Professor Pope

We’re back from vacation and while I have a lot I still want to write about as a result of the trip, I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on how (or if) travel can be used to affect change in one’s own life upon “the return.”  I’m not really talking about how travel can change a person, more like how travel can change one’s routine and habits (which, I know, help constitute a person).

I could ramble on about this at length, but my thoughts are still ill formed so I’ll keep it to this:

Most of struggle with “getting back into the swing of things” after we return.  It’s hard to go back to work, to get back to eating right, to get back to the gym.  But there are some things we don’t need to get back to.  The break of travel can be an opportunity to NOT get back to some things that had crept into out routine that shouldn’t be there.

I am going to try to eliminate some of those things now that we are back by not letting them into the routine (again).  More specifics as they emerge, but most of them involve my not-very-healthy relationship with food.

Does this make sense?

I am in my friend Tim’s study, in Farifax, VA, after spending the weekend a Prince William Forest Park in Virginia. Tim, Rich, and I had our annual guys weekend, which consisted of hiking, gaming, and (this time) camping at a cabin in the park.  Here are some things I learned:

1.  Ticks suck (pun fully intended).  I’ve pulled three off of me this weekend.  Yuck.

2.  Prince William Park is very cool.  There are good hikes there — we covered maybe 10 of the 37 miles of trails.  There are assorted campsites (RV, cabins, and primitive), bike trails, a senic loop to drive, and lots of things to see (nice wildlife, an abandoned pyrite mine).  It’s only 45 minutes from DC, yet the park was not at all crowded in a summer weekend.  The cabins we stayed in were built by the CCC and used by the OSS for training in WW2.  Ours had a fan, a light, and a mouse.  The later was extraordinarily brave, venturing accross the floor while we simply watched it wander around.  Our first night, it ate a small hole in our trash bag to get at a corn cob, but didn’t get into anything else.

3.  It takes a long time to boil water on one of those tiny backpacking stoves.  Much better to simply start a fire and put the pot over it.

4.  D&D 4th Edition is pretty cool.  Tim ran a game for us on Saturday night, at least until we were too tired to go on.  All the powers and stuff takes some getting used to — out first combat took a long time and we almost died, but as we figured things out we were faster and more effective.  While it is pretty cool, it didn’t wow me enough that I’m going to switch systems tomorrow, though.

5.  I need some better gear if I am going to do more outdoor stuff.  First, a real stove that can actually boil water in under 30 minutes.  Second, a lantern.  Third, some non-cotton clothes.  Granted, those first two things can’t be hauled along a backpacking trip, but with a two-year-old and a low tolerance for sleeping on the ground, I will likely just be car/cabin camping for the foreseeable future.  So those things will come in handy.

6.  Making it a life goal to visit all the National Parks and related national sites (National Historic Sites, Rivers, etc) seems doable.  I want to take my family to these places; I have a job that gives me lots of time in the summer to do it.  To this end, I picked up a National Park Passport on the way out today.  It lists all the parks and gives you a place to stamp the date of your visit to each.  I got my first stamp today.  Hopefully, Sarah, Eleanor, and I can fill it up in years to come.

I will note that this post is being done somewhat hurredly on a public terminal in the lobby of Alderman Library at The University of Virginia.  I’ve got some interesting thoughts percolating on this town and this university, but I think they need to ferment a little longer, so this post will just be a recap of the past few days of travel.  More profound thoughts (perhaps) will follow in a later post.

Monday was spent in Washington DC.  We took the MARC train from Baltimore to Union Station.  It cost the family a total of $72 in tickets, so I am not sure if we came out ahead in dollar terms, but we did miss traffic and parking and general hassle.  The real reason we did it, though, was to ride the train, which Eleanor loves.  Too bad she slept most of the way back.  DC was well, like most of the other times I’ve been to DC — hot, lots of walking, and time at Natural History and Air and Space.  I like the city a lot.  I like those museums a lot,  but it’s hard to get beyond them sometimes, especially if you’re only there one day with people who haven’t been there before.  I will say Eleanor did love the dinosaur bones and all the rockets.  That was worth everything, right there.

