Twenty Years

Having anxiously awaited Cassini's last moments for the previous week, I spent last Friday morning glued to the iPad, eavesdropping on the operations room at JPL where the folks who'd been working on the project monitored its End of Mission. As I watched the room erupt in hugs and tears after Cassini's final signal was called, I marveled at the idea of spending twenty years (as some of them had) working on a project that contributed so significantly to the sum of human knowledge. If you missed the live feed, NASA's flickr page features collection of photos that can provide a hint of the moment's emotional power. 

The combined sadness and joy expressed during the television coverage was both moving and enviable to an old space groupie like me. Ending one month shy of the twentieth anniversary of its launch, the project went out quite literally in a blaze of glory--which we'll never see because there wasn't anyone there to shoot the video. After having accomplished far more than anyone had expected when the Cassini-Huygens mission began, many more years will be required to digest all of the data gathered.

From its inception, the mission that took the probe Huygens to Titan in 2004 and enabled Cassini to continue on for several added missions made possible by a good battery and international cooperation presented us with almost incalculable benefits (partially enumerated on the nifty poster included below). But its ending also reminded me that quite a number of things have changed since the 1997 launch.

It's hard to believe that in those twenty years communications technologies have moved us from dialup computer service to wireless, from bulky mobile telephones to smartphones, and from clunky desktop computers to sleek Macs and ever skinnier, ever more powerful laptops and tablets. It was also in 1997 that I purchased my owlfarmer.com web domain from Network Solutions and developed the first faculty web pages for the use of my students--because The Institution (which had programs in web development, computer graphics, and animation) hadn't yet caught on to the value of online education. But even this cranky old technophobe saw the potential of being able to put instructional materials where they could be easily accessed at any time. And so, "Owldroppings" came into being, and served me well for the remainder of my teaching career. In honor of its twentieth anniversary, in fact, the domain is in the process of being transformed into a more complex version of Owl's Farm, where the Owldroppings materials will be archived and other concerns developed.

As rewarding as my experience with digital enhancements was, the general tenor of higher education had declined so badly by the time I retired that I found myself truly envying the level of accomplishment in evidence at the end of the Cassini mission. How good it must feel to have been a part of such an enormously rewarding experience! The emotions were obviously mixed, but even those members of the team who will themselves soon retire will have all that glory to bask in and all that experience to contribute to yet other endeavors.

So, yeah, I was jealous. But then, one of my former students texted to check up on me, and I invited her and another of those few but significant grads who are both memorable and have kept in touch to come to lunch on Saturday so we could all reconnect. Later, yet another student (who had recently texted to announce her pregnancy) stopped by. We had a lovely afternoon and a romp down Memory Lane (even though not all of those memories were pleasant), and as they were leaving I began to realize that rewarding experiences don't all have to be big, spectacular accomplishments like Cassini.

Seeing these bright, affable, creative young women again, moving toward their own futures (much as my own children have done--taking their own time, but leading rewarding lives), and realizing that I played a small part in how they've turned out, is well worth the effort that went into a teaching career that didn't always seem particularly meaningful.

In the end, my disappointment in not having the proper education to become an astronaut or a rocket scientist can be assuaged by the knowledge that there are some terrific people out there that I would never have met (or children I would never have borne) if I had made it to the space program.

Image credits: One of my favorite of Cassini's gazillion shots of Saturn and its moons (Epimetheus, Rings, and Titan, from April 2006), I pinched this from Wikimedia Commons. Many more can be found through NASA/JPL's pages, including the chart of Cassini's accomplishments (which I originally found in Wikipedia's rather nice article on the mission).

The View From Serendip

The importance of coincidence has always played a role in how I approach this blog. One newspaper item connects with a book or a film—or some other conjunction of media and/or events—and leads to musings that make their way into an essay that falls under the overall concerns of The Farm.

