July 21, 2008
Dear Clusterflock
Of all the courses you took in school (any school, at any time in your life), which one has had the most significant impact on your life?
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42 Responses to “Dear Clusterflock”
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Of all the courses you took in school (any school, at any time in your life), which one has had the most significant impact on your life?
42 Responses to “Dear Clusterflock”
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Introduction to Computers - BASIC, 1978. We used punch cards to feed our code to a reader. This course first taught me of the precise and unforgiving nature of language, meaning, and tiny holes in expensive paper.
Looking back, this sums up the entirety of my adult life.
A class I took in seminary, a throw-away class, called “Apologetics and Outreach” which basically was created to teach Christians (mostly for the benefit of the Southern Presbyterians) how not to be assholes to non-believers.
What was significant was not so much the class (I have, thankfully, never been a substantial asshole) but a book we had to read for the class, Introducing Postmodernism. It introduced me to thinkers like Derrida and clearly hedged and articulated what were, for me, hazy questions at the time.
In short, the book gave me a new focus.
1993–”Writing Short Fiction,” a class taught by Ed Allen, the Writer-in-Resident at the time I began my M.A. He had published stories in The New Yorker, Story, and GQ and had published a couple of novels. He was brutal in his critiques of our work. We also read a number of great short stories. This was the first class with a teacher who didn’t thrive on teacherly praise, so I learned to appreciate his honesty in my work.
Story and Meaning, final semester at UT. I thought, if all my classes could have been like this, I would have loved being here.
Typing class in high school (circa 1979).
Any one of the handful of classes taught by Louise Cowan during the years I was an undergraduate literature major at the University of Dallas. There was the Faulkner class, and there was the the Russian literature-in-translation class (mostly Dostoevsky, with Tolstoy and Gogol and Turgenev tossed in). And — was there a twentieth-century poetry class, or was it a more broadly ranging class in poetics? No matter: what informed it (and the others) was Louise Cowan’s sense of the specifically poetic imagination. (Forever will I recall her distinction between communication and communion.)
Hers was (and is) a fundamentally Christian — and Catholic — view. And I enrolled at the University of Dallas a secular humanist heathen and graduated secular and humanist and heathen — but changed utterly.
NONE!
I despise most school teachers, they go from one side of the desk to the other with out ever going out into the real world or gaining any knowledge of the real working environment they are preparing the students for.
The few teachers I liked had ‘history’ one was an alcoholic ex-fisherman the other a freewheeling hippy bum.
Probably a class I took in seminary as well, Andrew. “Flannery O’Connor and the Christ Haunted South”. Shed light on more than a few personal mysteries, and began the endlessly relentless search for grace: to be given and to be received.
It’s a toss-up between my introduction to playwriting in my first semester at Sarah Lawrence or The Historical Avant-Garde literature class that I took. The former introduced me to my preferred method of expression and set me on my career path (theater-geek!) and the second gave me a solid introduction to the work of the surrealists (Andre Breton, specifically) the futurists, the Dadaists and writers like Pynchon and Nabokov and Winterson. But most importantly, it made me realize that it was okay to be really, really weird and to make really, really weird, beautiful things.
here’s to making weird, beautiful things.
would it be too romantic to say the two and a half month climbing trip I took a year out of college? we lived in a tent, travelled from climbing area to climbing area. I learned how to look at a section of rock. spend enough time with it, figuring it out section by section. lying awake at night, imagining the moves it would require in my mind, going back the next day, making progress, and finally, making it to the top at some point from start to bottom without falling.
oh, and farting. we did a lot of farting. I learned more about fart management on that trip than on any other.
I could teach you a thing or two.
1. only open the car window on the side of the fart, otherwise, it gets swept across the non-offender.
2. hydration. hydration. hydration.
3. don’t eat dehydrated soy protein.
Clusterflock: Knowledge of our asses, to the masses.
Dougan, you’re unregenerate! (And I mean that in the best possible way.)
For me, it’s not about the class but about the teacher. I’ve taken a number of wonderful and stimulating courses from people known far and wide for their expertise, but I’ve had only one real teacher in my life: Miss Evelyn Vernon, Marian Manor Elementary School, El Paso, Texas. Miss Vernon was my English teacher for 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, and she taught me everything I have ever needed to know about grammar and punctuation. She was in her 60s at the time. She had one-and-a-half arms and spoke with a thick East Texas accent. Students were terrified of her, for good reason (she once chased Stanley Nichols down the hall to the Principal’s office, yelling “I’m going to beat the tar outta you,” all the while swinging a broom between her good arm and her stump). She was fluent in Old English. She looked like Winston Churchill in the face. She had no patience for ignorance.
