Hope, Springing

This post was begun about three weeks ago, before I knew that I'd be undergoing yet another invasive coronary procedure (an angiogram) that turned even more invasive when the doc found the expected occlusion of one of my old bypasses (now 25 years old) and transformed the scan into an angioplasty. The catheterization team inserted a shiny new Onyx drug-eluting stent into the offending vessel, and all the while I was wide awake with only mild sedation. As uncomfortable as it was, it sure beat the hell out of having my chest cracked yet again. I had four bypasses in 1995, and my aortic valve was replaced by a mechanical one in 2009. This time I left for home only a few hours after the cath, and got to sleep in my own bed. The only really negative aspect of the whole experience is that, for the next year, I'll be a teetotaler because of the anti-platelet therapy being added to my current drug mix. 

If you add the mechanical valve to the two artificial corneas received in cataract surgery a couple of years ago, this new stent ramps up my membership in the Borg club bigtime. So far, though, nothing shows except under appropriate scanning technology, so I'm no Seven of Nine in that regard. Well, in most ways I'm no Seven of Nine.

Anyway, I'm feeling fine and it should be a spell before I have to undergo another of these little encounters, even though it seems inevitable that I will. I'm certainly not getting any younger, and my genes aren't getting any better.

All this drama began just about the same time the bad news about COVID-19 was coming down the pike. In fact, the day of the procedure was the last day before the hospital (which I came to call the Baylor Heart Hospital, Hotel, and Spa after the valve job) began to institute new protocols for both patients and staff.

We've managed to do most of our home-prepping (and no, we didn't buy toilet paper) which has consisted of stocking up on a few things, but mostly just doing our weekly shopping. This week we're also getting most of our doctor visits (including the vet) taken care of, so that we won't have to do much getting out and about over the next month. We're looking into a local farm supplier for later needs, and once the food panic has subsided it may be possible to pop into Trader Joe's or Whole Foods for what we can't easily get online, or maybe get it delivered.

The truth is that as someone who reads and writes about depletion and abundance, and about non-capitalist political economies, I've been something of a prepper for a long time. We've also been revising our various impacts on the environment and economics in general by buying little and living as lightly as we can. So doing without has become a way of life with us, and except for an odd obsession with high-resolution television, we're not as technologically plugged in as our children are, and as long as the electricity stays on and the water keeps flowing, we'll be about as comfortable as we need to be. We can muddle through, abide in place, and (mostly because we're essentially hermits anyway) be able to handle social distancing quite well.

This is where the post I was originally preparing comes in.

Every now and then I get inspired by something that sets me off in a different direction. Sometimes that something is so transformative that it makes me rethink my current trajectory, shift gears, re-focus, and move on.

Such an event occurred when I read Margaret Renkl's lovely article in the New York Times last month (Feb. 23, "One Tiny Beautiful Thing") about surviving a bleak, soggy winter in the South. One particular paragraph struck home with a force I seldom experience in editorial writing. She is, of course, talking about politics, but her essay also resonates with the current, even more problematic situation.

Paying attention to what is happening in Washington is a form of self-torment so reality altering that it should be regulated as a Schedule IV drug. I pay attention because that’s what responsible people do, but I sometimes wonder how much longer I can continue to follow the national news and not descend into a kind of despair that might as well be called madness. Already there are days when I’m one click away from becoming Lear on the heath, raging into the storm. There are days when it feels like the apocalypse is already here.

But on a walk through a park, she noticed a small green sign of spring in a knot hole in a tree that completely changed her perspective. In order to survive the political (and climatic) moment, and instead of giving up watching the news for Lent,  she's going to be looking for more tiny beautiful things.

Now, as anybody who comes by The Farm even once in a while knows, I am not by nature an optimistic person, and by no means any kind of believer. But Renkl's column stirred my philosophical juices to such an extent that she provided a kind of intellectual epiphany, and made me wonder why it is that I can let the political climate, with its egregious absence of reason, drive me into the particular kind of malaise to which I seemed, when I read her piece, to have fallen victim.

Just yesterday I read another of Renkl's essays and sent it on to my children. It's about comfort food and making it through dark times: "Cornbread. Now, More Than Ever--Comfort foods, and the old ways of making them, bring solace when you really need it." Once again her logic and philosophical clarity reached into the darkness and offered a glimmer of light.

