Obsidian Noise

8/9/12

This morning I had to lead a three hour seminar on how to balance the teaching and research aspects of full-time, late-program graduate work. I had 20 nearly finished doctoral students from a variety of programs who will be teaching for the first time this fall as they complete their dissertations and formally enter their new fields. A basic issue at the university persists: super star researchers consider their teaching duties to be much lower priorities, sometimes to the point of sending TAs to teach in their stead. Faculty at higher levels rarely focus their energies on teaching– the reward structure of higher ed is tilted entirely toward research production. So these late-stage grad student researchers are becoming teachers now, and the question is what kind of teacher will they be.

An entirely different group here was asked to do this–to lead this thing– but at the last minute they realized they wouldn’t be able to pull it off. They didn’t have the right kind of experience to lead such a workshop, and this became clearer after their first session on Monday. All of the sudden it was offered to me to take over. Tuesday morning it began. I prepared the first session Monday night.

Although it was such short notice, I had a rough idea of how it could go because I have learned a few strategies over the last couple of years that have thus far worked pretty well. What I do is keep at least 2/3 of any program coming from the participants.  If that format is appropriate, I go for it. Participants are happier not having been lectured to for hours, and they do seem to get more out of discussion than reception. You know, “active learning”, etc.

Success in the discussion-based format of instruction is dependent on two things: the facilitator asking the right kinds of questions, and asking those questions at the right time in the discussion. If you can do that, then in my opinion you can really help almost anyone learn.

I opened with an innocent-sounding question that was actually pretty complicated. That is the best kind of opening question because everyone is quick and eager to jump in, and does so, and it is as they begin to articulate an answer that they realize there’s more to it than originally perceived. You can watch that process occur in real time– the deepening.  You can’t force them there, but if you create an opening for it they can get down to the good stuff on their own, and you’ll be down there already, waiting to take them on a tour ofThe Interesting.

The question I opened with was: “What is our impression of the relationship between “research” (and “the researcher”) and “teaching” (and “the teacher”)? Are they distinct from each other?

Everyone in the room had an answer, which for a first question is all you can hope for.

They concluded quickly that the two are completely mutually exclusive– the expert researcher is rarely the expert teacher. In their own experiences as students and as researchers, they see the two as distinct parts of the job and mostly unrelated. They recalled stories from their advisors about the tedious requirements of teaching that slowed research down, and as researchers themselves they could understand the frustration. They also shared what they had learned about the tenure process: that publication matters, and teaching basically does not count for much in the tenure process.

And it turns out their shared initial perceptions are very accurate. Research shows there to be no relationship between good, productive researchers and good teaching, and it also shows that expert researchers even tend to have characteristics that are contrary to those required of a expert educator, such as a certain objectivity towards the object of study that forces distance from it, contrasted to the important subjectivity and emotion-mediated quality of human-to-human interaction is critical for successful teaching. So the impression that the two are not correlated and that they might even be negatively correlated is correct.

But (obviously) the story doesn’t end there. The unknown or unconsidered extension of that story, the footpath that continues through the woods after the pavement stops, that’s where you’re trying to go.

“If expert researchers are rarely expert teachers, why does the university have them teach at all?”

The controversial nature of the question is important because you want their beliefs to surface, you want them taking risks and being open. The conversation exploded into a shared critiquing of the entire apparatus of “university”,  its constructs, and systems of power and movement. The summary of this 15 minute segway is that we were actively and vocally questioning some of the fundamentals of our own field. By building that atmosphere of safe and open questioning our assumptions and beliefs and concerns and our fears, you have the room read to make the leap you’re hoping for: questioning the fundamentals of the assumptions we have about our selves and our roles.

“So what is a researcher…what are you?

When you make this leap, don’t take answers quickly. Instead,  let the entire room, now a computer processing the question with 20 different cores working on it at once, let it process, and keep it silent.