Serendipity is a kind of coincidence, but one with generally favorable connotations. The term comes from the old name for Ceylon (the colonial name for today’s Sri Lanka), and was (according to the OED) coined by Horace Walpole based on a fairy tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip.” According to Walpole, the heroes “were always making discoveries by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” Hence, its definition as “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.” The title of the post is stolen brazenly from Arthur C. Clarke, who lived in Sri Lanka for most of his life (from 1956 until he died in 2008). He published The View From Serendip in 1977, in which he collected assorted essays, memoirs, and speculations.

As recently as 2014, an essay from the book was quoted by Michael Belfiore in his opinion piece for The Guardian, “When robots take our jobs, humans will be the new 1%. Here’s how to fight back.” But even though I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the jobs our current president wants to “bring back” (like coal mining) and why it doesn’t make any sense to do so (in light of what the future probably holds, and the fact that a lot of these jobs kill people—especially when that same president wants to get rid of as much regulation as possible)—this doesn’t even count as one of the occasions that prompted this post. Nevertheless, I should note that Clarke’s predictions often turned out to come true, and the book is well worth reading.

The real impetus for writing came from two directions.  The first arrived in one of my feeds (Medium), and I sent it to my Pocket list for future reference: How to Turn Wikipedia Into a Bottomless Pit of Story Ideas. What intrigued me about the article is that it advocates using Wikipedia the way I used to use library reference indices, by looking “around” various topics, noticing adjacent topics that frequently led to unexpected enrichment of potential source material. As research became more and more focused on digital sources (especially search engines), I often reflected on the loss of that kind of serendipitous encounter, until I realized that Google often afforded similar opportunities. The author of the article (“Moonlighting Writer” for Student Voices) provides a number of tips for using Wikipedia's features for more than just a quick look-up.

This might be a good place to point out that Wikipedia's description of "The Three Princes of Serendip" (linked above) focuses on the princes' education in the arts and sciences, and how they use that education in their adventures.

The next event arrived completely out of left field when my phone lit up with the name of a former student, one of whom I’d been thinking recently but hadn’t heard from for some time. I’d forgotten that she’s on my phone's contact list, else I’d probably have texted her before now. But she was driving through the neighborhood and decided to call me. Since we’d last spoken, she’d gone to grad school to earn a master’s in art education after discovering that working in the gaming industry wasn’t really what she wanted to do. And now she’s teaching high school, thinking about getting a PhD and also about starting a family—at just about the same age I was when I started out on similar path(s).

At the very moment I received her call, I had been wondering what to do with several years’ worth of Archaeology magazines, and realizing that if I wanted to donate them to a school, I’d have to sort through and arrange them by year, and bundle them accordingly—at least a day’s worth of slog.  But as my student and I were talking I connected “art teacher” and “archaeology magazines” and popped the question: Do you have any use for these? And indeed she did. So we got to enjoy a nice catch-up conversation, and I got to unload a slew of old periodicals and art-related stuff I’d been saving for who knows what. And I didn't have to sort through them because they'll be used for mixed media art projects.

In the end, it was particularly rewarding to realize that I don’t really need to abandon hope just because we’ve got an anti-intellectual in the White House, who has no regard for the arts or the sciences. There are young folk out there who have learned to love learning, and have decided to act on their curiosity and creativity and share it with yet another generation or two. One can only imagine what one of her students might do when he or she connects one event with another in the history of archaeology, or juxtaposes one culture’s artistic input with that of another. The possibilities are limited only by their imaginations, which I hope haven't been too stunted by the current cultural climate.

Image note: Mrs. Peel during one of her evening sojourns in the back yard, with serendipitous sunset back-lighting.

Year's End

Having just lived through the Quarter from Hell, I've been absent from the Farm for some time. So one of my resolutions (many of which I actually keep) is to post on at least one blog a week in the new year, just to keep my brain from tangling up.