Please know that I fully realize that many, many people in this country and around the world are in no condition to be hunkering down and making cornbread. Even retired old codgers like me and my Beloved Spouse, who are insulated by a fixed income, an owned house, and some small financial security (that isn't attached to the stock markets), are only "safe" for as long as our health holds out and the city keeps the basics running. But, at the risk of sounding much more sanguine than I actually am, this experience for many of us can be a lesson in true economy: oikonomia, in the Greek sense, and the relationship between ends and means. This notion is also tied into William Morris's description of economics as grounded in the education of desire. Since I'm in the process of rewriting my own thought experiment based on Morris's utopian vision in News From Nowhere, I'll be doing a great deal of thinking along these very lines.

And so, as I try not to despair of our national (or global) fate, and as I hope that science, if allowed to do what it does best, manages to accomplish what actually needs to be done, I'm going to use this blog to work through some possibilities.

I'll be looking in the knotholes of trees (in my case for baby squirrels), spotting the phenological evidence of Spring (which begins tomorrow), wading through my soggy garden to think about where we might be able to grow more food, and baking cornbread.

Be well, everyone, and may the Spring bring about Tikkun Olam, a healing of the world.

Image credit: This photo, Single blossom and leaves growing out of knot hole in old log originated on Pixio, the public domain image website. I obbtained it via Wikimedia Commons. I thought the image did a nice job of mingling the notion of something inserted into a cavity, with a sweet illustration of Renkl's first essay.

A Need-based Economy

"Sustainability" has become such a buzzword these days that it's equated with the superficiality of "green" programs in sprawling, rapidly growing suburbs in areas only marginally capable of sustaining them at all. Any time people start throwing buzzwords and catchphrases around, they're on their way to becoming cliches, and their meaning in danger of being lost. But many readers of this blog have pointed out that something is better than nothing when it comes to the environment, no matter how little or how insincere, so I've learned to put up with it.

However, recent worldwide economic events have only brought the bare-assed emperor into the sunlight, and most of the band-aid efforts of the last couple of weeks are going to do little to cover him up. They're more like loose patches over an open wound. Only if we manage to keep sustainable living out of the landfill of overused tropes and in the forefront of the discussion of how we might live do we stand a real chance of surviving the present.

As I see it, the underlying problem is that our economy has nothing to do with home--with the understanding and management of the oikos that the Greeks were talking about when they coined the word "economics" in the first place. Of course, the slave-based, male-centered oikos is itself a lousy model for how we should live, but it did amount to a small-scale, hearth-centered, sustainable effort, with little negative effect on the environment.

Coincidentally enough, the term "domestic" arises from the Roman version of the oikos--the domus (the image above is a model of a self-contained Roman household). The term "domestic economy," therefore, is a bit redundant. But "economy" today refers to such a vast, convoluted, confused, and ill-defined entity that it's almost meaningless. The local household is all but obscured in the machinations of the market, even though it's at the center of the mortgage meltdown. And at the heart of the mortgage crisis is the idea of dwelling as commodity: something to be bought and sold, and only peripherally to house the "American Dream" that has since become a parody of itself: Ozzie, Harriet, their children, and their dog in a Little Box on a quiet street in Anytown, USA.

In order to maintain the semblance of dream-achievement, people work for too many hours and pay outrageous prices for ticky-tacky houses with too much floor space in gated communities; they enroll their children in too many activities and let them spend too much time watching television or playing video games. And then when their absurdly complex mortgages balloon into the stratosphere, they lose it all, and the so-called "domestic economy" fails.

In the nineteenth century, William Morris saw all this coming, and tried to imagine what a need-based economy would look like. News From Nowhere pictures people living small-scale lives where they produce what they need, make it beautiful, and enjoy a richness of community engagement almost unimaginable today. When I wrote More News From Nowhere, I was trying to imagine what we would have to "give up" today in order to achieve Morris's utopian dream. I have no illusions about the possibility of achieving any of what either of us created, and that's why they're both the stuff of hope and imagination rather than of reality.

That's not, however, to say that none it is possible. So I thought I'd include in this post a little list of Good Things To Read that offer me a tiny bit of hope that we might be able to switch paths and, now that capitalism-as-we-know-it is showing its true colors, find a different one, more carefully centered on what human beings really need: food, clothing, shelter, community, and justice.

