Hugh MacLeod over at gapingvoid has set out the following rule for his life:
Seek out the exceptional minds, avoid everyone else… I am interested in the exceptional mind. I am utterly uninterested in the non-exceptional mind… I will spend the rest of my professional life working with visionaries. I know who they are, they know who they are.
Now, on the one hand, it seems like more of the typical CEO-worshipping, chest-thumping, neo-Social Darwinst, self-congratulatory BS we’ve come to expect in our economy. But!
On the other hand, my father’s told me the same thing, more or less: find the person in your field who is the best and bind yourself to that person. Seek out excellence at every turn, becuase it will rub off on you. Mediocrity will rub off on you too.
Of course, I never take my father’s advice.
The real reason I decided to write about this is because of the conversation that ensued. I was thinking that, as a teacher, I don’t really have the option of turning my back on the unexceptional — that would make me a total failure at my job, career, and vocation. There I am, thinking this, when I come across a comment (CTRL-F, “Nia”) saying:
I am/want to be a teacher. I’m going to be the one making exceptional minds, or at least directing minds towards the fields where they’ll be exceptional.
Yes, I thought to myself (as I generally do). But how?
I’m on the cusp of a new semester — classes start Monday. Every semester I imagine myself striding purposefully into class, setting down my bag, unpacking my books and syllabi and notes and water bottle and other crap with great deliberation, and proceeding to open young minds to the wonders and beauties — and horrors and brutalities, which are wondrous and awesome in their own right — of the world of culture within which they are all suspended. Then I get there. And… for the most part, excellence does not occur. Yes, I’m a newbie at this — this will be my second year, my fourth semester, teaching — and I actually think I’m pretty good at it, but by 3/4 through the semester I’m just pleased if I get papers that aren’t plagiarised, ecstatic if someone makes a comment or asks a question in class. At some point, it becomes “work” — often rewarding work, but work just the same.
I have excuses. I’m teaching community college, and the students are (for the most part) not the super-students who go on to prestigious universities but the “second rank”, the bright but not exceptional who have managed to satisfy the requirements of the system without breaking a mental sweat. They are poorly prepared for college-level work. My class (Anth 101, Intro to Cultural Anthropology) meets a social science requirement, so most of my students are there not because of any particular interest in anthropology, but because it sounds more interesting then Econ or easier than Soc. They’re young and undisciplined; they’re working adults and unmotivated.
My excuses are all lies.
The real issue is that, so far, I’ve not hit upon the way to induce excellence, to draw it forth and capture it in my classrooms. I’ve modeled myself after my own best professors — and judging by my evaluations and by the growth I see over the course of the class, to more or less good effect — but maybe their way is not my way?
So, I ask a question of whoever might be visiting this site and reading this post: how do we inspire excellence in others? How do we build that feedback loop, where the excellence around us draws forth our own best selves, which in turn pushes our intelocutors to even greater heights? I’m sure it can’t just be a matter of “be excellent all the time and those around you will be inspired”. We are not solitary creatures, but instead are enmeshed in networks of sociality, and are shaped by them at the same time we shape them back. Especially for teachers and other leaders, how do we urge our students towards excellence and away from mediocrity? Because ultimately, that’s my job — not to teach them who Franz Boas was or the difference between structuralism, functionalism, and structural functionalism, but to teach them to be excellent.
I’d really be interested in seeing how other people work through this problem, this challenge.
Connie Rice (not to be confused with Condi, though they’re apparently cousins or something) has an article on NPR’s site comparing US policy in Iraq with policy back home, based on statements made by our Illustrious Leaders. See how the imagined future of Iraq stacks up against progressive visions of a kinder, gentler America. For instance:
(9.) “There’s no physical security without economic security.”
Who would ever have thought this version of “no jobs, no peace” would come out of the mouth of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld? Someone needs to Humvee him down the street to his backyard, and give him a mike — so he can repeat this to the underclass of Washington, D.C. The new Republican call to action: No jobs, no peace!
Take a look at the whole list, it’s all there: affirmative action, gun control, freedom to protest, even the recognition that downtrodden people occasionally erupt into violence. This is not your father’s Republican Party!
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
A collective of uber-geeks brings us a daily dose of the neat, weird, sexy, sassy, and just plain awesome. The daily gossip sheet of the techie counter-culture. Better living through technology. If you’re turned on by toasters, this is the place to be.