And things do look a bit more promising, especially in regard to my classes. The nightmare of teaching four different overlapping preps to a surlier-than-usual crowd of students, few of them particularly anxious to learn anything I had to teach, is over. I'll only have one new class, and it will be small; the others have been consolidated into two (although there are two sections of each level--Art History 1 and 2--with between 30 and 39 students in each) and I've spent my winter break trying to get lesson plans in shape. I somehow managed to take notes on what worked and what didn't during the Fall term, and have had a chance to address troublesome issues. So, if I can manage to seduce three or four in each section into learning instead of whining, I'll count the upcoming Winter a success.

If I sound like I'm whining myself, I probably am. But I've been gobsmacked by a surprising number of students who simply don't care how they spend their money or whether they learn anything or not. They want simply to get through the course with a D, and if they don't--well, what's another two grand and another eleven weeks with the old bitch? Without the handful of eager learners who did emerge, I might well have been tempted to give it all up, take the minimal Social Security allotment, and chuck what's left of the career.

I'm fully aware that many of my colleagues are out of work altogether, through no choice or fault of their own; I'm also well aware that I should thus be grateful for mere employment. But teaching is one of those professions folks don't go into for the money; we're often passionate and committed and convinced that we've got a mission, and that this country needs good educators. But teaching these days is becoming something of an exercise in head-banging because politicians who know nothing about what's really involved with educating children are making decisions in state, local, and national legislatures that make it almost impossible for teachers to teach and students to learn. Top all that with a growing cultural bias against intellectualism that replaces curiosity with the instant gratification of digital technologies, and we've got a recipe for an abyssal decline in the national intelligence quotient.

Just when we need smart, capable people to help us get along in the world of the future, we're raising a crop of incurious, distracted, artificially connected young people who will grow up not understanding much about history, culture, science, or how to fix their devices.

Nonetheless, I begin each new quarter with hope. Perhaps this time I'll end up with a couple of classes filled with eager, hungry students grateful for the opportunity to learn. Then I can keep on trying to offer opportunities to discover new ideas without having to dumb down my material to meet lowered expectations or lack of enthusiasm. I can also usually bank on getting one or two older students, returning after a military stint or to update their credentials in order to find new work. I guess I'm fortunate that it still takes only a few of these to make the whole enterprise worthwhile.

I find myself thinking on a smaller, more local scale these days. Grand utopian visions seem a bit silly in this time of dearth and drought; but it's a new year. Anything can happen. I keep thinking of a character in the Nero Wolfe novel, Death of a Doxy. Julie Jacquette, a showgirl with an intellect of gold, gets 50 grand for helping Wolfe and Archie catch a killer. She uses it to go to college, and when she writes Archie with an update she ends her letter with "I wish you well."

It seems like an appropriate sentiment for New Year's Eve.

Image credit: uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Magnus Manske. Apparently taken in Norway on New Year's Eve, 2006.

The Precept of the Teacher

The other day, during a Library Committee meeting, one of my colleagues used what's probably an old saw by now (the toilet paper analogy) to characterize the way time works on old folk: the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes. The perceived phenomenon of the increasingly rapid passage of time has been weighing on my mind much of late, because there never seems to be sufficient time for getting done what I'd like to.

So I haven't posted on any blog in nearly a month, and am seriously thinking of bundling everything except the Parliament back under the aegis of the Farm so that I don't feel so much pressure to compartmentalize my musings. I'll probably end up using the others as an archive and--at least until I'm not teaching as much--restrict my efforts to the original focus.

A new quarter has started, with a fresh batch of students (the one class of mostly "old hands" doesn't meet until Friday), along with yet another massive effort to keep them engaged. Oddly enough, my two 8 am classes are, so far, the most enthusiastic and vocal, making it easier for me to muster the energy to embrace the educational cheerleader roll my job requires even when--as is the case on Wednesday mornings--I've only left campus at 10 pm the night before.

