Monthly Archives: October 2015

Education

Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last: “Comedy is so cold and heartless”

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Kurt Vonnegut often confessed that he wrote to a basic pattern, the joke. And while Margaret Atwood‘s voluminous and diverse canon of work is often punctuated with wordplay, the humor is often dark and the overall weight of her fiction is relatively heavy.

About one-fourth of the way into Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last, we encounter that wordplay at the center of the novel when a main character, Charmaine, muses about her work euthanizing undesirables inside the speculative near-future where the economically desperate choose to spend half their lives in prison: “Then he’s unconscious. Then he stops breathing. The heart goes last” (p. 70).

The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury Publishing)

The joke (“the heart goes last” is death, not love) is that this novel filled with a great deal of sex—including sex robots, infidelity, and brain surgery designed to turn people into little more than sex slaves to one individual or object (think The Stepford Wives)—is rarely sexy and certainly void of genuine gestures of love, at least until the twist at the very end.

Atwood’s novels demonstrate a brilliant awareness of and contentious relationship with genre; Atwood is often simultaneously conforming to and resisting the conventions of genre.

Science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopian fiction—these have become touchstones for the later Atwood (since 2003), who has written extensively about genre distinctions as well as having a public debate with Ursula K. Le Guin about science fiction.

For many people, Atwood is defined by her The Handmaid’s Tale, a speculative, dystopian work that she echoed later in her brilliant MaddAddam trilogy—Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam.

In these works, Atwood channels her inner-George Orwell, and argues that she is not creating science fiction (in other words, making things up), but speculating about much that already exists, or has occurred in human history.

These speculative works exhibit her masterful wordplay, but the motifs as well as the plots are dark and heavy.

I would add for context that Atwood also creates characters who are often compelling, complex and worthy of our compassion. In her speculative works, we have someone, or several characters, to pull for, to love.

While many will call The Heart Goes Last science fiction or speculative fiction, this novel is not in the Atwood tradition noted above. Instead of Orwellian, Heart is something of a comic hybrid—Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World meets Idiocracy.

Yes, we meet Charmaine and Stan, a stereotypical hard-working, middle-class couple who has been reduced to living in their car because of an eerily familiar economic downturn that devastates the middle-class and poor; as in our current real world, the wealthy appear mostly unscathed, if not benefitting from this apocalypse that comes upon people like going broke does for Mike in The Sun Also Rises—gradually and then all at once.

The central tricks of the novel also feel like SF—desperate people being coerced to spend half their lives as prisoners to regain economic stability, genetic manipulation of animals for food, sex robots, secretive and mysterious euthanasia, and brain surgery that creates permanent (and perverse) sexual bonds (even between a woman and a knitted doll).

However, readers reaching for Heart and expecting MaddAdam are warned early by Atwood as the narration, a shifting limited omniscient, reveals Charmaine’s thoughts on watching TV while doing her waitressing job:

She can watch TV on the flatscreens, old Elvis Presley movies from the sixties, so consoling; or daytime sitcoms, though they aren’t that funny and anyway comedy is so cold and heartless, it makes fun of people’s sadness. She prefers the more dramatic shows where everyone’s getting kidnapped or raped or shut up in a dark hole, and you aren’t supposed to laugh at it. You’re supposed to be upset, the way you’d be if it was happening to you. Being upset is a warmer, close-up feeling, not a chilly distant feeling like laughing at people. (p. 17)

Expecting Atwood’s manipulation of genre and her laser attention to detail, I see the “comedy is so cold and heartless” as an author’s hint of what is to follow—a work of nearly slapstick comedy exposing that the joke is essential human nature, a shallowness, a heartlessness.

While in The Handmaid’s Tale the wordplay and jokes were embedded in a much darker and serious work, Heart reverses this pattern so that the broadly comedic—sex robots in Elvis and Marilyn Monroe models, the Green Man group—is the main narrative with the dark and serious playing smaller, punctuated roles. [This, I think, makes Atwood’s novel more like Vonnegut than her other speculative fiction.]

About halfway through the novel, for example, again through Charmaine’s perspective, readers are presented with the guiding motif of the speculative story: “Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official” (p. 145).

Free will, sexual attraction/love, fidelity, pop culture, social class inequity, gender roles and sexuality—these issues are examined by Atwood with the same sort of insight and thoughtfulness she brings to all her work. Atwood, for me, is always meticulously well-informed and then capable of seeing and re-seeing the world in ways that are both unexpected and incisive.

