Sunday Salon: On Olympics and Outhouse-cocoons

I am utterly, utterly Olympics-mad.  I know that there are problems with the Games: they are emblems of globalization, funneling money into vast corporate projects with limited long-term usefulness and fostering nationalism when their putative purpose is to shore up internationalism.  But (and this is when it becomes obvious that I am a liberal rather than a radical) I can't help it: I believe in the idealism of the transnational project of peaceful competition, mutual respect, and the pursuit of achievement, even when it fails to meet its own standards.  The striving is all.

So in honor of the Olympics, I give you this cairn or inukshuk (the inspired Olympic logo for Vancouver) that D and I happened upon along the Fundy Shore of New Brunswick this summer.   Fundy sees the most extreme tides in the world: while we stood on this "beach," the tide began coming dramatically, visibly in, minute by minute.  Soon this wee inukshuk would be an island.

I have a particular fondness for the Winter Olympics, because I love obscure and poorly funded sports.  The more alien a sport is to my understanding, the more I want to watch every moment of it, and learn about the histories of the athletes who have dedicated their whole life to it.  Similarly, in the Opening Ceremonies, I weep voluminously over every team with just one athlete.  Imagine the pride in achievement, I blubber quietly to myself, to be the first Ghanaian (for instance) ever to qualify for the Winter Olympics, like the evocatively named "Snow Leopard."

What did you think of the opening ceremonies?  These are the first Olympics I have seen from outside the States (although there may have been one in my childhood that I watched from France - I can't quite remember), so I am struck by differences in coverage.  Essentially Canadian nationalism (Will this be the time when Canada finally wins a gold at home?  Will it? WILL IT???) replaces American nationalism in shaping the media coverage, all the more so in the opening ceremonies, in which Canada represents itself to itself, and itself to the world.  My Canadian friends felt that the way the First Nations performers were incorporated into the ceremonies had the ring of craven exploitation, of pretending to an attention to the history and concerns of indigenous peoples that the government does not, in fact, demonstrate in everyday practice.  In my Intro to Drama course on Tuesday, I am going to ask my students to talk about the Opening Ceremonies as a type of public national theatre, like the tragedy and comedy of fifth century Athens: how did the Games define their audience?  How did the allegory of national values work?

So, what have I been up to this week, apart from Olympics-obsessing? 

My mother was stranded here on a visit with me in Nova Scotia after Snowmageddon prevented her return to Washington, DC, so she went with me to a reading of the poems of Canadian poet-playwright and eccentric James Reaney that I participated in.  Reaney's poetry was a revelation: funny and vehement and odd beyond belief.  My poem was an "Invocation to the Muse of Satire," and began with this ritually rhythmic, deeply satisfying-to-speak introduction:

With Punch's stick (he holds it in his hand)

Beat fertility into a sterile land

and ends with another nod to the violently regenerative role of satire in society:

Has no one seen the country where your cure has nursed?

It is a land of upturned privies with occupants inside them

Crawling out through new tops like astonished moths

Bursting from their unusual, foul and dark cocoons.

I can't recommend the Reaney works I heard at the reading highly enough; more on this, I hope, when my copy of the book comes in.  They are all filled with this sort of vivid, irreverent imagery.

I just finished 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School and Bettie Sharpe's Ember (hope springs eternal in the reviewer's breast that I will have posts up about these soon), which were both profoundly satisfying defamiliarizations of their very different subjects (the nature of the architectural spaces we move through every day, and the idea of personal agency in the world of fairy tales).

Now I continue on with my long-term projects (Sense and Sensibility and the Beckett trilogy), and pick up The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, in the hope of finishing my heavy hardback copy before (hurrah!) leaving for Los Angeles at the end of the week. (Did I mention that in Nova Scotian universities, there is no Spring Break.  Instead it happens in February and we call it "Winter Break." A bit grim, eh?  Still, I shouldn't complain - the weather has been milder here this winter than anywhere else on the east coast I have ever lived.)

I am in the middle of watching Jules and Jim for my 1001 Movies Project (and, more pressingly, my Get My Tivo Cleared Off So That I Can Record More Obscure Olympic Sports Project), and it is quite, quite brilliant.  I heart Jeanne Moreau.  And so, apparently, do both Jules and his buddy Jim.  It has been a long time since I have enjoyed a love triangle so completely.  (Wait, untrue: LOST and Hunger Games both have really excellent love triangles, as do True Blood/the Sookie Stackhouse novels.  That's right, I just compared Truffaut to LOST and Charlaine Harris.  That's the way I roll.)

A couple of posts from the week gone by on Sycorax Pine:

• The Mystery of Pub Crawls
• The Evaluation Psychodrama

Righto: short-track speed-skating calls, and I needs must answer.

The Evaluation Psychodrama

You may remember that I expressed some wailing anxiety after reading a RateMyProfessor review of my teaching, a castigation by a student who seemed to regard me as the most irritating person whose presence s/he had ever been condemned to endure for any length of time, a student who nonetheless gave me a puzzlingly positive rating.  Apparently by numerical measures I was a better than average (or at least adequate) instructor; it was only on an aesthetic level that s/he objected to me in the most visceral possible way.