For many years my pedagogical philosophy has involved emphasizing common ground as a means of connecting with my students. I use translation as a model for teaching, so finding out what my students know that I know (and vice versa) is part of my engagement strategy. But as I told them yesterday, it's now easier for people of their generation to connect across cultures and continents than it is for my generation to connect with theirs.

The advent of social networking media has created a web of interaction among young adults who share interests in popular culture that transcends national boundaries. But because many in my Boomer cohort find it extremely difficult (if not downright impossible) to embrace various aspects of that culture, the gap can often broaden into an unbridgable crevasse. In my case, unless I've got a class full of science fiction geeks or Miyazaki fans, I have to work really hard to locate areas of common interest and knowledge. They just don't know what I know--and not all that many of them really want to.

It does help that we're at least all designers, and that I know some stuff that they will eventually find helpful. They seem to appreciate my sense of humor, and my acknowledgment of my own shortcomings, but keeping them with me for the entire eleven weeks gets harder and harder every quarter. It seems to me that at this point in my career I shouldn't have to work quite so hard, and I should have more time to just enjoy getting old. Shouldn't I be resting, Buddha-like, on my laurels or something?

And this is probably where the time-perception problem originates. Between every quarter I now spend a considerable amount of time going over old lesson plans and presentations to freshen them up and integrate new material I've discovered that looks promising. Education, as I've often preached, is an ongoing process; so if I keep learning stuff, chances are I'll be able to keep the small parcel of common ground from eroding completely in a world that seems to share my values less and less.

A footnote of sorts: As I was looking for an image to illustrate this post, I typed a few keywords into Wikimedia Commons, starting with "crevasse" but ending up with "teacher." The latter led me on an interesting quest to locate the painter whose work I used. Not realizing initially that "Nicholas Roerich" was the anglicized name of the Russian painter Nikolai Konstantinovich Roreicha, I spent some time transliterating his Russian name from Cyrillic into Roman letters and looking for some information on him. This took longer than it should have, but I was rather well rewarded in the end. Roerich died the year I was born, this was his final painting, and I'd never heard of him. However, the discovery does seem particularly fortuitous, given the focus of this post.

According to the biography on the Nicholas Roerich Museum page, the painter "constantly sought to connect ethical problems with scientific knowledge of the surrounding world. . . It was Roerich's gift that these 'connections' appeared so natural to him and presented themselves in all life's manifestations. And it was this talent for synthesis, which he admired in others and encouraged in the young, that enabled him to correlate the subjective with the objective, the philosophical with the scientific, Eastern wisdom with Western knowledge, and to build bridges of understanding between such apparent contradictions."

On the Wikimedia Commons page from whence I pinched the image, the title of the painting is listed as "The Precept of the Teacher," although the museum page calls it "The Command of the Master." "Command" doesn't make much sense to me, but since I don't know much Russian, I'm not in a position to question either translation. But I like "precept" better than "command," and "teacher" better than "master." By using "precept" in the title of the post, I'm calling on its connotation of a "guiding principle"--in this case, nature. Roerich clearly possessed the same appreciation for montane landscapes that I do, and I find the image of the solitary teacher atop a peak to be especially evocative.

In the end, another lesson emerges. As I continue to lament the evident loss of curiosity among a growing number of students, the process of locating this image, and eventually discovering this artist, reaffirmed my assertion that not only does philosophy begin in wonder, but so does creativity.

Engaging Chaos

As time goes on, I'm finding it more and more difficult to get a handle on things. It's as if the flow is going by so fast that I when I reach into the stream, I only manage to grab a handful of water. Meanwhile, all sorts of detritus is washing up on the banks, and none of it makes much sense.

I keep trying to tidy up the house, but get distracted or run out of steam before anything significant gets done. The holidays weren't much help, because I spent most of my time off constructing a new course (Technology and Utopia) and updating the old ones. I began to wonder why the only thing I could accomplish was related to what I was supposed to be vacationing from.

