The Classroom Conservative

Ab Uno Disce Omnes

"The schoolroom clock was worn raw by stares; and you couldn't look up at the bg puritanical face of it and not feel the countless years of young eyes reflected in it, urging it onwards" (124).  -- Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well

Ab Uno Disce Omnes

"... Jed would be asked numerous times what it meant, in his eyes, to be an artist. He would find nothing very interesting or original to say, except one thing, which he would consequently repeat in each interview: to be an artist, in his view, was above all to be someone submissive. Someone who submitted himself to mysterious, unpredictable messages, that you would be led, for want of a better word and in the absence of any religious belief, to describe as intuitions, messages which nonetheless commanded you in an imperious and categorical manner, without leaving the slightest possibility of escape -- except by losing any notion of integrity and self-respect" (63). -- Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory

21-17

Phooey!

What Is Remembered

I gave a talk in St. John’s a few weeks ago.  When I finished, a woman in the back row stood up and said, “I took a class from you fifteen years ago…”

How would she finish this sentence?  And you gave me a lousy mark?  And the grammar advice you gave me was incorrect?  And you know nothing about American literature?  It is funny to reflect on how many options can run through your head in less than one second.  It is equally funny to reflect on how all those options are negative.  Why do we believe that people hold grudges more readily than anything else?

“… and I came here today to support you.”  Over the next couple of minutes, she explained to the audience how she had been a nervous, mature student and how I had helped her adjust to her return to school.  As she spoke, I welled up, and I was thrilled that she did not actually have a question to ask me.

The experience was a remarkable one, and it is some indication of how St. John’s has remained a close community, even as it has doubled in size in recent years.  I checked my records, and the woman was indeed a good, dedicated student, the kind of student who sustained me as I taught sessionally and raced around the continent trying to secure a full-time job.  My glowing memory of her will forever be of that afternoon in the music conservatory when she took time out of her life to return to campus in order to provide me unsolicited sustenance.  It is a memory from 2012 and not from 1997-98.  You could forgive audience members for imagining that she was a “plant,” that we had kept in touch and that I had arranged her “performance.”  But that was not so.  I had not spoken to her for fifteen years, and I still have no idea how she learned about my talk.

While we may have vague memories of our students, and while we might remember specific events from the classroom, I am starting to think that students remember the time they share with us in broadest terms: we, and the classes we teach, most often leave general impressions.  This student remembered fondly the time she spent with me, her time in English 1110, but when trying to tell the audience what stood out for her, specifically, she recalled my thoroughness, my general support, not a particular thing I said or did during a particular class meeting.

We have hundreds, thousands of students, and while we cannot remember each by name, we do remember faces, we do remember particular classes and the people who took them.  For richness of detail, we look back to particular events.  I remember our Vice-President’s daughter asking me an embarrassing question in my first year, here; I remember the questions I asked my first graduate student at defence.  Our students have far fewer professors, and we provide them each day with an hour of impressions.  While I suppose it is possible that one remarkable gesture – positive or negative – can fix us in their minds forever, I am starting to think that the standard for us is both higher and more forgiving.  They remember, in a sense, everything that happens, but no one thing necessarily stands out.  We are always under surveillance, in a literal sense, and so we have both the chance and the responsibility to improve upon the impression we are making, day after day after day.  We cannot expect to fix ourselves in the minds of our students with one brilliant comment; hopefully, one clunky lecture will not do so, either.

Tipping On The Tax

On a stormy Friday night, we took my parents for dinner at one of their favorite chain restaurants.  There were more people there than expected during inclement weather, and the place was understaffed.  Still, the service was not bad: they were a little slow, and they forgot to bring my soup, but we had no complaints.

The young woman waiting on our table deserved the standard 15% gratuity.

The Canadian media has recently been abuzz with stories of restaurants in Toronto adding an automatic 20% tip to all bills, regardless of the experience its customers have had.  Proprietors argue that it is perfectly acceptable to opt out of this gratuity, but the distinction is far from subtle.  The assumption now is that the service will be exemplary, and it is the responsibility of patrons to signal any displeasure by actively removing an expected bonus.

I understand that wait staff are underpaid, and I accept that we are asked to supplement their incomes.  However, it is important to be able to signal okay service (15%) from exemplary service (20% or more).  One night, years ago, a friend and I used an excessive tip to compensate a young woman whose other table ran out on their bill.  The restaurant we visited with my folks last week sought to help us out by providing three gratuity options, chosen from a menu on the credit card console.  Again, there is an assumption that a tip is warranted, but one can choose 15% or 20% or 25% -- or, presumably, some different amount altogether.