Tuesday was our last full day in Baltimore, with Sarah’s parents leaving that afternoon.  Our morning was spent shopping and running errands while the grandparents got a few final hours in with the grandkids.  We ate lunch at Nicks Fishhouse, right on the harbor, behind an air conditioning refurb shop.  I think there may be a coorelation between food quality and proximity to heavy industry.  Nick’s was great.  Sarah had wonderful fish and chips, her dad had great tilapia, and I ate some wings (not in the mood for fish) dusted in Old Bay.  Sarah’s parents left for the airport right after lunch.

Wednesday we got up and packed, then drove down here to Charlottesville.  We spent last night at a friend of Sarah’s (who has three girls for Eleanor to play with), ate some Christian’s pizza, and had Bodo’s for breakfast this morning.  Now those two are off to Tennessee and I’ve wandering around UVA waiting for my friend to get off work.  Tomorrow our guy’s weekend begins.

We’re at Sarah’s sisters house in Baltimore, about a third of the way through our vacation.  We spend two fun days in Richmond, visiting with a friend from graduate school and his family.  Eleanor played with his two children, we grilled out, and did fun kid stuff.

We arrived here on Friday, just in time to eat dinner (crab cakes, of course) and head to my neice’s dance reciatal.  I’ll admit my initial scowl at being told tickets were $15 each, but it turned out to be lots of fun.  The recital had a “Night at the Museum” theme, combined with a cool multicultural vibe and a series of dances about Moses.  Eleanor was enthralled, despite staying up way past her bedtime.

We haven’t ventured out too much otherwise — a trip to the grocery store, brunch today after church.  The moms all cooked a great father’s day meal for us tonight.  This afternoon we visited Normals, a great used bookstore here in a somewhat sketchy part of town.  Another trip out (to buy beer, which can be purchased on Sunday from bars that also have their package license) yielded a nice drive past Johns Hopkins and Loyola.  Tomorrow we’re taking the train into DC.

I’ve seen more of Baltimore on this trip than I have any other time we’ve visited.  As I told my brother in law last night, Baltimore kind of scares me (and I’ve never even watched The Wire).  Many of these row home neighborhoods are run down and menacing.  But there are wonderful neighborhoods, too, like they one my in laws live in, with homes dating from the 1930’s nestled under trees.  There’s also a funky counterculture here, at least there seems to be, judging by the flyers in the bookstore and the emerging neighborhood around where we ate brunch (a packed place called Clementine).  I’m sure if we lived here there would be lots of cool stuff around, but then we’d have the school system to deal with.

A good vacation so far, with lots more to come.

I’m up early this morning to pack.  Our plan is to leave somewhere around 10:00 for a road trip up to Virginia and Maryland.  We’ll stop and see some friends in Richmond, then drive to Baltimore for some time with Sarah’s family.  We will spend the bulk of our time there, then head down to Charlottesville for a day.  I’ll get dropped off, while Sarah and Eleanor head down to Tennessee.  Friends from graduate school and I will then head to a park in Virginia where we’ve got a primitive cabin for the weekend.  We’ll game, hike, get attacked by mosquitoes, drink beer, and grill out.  Then, I’ll ride back to Fairfax with one of my buddies.  I’ll crash for the night, get dropped off at the metro station the next morning, and have to work my way to Baltimore/Washington airport in time for my afternoon flight home.

The trip sounds pretty complicated, perhaps more than it actually will be.  It lets us see a lot of friends and family — this is one of those vacations where seeing people, not seeing places, is the goal. Getting from Fairfax, VA to Baltimore/Washington International will be an adventure, but that’s how stories begin, don’t they?  Remind me to tell you of the time Harper and I took the bus from Greenville to DC. . .

All of this is also another way of saying the blog posts will be spotty for the next two weeks, as I’m not taking the laptop.

Books Acquired: Summer of ‘49 by David Halberstam; The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlien; A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

Books Read: Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon

I’m back chronicling my reading, a la Nick Hornby’s columns in “The Believer“, but I’ll admit my first foray back into it is a little disappointing.  First, there’s the fact that I didn’t really buy any books in May.  Lame, I know.  The three books mentioned above all came to me as gifts of sorts.  Sarah picked up a copy of A Long Way Down at the York County Library booksale, which was very thoughtful and frugal of her.  It’s the hardcover version, but has a name/address label stuck on the front cover!  I understand wanting to let people know who’s book is who’s, but ruining the cover to claim your book is like carving your initials in the hood of your car.  The other two books arrived via mail to my office.  I know I got the Halberstam from filling out a survey for some publisher about whether or not I used trade paperbacks in my classes.  I have no recollection, however, of how I received The Dumbest Generation.  That book is supposed to be about how the internet and social media is making those darn kids into, well, the dumbest generation.  I am not really predisposed to such an argument, despite teaching college freshmen, so I haven’t been all that disposed to start on that book.