During this last week, our "faculty development" period before the new quarter starts on Monday, I discussed the problem with a couple of colleagues, and we agreed that the combination of advancing age and an ever-increasing work load seems to suck the psychic energy right out of a person. And since I'm older than most of the people I work with, I seem to notice it more than they do.

Admittedly, I've taken on quite a bit. Nearly four years ago, when I started this blog, I was also participating in an online forum. I joined another when it became apparent that I'd have to have heart surgery again. The spin-off blogs (the Cabinet and The Owl of Athena) probably didn't expand the load because I soon realized that I wasn't going to be able to maintain them all with any regularity. Since then, though, my total output has diminished, and the forums are all but abandoned. I do wonder, as a result, how anyone who's on Facebook manages do do anything at all.

My selectivity toward social media has paid off to some extent. Not "doing" the Facebook thing (nor Twitter, which I find preposterous) may have been my wisest choice. I still keep hoping that if I can just get the course prep all snugged up, I'll have more time to write. I did, after all, manage to get a short story written in November for a contest I never entered. But while I'm teaching, most of my (remaining) little gray cells are tied up with the growing problem of engaging students who want less and less to do with what I teach.

If it weren't for the small number of adoring (and, I might say, adorable in their own way) current and former student acolytes, I might be tempted hang up my guns altogether. I'm pretty sure I won't end up watching soaps and eating bonbons all day when I retire, but the prospect of not teaching still seems more empty than enticing. Every now and then, too, I manage to come up with an idea that works with the over-connected generation, and that buys me breathing room.

As the new year rolled in the urge to organize increased: clear off the desk, get things in order around the house, and rid myself of distracting clutter. But at heart I'm still an archaeologist, and the piles of stuff represent layers of discovery--strata that I can carefully mine for scribbled notes and pages stuck into stacked books that record ideas gleaned from the op/ed pages of the newspapers I still make time to read. There are useful artifacts to be discovered, deposited during decades of enjoying the life of the mind. The spirit is still willing, at least until the flesh poops out.

One tangible result of having accumulated the thousands of books, piles of notebooks, and collections of tear sheets from magazines I've managed to recycle, is that constructing the new course has been an adventure in serendipity. One day I walk by a bookshelf and my eye lights on a book I haven't picked up in years. I sit down to leaf through my marginalia (few books I own aren't marked up with comments and my personal set of hieroglyphs to indicate important passages) and rediscover something useful. Or the end notes in an essay lead me to other forgotten works that reveal further fodder for the course. And so it goes.

The slow, episodic excavation of what amounts to an intellectual midden has allowed the new course to evolve into a reasonably organized, well-focused introduction to philosophy and how it works, as well as how we can use it to understand an increasingly technologized world. I get to ask my students to wrestle with questions I wonder about all the time, and I'll probably learn a great deal from their contributions. If the course numbers hold through today (fourteen), I'll get my first real seminar in sixteen years.

I've begun to think of my desk as a metaphor for my brain: it seems to be muddled, but it has its own internal coherence and logic. I still have to clear it off and sort things out, but that's the kind of cataloging process I love--and it may enrich the new course even further, as I uncover more forgotten bits under layers of more recently encountered material.

As an added bonus, by Monday I'll have opened up enough space to hold the new piles that are sure to build up over the next eleven weeks.

Of Comfy Chairs and Soft Cushions

I have many things for which I am grateful, not the least of which is the fact that I can spend my mornings tucked into a comfortable, if not beautiful, chair, with a couple of pillows to support my aging lumbar region. Here I read the paper, and then, if there’s time, I read another chapter in one of the books I keep on the stand next to me, under the stained glass lamp we got on sale not long after we moved in. The chair is set in front of the living room windows, three double-hung jobs badly in need of re-glazing and painting, that face east: the best orientation for the house, according to my Asian-influenced upbringing. Artifacts from our stints in Japan and Taiwan lie around the room, and many of the aforementioned soft cushions are covered in fabrics from China—probably woven in some sweatshop or other for the export trade. I am always torn between my love for the colors and patterns of the East, and the ethical questions that arise from purchasing them so far away from their origins. I have no way of knowing how the people who made them are faring; so I can only hope that some portion of their cost makes it back to the weavers, fullers, and tailors responsible for their manufacture.

