The Pages of Time's Book Keep Turning

[Orig. written 10/4, revised & published 10/6.]

Apple harvest is underway, field corn looks good in the land, and leaves are turning – popples to gold, maples to orange and red, ash to every color from banana-butternut to deep purple. October is here, a month of transition and variability, when any day of any week might steal a march from any other month of the year. What now? What next? In 2020, we ask those questions with more than the usual urgency, not only of the weather and the autumn season but also with respect to COVID-19 and toxic American politics, two parallel pandemics that have converged this week in the nation’s capitol. With more life behind us than ahead of us, the Artist and I wonder what we will see in what time remains to us.

Sunday morning could not have been gloomier: cold, wet, dreary, grey. I forced myself to get up and dressed ... to peel apples ... to cook up a pot of applesauce and get it processed in jars. My other self-assignment for the day was to clean the refrigerator, and I almost cancelled that plan, because -- Who would know? Who would care? But I reminded myself that it takes less time to clean the refrigerator than it does to postpone the job, and after it was done I opened the door a few times to admire my very minor household accomplishment. Sometimes we need to give ourselves positive reinforcement wherever we can find it. I made applesauce! I cleaned the refrigerator! I did not hide my head under the covers all day!

It was a mostly gloomy day, however, certainly not one I'd want to repeat Bill Murray-fashion as Groundhog Day, although that is one of my all-time favorite movies. Could I learn something important by living last Sunday over and over? Maybe "let go" of a friend's comment that disappointed and saddened me? But then, on the other hand, there was a long conversation with another friend, a dear, dear person, and we both felt better after that. [Note to self: call and write to friends more often!]

An inspiring little paperback I read cover to cover over the weekend was Jimmy Carter's Why Not the Best? which takes its title from an encounter young Carter had with Admiral Rickover. Instead of praising the young man for his class standing, the admiral asked if Carter had always done his best, and Carter had to admit that he had not always. "Why not?" the admiral demanded. 

In this 1976 autobiography, Carter writes in detail about his childhood and family, his Navy career, his run for the governorship of Georgia, and finally, as he resolves to make a bid for the presidency, his belief that the American people deserve and will respond to honesty in their political leaders. There is an entire chapter on what was a very crooked election process in part of Georgia and Carter's role in cleaning that up, a volunteer mission he continues around the world to this day, and that was very enlightening, but the thing that impressed me most was how, when he decided to run for elected office -- eventually for the presidency -- he set himself to learn what he would need to know in that office. He read and studied. The energy plan he put forward as president was no half-baked opinion off the top of his head but a comprehensive program carefully formulated after much study and consultation. That is, he took the job of president seriously before he ever ran for the office. He resolved -- I'm saying this; he did not -- to do his best. I think the title of his book was meant to ask why Americans should not demand the best of everyone in government -- and of ourselves.

Carter is often called, by those who find his presidency unimpressive, our best former president. I think history will look upon him more favorably. I make no secret of my admiration for him. 

A black woman being interviewed on the radio (and I'm sorry I did not make a note of her name) referred to "the two pandemics" we are dealing with in the United States right now, and I borrowed her idea for my opening paragraph today. As difficult as it is living with sensible COVID-19 social restrictions, to me the obvious fact that we are not "united" on that or any other question right now feels far worse. Hateful bellows or smirking, snide remarks: neither helps anyone feel better. The friend whose comment knocked me sideways on Sunday thinks I'm too generous in my thoughts and should instead wish bad things on those whose politics and social practices I abhor. Oh, friend, do you think it comes easily to me, not wishing evil on evil-doers, trying not to hate? You little realize how hard I struggle, on a daily basis -- an hourly basis! My sense of outrage is no less keen than yours! And I do hate -- do truly hate -- all appeals to our baser natures and all encouragement to hate! Does that sound like a contradiction?

When it comes right down to it, though, most of us are conservative on some questions and liberal on others. On certain complex issues we may not have reached a settled position but are still trying to sort out everything involved. And that I don’t see as a contradiction. Computer algorithms can afford to be purely rule-driven, because the world of a computer program is limited from the outset, each program modeling a piece or an aspect of the larger world for some specific purpose. Real life is more complicated, because nothing in our many-colored world is left out! 

