Joshua Converse's Blog, page 2
July 16, 2018
“Of Fangs and Phonographs: The Past as Un-Dead in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
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So, if you’re interested in that Masters Thesis I wrote a couple years back (or you just need help falling asleep some night) I present to you an ebook copy of “Of Fangs and Phonographs: The Past as Un-Dead in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”
July 11, 2018
“Keep the Lights On”
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FF8JQ6X[image error]
July 3, 2018
“Open Sky” by Joshua Converse
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What becomes of a man who denies what he is? What becomes of a pilot who cannot fly? What becomes of love denied under the open sky? This work of short fiction explores these questions and more, and discovers transformation, loss, and rebirth.
June 27, 2018
“The Summer People” by Joshua Converse
“People disappear in Good Hope, year by year, but in Summer they return to walk the streets again. Dempsey Shaw had lost his wife the summer before, and their children the summer before that. His parents had departed years ago, and yet they all returned, hale and hearty with soft voices and seductive stories that Dempsey did his best to drown out. They came out of the woods on summer nights. This summer, perhaps, the last holdouts would join them…” Available here.
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June 25, 2018
On the Passing of Donald Hall
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On the night I met him, my teacher introduced him as a giant in the world of American Letters. He was bent under his years, but his voice was a soaring growl dancing over syllables and silence. Before I came to the reading that February evening, I had finished his desperately broken Without; a book about the loss of his wife, the exceptional and beautiful poet, Jane Kenyon. When we shook hands, I was not so much starstruck as aware of Donald Hall’s scale, both in years and in greatness. Let me explain what I mean by that, because we hear about “greatness” a lot often as a term more or less interchangeable with other superlatives.
Perhaps you have had occasion to encounter California’s Giant Sequoias. Some of them were young when Rome fell, and some were already old before the birth of Christ. The depth of their roots, the height of their tops, their sheer mass, is breathtaking. I would compare Hall to such a thing; he was a man who wrote for over seven decades with blistering honesty, humanity, grace, and terrible sorrow. His learning, his erudition, and his depth of knowledge made me feel like a chicken tree shot up one Spring next to a tree so big and so wide and so deep that I couldn’t really even take its measure.
So, when I read yesterday that he died at 89, it felt like I had rounded a corner and come upon a freshly fallen Sequoia; one that had been a point of reference in my life. I carry Hall’s book Writing Well into every composition class I teach. I went to my shelf and took down his book White Apples and the Taste of Stone, (which sits next to Otherwise by Jane Kenyon) and read his poem, “Affirmation,” whose last line has stayed with me for ten years:
“Affirmation”
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
So, weighted with years, a giant has fallen back to earth as he knew he must. He was a giant who held up light for the rest of us to see ourselves by, and now those poets he leaves behind must gather what light they have and hold it high in a darker sky.
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June 15, 2018
Manhunt
I wrote a short story about a prison escape and subsequent manhunt in the swamps of Louisiana some years ago and have decided to publish it as an ebook. Let me know what you think, if you’re so inclined.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DR7RDVH
Warning: Parental Guidance suggested. Not recommended for readers under 18 for graphic violence and adult language.[image error]
June 7, 2018
The Ones We Can Save.
Photo by Vigan Hajdari on Pexels.com
It was probably early into my first semester as a teacher that I came across a student essay written, from beginning to end, in sentence fragments. It was so dense with grammatical confusion that I didn’t even know where to begin my corrections– nor did I know how to help my student to engage at the college level when he so clearly lacked the skills he needed to do so. Every semester I can count on getting at least one essay that is almost indecipherable. And the numbers are going up. I’ve received multiple incomprehensible essays that were endorsed and signed by student tutors from the tutoring center at my college. That speaks to a systemic problem, in my opinion. Kids are reading fewer books that are built out of stable grammar and are doing more texting, tweeting, and thinking in images and icons, which are often without punctuation, spelling, or traditional grammar.
