Saturday, February 9, 2013

Does this bus stop at 52nd Street?

There's a chance that, starting soon, Rockhurst students will, like their UMKC neighbors, be able to ride the KC Metro or free--FREE!--with the simple swipe of a student id card. A single Metro bus fare is $1.50--one way (counting a transfer). Needless to say, it's a great deal, and I am jealous (faculty ids won't be included in the benefit).
useless
But there's a chance that it won't happen, that students won't show insufficient interest in the privilege. What's up with that? 

I live with a woman who answered that very eloquent rhetorical question, reminding me that there's a stigma attached to public transportation. She used to take the bus to work--had a job that even paid for her bus pass. Now she works at a job that's even more convenient for bus travel, but (despite being an advocate for mass transit) she's decided to stop riding the bus. Why? She wants to control the kind of impression she makes at her new job. Who's to keep someone who sees her getting off the bus from thinking that she either doesn't have her life together enough to own a car or hasn't managed to acquire or maintain driving privileges.

Sure, I say, but who's to keep you from being seen as an awesome, civic-minded person who believes in responsible energy use and wants a more palpable connection to her city. Be a trend setter, I say. Show corporate American that riding the bus is cool.

She gives me that look that tells me that my ivory-tower idealism is getting out of hand.

Fine. I get it. The professor in me knows that Americans have always had a fraught relationship with public transportation, that busses and trains have been the testing (and, too often, failing) grounds of equality. I think of that provocative cover photo of Robert Frank's photobook, The Americans (1958) ...
... a photo that brings to mind a line from Amiri Baraka's play, Dutchman (1964): "Staring through train windows is weird business."

Busses and trains have been the sites of social unrest in America, the epicenters of legal arguments about race and equal rights--it was Homer Plessy's refusal to sit in a "blacks only" train car that sparked the case that led to the U.S. Supreme Court's endorsement "separate but equal" racial segregation, and it was Rosa Parks's refusal to move to the back of the bus that pretty much started the Civil Rights movement.

Long story short, one is definitely stepping onto more than a vehicle when one steps onto a bus or a train or a trolly or a streetcar. I like to think that whatever force it is that keeps so many of us off the bus, locked away in our private cars, is subsiding. And I'm not the only one.

A facebook friend posted this delightful reminder of the enchantment public transportation.


And this, my favorite song about busses: 

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Teaching Practical Jokes


"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." 
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

I like counterintuitive writing assignments, assignments that challenge students to think in ways they never expected to be asked to think.

For instance, for their first paper this semester, my Freshman Comp students had to demolish a U.S. monument of their choice and erect a better monument in its place. The assignment is an exercise in description. It doesn't matter what monument they choose, so long as it (a) can be described vividly and (b) sends a message about history that the student sees as in some way flawed/counterproductive. 

Students must describe the monument in such a way that illustrates its candidacy for (hypothetical) demolition. They then have to describe the replacement as an answer to the flaws of the first. It's a chance to think big, to build "castles in the air," to let the imagination to run wild. 

For their second assignment, students have to devise a campus prank that reveals something unique about their generation. For this assignment, they have to think smart, not necessarily big. They have to be practical, imagining a prank that is actually possible--though (as I remind them often) must remain hypothetical

Before such awful TV shows as Punk’d and Jackass, practical jokes were revered traditions on college campuses. Contrary to their names, practical jokes are quite serious—serious not just in terms of consequences but in terms of their ability to help otherwise powerless groups define themselves within a larger institution. When we take practical jokes seriously, we learn something about the community-building and belonging.

Here are some of my favorite pranks: 
This hijacked road sign is the handiwork of MIT pranksters.
I love it because it engages the viewer's  sympathy, and because
 it is a poignant reminder of the human element lurking just behind the machinations of daily life. 
Harmless fun. And it shatters any preconception that your hight teachers are humorless automatons.
These prank stickers an be found on the London tube. Leave it to the British
to strike such a subtle balance between alienation and cheeky fun. 
A reminder from the elusive graffiti artist Banksy to break out
 of the pattern of daily life and smell the flowers. Or paint them. 
Regardless of how I stress that pranks should be harmless but provocative--that they redressing injustice and reduce alienation without also putting anyone in harm's (or humiliation's) way, students always first associate pranks with cruelty (thanks, in part, to Daniel Tosh, Ashton Kutcher, and Johnny Knoxville), which is why I allow for a ten-minute cruelty-fest, wherein students (and I) recall some of the more sadistic pranks they've witnessed. I kick off the cruelty-fest with this clip from one of my favorite movies, Rushmore (1998): 
After we purge ourselves of cruelty, we set about the task of making the world a better place, one prank at a time. 

