Month: November 2015

On Not Being Efficient and Going Slow

About midway through her book Syllabus, Barry describes how students in one of her classes hated her crayon assignments. While crayons had been very successful in the past, this one class despised them. Why? Because, she realized, she gave them too much guidance in her efforts to make the process easier and faster for them.

I told them to color hard in order to do it right. And go straight to using force–thinking I was showing them a short-cut. This took away the way of coloring they would have found on their their own. By telling them just how to do it, I took the playing around away, the gradual figuring out that brings something alive to the activity, makes it worthwhile…

Lynda Barry

She concluded that we should forget shortcuts and that the most efficient way to do things because, “The fastest way is the slowest way” (94).

I’ve often read/wrote/thought about how taking your time increases your ability to think critically and to resist. I like how Barry links going slow and avoiding shortcuts with the creative process too. When I taught at the university, I frequently chose new assignments and readings because I was always trying to fight against the urge to shortcut/streamline the process for the students or for me. I felt that if I become too comfortable and used to assignments or classes (when I taught them multiple times), I would lose the creative/critical energy and passion for what I was doing and how I was doing it. I found that focusing on the “right” way to do things (which is like becoming the Expert) can prevent you from playing around and enjoying the process.

This idea of efficiency reminds me of something that I recently read about inconvenience. In his keynote for the 2015 Personal Digital Archive Conference, Rick Howard reflects on the potential value of personal digital records as inconvenient to collect and preserve. He writes:

But I think that inconvenience has its virtues. Wrangling with inconvenience is like choosing to write by hand instead of typing or dictating. You learn more about the words you are processing….Archives are a means to an end, not an end in themselves, and wrestling with the inconvenience of certain kinds of records causes a kind of reprocessing to commence, in which records can serve completely new purposes and often new interests.

Rick Howard

Note: This is the fourth processing blog post for my new book project. I’ve decided to do daily posts on all of my ideas instead of separate posts on each thought. Still not sure if this is the best approach.

On Not Being an Expert

Lately, I’ve developed the habit of listening to podcasts while I run. This morning I listened to an interview with Miranda July on Michael Ian Black’s totally awesome podcast, How to be Amazing. In the opening soundbite, July says:

Being a beginner, again and again, that’s a good feeling to me….And the feeling of being a pro and a master of this particular thing, that whole thing sounds nice, like I’d love the respect part of it, but it doesn’t sound fun creatively.

Miranda July

This idea of not wanting to be a Pro resonates for me. I always like experimenting with new methods and ideas. It helps keep me curious and excited. When I was a teacher, many of the readings I assigned were new to me.  I liked discovering them with my students. Now, as a storyteller who experiments with a lot of online tools, I’m always trying to craft and tell stories in new ways. Once I’ve used some tool for too long, the creative process isn’t as enjoyable.

My resistance to being a pro (or expert) is about more than losing my creative flow, however. As an ex-academic, and a child of an academic, I’ve witnessed firsthand the effects of too much expertise. People often become arrogant assholes. I’ve written a lot about not liking experts/pros, including this mini-essay for my first book and these haikus:

The shift from student
to expert is the end of
new ways of thinking

I don’t like experts,
They claim, “I have THE answer!”
when I want questions.

I dropped out when the
demand to be an expert
was forced upon me.

Watch out for people
who claim to be experts.
They are often jerks.

Why am I writing about this in my processing blog post? I envision this book project to be partly (mostly?) about my pedagogy and my work/stories as a teacher/guide/role model. I don’t want this book to be a how-to guide or the pontifications of an Expert. How can I do that? As I write these lines I’m questioning myself and my dislike of expertise. What’s wrong with acquiring skills and being proud of your knowledge? How is my creative/critical work harmed when I always only want to be a beginner/non-expert? 

Researching syllabus-as-form and trying to find useful examples from writers who have used the syllabus in their memoirs (or autobiographies or creative non-fiction…still not sure how to name what I’m doing in this project) is difficult. At this point, early in my process, I’m trying to be broad and read a wide range of things related to the syllabus.

This morning I came across an online article by Rebecca Schuman, an alt-academic/academic columnist, bemoaning how cumbersome and ridiculously lengthy college syllabi are now. She argues that the shift from concise 1-2 page documents, the standard in the 90s when she (and I) were in college, to the 20+ page behemoths that professors currently distribute, signals the “decline and fall of the American university.”

She writes:

Syllabus bloat is more than an annoyance. It’s a textual artifact of the decline and fall of American higher education. Once the symbolic one-page tickets for epistemic trips filled with wonder and possibility, course syllabi are now but exhaustive legal contracts that seek to cover every possible eventuality, from fourth instances of plagiarism to tornadoes. The syllabus now merely exists to ensure a “customer experience” wherein if every box is adequately checked, the end result—a desired grade—is inevitable and demanded, learning be damned. You want to know why, how, and to what extent the university has undergone a full corporate metamorphosis? In the words of every exasperated professor ever, “It’s on the syllabus.”

Rebecca Schuman

Is her discussion useful for me as I attempt to think through how to format and structure my book project? Not sure. It did remind me that while I enjoy constructing a syllabus, especially the process of crafting assignments, picking readings and creating a story to tell and then, as a class, collectively shape, I don’t especially enjoy its format. So, I probably don’t want to structure my book project as a syllabus. I think that that would be bit cheesy anyway.

Questions: Why the Syllabus? What is it about the syllabus that I especially enjoyed? How do I translate that into a book format?

After writing and then reading my reflections above, I jotted down the following in my blue notebook: What do I like about the syllabus? It’s an invitation to engage in a conversation, to participate in shaping a story.

Is “invitation to engage” a recognized function of the syllabus? After skimming through a few online resources, including The Many Purposes of Course Syllabi: Which are Essential and Useful? ,  the closest function I could find was syllabus as contract between the students and instructor (described at length in The Purposes of a Syllabus). This contract is formal and lays out responsibilities, expectations and rules of behavior. When I constructed my syllabi, I liked keeping rules and expectations to a minimum. Excessive rules often create a hostile environment. I don’t like the idea of a contract. Too formal. Too many rules. More of a request than an invitation.

Did I envision my syllabi as just invitations to engage? I need to think about that some more. I also want to explore the idea of the syllabus as a resource (guide?) for engaging as well.

4 November 2015/1:30 PM
Before I realized that I was ready to start this book project, I began reading and thinking a lot about memoirs. Did this thinking/reading start when I requested and then almost finished Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir? Now I can’t remember. The memoirs that I’ve read, and the theories about memoirs and remembering one’s past experiences that I’ve studied, focus a lot on accessing and communicating inner, and usually uncomfortable (embarrassing, painful) truths through the details of one’s life. Is that what I want to write?

What story am I trying/wanting to tell? How much of it is about the specific details of my life and how much of it is about the ideas/theories/authors/experiences that have moved me, shaped me, consumed me? For me, it is about the latter.

Having read 15 more pages since my last post on Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, I’m seeing that in her book she hopes to give an account of the evolution of her ideas about images, drawing, thinking and creating art and how she came to teach them (and still does) at UW Madison.

Maybe my book project could be about the evolution (or development…what other non-liner/progress word can I use here?) of my undisciplined approach to living–thinking, feeling, writing, creating?