Even though I received those three books in May, most of my reading time was occupied by a book that we’ve had on our shelves since before Sarah and I were married.  I bought Blue Highways for Sarah at the Half Priced Books near Rice in Houston a long time ago.  I am not sure she ever read it, but I was in the mood for a travel narrative (likely because it was the beginning of summer), so I pulled it off the shelf.  Published in 1982, it’s the memoir of a guy who is breaking up with his wife and is let go from his job, so he loads up his van and drives the back roads all around the U.S.  This sounds like a recipe for a great travel story, so I was doubly disappointed by Blue Highways.  Disappointed because a great concept didn’t pan out and disappointed due to the fact that Heat Moon seems like the fellow you would NOT want to be stuck in a van with for 12,000 miles.  He’s surly, depressing, self-absorbed and generally a grumpy old man.  As you might expect, he spends considerable time lamenting the disappearance of an America of small towns and people connected to their own past.  He’s disdainful of the fast food America, of homogenized people, places, and things.  I am in line with a lot of that.  But he’s also utterly dismissive of young people.  He picks up a hitchhiker in Minnesota and drives her to Michigan.  This leg of the journey takes several hundred miles but occupies maybe five pages of the narrative; we learn little to nothing about the girl, presumably due to Heat Moon’s lack of desire to learn anything about her or comment on what he does learn.  Despite the fact that he spends considerable time on college campuses (he often parks his van their overnight and grabs some cheap food in the dining hall), he doesn’t really care that much for college students, who are too self-centered and concerned with making money (um, yeah, Bill.  They are college students).

He does take us to some interesting places in America.  One of my favorites was a tiny town — basically an overgrown truck stop — in Nevada outside of a naval bombing range.  But he skips over a lot of the U.S. (the entire center of the nation) and drives right on through the center north.  He spends about as much time writing about western Washington to Michigan as he does writing about three towns in Maine, New Jersey, and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

You may reply that, well, the travel isn’t really that much about the U.S., it’s about him.  He’s the main character and everything else is setting.  Granted, a lot of travel narratives are like this — Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman comes to mind.  But we don’t really learn that much about Heat Moon, either, nor does he seem to learn that much about himself.  Almost nothing about the events that drove him to the road (his wife, his job) are revealed.  He’s not that self reflective; we don’t get much connection between him and what he sees or who he talks to.  In the end, he admits that he hasn’t really changed much or resolved anything.  In short, Blue Highways stands as evidence for Emerson’s maxim that “travel is a fool’s paradise”.  In other words, just driving around (even around a country with as much cultural and geographic diversity as ours) isn’t going to make you a new person or solve any of your problems.  Just stay home and fix what needs fixing  — you.

That may have sounded harsh.  I am sure Bill is a nice guy who was going through a rough patch.  But Robert Penn Warren called it a “masterpiece,” which set my expectations rather high.

Dear President Obama,

If you can make this happen, I will be utterly impressed and eternally grateful.

Thanks,

Professor Pope

I’ve been a bit frantic all day, the kind of frantic that comes from having lots of semi-formed ideas swarming around in my head like wasps.  I just came from a meeting with our science methods faculty member, who helped me crystallize some of those ideas.  My core concept is still the grammar of schooling, but I wanted to develop that concept in a way that could serve as the basis for an entire course.  What I came up with were three key questions for my social foundations courses to focus on:

1.  What are schools for?

This question lets me talk about the various purposes of schooling, such as preparation for work, citizenship, moral education, etc.  If I want, I can introduce some concepts from sociology here.  I have used a nice text that introduces Functionalism and Marxism for teachers.  We can also look at some history of education.  I have my 110 students read excerpts from Horace Mann that aptly illustrate our initial high expectations of public schooling for dealing with larger social issues like poverty.

This would also be the section to talk about school choice and other structural features of schooling, like age grading.