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Seriously Funny


For their first paper of the semester, students in my American Literature Since 1945 class have to treat an intensely funny novel as though it might be dead serious.
This is the kind of novel whose main character is so impossibly hilarious that the filmmakers who have tried (and failed) to make movie version of him can only think of top-brass funnymen to fill the role: Harold Ramis chose John Belushi in the 1980s, in the 90s the names were John Candy and Chris Farley, in the early 00s David Gordon Green picked Will Farrell. Now it’s The Muppets James Bobin in the director’s chair and (drumroll) Zach Galifianakis in the role Ignatius J. Reilly.
Galifianakis is the right man for the job. He is funny in a way that scares me a little, that inspires equal parts pathos and schadenfreude.

Students have to answer the question of whether A Confederacy of Dunces is a “Civil Rights novel” or not. By “Civil Rights Novel,” I mean a novel that is committed to solving such big American problems as racial segregation, to doing something more than turning such problems into a literary enterprise.

Confederacy is a good candidate for this kind of investigation. Like Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Confederacy is a novel whose light-hearted fun masks a more complex statement about race relations in America. Critics have long disagreed about what effect Twain’s book has on race relations, and on whether the author had any philanthropic motivations at all. This edition of Huck Finn collects all the relevant essays of that critical controversy. 

One of the things students have to do is track the novel’s representation of political activism, as such scenes can offer insight into the author’s impressions of the civil disobedience happening in the American South at the time he wrote the novel.

To that end, and in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I offer this very brief roll call of early Civil Rights-era actions:

In 1955, there is a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, wherein African American citizens of Montgomery refused to ride city busses, thus reminding the city how much it depends on the revenue of citizens it forces to the backs of its busses. The boycott is lifted a year later, after the U.S. Supreme Court declares Alabama’s bus segregation policy unconstitutional.
In February of 1960, four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, sit down at a “whites only” lunch counter and order coffee. When refused service, they refuse to leave. Thus the “sit-in” is born in the American South. Many restaurants are desegregated as a result.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was also founded in 1960.
In 1961, organizers in the North stage “Freedom Rides,” in which college students travel South in buses to test the effectiveness of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that desegregated interstate bus stations. When the Freedom Riders reach Alabama, violence erupts.
In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. leads antisegregation marches in Birmingham, Alabama. Police attack demonstrators with dogs, and firefighters turn high-pressure water hoses on them. Television broadcasts of the violence shocked the nation, increasing support for civil rights.
Later that year, national civil rights leaders stage a “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” at which King delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech to an audience of more than 200,000.
In 1964, the SNCC recruits Northern college students to help register voters in Mississippi. The project received national attention when three participants were murdered.

In 1965, at an SNCC protest in Selma, Alabama, police beat and tear-gas marchers. Televised scenes of the event shock create broad support for a law to protect African Americans in the South who want to exercise their right to vote.
In 1968, King is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

13

I've heard that 13 is an unlucky number. But I'm not convinced.

Thirteen is the number of ways one can look at a blackbird:
It's a number of ways to look at a novel:
It's the number of days it took Kennedy to avert the greatest crisis of the nuclear age:
It's the number of the day I was born. Friday the 13th, no less.

Needless to say, I am not superstitious about the number 13.

But I do find heartening the convention of not including 13th floors in buildings and foregoing 13th rows in airplanes. The fact that such sober citizens as whatever kind of engineers it takes to design elevators or the interiors of commercial jets comply on some level with the least logical among us gives me hope.

I don't know where our collective fear of the number 13 came from, and I'm not going to google it. One resolution I have for 2013 is to learn things in more meaningful ways, if only to cut deeper grooves into my memory. I think that sounds old-fashioned, but I don't think I care. I'm kind of fed up the access model of education--with the idea that being informed has something to do with knowing how to access the technology that retains information. The sum of human knowledge is floating in "the cloud" (that awful neologism).

To paraphrase a line from a 13th Floor Elevators, we're going to look around in our minds and find that knowledge gone:
Thanks to said cloud, human brains are now free to do things other than be a repositories of information. I joke sometimes about what we might do with our brains now that they no longer need to be receptacles of knowledge.

That joke got a little more serious this Christmas, when my wife gave me an iPad that had this inscription on the back of it: "Saber es acordarse. Aristoteles" My first challenge: Do I plug that phrase into a translation app or do I work it out on my own? I tried to work it out, but the "se" on "acordarse" threw me. Plus, thanks to years of google answering my every query, I have no patience. So I looked it up.

"Saber es acordarse." / "To know is to remember."

To place that sentence as the inscription on an information Pad (that's what the "i" in Apple products stands for, right?) is to compel its user to pause, to commit at least a brief stretch of time to the slow business of thinking, before summoning the awful beauty of big brother tablet and admitting your ignorance.

Which is to say that I might have the only iPad that is also a lesson in humility.