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: 

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.