BoingBoing always seemed a little familiar to me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, until sudenly it dawned on me that somewhere I have a book of articles collected from the magazine of the same name. Some post or another suggested that the website and magazine were one and the same, and I had a lightbulb moment. But it really doesn’t matter — BoingBoing is on my daily visit list, and it’s updated often enough that I often visit more than once. One innovation that I’ve always been rather cold towards is their Guestbar, a sidebar blog written by a guest blogger. It never really impressed me — never, that is, until Rudy Rucker took the side stage and set the bar impossibly high for all bloggers everywhere. Essentially, Rucker bebopped a whole book for our edutainment. It’s still up, at least the last post or two (they’re much longer than the main column’s content!), and something tells me it’ll be a while before the Boingers find someone with nerve enough to follow that act!
BoingBoing is just good. What more can I say?
OK, today is Day 7 of my “Blog a Day” project, and I’ve learned a few lessons:
- The title is totally misleading! Some days I’ve written about two or even three sites. With school starting next week (I’m teaching three classes) and me moving the same week, things are liable to get rather more sporadic. Think of the “Blog a Day” moniker more as a sort of Platonic Ideal (though I am generally in no way a Platonist) rather than a real-world condition.
- It’s really hard! It’s like wondering why I hate tomatoes but love salsa — who can explain matters of taste? Some sites I like just because of the author’s personality, their writing stsyle, a certain je ne sais quai in how they express themselves. Take Burningbird, a site that’s on my list for today (or tomorrow, depending on how together I am today) — for some reason, I just click with the site — it’s got great design, it’s well-written. I don’t necessarily agree with or even like the things she says, at least not all of them. There’s a certain inexplicable something. Here’s a better analogy — why do you love your partner? Other sites, like BoingBoing, also on the list for today, are hard to sum up becuase they’re so damn good at what they do — what could I possibly say about them that isn’t already clear to everyone in the universe?
- Attrition sucks. I’ve skipped a few sites because they hadn’t been updated for months and months. The first one like this, action figures sold separately, I reviewed, but after a couple more popped up in my blogroll, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. These bloggers may just be out of the loop for a while, but… I’m removing them from my blogroll, too (although not till I’ve finished this round of blogging a blog a day). The irony, of course, is that my own site was stagnant for so long — by my own criteria, I should be removed from consideration.
- Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes.
- This is a damn good way to fulfill some of the promise I see in the social Internet. I write about somoene, they see my site in their referral logs, they visit and see themselves written about — warm fuzzies all around! Blogrolls are nice, but they’re impersonal; I think that writing about why I blogroll someone adds the personal touch on which, as the Cluetrainers might say, conversations happen. So there’s that.
Future lessons to be posted as they happen.
Body and Soul
OK, if I had trouble with Alas, a Blog, imagine the trouble Body and Soul is causing me. Let me illustrate exactly how I feel about Jeanne d’Arc’s blog: about a year-and-a-half ago, if I remember correctly, Jeanne added my site to her blogroll, which meant, to me, that I had arrived in blogdom. I don’t always agree with her — and have disagreed quite strongly, and quite publicly, on some issues — but nobody, nobody writes with the pure humanity that Jeanne d’Arc brings to even the most off-hand post. To take an almost random example (her most recent post):
But nearly two months ago, I expressed some concern about the tendency on the left to feed the myth of the noble soldier, and it’s bothered me for a long time that Kerry takes justifiable pride in his service in Vietnam, but rarely talks about the courage he showed when he returned from Vietnam and spoke up about what he witnessed, trying to stop a brutal and insane war from taking any more lives unecessarily.
Almost all of us have our schtick — the right-wingers and nearly-con liberals are prone to chest-beating, Tarzan-style; others to cooler-than-thou hipness or techier-than-thou geekness; others, like myself, to satire and absurdity and (in Steve Bates’ case) doggerel — but Jeanne just says it. A more cynical person might claim that not having a schtick is Jeanne’s schtick — even if that’s the case, it works. There’s not many blogs that can bring a tear to your eye — Body and Soul is one of them.
And the crowning factor is this: if Jeanne happens to read this, I have no doubt that she’ll deny everything I’ve just said.
blivet
What’s a blivet, you ask? According to the site’s author, a blivet is 10 pounds of crap in a 5-lb bag — a pretty messy problem! In this particular case, though, blivet is the weblog of a Vegas-based archaeologist, buddhist, and co-procrastinator of blog entries. Although blog entries are light, when he finds the time, he says some pretty interesting stuff. Like this post from February, describing his take on the reaction to Mel Gibson’s S&M party, The Passion of the Christ:
Judging by the way reactions are to this movie, from yea to nay, it would seem that the rejection of the post-enlightenment world is alive and well in the popular culture of the West. All observations elsewhere of Mr. Gibson (and his father’s) politics and faith aside, this work would seem to be the very call for a return to the world of divisive theology. To only lightly reference the central teachings of Christianity such as the Sermon on the Mount while focusing on the final part of the Passion is to advocate a return to that ‘good old-time’ Medieval faith and a summary rejection of the central teachings that lead to the faith today.
