We made a number of decisions in class today (see updated syllabus for details).

We agreed that we will take a final class-wide "ramble":
we are eco-imagining a collective event to end the semester,
which will compliment the individual Thoreauvian stroll with which you each began
(lovely thought; thanks, rachelr!)

We also agreed to go do this @ 1 p.m. on Sunday, December 2nd --
and to accomodate that time by cancelling class on Monday, Dec. 3rd.

Next to be decided is where we will go, how we will get there, and what we will do once we arrive.

Current options for where to go include the
* Tinicum Wildlife Refuge (a visitor center, observation platform, and
10 miles of trails in southwest Philly, near I-95 and the airport);
* Forbidden Drive (a 5 1/2 mile trail in the Wissahickon Valley Park in the northwest part of Philly); and
* Mill Creek (which we can access from the edge of the Bryn Mawr
campus, and would try to walk along, as far as Dove Lake).

Options for how to get to the first include taking the R5, then the R1--or renting a college van;
for the second, renting the van; and for the third, walking.

Home and Garden

 

Island life is hard on a house                                     sitting beside a shed named Mouse House.

How like a horse is a house,     

                                     tender I                 wonder.  

                                                                  Where is the boundary between wild and wonderful?

Swelling plants

                      will swallow the water hose whole.

Dwelling place

                      cobwebs are the burglar alarm for daddy long legs. 

Originally, my intention was to write two separate posts; one about the Morris Wood’s experience and one about what I would have said if I were in class today based on to the course notes. However, after I wrote both posts, I found that the two were inseparable and ended up combining them together.

 

On Morris Woods and Carmen Papalia:

It was weird to be reminded of how dependent I am on my sight; to the point where I couldn’t figure out how to move my body. I kept feeling like my brain knew what I was supposed to be doing but my leg and hand movement seemed outside of my control; even standing up straight seemed like a particularly difficult task. When I finally took off the blindfold to find my tree, I realized that I had been so busy just trying to figure out how to move my legs forward that I hadn’t been paying as much attention my physical surroundings while Emma was trying to lead me. I also realized later when we met as a group that it seemed like the other pairs had been very careful to lead their partners as best as they possibly could; helping each other along the way. Emma and I actually did the opposite, doing our best to confuse each other further. We even went as far as spinning each other around so finding the right direction back was even more impossible.

While reading the Jane Thompkins for Jody's class, I found myself disappointed in Thompkins during her transition from Bryn Mawr for undergrad to Yale for Grad school. At Bryn Mawr,  students are unique, have the space to express their intelligence unashamedly and own their education. However, when Thompkins, as a BMC graduate, described her experience at Yale, she had to be sure she was right before speaking up, she felt dumb if another student beat her to an answer and she did not freely, along with her peers, express her love for her interest in English and poetry.

I am disappointed by Thompkins because as a graduate from Bryn Mawr, I am surprised that she did not carry with her the characteristics of a Mawrter to Yale. Perhaps her experience at Yale is not a reflection of her inability to be a Mawter (and perhaps this term need to be unpacked more) beyond Bryn Mawr. It could be that the culture of Yale demanded a different type of student--one that was more competitive and closed-off emotionally from the material. So, now I wonder if BMC does the same. Does the nature of BMC call for a "type" of student and/or experience? Is there a pressure unique to BMC that makes us act a certain way? If so, what is it? How and when and, above all, do we pretend to be something we are not under this pressure?

After yesterday's discussion about Hunger Games, I do not think I have been convinced by the inclusion of Hunger Games into the curriculum. While KCHarris made a fantastic suggestion of putting Hunger Games in conversation with another text, I'm still not sure that I would consider the text to be of great value to a classroom -- it just seems that there are other books out there that might address some of the things that we discussed.

1. I felt that a lot of the emotions surrounding the inclusion of The Hunger Games revolved around how it would motivate students to "read". But what do we mean by "reading"? Do we mean (as N. Katherine Hayles talks about in her essay, "How We Read") hyperreading, close reading....? What about the motivations for reading? To be able to think about how The Hunger Games would really affect the ability/love of reading, I think that these are important questions to consider.

2. I do see the point that some of our classmates made passionately about tailoring books to fit in with student's backgrounds. While I didn't take the comment about not being taken seriously in certain contexts personally, I do urge the consideration of how well these students will be prepared to enter college. (Since this seems to be the path that MGuerrero mentioned as being the "model") Would The Hunger Games prepare students to do the type of analysis/close reading required by freshman seminars? I can't speak generally, but probably not at Bryn Mawr.

In thinking about my site sit today I had a plan: I know there were some plants, some bushes at the base of the beech tree behind my bench. I knew that when I had collected leaves they hadn’t all been the same leaves. What could I find from Morris Woods at my site?

Surprisingly little. Or perhaps not so surprisingly. Morris Woods was once cultivated, a farmland; but since it has been left to its own devices, native trees, shrubs, and plants taking root while slowly but surely non-native plants creep up and across the landscape from the direction of English House. My site is manicured. The oak trees of senior row were planted and aligned, spaced apart. From the pairing of Hurricane Sandy with a sudden drop in temperature the leaves from the trees dropped, and sometime since last week the groundskeepers have not only cleared the leaves, leaving the ground bare save for some patchy grass on death’s doorstep, but also cleared of the plant life that, when I began my site sit, were densely packed around the base of the beech tree. No longer there, I can approach its root system, and its trunk that bears a plaque. A human mark on this easily scarred tree. Everything feels so bare.  Everything I like to look at has been cleared. The evidence of the loss of life has been stripped away, and the emptiness of my site in comparison to the (mostly) uncleared and dense Morris Woods makes me feel bare. I am no longer sitting amongst things, but rather against them and alone. 

As stated in the title line, this is Julia posting from Esty's account (which she kindly lent to me until my own is restored). 

I've probably made clear in one or many classes that I consider Adrienne Rich to be my favorite poet and perhaps even writer of all time.  The first poem of hers I ever read was "Diving Into the Wreck."  Here is a link to the poem from Poets.org.  The poem ends:

We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

I found myself thinking continuously about this poem when reading "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying."  The phrase that grabs me the most is, "by cowardice or courage."  Rich mentions both throughout her piece on honor, but I don't think she discusses either enough. 

Our truths are often created for us.  They can be conditions that we do not choose but that we often must choose to disclose.  I wonder how important the distinction between cowardice and courage are.  Is one always lying and the other always honesty?  If I find myself in the wreck, does it matter if it is cowardice or courage that caused me to arrive there? 

 One main connection that I noticed between Monday’s class and my site sits are the presence of humans .We are on a college campus with a densely populated surrounding area, so we have no choice but to come in contact with other people. I’ve been thinking about are the subtle ways that humans have changed the landscape over the past few hundred years. They have build buildings, chopped down trees, planted trees, etc., and they have also influenced the spread of “invasive” species in Morris woods. This is something that I would not have even been aware of, had I not participated in the class. It’s interesting how something as seemingly “natural” as a wooded area, can actually be quite artificial, and greatly influenced by human actions. I feel similarly about the wildflower area. I think that I have the unconscious, and obviously erroneous idea that all plants that I see on campus somehow got there “naturally.” This circles back to the sticky question about what exactly “natural” means. For me, I think that “natural” signifies something that has been unaffected by human activities.

Another idea that I’ve been meditating on since Monday’s class is that of trust. The trust activity made an impression on me because not only did I feel like I really did “get to know my tree,” I was astounded at just how vulnerable I felt without my eyesight in the woods. I can’t imagine doing this trust activity in a more wild environment than Morris Woods. I think I would have been very apprehensive if I hadn’t known that people were just a few feet away.