Heart is accessible and funny, although it isn’t the sort of speculative, dystopian fiction I most enjoy by her. Ultimately, my main criticism is that Heart never offers any characters for whom I care, leaving me, like Charmaine (sort of), needing a bit of brain surgery so that when I face them again, I can fall in love with their not-so-funny inadequacies of simply being human.

Capitalism

Are We the Walking Dead?

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What do presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Pope Francis, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and The Walking Dead have in common?

Capitalism. Or more precisely, scathing criticism of capitalism.

“The Walking Dead returns this Sunday [11 October 2015],” writes Erik Kain in Forbes, “and it pulls no punches.”

While Kain’s tease about the return of the AMC series for season 6 focuses on character conflict and plot, the broader punches of zombie narratives—and possibly an explanation for their appeal—are the metaphorical commentaries on human nature as shaped by a consumer capitalism culture.

Zombies are reanimated humans, reduced entirely to being consumers. Consuming is the only act of the zombie, driven to consume for the sake of consuming.

In most zombie narratives, including The Walking Dead, zombies are very frail and disturbingly slow—but their power lies in their relentlessness and usually either the sheer number of zombies or the coincidence of facing them in restricted spaces (claustrophobia is a regular feature of horror).

Once the zombie apocalypse happens, that reality becomes every-present. No one can take a vacation from the fact of zombies.

And there we have the ultimate power and aesthetic beauty of genre, zombie narratives as a hybrid of science fiction and horror. Zombie stories are not mere escapist fiction, but harsh and even distilled mirrors of what we have become in a world that is—like the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse—defined by consumer capitalism. No one can take a vacation from the fact of consumer capitalism.

Just as the zombie virus reanimates humans and thus erases that humanity, replacing it with sheer unbridled consumption, consumer capitalism animates us and erases our humanity, replacing it with the incessant need to work, to make money, to spend money, and to consume for the sake of consuming.

In both AMC’s prequel spin-off, Fear the Walking Dead, and the original comic-book adaptation, The Walking Dead, viewers are confronted repeatedly with a motif that shows characters facing the reality of who they must become to survive. The living, in fact, are far more terrifying in these stories that the simplistic and every darkly silly zombies themselves.

As millions will gather to watch the season opener of The Walking Dead, prompted to discuss and debate the characters and their actions (AMC offers as well Talking Dead, of course), we will likely fail to examine the great irony of this series and its place in the consumer culture (generating viewers, generating revenue); we will likely fail to walk ourselves to the mirror and look closely to see that we are the walking dead.

race

This Week in Whitemansplaining: Gun-Fetish Fatalism and Thinly Veiled Racism

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This week, in the U.S. where the female nipple is more dangerous than a gun, Jay Ambrose assures us that gun violence, including mass shootings at a daily pace, cannot be curbed by laws restricting gun ownership because Russia and single-parent families.

Ambrose throws up his hands at trying gun laws—”probably futile”—because, you know, Russia. And then the real kicker:

But President Barack Obama himself has underlined the single-parent linkage with crime, and some of the most prestigious think tanks in the land — conservative, liberal and in between — have produced impressive analytical and statistical backing for the proposition.

Along with his gun-fetish fatalism (“the charade of more gun control”), Ambrose offers thinly veiled racism with “single-parent families” (a corrosive trigger similar to Reagan’s “welfare queen”) and “gang shooters” (right in their with “thug” and “black-on-black crime” as the sort of racism allowed in polite company).

By the end of his whitemansplaining, Ambrose characterizes “mass shootings” as “a tiny percentage of all the killings,” which he again claims are more a result of single-parent families than gun-lust in the U.S.

But the key in the final paragraph is his shout out to “decent citizens defending themselves with guns,” and we should ask who those people look like.

This callous and hollow commentary comes just after I have read and responded to 24 first-year writing students’ essays; that assignment required them to write a public piece in an on-line format—using hyperlinks for support and images/video to augment their exposition or argument.

If I were to toss Ambrose’s piece into the pile, I would be forced to ask why he cherry-picked Russia—ignoring the powerful and persuasive evidence from European and Scandinavian countries with strong gun restrictions and incredibly rare mass shootings.

I also would ask why, if his evidence is so compelling, he fails to offer any hyperlinks to all that evidence—depending instead on shallow and coded rhetoric (the last refuge of the incompetent and deceptive).

With just a small amount of effort, Ambrose—if he were sincere—could point to the Department of Justice data that show crime and gun violence are extremely complicated topics but also refute the racist implications of his piece: all violent crime is almost entirely within race (“84% of white victims were killed by whites” and “93% of black victims were killed by blacks”; see page 13).