If you say to anyone, “I am a researcher”, what do you even mean? Do you even know?

Let it process.

Eventually, when you feel that everyone has really considered the question, only then is it time to ask for thoughts.

So what are we? I don’t know. This isn’t a trick question or anything– shouldn’t we know what we are? What are we?

What the room didn’t know is that the night before I had done the same. And in processing this question,  I realized that the key to successfully bridging these two seemingly disparate and contradictory parts of their oncoming lives– that of being an expert researcher and a responsible teacher– is in scrutinizing what it is a researcher does at the most basic level.

One quick step back– why bridge this? What is the purpose of reconsidering their notions about the dual-life of the professional academic? Because higher education sucks right now, it’s been corporatized and teaching and learning has fallen away in favor of celebrity publishing, and it’s creating less capable and less developed student products after four years. But if this new group can bridge the divide and find a way to make teaching quality a personally mandated objective, they can run with this career and positively fuck shit up because they can unify all their powers and become the Superhuman Professor . UPA baby, Unified Power of Attack.

In short, what is a researcher? A person who identifies questions they can’t answer, and seeks answers, and either finds them or proposes (and tests) them.

Q: If we had to categorize a person who tries to learn the answer to something they don’t know, what would that category be?

A: That category is student.

Q: How does a researcher get answers?

A: By teaching themselves.

At the most basic level, a researcher is a teacher: a teacher of the self.  A researcher instructs inwardly, and a teacher instructs outwardly, but both are instructors of things and people, and both are learners of things. That is their relationship, they are not mutually exclusive, and our initial impressions were wrong.

We went slowly. Notes were scribbled. The AC hummed. It came from them, not from me. This is when you really have a room, when you’ve led a group to discover something surprising together, something in contradiction to their starting point.

By the time 12p rolled around I was pretty empty– 3 freakin’ hours is too long for a seminar or workshop of any kind, in my opinion. But the participants were happy and satisfied and I do think they walked away with at least slightly different perspectives on teaching than when they entered our shared space. The whole session was recorded and I hope it turned out well.

I wish them all the luck possible for having chosen to get into what they have– education is a tough field with very few rewards outside of the personal. They’ll be surrounded by materialist pussy weakling coward fucktards who live in so much fear that they spend all their time alive constructing a giant buffer against death by filling their lives with junk things, and junk people with no value outside of distraction from the Great Inevitable. These new educators be criticized for their choice, and even punished for it, by the zombie-controlled system we live in. And as the world continues to move in the darkest of directions, it’ll be increasingly difficult to pursue truth over comfort. Yet it must be done or the world will end tomorrow. Remember, if it doesn’t, it’s because of these guys.

I’m tired for the first time in a couple of weeks. Movie still to come. See you tomorrow.

Friends, sorry for the delay on the video I promised. It’s here, it’s waiting. But it’s not ready yet.

I have another three hour seminar for tomorrow morning that I have to lead. This one is more presentation style, rather than discussion style like yesterday’s. I need to prepare for that for the rest of tonight and I won’t be able to post until the afternoon.

I just finished an epic jam in Hollow Way. We found an early riff and destroyed the universe with it. We went for 90 minutes straight, until our necks and arms were paralyzed and our fingers were sore and we were all dehydrated and empty and ecstatic at what we’d created from nothing. When it was over, we just all kind of nodded at each other, all 4 of us, with exhausted smiles. Nothing needed to be said.

The riff and the song were born, lived well, and then died in the Hollow Way. It is now gone forever, never to be reproduced, and sometimes this is the way it should be. It can be hard to create something only to let it go. But it’s important to do that sometimes, to remember what you’re creating for, to be OK and know it’s not about the thing. 

It’s about what made the thing.

Nighters.

Yesterday was good. My seminar went well, I think, and the afternoon was full. I ended up at Pier 11 headed back to Ikea for something at around 5pm and I shot a video that says it all, about so much. I will make a soundtrack for it and post it. It’s almost too good…  too perfect a capture of fuckface town. Almost to the point that it looks scripted. But you’ll see it’s not. It’s just how things are here and there.