Here’s my question: How do you teach a college English course to students whose literacy and composition skills are situated on a spectrum that ranges from almost totally illiterate to college freshman level? Many to most of my students have trouble with basic grammar, but how much time can I devote to grammar in a class that is supposed to be about college-level reading, analysis, and writing?
I generally provide a block of instruction early in each course that touches on common grammatical errors, and then I refer them to websites like OWL Purdue and Scribendi’s Grammar Guide that cover the rules of grammar. There’s just not much time to cover what we need to cover to prepare them to write at the college level and also to do remedial work in class. I urge them to take advantage of the tutoring services on campus and via NetTutor (through our online component). I highlight grammatical mistakes in the feedback I provide for each student’s essay. Generally, students whose writing has grammar issues improve very slightly over the course of the five essays that I assign in a semester. Should a college course devote more time to this crucial (but remedial) piece? There are trade-offs– the more time we spend on elementary rules of English, the less time we have to talk about research strategies, vetting sources, logical fallacies, proper argumentation, modes of persuasion, etc. After all, classes meet generally for about 3 hours a week. That’s very little time, indeed.
I don’t have a good answer, but I think community colleges need one. Increasingly, students come into class with extremely limited English skills. A transfer-level class should be engaging students at a college level, by definition. But if multiple students per class aren’t capable of functioning at that level because they need remediation, how should instructors proceed? The students who are ready for college need to be challenged, and the students who aren’t ready deserve the opportunity to grow. How do you accomplish both?
I think community college is increasingly doing the traditional work of high schools. This will affect the entire higher education model as students spend more time in college classrooms remediating instead of doing college-level work, and the result will be a loss of quality. Degrees will be less impressive and less desirable to employers, and more importantly, students will have spent more time working on basic skills or simply failing to understand what they’re being exposed to because of that skills deficit than grappling with great ideas, experiencing new ways of looking at the world, and stocking their inner shelves with substantial, humanizing, soul-sustaining material.
One possible solution might be simply to set standards for entry into community college, and to refer adult students who lack basic skills to adult schools to work on whatever gaps there are in their fundamental education. Another solution might be to identify students who are not operating at level and set them up with both a tutor and a personal instructor/mentor to bring them up to level through additional instruction. And, of course, the truth is that some students are not necessarily going to be able to function at the college level for whatever reason. For my part, I advise students who have trouble with basic writing and reading skills to read as much quality fiction and nonfiction as they can get their hands on, to get a grammar book and work through the exercises they find there, to read their writing out loud and see if it sounds correct to their ears, and to bring tutors and additional knowledgeable eyes (including my own) to bear on their written work. That works better for some people than others– generally, student success is a matter of time and dedication on the student’s part. Teachers can provide direction, guidance, support, inspiration, and advice the livelong day, but learning to write, read, and think comes down to the student; student grit, dedication, and ability will determine all outcomes (provided the teacher doesn’t actually get in the way).
In my average community college class of 31-32 students, about 12-14 will drop, and of those that remain 2-3 will fail, 1-3 will do exceptionally well and earn an “A,” and the rest are in the “B” to “C” range. This is on average, of course. I would like to identify more of the students that will drop or fail and help them be successful, but I can’t impart grit, nor change life situations, nor make up for 12 years of either ignoring English teachers or learning the wrong things. For now, like all teachers, I swim for the ones I can save.
May 28, 2018
Yelping Toward Bethlehem
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I wonder, if the technology had somehow existed, whether or not some student could have come away from a conversation with Socrates and gone to RateMyPhilosopher.com: “Guy doesn’t seem to know very much for sure. I’m looking for more certainty. Very low rating from me.”
I wonder if some loaf-and-fish-eating listener, had he heard the Sermon on the Mount, could have stepped away to rate Jesus at RateMyRabbi.com: “Dude is really idealistic. Pray for your enemies? He tells people to love their enemies as themselves?? Aren’t you supposed to hate your enemies, by definition? I mean, who does he think he is? Avoid this rabbi.”