2.  What is a teacher (what does a teacher do)?

In this section of the course, we can discuss the various metaphors for teaching including teaching as a profession, teaching as a vocation, teaching as a calling, etc.  We’ll also discuss the peculiar nature of teacher authority and the tension between democratic authority and professional authority and why all of this matters to the daily lives of teachers.  In classes that aren’t for practicing teachers, this would also be the section where we talk about working conditions, the division of educational decision making, etc, but I figure practicing teachers know all this stuff already.

3.  What does it mean to know something?

This is the epistemological question, of course.  It’s also the most “purely” philosophical and, therefore, the one that’s likely to engender the most resistance.  Never fear, because standardized testing is the issue that can get everyone talking about this topic.  We will also discuss construcitivism and other epistemological concepts like understanding.  This is also the logical place to talk about content area standards (and who decides them).

Given that my first course that uses these three questions will be an M.Ed. course for math teachers, I’ll also include something like “what does it mean to be mathmatically literate?” to give the course more of a focus that they can grab on to.

Readings will consist of a bunch of articles that I am still compiling and Tyack and Cuban’s Tinkering Toward Utopia.

Thoughts?

George R.R. Martin is not my bitch, but I now have less confidence in his skill as a writer.

Wait, let me start over, since I’ve been percolating on this blog post for almost a month.

A few weeks ago, Neil Gaiman answered a fan email on his blog.  The fan asked, basically, if Martin was “letting him down” by taking so long to finish the next book in the Song of Ice and Fire series.  Gaiman said “no”; that Martin has no obligation to his readers.  Martin writes stories; ultimately he’s responsible to the stories and must do what it takes to get those stories done at the time the story dictates.  Good stories are better than rushed stories, churned out because of deadlines.  The reader, therefore, has no right to criticize an author for not getting the stories out.  They come when they come.

I, too, am a follower of A Song of Ice and Fire.  I, too, am dissapointed that the next book hasn’t come out yet, even though it’s been promised for something like two years.  I also waited six years between books for Steven King to finish The Dark Tower, so I know what’s going on here.

The thing is, I agree with Gaiman.  Martin, or anyone else, doesn’t really owe me anything.  He’s not working for me.  I have no problem with that.

What bothers me isn’t the fact that it’s taking so long, it’s the fact that Martin seems to be in constant renegotiation with the story.  That renegotiation has resulted in a delay.  It’s resulted in the series growing from four to six to seven books.  It’s resulted in book four becoming books four and five, with five not yet out.  That worries me and gives me less confidence in the story as a whole.  I can get behind the idea that the story comes when it comes.  I can also get behind the idea that sometimes it comes in torrents and that the story grows in the telling.  But isn’t it the author’s responsibility to prune that growth?  Choice matters — word choice, character choice, plot threads to follow, etc.  Every character doesn’t need their own chapter.  Every meal does not need to be described.  Choices, hard choices, have to be made by the author.

Stephen King talked about how he had trouble finishing The Dark Tower not because he didn’t know how it was supposed to end, but because he was afraid of ending it (and, while I loved the actual ending of The Dark Tower, the narrative road to get there took some unnecessary turns).  Michael Douglass’ character in Wonder Boys has the same issue.  His unfinished novel is unfinished because he’s afraid of making choices, so everything gets written.  I think the same thing is happening to Martin, which is going to result in a story that’s less that what it could of been because there is more actual story.

I’m sitting in Augello’s Coffehouse.  We just had class here today; we also had class here last week.  At first, I just suggested this venue to my class out of a desire to do something cool, leverage some Maymester advantages (extended class time, meeting every day, small class), and support a local business I want to succeed.  Today, however, while discussing challenges to the grammar of schooling presented by Elliot Eisner, Walter Parker, and Rosetta Cohen, I realized that I was challenging this grammar by meeting in a coffeehouse.  It was unintentional, but having class sitting around a big table while sipping on coffee and discussing articles suggests that school can be different from simply sitting in desks, viewing a powerpoint, and listening to an instructor.  It was a nice bit of synergy, even as it was unintentional and not necessarily realized by all my students.

I don’t want to pat myself on the back too much.  I still did a lot of talking.  I sat at the head of the table, making myself the center of class.  I need to find ways to encourage my students to respond to each other rather than just look to me for commentary after a student speaks.  We did break up into groups (the coffeehouse makes a nice format for that!), but our class activities weren’t much different that our normal class activities.  Maybe they shouldn’t be, but I want to be careful not to elevate my change in venue to some major pedagogical breakthrough.

Still, having class in a coffeeshop is pretty cool.