On Education

These are segments of my first essay of summer quarter, while not graded yet, I'm relatively happy with what I turned out. I should know around monday how I did. Maybe I will post with that sort of update.


“Rule 2: General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students. Rule 3: General duties of a teacher; pull everything out of your students” states Sister Corita Kent in her Immaculate Heart Art Department Rules. Many people, myself included, hold onto this image of college academia as a place in which great ideas are created and shared, where the minds of students and professors alike are opened up at the beginning of the day and by the end are bursting with ideas, good and bad, needing to be sorted. It’s a place that instigates change or at least it used to. In reality, there is very little pulling going on in any educational environment anymore. Students aren’t awed by the knowledge of their teachers and teachers more often than not aren’t willing to learn from their students. The pedestal that college had been sitting on is coming crashing down around us. More and more, students of America are seeing college education as a right rather than a privilege. Even I am guilty of assuming that college was just going to happen, that I didn’t even have to try to get there. By the time I finished high school, my opinion of academia was so distorted that I didn’t even want to be a part of it. I wanted to lead a bohemian life. I moved to Seattle and enrolled in community college simply because I had nothing better to do. And from here, this place which Professor X would most likely classify as a school of last resort, I have caught glimpses of that idealistic academia, and realized that I want to be among the great minds of the world and am ready to work my ass off to get there.
The truth is, not everyone has the self discipline required for college, I certainly didn’t have it when I started. Many students don’t realize that school is a tool they need to use in order to better themselves, a tool given to them in which they actually have to put an effort in to get something in return. An educated mind is one of the greatest tools a person can have. Robert Henri, in his piece On Education illustrates what college - and school in general – used to and should still be for every student involved. He states, “The student should know that the school will be good for him only to the degree that he makes it good.” Illustrating that a student must be self-disciplined, have an open mind, a positive attitude about situations, and be willing to work incredibly hard in order to succeed in becoming an educated person. Sister Corita makes this point in her rules as well, “Rule 5: Be self disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow them in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.” For me, the best way to realize the necessity of self discipline was to fail once. I didn’t want to do it again, so I got my act together. And I’m starting to be able to see a better future for myself. This self discipline is an act of will, and I’m afraid other students, particularly those in Adult Education programs, have already been through school once or those that are better suited for a vocational education route, but are required to be in a traditional college environment for work, have a much more difficult time achieving that amount of discipline. This is destroying college as an elite educational institution. Maybe the best way for these students to succeed is to follow, as Sister Corita said, to find someone wise or smart and follow them, to learn by example. Although, sometimes a bad example is the best way to understand how you want to be. As Robert Henri so accurately pointed out, “He may equally learn from the strong and the weak students.”
One of my middle school teachers opened her class with the phrase, “Knowledge is power” and I don’t agree with any other phrase more. I feel the need to point out that there are several types of knowledge and intelligence, that just because a person is not a good writer, plumber, scientist, carpenter, mathematician, or musician doesn’t make them stupid. No one is good at everything and not everyone can be good at college. Would college writing and literature classes even help them? As Professor X muses, “Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s Daddy?” While I am of the opinion that literature is one of the few ways to truly understand people and situations different from you and your own, I can’t imagine how reading a book like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina would truly help the education of a police officer, carpenter, or welder. Their intelligence is simply better suited to a different environment. America, for whatever reason began to see this fact as classist. Maybe it would be best for everyone if we took a step backwards in our thinking.

Skeletons!

I have an interview at a Market in Queen Anne tomorrow. Waiting to hear back from the printing and graphics company, though, I can't see how I am qualified for binding things ...
Reconnecting with a ghost from my past. It's kind of nice, I missed laughing this much.

What are the stresses of the intertidal zone? Does anyone really know?

One of the study questions for my Marine Bio. final, I still am avoiding my Music History presentation. It's due on Thursday, while my test isn't for another week or so.

Here I go to learn about SKA.

Faces Come Out in the Rain

Q. Am I ever going to start updating this blog regularly, and start to write about things of importance?
A. Probably not. This is mostly for random thoughts and observations.

As we near the end of the quarter, one would assume that I am swamped with projects and last minute studying for finals. That assumption would be correct. I think this is the longest period of time that I have ever functioned on 4 -5 hours of sleep per night. Multi-vitamins and coffee are two of my closest friends.
This lack of sleep is paying off, it's looking like I'm going to finish the quarter with two 4.0s and one 3.6. Not half bad.

Today, I was taking my mind off things by creating a playlist. It's still in a pretty rough state, as in, I'm not totally satisfied with the order of the songs here. But it's pretty good. I will share.