I loved that woman.
Me too, Cindy. It’s all it’s ever been about.
That is a wonderful tribute to Miss Evelyn Vernon.
Like Cindy, I tend to bring specific teachers to mind rather than courses. I have narrowed it to three (I know, I know–I said “which one, but please feel free to expand as I am doing here). When I was fresh out of the military, where I had finished a G.E.D. instead of the regular diploma, I headed for college and was scared shitless that all those teachers and everybody else would discover that I had slipped in, that I was an impostor, destined only to be exposed as such. But I had the great good fortune of encountering a remarkable teacher of college writing 101 & 102. Mark Kelso encouraged me at the precise moment that I needed it, and in a gentle way he noted where my abilities were strong and what I needed to work on. I would have killed for that man by the end of those classes. He treated everybody with respect and had the deepest understanding of human nature of any teacher I have known.
When I moved on from that college to UTD I encountered Robin McAllister. He was (and is, to this day) much like Mark Kelso in his encouragement, but I also saw in him a way of being a person of wide interests in the world who also regarded ideas in and around literature as crucial in importance and worthy of late nights spent reading and pondering and discussing. This dispelled my notion that the study of literature and the writing of such things was not “real” work. One of the courses I took from him was focused on Dante’s Divine Comedy and that course gave me an appreciation of poetics and, in particular, systems of imagery, that has stayed with me to this day. It’s a constant comfort and inspiration for me to still be in touch with him.
And another teacher (okay, I’ll quit after this) is a man by the name of Rainer Schulte. There are few brighter people in the world ( he’s right up there close to Cindy in this regard!) and he helped me switch gears–helped me to see the importance of articulating ideas with precision. In a way his mind was like the stick with which young dancers are beaten, though the result, after a time, made it seem much less severe. His silences could chip the paint off walls, and his gaze was enough to melt the wax of minds. For years I heard his voice in my mind when I imagined objections to a position I wanted to argue–and he sharpened me (to the extent that such might be done in my case) in a way I will always be grateful for.
I have been a teacher, now, for most of my adult life–counting full-time and part-time stints–and these three men remain, for me, emblems of the way it should be done.
I just went through about a dozen teachers I remember, connected of course with their courses. The highlights:
Mrs. Staten, my first grade teacher who also sold encyclopedias on the side. Years earlier, Mrs. Staten had taught my mom to play piano in Northeast Arkansas. (In that delicious–if you’re akin to it–gospel, honky-tonk style.) From Mrs. Staten, my folks bought, on payments, Compton’s encyclopedia (circa 1960) and dang near every year book since. Even now, when confronted with a question she doesn’t know the answer to, Mom will jump up and grab a Compton’s to see what it has to say about the answer. (Oh, I tried to bring them into the computer age, but Mom’s no Googler. The answer has to be “in print.”) She’s the same with medical knowledge, still using a medical encyclopedia I can’t name from the same era. And with a dictionary, The Reader’s Digest Dictionary, a big fat tome with nearly all the words of English in it.
A gym teacher in tenth grade, Mr. May who taught me to try. In his class you got an A if you showed up, if you tried. I sucked, pretty much, in any physical sport. For his gym class, I’d try. I found out I was relatively good at Volley Ball, and Badminton. And I learned that “weight training” wouldn’t kill me. And in his class I wasn’t always the “last” chosen on sides. And suck or not, I got A’s. He was a breath of life in a world I did not wish to inhabit.
“He was a breath of life in a world I did not wish to inhabit.”
Daryl
Honestly, I’m breathless. I can’t imagine you haven’t exerted a magnificent force on the world. Years hence, there will be stories of you, in the same way we’ve shared our stories, here.
Not that the stories of you they’ll tell is all what’s it’s all about for you. But you have marked the world.
I think it was Art of the Film, senior year at Lexington High. I gave the teacher, Warren Brown hell- as I wasn’t extremely into high school. But something clicked about watching films as a visual language- He taught me how to watch and to notice patterns. That the director(s) were telling me something more than the story. It informed how I chose to make work- how to create a multi-layered experience that worked on several planes. I’m not going to say I’m always successful, but the resonance in that class with what I was, and still am, trying to do with my work is and continues to be profound.