And I wonder about whether or not the democratization of information (and necessarily, misinformation) via the Internet has led to a kind of unearned entitlement from people conditioned to see themselves, ever and always, as enlightened consumers. I think it’s demonstrably true that as the Internet has bloomed, expertise has been conflated with just another opinion, and common opinion (never in short supply, let’s be honest) has become unavoidable, ubiquitous, and awfully loud.
At the risk of sounding undemocratic, there are hierarchies of value where opinions are concerned– and that idea seems to erode yearly in America and maybe across the world. I would suggest it’s part of the reason a “Reality TV” star is in the White House and he imagines his children make effective advisers, instead of experts on geopolitics, diplomacy, science, Intel, and military strategy. I am reminded of the moment in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day when Senator Lewis very rightly points out to well-meaning and duped Lord Darlington that politics is no longer a place for gentlemen amateurs. Would that the current President were more gentleman, and less amateur, and that his advisers were longer on expertise and shorter on opinion. This is not a digression; this Presidency is indicative of a culture that holds its own ignorance to be the equal of an expert’s knowledge.
Where education and consumerism are concerned, I find Mark Edmundson writes convincingly of the troubling aspects of student as cool consumer in his book, Why Teach? “I do not like the [evaluation] forms themselves, with their number ratings, reminiscent of the sheets circulated after the TV pilot has just played to its sample audience in Burbank. Most of all I dislike the attitude of calm consumer expertise that pervades the responses. I’m disturbed by the serene belief that my function — and, more importantly, Freud’s, or Shakespeare’s, or Blake’s– is to divert, entertain, and interest.” It is fair to ask, surely, whether or not a teacher needs to be “entertaining” or “likable” to be effective in exposing students to the material of the course. Probably that’s helpful in any event, but has it become essential to please one’s contemporary American students in order to successfully teach them anything?
For my part, in two years I’ve amassed quite a lot of internet-based disdain. Ratemyprofessors.com posters allege, for example that I “set students up for failure,” despite the fact that all quizzes in every class I teach are open book and open note, and that I will make line-by-line corrections of their drafts before they turn them in, if they can get them to me in a timely fashion (3 students out of every class of 32, on average, take advantage of this). Some of the Net-based aggrieved complain I am “rude” or that I “lack social skills” and although I always try to be courteous, I understand that some may not like my personality, nor my sense of humor, or maybe they just don’t like that they didn’t get a good grade.
I rather like what Professor John McIntyre of Loyola University has to say about this matter, in his YouTube video, “One final point: my manner and my sense of humor may not be to your taste. Admiring me is not a course requirement. I might add that in 21 years of teaching this class, on Ratemyprofessors.com my hotness quotient remains zero. But one of the reasons you are in a university is to experience different personality types, different senses of humor, different approaches to the world. I am not the only jackass you will ever encounter in your adult working life. Use this semester as an opportunity to polish your coping skills.” McIntyre is addressing the potential static between an experienced teacher and students who probably conflate the value of a course with their personal opinion of the professor, which is (of course) nonsense. I didn’t particularly care for my Drill Sergeants in Basic Training, but I learned how to shoot a rifle and detonate a claymore mine all the same. I did not, however, have the opportunity to “drop” my “classes” because I “wasn’t feeling it.”
For all the Internet-invective directed at me, many of my students have very positive things to say about their time in my classes. Not long ago I received this particularly encouraging email from a student who took my Critical Thinking class:
“Dear Mr. Converse,
I am writing this letter to express my gratitude to you for all the things you have done for me this semester. I am grateful to you for not dropping me out of the class after I had missed four classes and for understanding my situation. I am also grateful to you for showing us a class all the resources available to us on campus, such as the ESSC. I did not know this resource existed and I probably would not have gotten a B in this class without it.
Lastly, I am grateful to you for being a great instructor with an open mind. I did not know at first what to expect out of this class when I had registered for it. It was simply a requirement I had to fulfill. Now that it is over, I can truly say that it was a class I very much enjoyed taking. I also know that it would not have been the same experience had I taken it with a different instructor.