A little more research and Ambrose would find that single-parent families are also a very complicated part of the U.S.; notable is that despite popular assumptions whites are the largest number (9,289,000 compared to 6,427,000/ black and 7,044,000/ Hispanic/ Latino).

Ambrose’s entire pitch depends on making sweeping and unsupportable claims that seem true to the general public; his assertions and the ugly implications (which he either does with intent or is so privileged he cannot see his own racism) are the very worst of what counts as public commentary in the U.S.

While we must not make the same errors in logic and rhetoric that Ambrose does, it seems far more credible to state that gun-fetish fatalism and racism are greater causes of our violent nation than single-parent families.

Once again, Ambrose and his ilk need to stop their whitemansplaining and take a long hard look in the mirror.

Lou LaBrant, reading, teacher preparation, Teaching

Lou LaBrant and Teacher Education’s Enduring Legacy

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A colleague of Louise Rosenblatt at New York University, Lou LaBrant faced mandatory retirement when she turned 65 in 1953. Reflecting on her work at NYU as a teacher educator from 1942-1953, LaBrant wrote in 1988 “Public School 65, Down on the Lower East Side” as she turned 100.

LaBrant noted “that [New York City] requirements seemed to me inadequate for those who already spoke the language clearly but needed a richer background” (p. 6). Candidates for teaching English, LaBrant argued, needed greater linguistic understanding and experiences grounded in the complex Germanic and Latinate roots of English.

But other regulations also impeding LaBrant’s goals, including restrictions on the number of student teachers placed in each school. Circumventing that restriction, however, LaBrant placed 6 teacher candidates at “P.S. 65, a junior high school on the Lower East Side, known as one of the worst slum areas in the city” (p. 7). LaBrant then explained her choice (p. 7):

two years below

Next, LaBrant built her program and the experience for the student teachers on the characteristics of the students being taught—a progressive and student-centered approach to scientific education. The students at P.S. 65, they found, had very limited experiences with the wider city, lived in cramped and poorly lit housing, had no books or reading materials in the home, had life experience unlike the national research on student reading interests, and attended a school in which “[t]eachers did not welcome an assignment to the area and within ten minutes after the final gong were on their way to the subway to avoid the five o’clock rush” (p. 8).

In that context, LaBrant’s program included taking students on bus trips to explore the city, having librarians provide students time and opportunities to examine and choose books that matched their interests, committing to not requiring book reports, and creating an overarching goal that “[s]chool was to become a pleasant place” for students and their teachers.

Key, as well, was LaBrant’s rejecting deficit views of race, literacy, and poverty that pervaded popular practices: “This simple program did not depend on the theories about word count, word recognition, left-handedness, or any of the educational fads then popular” (p. 9). This “simple” approach to teaching reading was a hallmark of LaBrant’s work, including her rejecting reading programs as “costume parties” (LaBrant, 1949).

And while LaBrant admitted she did not know the long-term results of her work, she did note that this year, this “simple” experiment with teaching a vulnerable population of students (impoverished, racial minorities and English language learners) resulted in reading levels that “[rose] from two years below to two years above” in the city testing.

Today, we can see LaBrant’s legacy endures: public education policy that impedes teacher education, reading programs and “fads” that overcomplicate and distort literacy education, and the lingering challenge of teaching vulnerable populations of students who have strengths and unique needs that cannot be addressed through deficit ideologies or “silver bullet” approaches to schooling.

In 1940, LaBrant implored: “Language is a most important factor in general education because it is a vital, intimate way of behaving. It is not a textbook, a set of rules, or a list of books” (p. 364).

Again, teacher education and teaching children to read are, in fact, “simple”—if we allow them to be.

References

LaBrant, L. (1988). Public School 65, down on the lower east side. Teaching Education, 2(1), 6-9.

LaBrant, L. (1949). A genetic approach to language. Unpublished manuscript, Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, CT.

LaBrant, L. (1940, May). The place of English in general education. The English Journal, 29(5), 356-365.

Charter schools

North Carolina: The Anatomy of How Sham “Research” Becomes Bad Education Policy

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First, count on the media: An Orwellian (read: misleading) headline, North Carolina Senate approves funding equality bill.

Add an equally Orwellian lede: “North Carolina senators passed a bill Monday night that would push public schools toward more equitable funding.”

And then stir in the kicker, sham “research” from a bogus university “department”: “North Carolina charter schools receive 83 cents for every dollar traditional public schools receive, according to a study by researchers at the University of Arkansas. Bill proponents say this is unfair.”