There was also a computer language class back in middle school. I thought everyone in the world was taking this class, it wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized not everyone was taught turtle at the same time as basic arithmetic. I think that the basic fluency with computer tinkering (albeit mild) has brought me here to this place at clusterflock.
Oh, and I learned an awful lot at the public library. Before I was big enough to go on my own, my dad and I went to the central library every Thursday night, when it was open till 9:00 pm.
My most influential course was self-directed, from S.I. Hayakawa’s semantics text, Language in Thought and Action. Picked it up on a used bookstore shelf, around middle school. It was my introduction to the imprecision of language, the futility of argument, and postmodernism generally. To this day, I can’t really have a proper argument; I’m too busy thinking, “Yeah, their definition of ‘morality’ is not my ‘morality.’ And the map, ‘morality’ is not even the terrain.” I tend to raise a glass, and smile.
Probably “Care and Training of the Working Dog” offered by Dr. Steve Mackenzie at SUNY Cobleskill, I took it in my second year there. I couldn’t recite the facts from the material (the principles stick with me) but the material isn’t what touched me about the course. What got me was what he said toward the end of the course. “You could do a lot of things with what you’ve learned, but there are a lot of them that you shouldn’t. You do not have my permission to be evil.”
drivers education
I remember one module at college, taught by “the most liberal man you’ll ever meet” (his words). It completely changed my view of news broadcasting.
Beforehand, news programmes broadcast bible truth. Afterwards, I became a grade-a cynic. I can’t watch the news now without analysing where the reporter is coming from, whether they’re covering all sides of the story, how deeply they’ve researched it and so on.
I can’t watch ITV news at all anymore — their style was that of a sensationalist tabloid newspaper, which put me off completely.
Oh Rick, I love your stories of Mrs. Staten and Mr. May. The way you speak of them brings them to life and shows the wonderful range of human behavior, and the fact that what’s remarkable about people can often be overlooked when we don’t first acknowledge the importance of this range, of difference. And thank you too, again, for the kind words about me. I fear I am not worthy of such praise, but your lovely giving of it makes me hope to be.
Mary Jeys: I’m sure glad you took that middle school computer language class if it led you to clusterflock. Your lovely smile and all of the wit and energy behind it surely lift all spirits lucky enough to encounter them.
Hey Deron– your comment that includes the advice to “only open the car window on the side of the fart” reminded me of something I’m sure you will know from the past: What happens when several kids are in a Camaro running at about 100 mph, with the windows down–so fast that the wind doesn’t even seem to have time to get in the car–and then some dumbass opens the full ashtray in the console? Wow. Talk about commending Donny’s ashes to the bosom of the Pacific.
Daryl, years and years ago some guys I know were on a cross-country trip when one of them did something similar with a half-eaten pice of fruit. Meant to toss it out the window, but . . . yep. Same as Donny’s ashes.
This too constitutes a course in the schoolhouse of life.
We’re planning a sock puppet reenactment of the scattering of Donny’s ashes.
Sheila–about tossing fruit out the window of the fast-moving car: let’s not get started on spitting, or what happens to vomit that issues from the person riding shotgun.
Will Pinky D and y’all be painting the backdrop?
Not that you’re lacking for images of “Leo Carrillo”, but I do have (somewhere) some shots that I took of the Very Site. As well as a photo Allen took of me lounging on the highway sign directing travelers to “Leo Carrillo”.
Talk of the Great School of Life does seem to lead to the Dude, does it not? At least for some of us.
Cooper had brought the car to a complete standstill before I opened the door and vomited onto the shoulder there near Mountain Creek Lake.
I’m not sure we’ll enlist Pinky for the ashes scene. He’ll be helping with the West Texas scenery for No Country For Old Men. And (completely unrelated to sock puppetry), I’m hoping he’ll draw me a bunch of dead birds. Maybe a beaver or two. You know, the usual.
Very late on this one (a birthing to attend to and all), but a nineteenth century political thought undergrad course really did bring history, politics, politics and governing as a science, political theory all to life through an intelligent lecturer/tutor, who combined humour and knowledge in just the right mix.
Kris, did your wife deliver (or is she about to deliver)?
A very quick labour, a tad early but all is well. No drugs, no stitches, straight out of hospital for mum and Ezra. Henry (21 month old) is taking it in his stride.
Why’s it always about Vietnam?
Congratulations, Kris! Ezra is a wonderful name (as is Henry). I’m sending happy wishes across the sea to all of you.