Choosing Who We Are

I. Two weeks ago, Anne told the story of a student who’d said to her, “I don’t know how I’m doing.” We mused together about how we must be failing as teachers, if our students are looking to us to tell them “how they are doing,” and how giving too many instructions/ offering a review of what is "great"/giving grades can contribute to this effect. This is, of course, part of a larger social phenomenon, of asking experts (doctors, esp.) to tell us "how we are doing."

II. So: turn to your neighbor and tell her how you are doing….

III. On Sept. 12 (presumably having made a similar assessment of how he was doing) the writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide. Several years ago, he had said this in a Commencement address he gave @ Kenyon College:

…everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence

[He goes on to say that a good education will take you outside yourself,
enable you to imagine the lives of others, be patient in grocery story lines....]

the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: …. learning how to exercise some control over…what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to… if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed….

[But--and here's the turn of the screw we want to worry today--
Wallace then "loops" back to the beginning:]

Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education…is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize … instead of simply paying attention…to what is going on inside me.

This is today's (triple) topic: the dance between attending to the self and to the world around us, and what a liberal education might play in that dance.

William James, the great 19th century psychologist, wrote [similarly, and] at length about the varieties of human attention…To James, steady attention was…the default condition of a mature mind [in contrast to the] “extreme mobility of the attention” that “makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.” For some people, James noted, this challenge is never overcome; such people only get their work done “in the interstices of their mind-wandering.”

These comments by Foster and James seem to accord with much of the current work being done on the brain and education, which focuses on ways to stop students from mind-wandering, to get them engaged, to attend. One question we have is whether such attentiveness involves limiting our students' choices.

Consider the comment made the first week we talked, on the educational consequences of Mark’s idea:
there may be more “choice” (to mind-wander)--because less engagement?--
in a lecture than there is in a discussion?

Wil’s report on The Art of Changing the Brain

Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential Learning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall

Zull, J. (2002). The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching
by Exploring the Biology of Learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Experimenting-->Experiencing--> Reflecting--> Theorizing-->

So: what does it mean for us as teachers, if education,
understood generally, is teaching/learning what to attend to/think about?

What are the psychological (and political!) ramifications of thinking about education
as a training in attentiveness? (vs. mind-wandering)?

What is our project here?
Getting students to attend to what they haven’t noticed before….?
To stop their minds from wandering….?
Why might we want to do that…?

[Think about this while we play]
Beatles, “Fixing a Hole” from
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Clubs’ Band (2:36):

I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in
And stops my mind from wandering
Where will it go
I'm filling the cracks that ran through the door
And kept my mind from wandering
Where will it go
And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong
I'm right
Where I belong I'm right
Where I belong.
See the people standing there who disagree and never win
And wonder why they don't get in my door.
I'm painting my room in the colourful way
And when my mind is wandering
There I will go.
And it really doesn't matter if
I'm wrong I'm right
Where I belong I'm right
Where I belong.
Silly people run around they worry me
And never ask me why they don't get past my door.
I'm taking the time for a number of things
That weren't important yesterday
And I still go.
I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in
And stops my mind from wandering
Where it will go.

Notes from the conversation
What's the relation between wandering and attending?
Do we "learn to remember" or "remember to learn"?

There are a million ways we are "not at the center of our experience."

This is "too narrow an index to engagement."

There needs be no opposition between self and other, between structure and wandering.
There's no need to set up binaries bewteen objective/subjective,
between mind/body, between understanding and experiencing.

Theorizing requires wandering.
Getting students to attend might be like resetting the reistat.

Think of a porous "participant structure,"
with people free to do what they want in their heads.

"People aren't responsible for their passing thoughts, only the ones they hold onto."
We might try to create participant structures that encourage "holding on."