If one chooses the automatic 15%, this number is unlikely to be a whole number.  For awhile, I used to tip, even on credit cards, in order to achieve a round number.  Say, for example, that the bill came to $24.22.  I would tip $3.78, so that the total was $28.  A friend pointed out that no one wanted my 78 cents; I should just tip $4.  Whether the cash is kept behind the counter or tallied electronically, no one wanted pennies.  But, of course, if one chooses to let the credit card console do the calculation, there is no chance to round up.

For some people, calculating the gratuity is often a hassle.  When GST was 7%, folks in Alberta would double the tax and round up to determine the tip.  (If the service was great, we could triple the tax.)  Now that GST is 5%, we triple that tax to calculate an average tip.

So, spare some thought for me as I sat in that restaurant in St. John’s.  Is tax there still 22%?  No?  It is 13%.  (When did that happen?)  That will not help me.  I find it simple, of course, to calculate 10% in my head, and, if I add to that amount half as much again, I can find 15%.  But wait.  The number is not adding up to the 15% recommended by the credit card console.  The subtotal is $80.  If 10% is $8, and half of that is $4, then a 15% tip is $12, right?  Why, then, is the recommended tip actually $13.56?

The answer, math fans, is that before recommending a 15% gratuity, this large chain restaurant first added the HST.  They wanted me to tip on the tax. 

We were happy that we did not order alcohol, as one traditionally does not tip on that amount, either.

Beaten Fair And Square

For the first time since 2008, the professional football team I have followed since childhood, the team that has broken my heart more times than I can count, won a playoff game.  Saturday night’s 45-10 victory over the Denver Broncos snapped the New England Patriots’ playoff draught, but the most interesting sports coverage on the weekend had to do with a game that was played on December 4.

The first meeting of the season between New York and Green Bay suggested that the Giants would give the defending champions a game in the divisional round on Sunday, but before kickoff everyone was still talking about the moment, more than a month ago, when Hakeem Nicks beat Packers’ defensive back Charles Woodson for a touchdown.  Quarterback Eli Manning had the ball, second-and-goal on the four yard line.  Woodson had perfect coverage; it really was.  But when Manning lobbed his pass, Nicks reached out and grabbed the ball with one hand.  There was absolutely nothing else Woodson could have done, and, in the moment after the play, he reached out his hand to congratulate his opponent.

I remember thinking, at the time, that the gesture was unusual, but I never imagined that it would elicit such comment.  Players on both teams thought that it was inappropriate, that Woodson should have been upset about having been beaten; if he wanted to congratulate his opponent, he should have waited until after the game.

I have been struck by a realization of just how potent raw energy can be during sporting events.  Clearly, as fans, we get caught up in the same emotion as the players feel, so why should I be surprised?  In a recent documentary, for example, Bill Belichik, Patriots head coach, was shown chewing out his players for not flocking to a teammate to celebrate a good play.  Could that frenzy be that important?  I have always admired the pre-game demeanor of football players, dressed as suited assassins, filing off their bus and into the stadium.  Is that steely, confident determination really counter-productive once they get on the field itself?

To my mind, Charles Woodson did not lose his focus during that December game.  God knows that, between the television time outs and the instant replays, there are all kinds of interruptions.  I had, and still have, no problem with a competitor stopping to acknowledge something unusual, even when it is done by a competitor.

Talking To The Taxman About Research

Every six months or so, I clean out my inbox and take down from my tackboard all the receipts for my professional expenses.  For a couple of days, I get to play amateur accountant, looking for all the world like the cliché of an American small business owner preparing to engage the IRS with a shoebox full of slips.  It is not that I am complaining: I am fortunate to have a job where the costs associated with teaching, research, and service can be reimbursed.  But these funds are a negotiated benefit, of course; if we did not have them, we might have a higher salary or different medical coverage.  While it is fabulous to be able to afford to order from the United States an edition of a textbook not yet available in Canada, please do not begrudge me my grumbling as I try to determine the proper exchange rate to use when indenting for said purchase.

I love my accountant friends, but I am not an accountant.

The kindly older gentleman who used to oversee the ham-fisted attempts of academics to manage their petty expenditures used to call our submissions, with great affection, our “swindle sheets.”  It is not that we try to mislead; it is simply that some of my colleagues are woefully inexperienced in the close tracking of money.  I remember once applying for and receiving a travel grant, $1,100 to give a paper in Quebec City.  By using airline loyalty miles, I discovered that I could continue on to Philadelphia to give a second paper, only to learn that, because I did not list this gathering on my initial application, none of my incidental expenses (hotels, meals, taxis) could come from that fund.  Still, it was in my dealings with another financial officer that I reached the end of my rope.  I used research funds to travel to an archive to review manuscripts.  “Why?” he asked, with no hint of humour, “could you not just go to a library in Calgary?”