As you may already know, I was born in Iraq and I immigrated to this country with my mother ten years ago. My experience in American schools have not always been pleasant, especially in my first few years here. I was bullied throughout middle and high schools because of where I am from. Most students and sadly even some teachers looked down on me and treated me unfairly. I was often accused of being associated with terrorists and told other comments of that nature. On the first day of class, you had mentioned to every one that you were a US army veteran who had served in Iraq. Honestly, this was a major concern for me. I was afraid that you would treat differently and with bias. I knew you could probably associate my last name with where I am from. As the class went forwarded, you made me realize that you were not that kind of person. You treated me just like any other student in class. I felt safe to speak up and express my opinion about the subjects we were discussing. I thank you for that.
I realize this may not seem like a big deal to you as I am sure that you treat all of your students equally. It was a serious concern to me. Two years after the 2003 war started in my country, a misguided mortar fell through my second-floor classroom during an Arabic composition class. Reportedly, the mortar attack was intended to target a US military outpost nearby the school. After the attack, which had killed one of my class mates, my mother refused to send me back to school for three years out of fear for my safety. Shortly after the war had started, my mother was hired to work as an interrupter for the US army and had to travel to the “Green Zone” everyday for work. In 2008, after having worked there for three years and getting dozens of death threats from local terrorists for being there, we finally had decided that it was time to leave the country. That’s when we had applied for a visa to the US. That’s probably enough about me, but I really wanted to share a little bit of my story with you.
Again, I thank you for the great class that we had and for teaching us to think critically. I wish you the best of luck and hope to see you on campus sometime.
Sincerely,
XXXXXXX”
My English teacher’s class motto, those many years ago, was this: “Education should be like a gun to your head.” Educators serve their students best when they challenge them, teach them to question the world, and even unsettle them with ideas that force them to examine their own assumptions, conclusions, and worldview. Sometimes that makes people (particularly people whom advertisers and web-designers work tirelessly never to discomfit) uncomfortable, even hostile. If popularity, affability, comfort, safety, and entertainment are one goal, and an education that challenges students to be their best is another, then I’m reminded of the Japanese proverb: “A man who chases two rabbits will catch neither.”
May 24, 2018
On American Education Now and Soon.
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
As the Spring 2018 semester closes, I am more pessimistic than I have ever been about the fate of American education, which is another way of saying I am as concerned as I have ever been about the fate of America itself. I have many reasons to be dubious about the future, but here are three: the rise of vocationalism and away from a classically liberal education, new initiatives like California’s “Guided Pathways” that tie college funding to “student success,” “equity,” and (explicitly) matriculation to state universities for degrees that lead to “in-demand jobs,” and the digital entrainment of the general population, and particularly student populations into what Richard Foreman describes as “pancake people.” The confluence of these various conditions, it seems to me, will result in degree inflation and effective meaninglessness (and educational worthlessness to the individual as colleges become diploma mills), a labor glut in markets that, evidence suggests, may not exist in five years due to the rise of automation, and general (further) dumbing down of America.
One of the lies that college deploy to entice students to enroll is the promise of a better job and more money. It is perfectly true that, statistically, people with degrees tend to earn more than people without. People aren’t stastistics, though. There are many out of work or underemployed Ph.Ds swimming in debt because they swallowed the lie that a degree (any degree) is the promise of lucrative employment. That’s patently untrue, but college literature is fairly littered with the promise of glittering, frictionless, and golden futures. This push toward the promise of a career is a kind of vocationalism; it’s not that you go to college to be exposed to “the best that has been written and thought,” or to navigate a bustling “marketplace of ideas,” so as to “become a better companion to yourself” as educators like Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler had it in The Great Conversation, but rather to learn to write emails, communicate effectively with superiors or subordinates, and to troubleshoot time-sensitive issues in a manner consistent with company policy. In other words, they’re training obedient workers and serviceable cogs in the wheels of industry. The problem with vocationalism, as I see it, is that it impoverishes the inner world of the student in question and precludes the very necessary engines of skeptical inquiry, philosophical understanding, and information literacy required of a citizen in a democratic republic– so it is to the detriment of society that obedient workers are being churned out for hypothetical jobs that may or may not exist, instead of citizens graduating with a robust grounding in history, philosophy, art, literature, and cultural literacy. A classically liberal education is at variance with current educational trends because it is intrinsically and explicitly humanist in the age of the machine values of speed, efficiency, and iterability.
