Yesterday was a hard day as My wife and I prepared to down size and pack to move to be closer to our family. We went through about half of my library and we culled over two hundred books that we are donating to our local library instead of packing and moving them 600 miles to have them set in a storage unit since we won’t have room in our new apartment for the book cases needed to hold all of my books. As I held each book, I recalled why I had the book and what it meant to me when I first read it. Some of them almost brought tears to my eyes. I know some of you would be surprised to know what books I kept and what books I decided to donate. I kept several books about the Dodgers who have always been my favorite baseball team. Of course they were “da bums” of Brooklyn when I started rooting for them. However, I donated the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Ibsen. The stories of Duke Snider and the other boys of summer were important to me growing up in ways that other people wouldn’t understand. However, Poe and Ibsen can be of more help to others right now if they would take the time and make the effort to read them.
Books
Reading through the Week–Part I: Introduction
In the January 2012 issue of Christianity Today Alan Jacobs, Professor of English at Wheaton College and author of the recently released Oxford University Press book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, is interviewed by John Wilson, the Books and Culture editor for CT. The title of the interview “Don’t Worry, Read Happy” is a light hearted attempt to encourage CT readers to expand their horizons for reading beyond work related assignments and to read for enjoyment. The subtitle of the interview, “Stop Fretting Over What You Need to Know, and Enjoy Those Books that Bring Delight,” is a quote from Jacobs that interviewer Wilson culled from the interview.
As I read the interview, I was reminded of two of my previous blog postings that I entitled, “Relief through Reading.” I went back to look at them. I was extremely surprised that it has been almost a year since I published those posts. As far as my reading for the past year, it has definitely been up and down. I have been able to read a few books for what one could the sheer enjoyment of it. However, most of my reading has been focused on my writing projects.
The title of one book, The Curious Incident of the Upside Down Dog, might suggest light reading. It was anything but light reading. It was a bio-novel, written from the perspective of a young adolescent boy suffering with Asperger Syndrome who discovers his neighbor’s pet dog killed in her backyard. Since the neighbor finds him with the dog and “she considers him strange,” she accuses him of killing her pet. Since the boy loved the dog and wanted to prove his innocence and find the real culprit, he begins an involved search for the real perpetrator. As the boy delves deeper and deeper into this mystery, we are drawn into the mind of an autistic youth, the inner workings of two dysfunctional families, the awful truths from which both parents and neighbors tried to insulate this innocent autistic boy, and the boy’s herculean efforts to find that truth, no matter what it meant for him and his family.
I selected this book because I knew from the advertisements it dealt with Asperger Syndrome supposedly written from the inside. Since much of my writing has attempted to write about difficulties from the inside of those difficulties, the first reason I selected this book was to get another example of how this type of writing might be done, definitely not reading for the pleasure of entertainment.
The second reason for selecting this book was because of an essay that I wrote more than two years ago, but have not yet published. In that essay, I suggest the behavior of many college and university faculty members was consistent with the behavior of autistic adults. I was hoping I could glean some guidance from this book on how to write about abnormal behaviors without criticizing those individuals for behaviors that were beyond their control.
I must admit that I didn’t get everything that I wanted from the book. It was a polemic about how adults treated this boy. The best message that I could take away from the book was that college administrators have a great responsibility to monitor, hold themselves and faculty members accountable for their behavior, and assist faculty members when they seem to be straying from acceptable behavioral norms.
I started this posting with the idea of writing another light encouragement to read. However I started to approach this in a manner that went against the advice of Professor Jacobs. My first idea was to suggest a reading plan that hit each day of the week. I was working on this idea even before I saw the Jacobs interview in CT.
In “Reading Through the Week, Part II, I will outline the reading plan that I developed for me. It is a plan that includes 7 books that contain the names of the days of the week. This book list is not for everyone. It was a plan and a book list to which I was attracted. I learned something from each of the books. I found some of the books to be a challenging read. Each of the books brought me enjoyment at some point during the reading. I found this exercise has helped me to return to an activity that I enjoyed during my childhood, reading for reading’s sake and not just to complete an assignment.
Living in a metaphoric world and trying to communicate with the academy
I found two articles published this past July very significant and helpful. The first was an article in the Epilepsy Advocate magazine about Chris M., a minister and author, who found he was thinking and writing differently after the onset of epilepsy. The article may be found at http://www.epilepsyadvocate.com/default.aspx. The second article was a Chronicle of Higher Education review by Carlin Romano entitled “What’s a Metaphor For?” which can be found at http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-a-Metaphor-For-/128079/
Why were these two articles significant for me? After two traumatic brain incidents (TBIs )left me essentially able to think only metaphorically and unable to think analytically, sequentially or deductively, I have found it extremely difficult to communicate with the academy. This has been very difficult for me because the academy was my life for 40 years.
