Path--Logic

Dear Colleagues Across the Curriculum,

On what’s cool:

"Requiring sessions with Art Shuster ..THAT is cool."
Christine LaPorte

"I miss Art Schuster. Art Shuster is definitely cool.
Re the blog post: We human creatures crave adversity,
and the scars to prove it. If we are not born into it, we
invent it (I stole this idea from Diane Arbus, who called
her favorite subjects--dwarves, giants, hermaphrodites—
'aristocrats' and found her own childhood to be 'plagued
by a lack of adversity'). Ergo, there's always trouble
brewing in the suburbs."
Christopher Chandrek

2 former students of 80’s vintage. Christine went on to
Yale in environmental work & is now in Asheville.
Christopher played in Hope Nichol’s Fetch & Bones
I think it was—made the cover of Spin: one of our
all-WWC bands—& is now respectable in Charlotte
studying law..

1/3 of my quite brilliant and enthusiastic First Year
Seminarians were assigned sessions with Art this past
fall, several of whom I recommended for Natalie
Nimmer’s leadership program .

For years I’ve been amazed at the increasing number
of “screwed-up” students, trailing varieties of learning
disabilities & diagnoses and so many turn out to be my
favorites: constellational and imaginative: putting IT in
play, which I claim is what counts now—not what you
know: that’s galore. Anyone with a laptop has it all.

One fellow (now leading study-abroad groups to Israel)
claimed he never read a book in college. Did a semester
at Oxford. Would pick IT up in air: the conversation.

Simultaneously multi-tasking and attention deficient.
Adderol and Ritalin poppers. Someone says “bong” in
class and everyone breaks up. Must be cool. Rebels
without a Because & Affect —internet media savants
all of them, virtual reality surfing.

Much older than I am.

THAT plus the ubiquitous language of sexual predation
and victimization and so many survivors surviving: it
strikes me that our deviant behavior right here at home
is local food, worth study and wonder—as significant
as service projects abroad and green concerns here,
an environmental issue, really—meta-sustainable maybe

Very cool.

(I’ve had a persistent hunch much of student
“screwed-up-ness” is generated by the cultural
lag between traditional educational study-skill
practices and pedagogies and growing up in the
Guttenbergian-like media environmental trans-
formations of the past 20 years. Battle of the Sets:
non-linear and linear processing & can they
just get along?

We are paradigm shifting from an Age of Information
to an Age of Conceptualizing, says Daniel Pink’s
(A Whole New Mind); .& Keith Sawyer’s studies
in collaborative genius reinforce if not validate this bias.

Seems like a worthy conversation
for going across the curriculum
these days of strategic change. .

Any of you could frame it better than me. Beyond the
pathological maybe, to cool. Very cool.

xxxooo, Sam