning, we are family
I don’t miss the daily grind of trying to facilitate the western-style critical thinking of students whose learning priorities were largely elsewhere, but I do miss the field trips. The visit to a mid-Canterbury dairy farm in which half my class and I had suddenly to leap out of the way of flying excrement (flying at speed, too, as the cows stepped on to the rotary milking machine) remains in memory, as does another day on which we alighted, two busloads of us, at Nga Hau e Wha marae only to discover we were a day early for our booking. That short trip ended with me running up to the entry to the marae, crying cease-and-desist to students who were running ahead of me taking photographs of the pou and wharenui, sans powhiri, and thus formed part of my history of absurdist problem-solving, if not pedagogy’s finest hour.
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