California’s “Guided Pathways” initiatives are a great example of machine values in action. The stated goals of “Guided Pathways” aka “A Vision for Change” are as follows:
1. Increase by at least 20 percent the number of CCC (California Community College) students annually who acquire associates degrees, credentials, certificates, or specific skill sets that prepare them for an in-demand job.
2. Increase by 35 percent the number of CCC students transferring annually to a UC or CSU.
3. Decrease the average number of units accumulated by CCC students earning associate’s degrees,
4. Increase the percent of exiting CTE students who report being employed in their field of study,
5. Reduce equity gaps across all of the above measures through faster improvements among traditionally underrepresented student groups, with the goal of cutting achievement gaps by 40 percent within 5 years and fully closing those achievement gaps within 10 years.
6. Reduce regional achievement gaps across all of the above measures through faster improvements among colleges located in regions with the lowest educational attainment of adults, with the ultimate goal of fully closing regional achievement gaps within 10 years.
On the face of it, these measures might sound reasonable. After all, only 13% of the students who enroll in one of the community colleges where I teach successfully matriculate. However, it isn’t as if colleges aren’t already trying, and trying hard, to help students succeed. There are myriad programs like EOPS, TRIO, free tutoring, library and research resources, employment and work-study opportunities, federal grants, scholarships, tuition waivers, book vouchers, textbooks on reserve at the library, and even food banks to help struggling students be successful. How will 20% more students graduate? The only answer I can see is via grade inflation; students will simply need to be passed along at higher numbers in order to meet this goal. The problem, of course, is that a passing grade must be earned. In my experience, students coming into a Community College out of high school are often (and by no fault of their own) profoundly underprepared to be students in college. They are surprised by my attendance policy that mandates they show up to class. They are exceedingly resistant to reading and largely won’t do so outside of class, and when they do it is often without much retention or consideration of what they have read. They tend to feel “required texts” are optional and even when they purchase them and they are urged to bring them to class, they do not. They tend to feel I am unreasonable to instruct them to write within the conventions of academic writing. To be clear, I am not trashing these young people; they are largely a product of the system that educated them and the modes of communication they use most. To be asked to pass 20% more of the students who enter my class, and to be told that a significant portion (25-50%) of the college’s funding will be tied to “student success” is tantamount to the threat of defunding the college, unless I and others like me massage the numbers to pass along students who have not earned a passing grade.
Other examples of machine values in “Guided Pathways” are: the idea that students should amass fewer credits (i.e. be exposed to less in order to speed their matriculation), that they should declare a major early and maintain it (like computers, they should heed their coding), that they should get a job in their field of study, and that the kids in affluent Marin County and the kids in East Salinas (with nearly the lowest education rate in the nation) should be earning the same grades, and that all of these things will affect Community College funding. How can a college control whether a student changes majors, or if a graduating student gets a job offer outside his field of study, or if students in low-literacy areas simply don’t earn the same grades as kids who come out of excellent schools? Short answer: it can’t. But “Guided Pathways,” taken as an ideology seems to think colleges should code students and mass produce workers for some kind of social/labor plan and students should act like machines, never resisting, varying, changing, or quitting. This plan, of course, is doomed because people aren’t machines, but Community Colleges are in for a punishment when the state money-wells run dry for a lack of “student success.”