In March 2009, I had brain surgery to remove a benign tumor which was discovered when I had a stroke-like event (first TBI). When I regained consciousness in the hospital after the surgery, I immediately realized something was different. I couldn’t find the right words to complete thoughts. I knew what I was trying to say but the best word to express my thoughts would not come to my mind. I also had trouble following what other people were saying or writing. My speech therapist called the condition aphasia (loss of words). After 9 months of intensive therapy, I got to the point where usually I was the only person who realized that I was having trouble with words.
In December 2009, I had four conic-tonic seizures within a 30 minute time span (second TBI), which my neurologists blamed either on the stroke-like event or the scar tissue left from the removal of the benign tumor. When I regained consciousness in the hospital three days after the seizures, I immediately knew something else was very different.
I knew my ability to think analytically, sequentially or deductively had been severely compromised. Prior to the first TBI, I would try to think everything through analytically. After the seizures, my first reaction to any situation, problem or question was to draw a mental picture, i.e., devise a metaphor. What’s the difference? The battle between thinking analytically and metaphorically is like living in two different worlds or looking down two very different sides of the same mountain. For 40 years, I lived in an analytic world. However, now I was living in a metaphoric world. In such a world I found that I could not rigorously define metaphor. The best I could do was to describe it using more metaphors. Notice in my account above, to describe what was going on in my mind, I had to use a metaphor. Another discovery is that even the best metaphor may not completely satisfy the need for the rigor of those living in the analytic world.
Having lived in both worlds, I found it easier to understand someone living in the metaphoric world when I was in the analytic world, than vice versa. This insight reminded me of the episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation, entitled “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” In this episode the Enterprise Crew was working on trying to understand messages from the alien world of the Tamarians. The Star Trek universal translators could translate the words but the words make no sense to the Star Trek crew. Finally Dathon, the leader of the Tamarians, kidnaps Picard and strands the two of them on the planet El-Adrel together with a common foe. When Dathon tosses Picard a dagger, several of the Star Trek crew members suggest that this is a hostile act. It is not until later when Picard and Dathon are attacked by a third hostile alien that Picard understands that the dagger was an invitation to cooperate and jointly fight this new enemy. Although Dathon is killed in the fight, the humans and the Tamarians see that they can cooperate. It is only when the Tamarians start referring to this event as Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel, does the Star Trek crew understand that the other phrases the Tamarians were using were actually metaphors that referred to important events in their history. Thus, even though the Tamarians never could understand the straight-forward explanations the humans offered for events, the two groups were able to communicate and understand each other through metaphors, because the Star Trek crew started using metaphors.
As I contemplate a limited future within the academy, the two articles mentioned above have given me some new hope that I can find a few good friends who will be willing to work with me so we can translate each other’s language so that both groups will be enriched.
General Education and Turf Wars
The National Endowment for the Humanities begin their booklet “50 Hours: A Core Curriculum for College Students” with a quote by Mark Van Doren from Liberal Education: “The one intolerable thing in education is the absence of ntellectual design.” I find this ironic in that the curriculum outlined in the booklet and the process used by most institutions to arrive at their general education is a process of turf wars. I find almost nothing intellectual in turf wars. In turf wars, the largest, most powerful departments will win almost every time.
I remember the process of redesigning the general education at one institution. At this institution the general education was listed as 48 hours. As we surveyed the faculty, it was their over-whelming conclusion that 48 hours was too large. Why? Because this didn’t give students enough room to complete a degree in many disciplines within the normal four-year path to a degree of 120 hours. How is this possible? Many majors specified courses in other disciplines as requirements within their discipline. When you counted these courses and the required prerequisites for these courses, the total number of required hours for the average major was well over 90 hours. For example, the psychology major required a course in statistics. But the mathematics department required a course in Fundamentals of Mathematics as a prerequisite for statistics which was different from the general education course that was entitled Quantitative Reasoning. Thus the typical psychology major had to take 9 hours of courses from the mathematics department. In another area, the psychology major required a two semester sequence in anatomy and physiology (8 hours since these were lab courses), but the biology department required a 4-hour prerequisite to these courses that was entitled Introduction to Human Science that was different from the 4-hour lab science general education requirement entitled Introduction to Life Science. Thus, a psychology major would graduate with 16 hours of biology courses. How could the mathematics and biology departments have this much effect on psychology requirements? Because the courses in question were in their turf and they were the best judges of what was needed.