From New Scientist this week, a special report on How our economy is killing the earth. Some of the articles are free online (premium subscribers have access to them all, or you can pick up the print edition at some US bookstores), including Why politicians dare not limit economic growth.

A recent article from Orion by Chris Carlson talks about Building an anti-economy; there's a lively conversation going on in the accompanying forum as well.

From the May/June issue of Orion Jeffrey Kaplan's exposure of the Gospel of Consumption offers some insights into the nature of work as defined by the current economy--and how things could be lots better.

The more I read Thomas Friedman's analyses of current events, the more I appreciate his perspective. His new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded made it to the top of the New York Times best seller list with good reason. Friedman's views are clearly articulated, and he actually offers remedies. I don't agree with everything he proposes, but his approach is generally more practical than I tend to be, and his ideas do have a better chance of actually being implemented than mine do. Also, he doesn't need a wormhole to get where he wants to go.

I fully understand the need for practical solutions in a world gone nuts. But without alternatives to the intellectual poverty we're suffering from today, and a good healthy injection of innovative concepts and reflective thinking about how we got where we are and how we can go somewhere else, we'll keep falling into the patterns we've established for ourselves--patterns that are becoming deeper and deeper ruts from which it's getting harder to extract ourselves. Just because something is the case doesn't mean it has to be. If anything at all beneficial has emerged from the current situation it's that people do seem to have recognized the need for radical rethinking on both local and global issues. Replacing greed with need seems to be a good place to start.

Images: Model of a Roman domus at the archaeological site in Vaison-la-Romaine, France. Photo by Ohto Kokko. Portrait of William Morris by George Frederick Watts. Both courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

At Last

Well, I've done it. I've cobbled together a website on which to house my love-child (the one that was supposed to be a dissertation, but decided to become illegitimate instead), More News From Nowhere.

The process has taken an inordinate amount of time (nearly ten years), but I hope those of you who read this blog (which was designed to augment the website) will find some time to read the story--which should sound familiar if you've been along for the ride to any extent.

I had planned to have it finished by 2006, when Morris's story takes place, but (if you'll pardon the already-exhausted metaphor) the labor lasted longer than expected. However, it truly has been an example, for me at least, of "useful work" as opposed to "useless toil."

And so it goes.

The Assessment Obsession

I’ve been absent from the blogosphere for a couple of weeks now, due to the inevitable, inexorable periodic pressure of grading inflicted upon those who practice my profession. Few teachers manage to avoid the necessity of testing and assessing their students’ work—and none of us enjoys the task.

Education has preoccupied utopian thinking at least since the time of Plato, and it figures prominently in his design of the Republic. William Morris’s response (in part stemming from his experience in the boarding school “boy farm” at Marlborough) to the question of how we should educate our young was—as he described it in News From Nowhere—to let it happen naturally. All children are hungry to learn, and adults need only supply them with the means to do so, by example primarily, and by allowing them to pursue what interests them while learning alongside adults about how to farm, how to develop a craft, how to build a boat, and how to live. Although he didn’t rule out “book learning,” Morris recognized that children require instruction and learn best through the example of adults. He completely rejected, however, Edward Bellamy's concept of compulsory education (through the age of 21) and preparation for the Industrial Army—centerpieces of Bellamy's utopian vision in Looking Backward.

When I look back on the significant moments of my own rather eclectic education, it’s clear that the memorable experiences are not those that took place in a classroom, but rather the explorations of my environments and encounters I had with the adults who helped shape my world view. Books were another major component, especially in a childhood that afforded little opportunity to watch television.

Now, as an educator of young adults, I’m faced with trying to combine a broadly-conceived philosophy of education (one that focuses on doing rather than rote learning) with a badly thought-out outcomes-based educational system. According to this regime, all courses need to show immediate results, and those results have to be quantified. I have to design course objectives that use “action verbs” to describe outcomes that can be achieved, demonstrated, and measured by the end of the course.

But what if what I’m trying to build is an intellectual toolkit that will allow students to learn how to determine what they need to learn in the future? How do I measure the ability to absorb information over time, make interesting connections, draw on experience, and combine new understanding with an existing knowledge base? What if my goal is to offer ways of seeing the world that can’t be measured in any meaningful way? What if I’m just trying to teach my students how to consider new ideas before jerking their knees in response to some pre-digested pabulum set forth in a textbook?