I made the very great mistake of reading this review just before teaching a class at the start of the semester, and it shook my confidence for weeks.  I have a (fairly common, I know) personality quirk that is uncomfortable in everyday life and particularly disastrous for a teacher: a compulsive wish to have everyone I encounter like me.

Pedagogical philosophy and the status of teachers is shifting right now away from an authoritarian model (the teacher has all the power and information, and they require absolute respect from a relatively passive body of students) to a commercial model (the teacher provides a service for which the students are paying a substantial fee, so they have the right to treat the classroom as a place where they achieve concrete improvements to their future job prospects, and are entertained while they receive these services). You can see where this cultural shift, although positive in many ways (including the fostering of a less inert, more creative student body), is a disaster for the insecure and perfectionist: you have to woo the students, and if they don't learn, it is because of a failure on your part to be sufficiently magnetic on a personal level.  For instance, the evaluations that my students fill out now contain this question (among more than 30 others): does your instructor enhance presentations with the use of humor?  I mean, I do, but surely a professor shouldn't have to be funny to be effective.  We aren't, after all, stand-up comics.

Word bubbles through academic circles of studies being done that disprove this new ideal of classroom management: different fields and skills require different teaching methods, they say, and the most effective teachers are often those who are most flexible and open to experimentation, rather than the most entertaining or likable.

But this is not necessarily how the students feel when they fill out evaluations, or how instructors feel when they read them.

In the course of my half-decade or so of teaching at the university level,  the nature of my evaluations varied sharply with the institutional attitude of the students to both authority and the act of evaluation itself.  My attitude, and the one I wish more students would take up, is this: students should adopt the same measured tones that their teachers use when evaluating them.  Suggest concrete areas for change and improvement, noting possible solutions as well as identifying problems.  Do not make personal attacks.  Be aware of what is within your teacher's control and what isn't.  Be honest with yourself: would you have responded better to the class style or absorbed more information if you had done more of the reading and attended more classes?  Or is there something that the teacher could have done that would have encouraged you to be more attentive?

Part of the problem is that most students don't understand the varied purposes of evaluations: they are intended to help instructors improve both their teaching style and the course itself, but they are also used by many colleges and universities as part of the hiring, contract renewal, promotion, and tenure processes.  What you say on evaluations can change your professor's life in concrete and vital ways.  Negative evaluations (although usually only in bulk) can deprive your teacher of his or her livelihood.  So be careful and constructive.

In general, students are very fair in their evaluations.  At my first teaching gig, a prestigious and authority-admiring institution, the majority were.  They were noticeably and understandably harder on me when I was a TA than when I was teaching my own class: I believe this is partly because I was a better teacher by the time I was given a course to run on my own, and partly because undergraduates sense that TAs are slightly below them on the university totem pole.

After getting my doctorate, however, I also taught at a competitive liberal arts school with a strong institutional identity of iconoclasm.  Evaluations here were traditionally harsher there: students considered it their right and duty to confront and question authority, so they did at every possible opportunity, challenging assignments as too many and too hard, arguing with class policy, and savaging professors online and in end-of-semester evaluations.

Since I had always gotten very positive feedback from my students at school #1, I was shocked by not just the content but also the tone of these evaluations at school #2.  Students would call me "a sweetheart" - a term whose condescension becomes apparent once you ask whether they would be comfortable using it to describe a waitress or housekeeper to her face - before insulting my class.  The power dynamic was dramatically different.

So, after reading my RateMyProfessor review after my first semester at school #3 (where I have been enjoying my job immensely), I was not only shaken in my confidence but profoundly reluctant to read the official evaluations when they came in a few weeks ago.  What if they were so profoundly unfair that  they shook my confidence and undermined my teaching for the rest of the semester? Perhaps I should wait until summer to look at them.  Developing a thicker skin is one of my priorities, but in my first year at a new job, I feel precarious enough to make this more than usually challenging.

After some good classes on Thursday buoyed my spirits and UNC's defeat by Duke reminded me that all earthly glories are fleeting and I must adopt a stoic attitude towards loss (I was teaching Everyman this week, remember), I decided on Friday to bite the bullet and read the damn things.

And they were among the nicest evaluations I have ever received.  Constructive and interesting suggestions for change, honesty about issues that were curricular as well as some that were within my control, appreciation of my enthusiasm for teaching.   Reaction: giddy glee.

And then, a comment so nice that I want to have it embroidered on a set of throw pillows:

Which characteristics have been most valuable to your experience in this class? Her friendly nature and her dedication to the work.

Which characteristics are most in need of improvement? She is a very nice teacher.  She does not have to improve.  She is perfect.

Ahhh.  So untrue, and so very satisfying to hear.

The Mystery of Pub Crawls

One of the delights of my new job is this: my students are forever surprising me.   When they can get a word in edgewise amidst my constant chatter.  This (the surprising, not the getting-in-of-an-edgewise-word) never used to happen; I knew where my students' thinking was heading, and on a good day they would head that direction with sophistication and enthusiasm.  But I always felt that the lack of surprise in the classroom was a sign that I was holding them on too tight a rein.  Teaching is often as much a process of letting go as it is of asserting control.