In fact, a good deal of the time I spend in my chair each morning is devoted to thinking about utopia—or reflecting on these dystopian times. The pile of books from which I glean ideas and which provide the fodder for most of my blog posts, almost always focus on what human beings have done to the world that makes it necessary for thoughtful people to wonder about the environmental and cultural impact of everything we buy, eat, wear, or otherwise consume. It’s not that I mind being mindful; it’s just that it would be better for us as a species, and better for the world as a whole, if we were more able to “spend” that time living in the world rather than worrying about it.

Writing and thinking occupy almost all of my “off” (i.e. non-teaching/grading/prep) time during the winter. I often spend Saturdays ensconced in my chair with my laptop, working on the “Farm” or on my latest literary effort (a science fiction novel about an older woman on an archaeological adventure), at least until the sun has risen enough to suggest the possibility of working in other parts of the house. The study is, unfortunately, the coldest and darkest room in the house, even though it faces south, because of the deep eaves that shade the windows. These conditions make it pleasant in the summer, but in winter I often have to sit at my desk with a comforter around my knees and a shawl over my sweater. It’s a bit like writing in a garret in a tenement somewhere, but not terribly romantic. On sunny mornings, though, the Comfy Chair is the venue of choice, especially when there’s a fire going, and one of the puppies is napping on my feet.

Come spring, when the morning temperatures are above 60°F and the weather fine, we move into the garden for our morning read. This year, since we’ll be rearranging things a bit, we’ll be able to sit at a table, with the coffee carafe and the newspapers, and perhaps even the laptop (I’ve recently discovered that the wireless connection reaches out there), which should make for some pleasant writing-mornings. The seasonal migrations through and around the house are something I’ve become much more aware of since I began working on the “Farm” in the first place. As I was writing More News From Nowhere, I spent much of my time “living” there—thinking about alternatives to “civilization.” But I have since begun to think more about the quality of life in my immediate vicinity, and how what I imagined in the book could in any way be implemented in “real life” (or the “RW” as they call it on my forum).

One of the few ways to escape the constant, intrusive, nagging, and mounting problems in the world has always been to become a hermit, and I can certainly understand the impulse. If I did not find myself regularly in the company of young adults who are inheriting what those of my generation have bequeathed them, I’d be very tempted to simply enclose myself in my little domain and lose myself in the works of Morris and the other utopians I’ve spent the last twenty years reading, or in the ancient world, or some other place not here, not now. But the kids I teach—creative, funny, sardonic, frustrating, but sometimes quite wise and much more optimistic than I—draw me back into the world at least four days a week, and make me want to fix things for them. I can’t, of course. And I’m too old and too tired to do much other than help them know some of what I know, so that maybe they can do something to fix it for themselves. Maybe our job now is to help them keep wanting to figure out a way to keep the world going.

Meanwhile, I need to get out of the chair and into the garden. I picked up herb seedlings and lettuces at Whole Foods yesterday, and need to get them in the ground—or at least into pots where they can be protected if another freeze sneaks in on us. Planting a garden is always a sign of hope, so perhaps I’m actually more sanguine than I pretend. And I now have to go make entries in a new garden journal, which gives me something else to look forward to doing in the Comfy Chair—at least until the puppies start poking me with their soft noses and luring me out to get some actual work done. Perhaps we should have named them after Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam, in honor of their antics in the Python sketch that suggested the title of this post. After all, as long as we live in a world that can remember its past well enough to make fun of it, perhaps we really do have a future.