Confused? You’ll see what I mean. I just need some time to clean it up a bit. More later.

I traveled with a friend to Ikea via ferry from Pier 11 near Wall St. The day was uncomfortably hot so being on the water was a nice escape. The “summer of concerning heat” continues now in early August. I’ve worn shorts to work daily since June and I have the deepest flip flop tan I’ve ever had.

As it was a weekend day, Ikea was like an ant farm, and most of the ants were pregnant, and the rest were couples. “Oh honey, wouldn’t this be great on that little table you got from your sister?” I think I handled it all pretty well… for a time.

I felt the first pangs of crowd-induced discomfort about two hours in, which for me is a pretty good performance. But those pangs then grew in intensity until my attitude started to go bad.

I’m so anti-social sometimes. Mostly I’m fine with it, but sometimes if I’m with other people I wish my tendency to get tired out by being around other people was easier to control. Throughout my life there have been very few people I never got tired of. My last  serious girlfriend was one of those people. I could have spent days on end with her without a break. And in fact, that happened a few times, and that was a first for me.

I always used to wonder if she was aware of that.

When I travel I get high off the feeling of sensory overload. But here at home I get antsy and need to start flipping switches off to stay functional. It’s the result of taking in too much information for too long. I think it’s hard for people to understand.

You know how you can go through your day and pay attention to important things and everything else is just automatically passed through, a hazy blur in your memory? There’s no blur for me. The shape and feel of the doorknob you used to get out of your house this morning–  I paid attention to that thing, against my will.  It made me feel something, think of something and remember something, and it made me wonder something that I’ll ask you about later. That person you passed on the street who you didn’t notice? I noticed. The slight waiver in the voice of the woman who said hi to you that you didn’t realize meant she was feigning happiness? I realized it. And after hours of that kind of absorbing, I need to flip the inputs off, or they get flipped off for me.

That’s just how I was made.

I never wanted a “normal” living room. It reminds me of complacent middle-class TV culture and gives me chills. Couch, “Loveseat” (what a shitty name), rug and “coffee table”, TV and “end tables”.  Just thinking about it sends both testicles in search of self-preservation.  I want to come home to an empty room, maybe with some spilled paint on the floor. Maybe mixed with some blood and sweat drops.

The first thing I did with the newly assembled “coffee table” from Ikea was paint it. I needed to make it mine somehow. I could have shot big wads of cum all over it…

But instead I began painting with actual paint, and as I moved onto painting and repainting other things, I felt better about the purchases and my environment.

I built and painted until the Mars Rover Landing live coverage began at 1:30am. It was incredible to follow, and if you haven’t been paying attention to it, you’re seriously missing out. The basic event: 8 years ago we started working on a research jeep and 8 months ago we shot it on a rocket to Mars, and last night it blasted through the Martian atmosphere, descended via parachute, and then a rocket-powered hovering platform with a crane on it slowly lowered the jeep, named Curiosity, down to the surface of the planet.

There was a landing party in Times Square last night to celebrate this event… it was the most extraordinary accomplishment in NASA history after landing on the moon and will change human history forever. It was hard to fall asleep after listening to the live coverage.

I listened to the cheers from the command center at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasendina via live stream. People were crying and screaming with joy and my own throat soon started to ache. 8 years of work and the chances of failure were very high, and failure meant ending the entire Mars program… and they had a perfect landing. Celebrate the hell of that if you can.

(But don’t if you’ve been celebrating other things for no reason, for you have in that case diminished the value of celebration too much and instead you should go meditate on a lake or something.)

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Tomorrow I’m teaching a seminar for three straight hours in the morning so won’t be able to post until afterwards and I’ll be preparing for that between now and then. Save for some good training this afternoon. I’ll explain it all soon.