This week, we are deep into medieval theatre in my Intro to Drama class.  First we had the nun Hrosvitha, the first woman playwright of Europe, and her rollickingly comic saint's play about miraculous rape-escapes.  Then we had the "Crucifixion", a single pageant from the longer York cycle of mystery plays, which are an account of the history of the world (in biblical terms, from the Creation of the universe to the Final Judgement) in a series of small "pageants" performed by various trade guilds in a procession around the city.  The guilds would often be assigned pageants that were appropriate to their craft (or "mystery"): the shipwrights were quite likely to get the Noah stories, and the goldsmiths the Adoration of the Magi.  The pageant we read this past week, the Crucifixion, was performed by the pinners, a guild who crafted pins to hold together pieces of wood, and anything you might, say, want to attach to pieces of wood.


Eurggh, right?


In the "Crucifixion," we see a group of soldiers who have been instructed to nail Christ to the Cross.  They think he is a wizard, and taunt him extensively while going about their task, which they anticipate will bring them great "worship" (or esteem - they are confused, you see, about what sort of worship they should be pursuing) in the community.  


But there is a problem.  They are not, actually, very good at the job of pinning.  Whenever they managed to get one limb pinned to the cross, they find that another is a good foot away from where it is supposed to be.  And they are always squabbling amongst themselves in a manner so contemporary and human that it (along with the incredible gruesome detail of the play) has led the anonymous author to be called "the York Realist."  


So they get out the rope and begin stretching Jesus's body to make it fit the cross.  A lot of technical discussion ensues about the details of the pinners' work, amidst the gory slapstick of what is, essentially, a torture session.  Finally they are done, and they lever the cross off the ground (where Christ has been largely invisible to us) and into a hole in the ground.  


And suddenly we are in a different play completely.


Gone is the slapstick.  Gone is our attention to the everyday banter of the pinners/soldiers.  Instead we (the medieval, Christian audience) are looking at the most holy of holy images, and we aren't laughing at all.  In fact, the very idea that we laughed before makes us somehow complicit in the torment of Christ.  


Forgive them, Father, Christ says at this (literally) crucial moment.  They know not what they do.


And that, in a nutshell, is medieval dramatic irony.






So before we moved on to the bleak pilgrimage of Everyman, and because they had just turned in a paper (and were probably a little hazy on the reading), we embarked on a mini-project to dispel the mid-semester glaze from their eyes.


What, I asked them, would the modern equivalent of a medieval mystery cycle look like in Halifax, NS?  This involves answering three questions:

1. What does the history of the universe look like, from our particular perspective?  The medieval communities composing and performing these plays had a easy map to the history of the world: the Bible.  It told them everything vital that had happened in the past, and everything that would happen in the ultimate future (a period of time in which demon-filled Hell Mouths loomed large, just as in Buffy.) The present day was largely made up of a series of echoes of Biblical history.  Our cycle, I told them, didn't have to follow this Biblical conception of history unless it appealed to them.  Instead, they might consider what the crucial events that define world history are, from their local perspective.   Their answers?  Well: the Halifax Explosion.  The Holocaust. The Beatles. 9/11.  The Election of Barack Obama. Sidney Crosby bringing the Stanley Cup home to Halifax.
2. How would your modern mysteries use the space of the city, symbolically or through processional motion, to draw everyone into relation with this grand sweep of history?  One group toyed with the idea of performing on the Harbor, each play on a different boat, so that the ships of the Halifax seafront were a sort of modern pageant wagon (the elaborate carts that we believe some of the medieval mysteries were performed in).
3. Who would perform your pageants?  What is the contemporary equivalent of trade guilds?  Sports teams?  Rival universities or departments?  Different trades?  Neighborhoods of the city?  In other words, what smaller communities are in competition that can be drawn into the larger community that is Halifax by the structure of the mystery cycle?  This is what the original plays did: they said "Yes, compete against each other for the glory of the guild: show us who has the greatest ingenuity and resources to devote to performing their elaborate pageant.  But though your efforts at competition will contribute to the glory of your individual guild-community, they will also contribute to the glory of the town we are all apart of, and, beyond that, to all of Christendom."  For guild, for city, and for God.

What did the final group come up with?

Well, they said, our mystery cycle will be a sort of modern processional theatre, a drunken revel. What better than a pub crawl? 

The Creation (they told me) would take place in Alexander Keith's Brewery, where Halifax's history is enshrined (it is the site of the continent's oldest farmer's market) and the beer itself is born.  Various other moments in Biblical "history" (like the expulsion from Paradise) appear in appropriately named drinking establishments. The Last Judgement takes place at a pub called The Bitter End. The Hell Mouth would be the drunk tank.

Well done, I said, and laid out with tremendous expertise.  I will call you "the Artists of Dionysus."

And then they went off, to pursue what I can only assume will be further research on the project.