If my attempts to impress upon my professional colleagues something of the research world have not always been successful, I have embraced the strange world of financial auditing with enthusiasm.  Combined with my love of speaking with people about their jobs, I have bored hotel clerks and cabbies around the world with explanations of how we track money at the University of Lethbridge.  On a recent trip to Arizona, I told the woman on the desk at our hotel that I needed more than the invoice that had been slipped under the room door that morning.

“My receipt must show a balance of zero,” I explained.  “Otherwise, my institution might think we had cheated them.”

“Cheated them?” she looked surprised.

“Imagine that this invoice asked for $500, but you agreed to charge me $200 in cash,” I continued.  “With an invoice that requests $500, I might be reimbursed for an extra $300 that we had arranged to split.”

“Oh, no, I could never do that!”  Her look turned to one of horror.

“I wasn’t proposing that arrangement!  No, no!” I tried to reassure her.  “I was trying to explain why I need to show my employer how I actually paid you $500.”

She looked wary.

I should have explained to her the joy of a library archive.  Right, I am going back to my receipts now: all showing balances of zero, I assure you.

Remembering Fred Gamberg

On a summer night in 1995, Fred Gamberg drowned in Flatrock, Newfoundland.  Because I was away at school, I did not hear the news.  I did not know Fred well; when I worked at Sam the Record Man in the Avalon Mall, he was a frequent patron, looking -– as anyone who knew him at all will attest -– for Dead Kennedys imports and encouraging us to give punk CDs their own section.  When I moved back to St. John’s after graduation, I was confronted by this mural while walking downtown.

Now, obviously, had Gamberg been a friend, I suspect that I might have known about his death.  As it was, it was quite a shock to see an old acquaintance thus depicted on a retaining wall next to the LSPU Hall.  Peter Evans painted this commemoration quite spontaneously.  It was graffiti, strictly speaking, but I always thought that it fit well with the surroundings.  It also generated a lot of debate, I have heard, as Gamberg was far from a public figure in the city.  Those of us of a certain age were aware of him, and his short life underlined for me the fragility of our existence: he died at a time that few of us were even thinking about death.

Part of the debate about the mural had to do with the city’s tolerance of it.  It was not removed; it was, unquestionably, a work of public art, in the way that some graffiti clearly is not.  I observe, for example, that much of the highway across Newfoundland runs through small bluffs where one teen’s love for another is spray painted for all drivers to see.  Some of these proclamations, passed frequently, fill me with nostalgia, but they cannot be called public art in terms of their composition and execution.  Whether you think that a young man with a small circle of close friends deserves a public memorial in a Canadian city, you cannot question the efficacy of what Peter Evans created.

Over time, however, the mural began to disintegrate.  To my mind, as the next generation of downtown youth painted over Gamberg, they added to the mural, even though the face of the original subject was eventually obliterated.

 

As the paint began to peel, the work became an eyesore to some.  It had never been commissioned by the city, of course, and so did the city have any role in maintaining it?  Eventually, St. John’s stepped in and made a great decision, to my mind, in having it “renewed.”

I can imagine that the old work was beyond restoration, but -– by repainting Fred Gamberg -– the city's committee on murals has affirmed the contribution of the original piece.  I will miss the old one, certainly.  Had it been my decision to make, I would have liked to have had it redone from old photographs.  But this new mural is a work of art in its own right, the interpretation of yet more people embodying the spirit of downtown St. John's.

Midnight In Paris

Having suffered through a busy autumn, I am a little late to the discussion of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.  Mr. Allen is at a point, after having directed more than forty films, where people simply ignore his projects when they do not work and draw great attention to those that connect with an audience.  He benefits from low expectations, perhaps lower than any current artist who has been so prolific and so successful.  For me, his last unqualified success was Match Point (2005), though it was, essentially, a retelling of my favorite Allen film, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).  I am level-headed enough not to buy the hype associated with the vastly overrated Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and to be disappointed with Whatever Works (2009).  Still, I can be charmed when stumbling across something I missed, like the forgotten Sweet and Lowdown (1999).  I acknowledge Woody Allen’s unmatched success through the 1970s, and I will admit to having asked for, and received for Christmas, a DVD of the charmingly nostalgic Radio Days (1987).