I also want to point out that there’s an AI currently practicing Law, that the so-called “learning algorithm” has produced computer programs that can teach themselves how to do things. Kiosks and self-checkout lines and self-driving trucks have arrived all over America and all over the world. Teams of editors have been fired at places like Facebook and now a small contingent of “janitors” maintains algorithms that curate information. Given the fact that there are no more lamp-lighters, no more dustmen, and no more door-to-door Encyclopedia salesmen, I would argue that it’s going to be very difficult to know what jobs will be “in-demand” in five years when a student who begins studying (and presumably will be pressured to declare a major for an “in-demand job”) this semester gets to the workforce, much less five years after that, when community college funding is no longer tied to that student maintaining a job in his field of study. Certainly, there is a good deal of pressure to steer students toward STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) programs, but given the rise of automation it may be there are many more trained STEM workers than there are STEM jobs– a fairly small contingent of engineers could conceivably oversee vast automated factories, warehouses, and shipping lines. The kind of social engineering outlined in the stated goals of “A Vision for Change” sounds good on paper, but will implode on contact with the vagaries of human choice and the uncertainties of our future reality.
Finally, I am concerned about the primary (digital) modes of communication in currency among students; Richard Foreman wrote (and Nicholas Carr quoted him in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”):
“I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.'”
Foreman, I think, suggests our inner world is made up of what we think, what we know, what we remember, and what we make of ourselves. This dovetails very well with what George Steiner said in an interview from the film Of Beauty and Consolation, “I think we are what we remember; what we have in us the bastards can’t touch.” Our inner structures, fostered in education and developed over a lifetime, can enable us to resist propaganda, misinformation, political doublespeak, and philistinism. But digital technology, the primary source of information for the current generation of college students, is a technology of fragmentation, power-browsing, superficiality, and the outsourcing of previously internal structures like memory, navigation, and social discernment. Attention spans have shortened under the tender ministrations of digital technology, the cost of extended focus has increased; the medium of the screen is hostile to the medium of, for example, physical text. David Clemens writes eloquently of the dearth of cultural knowledge held by the current generation of students. He says, in part, “Students’ focus is not on understanding or knowing (in the sense of possessing) but on finding the answer (Googling, asking Siri). Hence, they don’t become more knowledgeable because the actual knowledge, even if it’s correct, remains stored outside of themselves. Their inner shelves of memory remain empty.” Given these conditions, none of which are the fault of the learner, it is no wonder that employers all over the country are complaining that college graduates in their employ are unable to think, problem solve, or perform as well as generations past.
The confluence of vocationalism over a classically liberal college education, misguided legislative educational initiatives like “Guided Pathways,” and the rise of digital technology as the primary mode of information-gathering and communication has led to a situation in which colleges, particularly community colleges, are doomed to fail in educating young people, and those young people are unlikely to emerge from college prepared to function successfully as citizens of a democratic republic, nor to live as integrated personalities housing “personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.” They may be, in many cases, unable to find the careers they were promised in the ads that seduced them to college in the first place. It seems to me the idea of treating college like a business is the originating and false premise from which other policy errors descend. I would do away with “student success” models and focus on creating a “marketplace of ideas” with the goal of teaching students to be better companions to themselves, to read books more than they scroll social media feeds, to fill their inner shelves with the true, the beautiful, and the good, and to resist both the rampant fragmentation of “truth” that led Farhad Manjoo to dub ours the “Post-Fact Age,” and thereby to resist pancake personhood. Individuals with the apparatuses and habits of mind conferred by a classically liberal education with maximum exposure to diverse and varied ideas, disciplines, and lenses for looking at the world will be a boon to the Republic, to the workforce, and to themselves. That is what colleges in America should be aiming for.
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Photo by Janko Ferlic on Pexels.com
December 21, 2017
“Wizards in Winter” now available.
“Wizards in Winter: A Christmas Tale” is now available on Amazon for your reading pleasure. For those who are interested, I listened to this pretty much the whole time I wrote it. I’m told it’s atmospheric during the read. Merry Christmas, Happy Yule, Good Solstice, and God bless.