You should have heard the cries of distress and the weeping and wailing when I strongly suggested that we cut back the average number of required hours by 20 hours. I was decimating majors. Graduates would never get into graduate schools. So where did the faculty find hours to cut? They agreed to limit the number of hours required for a major to 78 unless there was an outside accrediting agency requiring more. Although, in the first survey of the faculty they said that students needed more foreign languages, then they cut out entirely the general education 9 hour requirement in a foreign language, but added a new 3-hour course in cross-cultural communications. They cut the 12-hour requirement of sequences in both United States and World Civilization and added a new 4-hour required course in Western Civilization. How could the faculty make these changes? The Foreign Language Department and the History Departments were not members of large enough voting blocs to get the votes they needed to stay in as part of the general education.
These days were out and out turf wars. Intellect and intelligence were not very visible anywhere. It was a matter of who had the votes or what treaties you could make to get the votes. Who said there is no politics in education?
Teamwork is Critical: Learning with and from Others
One of the blessings of my current physical situation has been the opportunity to nventory anbooks on the d catalogue more than forty years of collected files and academy. While working full-time I never had the time to review all the files and books that I was collecting. These files and books were just piling up in my university offices and in my home offices and the storage areas of our homes. I had some idea of fwhat I possessed, but I didn’t know for sure. This led to duplication of files and books. As I have discovered these duplicates, I have given them to individuals who can ake good use of them.
However, the process of inventorying and cataloguing has also created a problem. In Chinese philosophy, this dichotomy, where opposite but complementary items form a complete whole, is known as yin and yang. The same situation is viewed by some people as a problem and by others as an opportunity. A modern western idiom attempting to express this is the question, “Do you see the glass as half-full, or half-empty?” I must admit that as I have inventoried and catalogued my collection of files and books, I have experienced both feelings. At times I am elated at the long hidden jewels of ideas and thoughts that I am finding in my files and books. As I consider these ideas I am easily distracted and start trying to track down more about the given topic. I find myself creating more files to add to my already abundant collection. When I try to return to where I was when I was distracted, I can’t find my place or I can’t get back into the flow of things. I am pleased that I have been reintroduced to many ideas that I had abandoned. However, I am frustrated that I can’t excavate around these ideas more fully. I am almost convinced that a life-time of thinking will take a second lifetime to explicate it.
One of the dangers when an academic picks up a book or an article is the temptation to scan it. Whenever I start to scan a book or an article, I find it almost impossible to put it down. It happened again and again as I went through my books and files. At one point, I came across a somewhat dated book with the intriguing title of Rural Development and Higher Education: the Linking of Community and Method, published by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. While I have been laid up, I have been reading and thinking about the development of American Higher Education. Recently, I was reading about the effect that the Morrill Acts and the establishment of Land Grant Colleges had on the overall development of rural America. My curiosity got the better of me, and I started scanning the Kellogg book. I was trapped. Soon I found myself reading the last chapter which was a summary of the nine Kellogg funded projects that were outlined in the book. The first section of this chapter was entitled, “Learning from others.” It began with a great story about “a city fellow who bought a thriving farm that had a new brood of baby chicks. A week later all the chicks were dead.” At this point the city fellow went to the neighboring farmer to find out what had happened and if there was anything he could do to prevent this from happening again when he bought some new chicks. The neighbor in all innocence asked the city fellow, “What did you feed them?” The city fellow was shocked and he stammered, “Feed them. I thought the old hen nursed them.”
The conclusion of this story is obvious. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be very dangerous to make faulty assumptions. In the setting of this book, the authors continued by suggesting that university faculty can’t hope to deal successfully with rural development if they presuppose full knowledge of the local needs, wants, and conditions of any given location and any given group of people. This led to the standard operating procedure within all Kellogg funded projects of forming a citizens’ advisory committee at the very beginning of the project. Everyone was constantly reminded that “Teamwork is critical.”
In higher education this is not only true when we are working on projects outside the institution, such as rural, urban, or industrial development. It is also true when we are working on a project inside the institution with our own students. How easy is it to assume we know what people need and what they already know? We can save a lot of time by just plowing in and developing assistance programs for them. Why should we ask students what they need? How absurd, they are only students! How many colleges and universities have set up student assistance programs to help students and find these programs don’t address the needs of their students?
Today almost everyone gives lip service to the adage that cooperation is the best policy. People know that generally you’ll get better results if you involve other people, seek their advice and help, early in a process. People are more willing to help and accept change if they have ownership in the process.
If teamwork was the most important lesson that the Kellogg Foundation learned from these projects, there was one more lesson that was a close second. This second lesson was that every project needs a project director who possesses the appearance of neutrality, “the statesmanship of a Disraeli, the leadership abilities of a wagon master, the selflessness of a missionary, and the energies of a long-distance runner.” These are great lessons for any organization to learn and master.