1. How Do You Spell ... ? - Volu-men
2. Parents Just Don't Understand - DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince
3. People are Strange - The Doors
4. Move Along - The All American Rejects
5. Solidarity - Rancid
6. Baby One More Time - Britney Spears
7. The Tide is High - Blondie
8. Wind it Up - Gwen Stefani
9. 6060-842 - The B-52's
10. Let's Talk About Sex - Salt 'N Pepa
11. Like A Virgin - Madonna
12. There Are Worse Things I Could Do - Stockard Channing
13. Hello, Goodbye - The Beatles
14. Here It Goes Again - OK Go
15. For You I Will (Confidence) - Teddy Geiger
16. Girl All The Bad Guys Want - Bowling for Soup
17. I Want Candy - Bow Wow Wow
18. Mommy's Little Monster - Social Distortion
19. Centerfold - J. Geils Band
20. Riot Girl - Good Charlotte
21. China Girl - David Bowie
22. When I Come Around - Green Day
23. Mrs. Robinson - Simon & Garfunkel

I would like to note that I was going for a more mainstream 'pop' kind of feel. Hence the presence of a lot of artists that I won't normally listen to ( ie: Teddy Geiger, Good Charlotte, Britney Spears ). And in spite of all this I still find a way to classify Rancid and Social Distortion as 'pop'. It all works, and makes sense. Order is important in that one.

On loosing a family member

I’ve lost my mother. No, I can’t tell you how, or when, and certainly not where because she never disappeared. It just happened that one day I noticed the woman who was my mother was gone, replaced by a body completely void of personality and reason. A body content to just sit on the couch and watch TV, showing little interest in anything but her pill bottles and Dr. Phil while the lives of her family passed her by.
The woman I remember as my mother was incredibly dedicated to the well being of my brother and I. Early in my life, she and my dad were going through a rather rough divorce, but, I didn’t know it was so rough until recently. The only memories I have of that time are happy and loving, which is a pretty good indication of how well she hid her own feelings about the situation from my brother and I and made sure we felt that we were loved.
The woman I remember as my mother tried so hard to expose me to opportunity. She was involved in the PTA at my school, she was my Odyssey of the Mind coach, she allowed me to take piano lessons, dance lessons, and she let me be involved in MCT even if I was a little shy. I remember when she was a lunch lady at my school (not the most glamorous of jobs) and for who knows what reason, all my friends thought it was “the shit.” She started the Halloween Treat Festival, an excellent way to keep the kids out of the awful, cold, Montana Halloweens. When I was in the second grade and her sister, my aunt, started working for a cruise line in the Caribbean, my mother helped me turn the situation into an ongoing project for my second grade class called, “The Adventures of Hermy the Hermit Crab.” When my Odyssey of the Mind team finally won state and had the chance to go to the world-wide competition, my mother was totally willing to haul seven girls from Missoula to Ames for a week of competition and pre-teen drama. The woman I remember as my mother was incredible, and I love her so much.
When my mother first started to become a shell, I tried so hard to pretend things weren’t changing, that she was the same person she always was. I tried to keep her involved in my life, but never again did I get the same approval and encouragement she provided in my youth. I started performing poorly in school, expecting some sort of reaction. Expecting anger, at the very least, and help forming a plan for success. Instead my poor grades were received with indifference.
Initially, when I started high school, making new friends and beginning to experience an independence that I never had before, I wanted to share these experiences with her, to retain the close relationship we had before. So, I would tell her of my new friends and what we did, and again she did not appreciate or understand the joy I felt at having flippy frog wars at Finnegan’s. It was at this point that I started to make up a social life that she found interesting. I didn’t do this to hide anything from her, like most teenagers would, but to be able to see for a couple minutes, the woman my mother used to be.
My mother turned into a woman of empty promises. She would promise travel, clothes, gadgets, and experiences that I knew we really could not afford. It was these promises that caused me the most anxiety because I knew that she did not have the resources to make these things happen. I was afraid of the long term consequences that would occur if she actually did take me to San Francisco and Chicago. At the same time, I loved the idea of these promises, of traveling around the country with my mom. I knew these promises were empty before she gave them, but it hurt just as much when none of them were fulfilled.
Ultimately, my mother turned into an emotional wreck. And I began to fight with her at every opportunity. I felt justified because she misunderstood everything I said, and I felt she deserved to feel just as much pain from me as I felt from her. She still tried, on occasion, to be the woman I remember as my mother, but it was only ever halfway there. The love and opportunity she had once provided unconditionally now had strings attached and as I began to find my own way in the world, I discovered that I didn’t need people like that in my life.
I do feel that it is important for my mother to know that I still love her, I just cannot have someone in my life that manipulates my feelings and misunderstands my every word. I am very close to giving up on my mother. But I think there’s still a chance for her to better her life as soon as she realizes she needs a lot more help than is being provided for her now.

Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for

That quote is from Earl Warren. I have it written on a piece of paper above my desk. A mantra of sorts. Honestly, I have no clue who Earl Warren was, this quote was on my Good Earth teabag this morning and I like it.
I feel like I should know who he was, so I will find out more about Earl Warren this week.

EDIT: Duh! I recognized that name from US Government in high school. He was a Supreme Court Chief Justice, or Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. However you want to phrase that title.