Enjoy Monday.

I was born angry and the initial supply has never run out. It’s good I have enough because it keeps me alive.  If I wasn’t angry, I’d have only curiosity left and I don’t know if that’d be enough, day after day.

I see you laughing so hard that your arms go limp at your sides.

Your mouth opens so wide in my direction

That your eyes shut,

And your happiness fills

My entire dream.

Sometimes when I walk down the street I pretend to be someone else. Someone with a completely different life. I walk the way that imagined person would walk. If for any reason I have to say anything, like maybe an “excuse me” in a line, or a “thank you” at the checkout counter, I’ll say it the way the imagined person says it.

And the imagined person then becomes real. His reality is confirmed by the people around him. Their response to him, whether it’s friendliness or fear or anger, validates the existence of the imagined person and for those moments of connection, there is no difference.

Sometimes it happens because I’m in a particularly good mood. In that mood, I might smile at other people, which I normally don’t do. The normal me would never smile for no reason at a stranger. But the imagined person, the happy person, well he smiles at everything. Old women react well. Younger people do not.

Sometimes it happens at work. I pretend to be assertive and productive. I move about the offices and labs like an engineer, creating mechanisms of production out of groups of people as if they were tools in a giant machine. The oil in that machine is friendliness and correctness: when morale is high and everyone is happy, work gets done fast and well. Adding oil is easy. When things slow down, the imagined engineer speaks with people and jokes with them and maybe asks if they want to take a quick walk. The key to that interaction being successful is that the imagined engineer needs to be correct about 99% of whatever they say. People need to trust that he knows best. If they do, the machine will work. So pretending to be the person means pretending to be always right. It is interesting that pretending to be mostly right usually results in actually being that way. The social reaction, either compliance or thankfulness, confirms the existence of the pretend person, and in that instant there is no difference between what’s imagined and what’s real.

Sometimes it happens when out in a group. That’s much rarer though. More often than not, I prefer no group. I find that people speak for the sake of speaking, saying almost nothing. It’s the ceaseless sound of mutual assurances that everything is fine between everyone. They say little that doesn’t directly serve the function of ameliorating the natural anxieties that exist between people in a group.  The effect it has is encouragement of chatter.

“I engaged in small talk.” I played the game.

I always find myself wanting to ask the other person if they realize they’re participating in a game, and to let them I’d prefer if they just be themselves.

“But that is myself!”

And that’s the crux.

Who knows. Ultimately, your pretend person of those moments is not real. When the distinction between the two is lost, what happens is that you end up pretending that your pretend person is real…

…and then you’re really down the rabbit hole. If I’m in a lounge or a bar, I can be so far down the rabbit hole that there’s no way out until I can get some time to process everything.

You could argue that Hamlet is temporarily real, and that our pretend selves are as real as any. I would respond that that’s only true from the perspective of the audience. The actor playing Hamlet knows that his reality is distinct from the character, and that is how he’s able to play the role so well: deliberately, consciously, skillfully, purposefully– not “naturally”. What’s left in the mind of the audience, your audience, might be real, but you will always know the difference, won’t you?

You are not the only actor on this stage. Everyone you’ve ever known is doing the same pretending. How many of them do you know for who they are, rather than the roles they play for their audiences, of which you are a mere part? Would you argue there is no difference, and that we imagine ourselves into a role that then becomes real? Or is there a difference between the imagined and the real? You can decide this for yourself.

Social interaction is a game of acting. But there’s a real self, your real self, that makes the decision to act in specific ways, to do certain things, even deciding what is liked or hated. Sometimes it feels like you don’t have a choice, but that’s because you’re down the rabbit hole, pretending that your pretend person is real.  If you lose it, your real self, then the imagined one will be all that’s left, and that one is a product of your audience, rather than you.

At that point, you no longer exist.

So don’t do that, little monkeys. It’s better the other way, when you exist.

Off to the airport, wish me luck if you can.