Moreover, human beings live in a world of contingency. We find ourselves in some situations as a result result of our own prior choices, it’s true, but many situations result from choices other people have made or even from natural processes we could not have foreseen. Partisan, knee-jerk responses, therefore, whether always ‘liberal’ or always ‘conservative,’ too often miss the mark. What good are our own brains, the meaty ones inside our bony skulls, if we are going to run a preset program to yield a programmatic answer to any and every situation? Sometimes – shock! -- it even may even make sense to change our minds! (What a concept, eh?) On some issues both “sides” have important things to say, serious considerations we need to take into account, and there are many issues with more than two “sides,” although our two-party political system has a hard time accommodating and acknowledging that truth.

 

Here, though, is the bottom line: How should we treat this precious earth we could never ourselves have created? How should we treat one another while we are here? And what kind of country do we want to bequeath to future generations? We Americans are in a pivotal moment right now, one that will all too soon be history and one that the future will judge us by. 

Long after we have returned to dust, the consequences of our decisions will be playing out. We won't see the harvest, but it will come.

 

My On-and-Off Teaching Career, Part I

Reading the book about introverts (see previous post), I was reminded of my experience teaching college classes in philosophy. It’s something I never did fulltime, and there were years when I didn’t do it at all, but still, over time, it was an experience in which I learned and grew along with my students, and I’ve been thinking about how it was that a “shy” person might lead a class and do it well.

As a graduate student, my first “teaching” experience was as an assistant responsible for helping professors grade papers written by students in their large lecture classes. Those of us grading papers worked alone and almost never had direct contact with students whose papers we graded. We worked behind the scenes, which you can see is often the perfect introvert position. One incident, however, stands out in my memory.

A student wrote to the professor to complain about her grade, certain that the reason she had received less than an A (I believe the grade assigned was B+) was that the graduate student grading her paper didn’t agree with her conclusion. The professor, a quiet man whose policy was to give all his students, graduate and undergraduate, minimum advice and maximum autonomy didn’t tell me what to say but asked me to write a response to the student’s written complaint. It was a delicate situation and the first serious challenge to what little “authority” my position held. 

My written reply assured the student that she had been graded on the quality of her argument alone, with no reference to my opinions on the subject. The problem  was that the example she had chosen for support undermined rather than supported her conclusion. The rest of her argument was excellent, as was her articulation of it. I reminded her that all her other work for the class had been A work and said there was no reason to believe it would not be excellent for the rest of the semester. I predicted an A for the course for her, based on her overall performance up to that point.

The next time the lecture class met, I had butterflies in my stomach. How had the student taken my explanation of her grade? Would she pursue her complaint? Would the professor be happy with the way I had handled the situation? The incident had a very happy ending. The professor could not have been more pleased, and the student, attentive in the front row, looked happy and confident. Her major was pre-law, so my explanation had satisfied her, and I think she learned something from that one B+.

From grading I went on to leading small discussion sections that met once a week.  In the large lecture hall, there was no time for questions, so discussion sections were set up to compensate and to give students an opportunity to converse on the week’s topics.

Finally, I had the opportunity to “teach my own classes,” as we grad students put it—and as it really was. At large universities, undergraduate classes offered in smaller than huge lecture sections are often taught by advanced graduate students. (Course listings that say “Staff” rather than having a particular professor’s name attached will usually be taught by an adjunct (temporary; term) faculty member, a postdoctoral fellow, or an advanced graduate student. Some will be disappointing, others excellent, but this is true of classes taught by senior faculty, also, isn’t it?) At this level, we were given an opportunity to choose our own textbooks and write our own syllabi. Courses I taught at this level were intro to philosophy; intro to ethics; philosophy and public policy; and introduction to logic. Logic gave me the most initial anxiety. Public policy was the class I most enjoyed.

Logic? Me? Oh, the shock when that assignment was handed down! The first time I’d signed up for logic as an undergraduate, I’d dropped it halfway through the semester—the only class I ever dropped in my entire academic career! I managed to get through it on my second try, with a different professor (it’s amazing how a subject as apparently cut-and-dried can be so different from one professor to another, depending on their particular interests in the subject), but can still recall the many nights I went to bed metaphorically banging my head against the wall to understand “only if.” “If “ was no problem; “if only” was no problem; “if and only if” was a piece of cake; but “only if” gave my brain fits. Will you believe that understanding came to me in a dream?