Relief Through Reading – Part II
For my first excursion after many years into what I thought would be recreational reading, I chose a book I saw on the New York Times Best Sellers List that sounded interesting. It was a novel by Emma Donoghue, entitled “Room.”
If recreational reading is reading for fun and enjoyment, it is hard for me to call “Room” recreational reading. However, I have to label it recreational reading in my taxonomy, because it definitely isn’t informational or work-related, at least at first glance. I will explain this a little later in this posting.
After getting started on the book, I found myself having a hard time putting it down. I found myself mimicking my wife, reading for hour after hour, trying to either get through the book or at least to a good stopping point. When I finished the book, I returned the favor to my wife by telling her, “You’ve really got to read this book. It will disturb you, but you will like it.”
Since we had gotten the book from our local library and there was a long list of people who had reserved it. My wife picked it up immediately and finished it before we had to return the book to the library. My wife admitted that it did disturb her, but that she liked it so much she recommended the book to her book club as a future choice for a book of the month.
The story line of the book revolves around a five-year-old boy named Jack who has lived his entire life in an 11×11 room with his mother. They are captives of a deranged individual who abducted Jack’s mother when she was a teenager and imprisoned her in this specially constructed room that had one door and only one window, a skylight. For more than eight years ‘Ol Nick’ would come in the room at least once a week to bring food and molest the frightened young woman who had no way of escape. Because of these sexual advances, two babies are born in the room. Only Jack survives and we pick up the story when he is five-years old with all the normal curiosity of a young boy, but no knowledge of the “outside world” other than what he can see through a skylight, a black and white TV with limited reception, and a few National Geographic books. ‘Ol Nick’ knows of his existence but Jack’s Ma shields Jack from ‘Ol Nick’ by making Jack hide in a wardrobe every time ‘Old Nick’ comes into the room. When Jack starts asking Ma about the outside world, Ma begins concocting a plan of escape.
As I continued to reflect on the book and its story, I began to discover applications of the story to higher education and to my life. I kept finding rooms that had been constructed to imprison people and keep them from fully developing and enjoying the outside world. Most of those rooms were not physical rooms, but they were prisons all the same. In the posting by Finding Strength to Stand Again, entitled, “Hitting my head on Glass Ceilings” : http://findingstrengthtostandagain.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/hitting-my-head-on-glass-ceilings/,
we see rooms that have been constructed to keep those people with challenges “where they belong.” In her Glass Ceilings posting, the author talks about how she has been shut out of employment because she is different. She has a disability.
These rooms are difficult to see, hence the name “Glass Ceilings” They are metaphysical rooms, but they are just as real as the room ‘Ol Nick’ used to imprison Jack and his Ma. I know because I have experienced several of these rooms recently. The law says people who are aged challenged and physically challenged are members of protected classes in terms of employment. However, if I were to submit my resume for a job opening that I was perfectly qualified to fill five years ago, I wouldn’t even get an interview today. I know because three years ago I was looking for a new job as a chief academic officer at a college or university. Even though I had an outstanding resume from my 40 years of work in higher education, and was well-known in the Christian college and higher education assessment circles. I had a difficult time convincing some institutions to even give me an interview. I know that my age was a problem. When I finally did get two interviews, one of the first questions that I was asked at both institutions was, “How long are you planning to work?” I told people who I could not promise anything, but that I planned to work for another seven to ten years. At that time, I felt that was quite doable. I felt good and I had maintained a rigorous physical exercise routine for more than 50 years. One of the great advantages of working in higher education is the availability of a gym. Until my knees finally gave out and I couldn’t find a surgeon who would operate on them for a fourth time, I played an hour of competitive basketball five days each week. In life after basketball, to keep up my workouts, I switched to a recumbent stationary bike. In my first year on the bike at age 62, I racked up more than 10,000 miles pedaling more than 30 miles per day.
Paraphrasing the 1970’s hit of the Five Man Electric Band, “Rooms, rooms. Everywhere rooms; keeping me in my place; playing with my mind,” I can hear a new acquaintance that I have come into contact with through the web, say right now, “Be careful. You’re heading into dangerous territory. You are trying to stretch an analogy or metaphor too far.” ‘Ol Nick’ was imprisoning Ma for his own evil intents. People in higher education are not imprisoning people for evil intents. I concur with that. However, to the victims, the results are similar.
I believe that by playing off the metaphor of “room as a prison,” I am using what we know from learning theory. People learn more when faced with a compelling problem and can connect the new problem to something with which they are already familiar. I understand the concept of a room. The compelling problem is looking for a means of escape. It makes sense to me.
In Part III of Reading for Relief, I will explore the ideas of rooms and means of escape in relationship to higher education.