Hopefully he’ll find more time to blog in the future, if the freaking heat out here doesn’t kill him. People do archaeology in this weather?
Alas, a Blog
What am I gonna say about Alas? It’s one of the big fish, with a huge community of commenters and cross-linkers, hardly an unknown player. But such is the task I’ve appointed myself…
Alas, once the domain of the punctuationally-named Ampersand, has transmogrified into a full-on group blog. Although — as expected from a group of posters with different interests and specialties — subjects cover range pretty widely, I go there for the commentary of gender, sexuality, and feminism, which is, regardless of who’s posting, uniformly excellent. Even when I disagree, I’m generally impressed with the thoughtfulness of the posts, and have more than once seen incredible exchanges unfold in the comments threads, which can often top 100 or even 200 posts.
Plus, the drawings are really cool.
A three-part program for structuring arguments with representatives of the Right: Do your Homework, Stay Cool, and Keep Organizing. Each section includes tips and advice that is really just good debating sense, whatever part ofthe political spectrum your opponent/ discussant calls home.
A good solid entry in the ongoing Sapir/Whorf debate by Kerim over at Keywords. I’ve posted quite a bit on Whorf here and here, and it’s always good to see the discussion carried forward. Kerim hits the key issue head on in his post, writing:
Whorf’s point was that some cultural differences in behavior where linked to conceptual differences arising from linguistic analogies. That is to say, it wasn’t so much that we are locked into thinking about the world a certain way because of our language, but we have a tendency to do so – and this tendency has an effect on our cultural behavior.
As he notes, the overdrawn version of Whorfian relativity — that language determines culture — is such a parody that it’s easily dismissed, leading most people to miss out on the richness of Whorf’s thought. What Whorf is really trying to do is to draw our attention to the ways in which language subtly influences thought and, more crucually, behaviour. In anthropology, as just about everywhere else, it’s often the littlest differences that make the biggest differences, becauase their effects are so small and so taken-for-granted that they a) are rarely even noticed, and b) hard to single out as the cause of misunderstandings.
I confess — I don’t watch the Olympics. Sure, some ice skating if I happen to be around when someone’s watching it, but as far as I can remember, I’ve never actively cared about who won or lost or how anyone performs in the Olympics. Jewish body-hate? Perhaps — I just don’t get all weepy-eyed and patriotic over sports. Sure, as I said yesterday, some sports, maybe sports in general, seem to produce decent, upstanding people, but still, I can’t seem to, you know, care about the sports themselves, certainly not enough to waste time watching them on TV (when there’s so many other ways to waste time, like blogging :-)).
Anyway, once upon a time I could forgive my co-humans their quadriannual (now biannual) Olympic fever — just ’cause I don’t give a flying fig doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t — but nowadays I think it’s pretty clear the the Olympics is a scam, a giant glob of forced marketing synergy and official corruption that plays on our patriotism and our need to experience some kind of athleticism, even vicariously, through the unhappy medium of televised sports, all in order to sell us more and more Product. The latest news out of Athens is pretty telling — their “clean-venue policy” protects sponsors from consumers who just might enjoy products other than those made by Olympic sponsors (like Budweiser). As one official noted: “We have to protect official sponsors who have paid millions to make the Olympics happen.” So it’s not enough that they get to use the Olympic Rings in their advertising, or have their names and logos plastered all over the stadium, performance spaces, and on the athletes themselves (US athletes are required to wear Adidas when accepting any medal) but now advertisers have to dictate to attendees and stadium employees what kind of clothes they can wear, food they can eat, and beverages they can drink — or they just aren’t getting their money’s worth!
Expect to see a lot more of this, and not just at the Olympics, but wherever corporate-sponsored spaces replace public spaces. We’ve seen over-zealous principals punish students for daring to wear Pepsi logos on Coke-sponsored campuses — I think we’ll be seeing this written into the contract with Coke (and, let’s be fair here, Pepsi too, I’m sure) in the not-so-distant future. Colleges who rely on corporate sponsorships to support their stadiums, rock concerts and other corporate-sponsored cultural events, and who knows what else will begin to come with dress codes, even when held in otherwise publicly-funded spaces.
Randy Cassingham, the author of the most excellent e-newsletter, This Is True (you can’t read the story on the site, though you can sign up for the e-newsletter and never miss another — there is, however, an RSS feed you can read, at least for the next couple days), hits the hammer on the nail when he calls the clean-venue policy “a policy that in the future will be known as ‘The Olympic Spirit’.” Corruption, corporatization, domination, and a total lack of respect for the audience — Olympic Spirit indeed.
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