So I agonize over how to determine whether or not my students have learned anything during the quarter, and how I can measure that learning at the end of eleven weeks. I then must assign grades, for which I have drawn up rubrics to describe what they mean, in an effort to provide an assessment that actually says something about what students are actually accomplishing.

Ideally, my students would produce a portfolio of design work and essays that indicate what they’ve learned about the history of art and design. But I have upward of 150 students every quarter (that’s 600 students per year), and reading and responding to essays is enormously time-consuming. I’d never sleep if I were to assign a meaningful number of essays (say four per course per quarter) and a couple of design problems that would help me determine what students were learning about the principles and ideas being discussed in the class. So I end up giving exams that ask them to identify images, recognize terminology, and remember the characteristics of particular movements. I assign only one design problem (illuminate a literary text, for example, or produce a poster in the style of a particular design movement) that asks them to engage in the process of design and to describe that process in a concept essay. I ask them to conduct research—but not to write research papers, because I want their research to inform their design solutions. They produce annotated bibliographies of their sources to show me how they used their research, in an effort to make them aware that using others’ materials must be acknowledged. I’m generally quite pleased with the results of these “hands-on” projects (although the bibliographies generally leave much to be desired), and they usually tell me much more about what a student has learned than the exams do.

In other words, I do what I can to accommodate the “system,” but probably engage my students less and allow them to learn in a less meaningful way than I could if I didn’t constantly have to figure out how to “grade” them on what they learn.

Mind you, I have it fairly easy. Providing art students with even one creative assignment makes my job somewhat easier than my husband’s. He teaches philosophy courses (intro, ethics, social/political) in which he requires his students to think on paper. But his students (in a local community college) are not any more prepared to write coherently than mine are, and many of his students are on their way to four-year universities where they will major in business and politics and other professions that will determine the shape of our future economy.

The problem is that these kids have been taught to take multiple-choice, true/false exams that require only their ability to retain information long enough to pass a test. They have not been taught to think. They have not even been taught to write, except for the standard five-paragraph, “tell me what you’re going to tell me; tell me; then tell me what you told me” essay—which is hardly an essay at all because it explores nothing. It simply weaves a few facts together, artificially, mechanically, and inelegantly. And the only reason they’ve been taught this is so that they can pass the essay component of a standardized test, which will then be read by someone who’s reading for mechanics, not real analysis or synthesis.

What my husband’s dean calls “the assessment regime” has infected education in this country at all levels. In order for my college to be regionally accredited, for example, we periodically have to jump through a series of hoops governed by the latest fad(s) in higher education. I’m not knocking the necessity for improvement and internal accountability, but the accreditation process requires major input of statistics, and immediate results—an inappropriate goal in many fields that require long study in order for “results” to emerge. So the statistics give us a snapshot of the moment, but they tell us nothing about what’s really going on over the long term. I’m sure that ten years ago people were noticing that writing and math skills were both on the skids in this country. If anything, after all this assessment, and despite programs like “No Child Left Behind,” nothing has improved, and our students are falling further and further behind the rest of the world. In fact, one report (Math and Science in a Global Age: What the U. S. Can Learn from China) suggests that even though we know about practices that will produce significantly better results in math and science education, they are seldom employed in U. S. classrooms. The report cites several reasons for this, including badly-designed textbooks, but I would imagine that the pressure of immediate assessment “results” has at least something to do with it.

If anything is to change, the system has to be shaken up radically. I don’t have the energy, at my age, but I’d urge people interested in teaching to read Morris and reimagine the possibilities. I’d also urge parents to yank their kids out of preschool and take them into the garden, to the zoo, to the natural history museum, the art museums. When they’re older and the state requires them to be in school, do it yourself, or enroll them in a program like Montessori, that promotes experiential learning. If you can’t afford that, volunteer in the schools, participate in their governance, and make time out of school to compensate for what’s lacking or what you can’t change. No double income is worth the sacrifice many parents make. The stuff you can buy, the big house you can live in, the SUV—none of this is worth what you lose by not being the principle educator in your child’s life. Work at home, or don’t “work” at all; spend your own time learning, and pass what you learn on to your children. By the time I get them, it’s almost too late.

Oh; and before you do anything, get rid of the television set. Doing so couldn’t hurt, and it might make all the difference.