The study? Bruce Baker concludes in a review:

The University of Arkansas Center for Education Reform’s report on charter school funding inequities proclaims large and growing inequities between school district and charter school revenues, even after accounting for differences in student needs. But the report displays complete lack of understanding of intergovernmental fiscal relationships, which results in the blatantly erroneous assignment of “revenues” between charters and district schools. A district’s expenditure can be a charter’s revenue, since charter funding is in most states and districts received by pass-through from district funding, and districts often retain responsibility for direct provision of services to charter school students—a reality that the report entirely ignores when applying its resource-comparison framework. In addition, the report suffers from alarmingly vague documentation regarding data sources and methodologies, and it constructs entirely inappropriate comparisons of student population characteristics. Simply put, the findings and conclusions of the study are not valid or useful.

This toxic formula of naive and/or biased media plus the erosion of scholarship into mere think-tank advocacy resulting in Orwellian public policy isn’t unique to NC, but nonetheless, shame on political leadership in NC for allowing yet more bad policy to dismantle public education.

introversion

The Energy Cost and the Power of Empathy

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empathy: noun em·pa·thy \ˈem-pə-thē\

the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions

the ability to share someone else’s feelings

Some analogies seem credible, but fall apart when considered carefully: the mind as a blank slate or even as computer hard drive, for example.

But analogies work when they bridge one person’s understanding with another’s—such as how the iPhone battery life reveals the energy cost of anxiety or being an introvert [1].

Despite the popularity of the iPhone, battery life has plagued the device, prompting each time a new version is released dozens of posts on how to increase battery life.

Often, battery life is being drained unnecessarily by Apps running in the background, thus not apparent by simply looking at the screen.

And herein lies the analogy: anxiety (living in a constant state of impending doom, having a constant internal, and negative, conversation with yourself) and introversion are states in which even though the person may appear to be functioning well—or even extremely well—the stress of anxiety and introversion are draining that person’s psychic and even physical energy.

The consequences are often heavy: exhaustion but being unable to sleep soundly or at all, aches and pains in joints where the tension rests, and assorted seemingly unrelated health issues. As well, the response to environments hostile to the anxious or introverts is to flee—a flight that in fact is a running to a place where they can try to stabilize, to recharge.

The energy cost of anxiety and introversion also significantly reduce a person’s ability to concentrate, to focus.

For teachers, then, Michael Godsey’s When Schools Overlook Introverts is an important addition to carefully considering the many ways in which student engagement and achievement may be signs of anything except student effort or learning.

Just as living in poverty drains a person’s ability to think in ways similar to being sleep deprived, anxiety, stress, and introversion often impose energy costs on students that significantly impact their learning.

Godsey highlights that school functions overwhelmingly in ways detrimental to introverts:

The way in which certain instructional trends—education buzzwords like “collaborative learning” and “project-based learning” and “flipped classrooms”—are applied often neglect the needs of introverts. In fact, these trends could mean that classroom environments that embrace extroverted behavior—through dynamic and social learning activities—are being promoted now more than ever. These can be appealing qualities in the classroom, of course, but overemphasizing them can undermine the learning of students who are inward-thinking and easily drained by constant interactions with others.

Beyond the emphasis on collaboration, schools are generally noisy, and few opportunities or spaces exist for students to be alone. For introverts, a school day may often be something to endure, forcing those students to spend a great deal of time outside of school simply recharging instead of attending to homework or studying.

Introversion, like anxiety, can have cumulative and very negative consequences—especially when those predisposed to either do not have the support of family, friends, teachers, or co-workers who can empathize with experiences unlike their own.

As I have noted about anxiety [2], having to explain constantly ones introversion is yet another energy cost.

For teachers, especially, we must be aware and then willing to empathize with students whose measurable outcomes in the classroom may be windows into something quite different from their effort or learning.

For the anxious, the stressed, and introverts, the empathy of others not only avoids one energy cost but also allows the space some need to recharge.

See Also

How to Teach Introverts, Nancy Flanagan

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[1] Alone in my office, my back to the door, the office mostly quiet, I write—I, an introvert, drained and fighting the internal-dialogue demon of anxiety. As many writers are, as many writers do, we write in quest of empathy.

There is the soft sound of rain on the leaves outside my office window. Rain asks nothing of anyone. For an anxious introvert, few gifts could be greater.

[2] More on analogies. Know the scene in Alien when the alien bursts through Kane’s chest? The moment right before that is the constant state of impending doom of anxiety. Anxiety is a physical manifestation of a psychological response to the world.