Well, they say that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it. My best day in logic class was when one of the male students skeptically asked me if I was “sure” about an argument form I’d told the class was a fallacy. I remember how good it felt not to have a sudden sick feeling at the student’s challenge but to be able to say calmly, “Don’t take my word for it. Do the truth table.” There is no arguing with truth tables! In fact, this is one of the joys of “arguments” in formal logic: they are like mathematical demonstrations. A friend from a country that had been torn by civil war told me that following the conflict all the philosophy students wanted to work in formal logic, because arguments about “the good life” were just too frightening, and they didn’t want to end up in prison.

So you can see right away that philosophy and public policy would have been avoided like the plague by students in my friend’s native country. Here in the U.S., at the university where I taught, however, the subject held a lot of interest. How did I teach it? In order that everyone in class have a common background vocabulary and principles with which to work—and because it was, after all, an undergraduate class in philosophy--we spent the first half of the semester reading John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. Many of my students were not thrilled with this work. A couple of them, dragging through what to them was archaic language, asked jokingly one day if we could read the work “in translation,” and from then on I asked that all students come to class with a written list of the numbered paragraphs assigned for that day, along with a one-sentence summary of each paragraph. The results were excellent. The students were fully capable of understanding the ideas but had to think about them, not just let their eyes skitter down the page. Sometimes there would be a paragraph that a lot of people had trouble with, but the trouble was obvious from the sentence summaries, and we could address the confusion together. Discussions were good, too. There was disagreement and argument, but it was focused, thanks to the common reading.

In the second half of the semester, we took a new and different direction. The class divided into groups (three? four? five? I no longer remember), and for the remaining weeks each group would work as a team. Each team was to imagine itself as a village or town council, and each individual was to give himself or herself a specific character. Characters and towns were to be imagined in detail: How old are you? Are you single, married, childless or a parent? What kind of work do you do? What are your personal beliefs? What is the population of your town? Describe its economic base, demographics, and history. What is important to the citizens of this place? Then a proposal was brought before each town council: Should the town have a public, tax-supported day care facility? Within each group, members were to argue for their positions in character, and at the end of the semester each group would present its conclusion and rationale for the conclusion.

The group exercise half of the class was a huge success. As an introvert myself, I’d seldom been comfortable working in groups—preferred to work on my own—but I’d realized that many students relished working together, and the class was for their benefit, not mine. There must have been introverts as well as extroverts in the class, but—and maybe it was the size of the groups or the fact that they’d already had weeks together in the same room—everyone seemed to find a comfort zone in which to work. They enjoyed having an opportunity to bring imagination into play, and they appreciated getting to know one another in the process. When it came time for final presentations, those were very impressive. Each group, as I’d hoped it would, had taken on a unique,well-rounded identity, and the conclusion each group reached was consistent with that identity.

I’ve read that citizen groups, at whatever level, can more easily come to agreement on a practical question than on a question of principle. Certainly my students, in their roles as town council members, appealed to principles in part, but they also paid attention to the real needs of their respective towns. And when there was argument over principle, they had—thanks to Locke—a common vocabulary and background against which to frame their disagreement.

Introverts had the initial comfort of working alone and subsequent opportunity to voice their thoughts in the safety of a group smaller than the entire classroom, while extroverts had a chance to energize the group process and to shine as presenters. I don’t recall anyone who was unhappy with the class.

I’m thinking back on classroom teaching because getting up in front of a roomful of people is a challenge for an introvert, and it’s interesting for me to think back on my experiences in light of insights provided by Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. One reason I think I grew confident at the front a classroom was that the authority of my position meant I didn’t have to compete with extroverts for attention. It was my class. And one of the strengths I believe I brought to the classroom was I was a good listener, not just a star performer. I could see when someone didn’t understand something or had a thought to share, even when that student might be sitting quietly, and I could help the students hear each other, too, not just try to out-shout each other.

Later teaching as an adjunct was both similar to and different from my teaching as a graduate student, but that I’ll save for Part II.