So, with some authority, I can say that Midnight in Paris is good, respectable.  It is something that can stand on its own merits.  Owen Wilson is a fine protagonist, and Rachel McAdams is deliciously shallow and mean as his fiancée.  Michael Sheen gets to imagine what the McLuhan “fan” outside the theatre in Annie Hall (1977) might have been like as a more-rounded character.  Marion Cotillard is the pleasant diversion she must be for the plot to move along.  If, like Chekhov’s gun, a firearm introduced in the first act must be fired in the second, Léa Seydoux proves that every pretty girl dwelled upon in an Allen movie must become a love interest.  The conceit at the heart of this film is that, having once gotten lost at midnight, Owen’s character Gil can find his way back to the same spot each evening in order to ride in a vintage automobile back to the 1920s.  Try not to think about it too much – after leaving Ernest Hemingway in a bar, Gil loses ninety years in a flash, but at other moments he can walk around Jazz Age Paris at will by himself – and you can have a lot of fun.  Allen allows himself the farcical touches that season his best work: Adrien Brody’s Salvador Dali, obsessed with rhinoceroses; Detective Tisserant pursued through Versailles; Gil outlining the eventual plot of The Exterminating Angel (1962) to a bemused Luis Bunuel.  Paris, present, past, and more distant past, is beautiful onscreen.

But the lingering question I have after watching Midnight in Paris has to do with the background an audience must possess to engage with art, a question interrogated by my class in the Fall as they struggled through the footnotes to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.  Obviously, to enjoy fully what Woody Allen is doing in this film you need, at minimum, to know that American writers spent profitable time in Paris between the world wars.  This is what motivates Gil.  It helps to know Scott Fitzgerald, though you might wonder if – “old sport” – he really spoke as did his most famous character.  Do you appreciate Hemingway, all puffed up and played as a caricature here, unless you know enough about him to know that Allen collapses three or four stages of his development into the mid-to-late-1920s?  If you know that much, you might know that he was not speaking to Gertrude Stein by this time, and so he would never take Gil to Stein’s salon, where he meets the brother from whom, in reality, she had been long estranged.  You will not catch Gil’s joke about Djuna Barnes being butch unless you know enough to know that Eliot would have likely slammed the door on him for complimenting, ten years later, the juvenilia that first made the poet, by this time turned to serious poetry of religious iconography, a sensation.

Look, I am not trying to be a “Paul,” the pedantic lecturer Allen has Michael Sheen play in order, for all I know, to deflect this kind of nitpicking.  By all means, as I said, suspend your disbelief and have some fun in an era I have studied for twenty years.  But, as I sat on the couch, thrilled at the unearthing of Bricktop while questioning the commercial value of certain modernist canvases before the Stock Market Crash, I marveled at how difficult it is for any artist to rely on an audience to bring some knowledge, just enough, but not too much, to get the most out of a work of the imagination.

Teaching, Week Fourteen: Those Late Withdrawals

The university changed its withdrawal policy this year so that students might remove themselves from courses until the last day of classes.  Previously, a student had to make this decision by the end of the ninth week.  Out of a class of thirty, I had two students withdraw after week nine, related undoubtedly to frustration with preparing their term papers, but I had no one leave at the last minute.  The term paper results were average, and there was nothing there to chase anyone out, I allow.

Some of my colleagues complained about losing people after putting in a lot of effort grading their work, and I understand the frustration.  On the other hand, it never feels any better to assign a student an “F” for a course.  I see that as wasted effort, as well.  Due to some ancient rule, the pedigree of which no one can remember, individual faculties would get the tuition only for students who completed courses; if a student withdrew, central administration would get whatever was not refunded.  Under these new rules, students would get no more money back by withdrawing in the ninth week when compared with that last minute withdrawal, but the faculty would still get paid for the latter.  So, in a perverse way, instructors would, indirectly, realize compensation for fruitless late effort where they go unacknowledged for the work of a half term, only.

The rationale behind the change, beyond the fact that the policy exists amongst our competitors, is that students get to leave classes they would otherwise fail.  It is a retention initiative, and I will be interested in seeing whether grade point averages rise.  One of the unintended consequences, however, has been a reconsideration of what kind of feedback a student deserves (and when) and when a grade has been assigned (and a course is over).

It used to be that a student expected to have a meaningful evaluation returned before the ninth week.  For many of us, that meant having the mid-term or calling due the first essay at some point in the first two months.  But with the “W” deadline moved back, is it fair to expect that the whole term mark be prepared by the last day of classes?  I take in term papers in the last fortnight, and I can usually turn them around.  If an instructor is used to asking for term papers on the last day and returning them at the exam, is that arrangement now unfair?  Equally puzzling is the common situation where, in lieu of a final examination, a colleague has a “last test” in the last two weeks.  If this is done through moodle or graded electronically, the final grade may be calculated before the last day of classes.  Is it fair for a student to know, precisely, what grade will be assigned before deciding whether to withdraw from the class?