All the Kings Horses and Men

Dear Colleagues Across the Curriculum
(and Transcendental Romantics, Linguists,
Fiction-ists)    Courses w/o Border Series

Professors of the Year: They Put Students
          in Charge of Learning
http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-of-the-Year-Put/125425/
 
A follow-up on student involvement and teaching that
focuses on "learning, notlectures; inspiring, not processing;
exploring and not just explaining."
  .  
DADA.  A European movement in art and literature founded
in Zurich in 1916 with an admittedly destructive intent—to
mock, pervert, and demolish all of the tenets of painting,
music, poetry, philosophy, logic and even reason itself and
set up a pretended   madness instead, in protest against what
the leaders of the movement regarded as the insane and vicious
destruction of civilization, life, and thought taken place in the
trenches of WWI.          (Benet: The Readers Encylopedia)
 
When the word  & notion “surreal” emerged from
and replaced “dada” – it was  more aesthetically
descriptive than politically ideological.

By now “surreal” simply stands for OMG  and
awesome and is ubiquitous as is “plethora.”  among
teens and young adults.
 
A student in my Transcendental & Romantics course
suddenly flipped his desk over and stuck his chair on
its edge. Others seemingly  responded to this gesture
by crawling  into the middle of the floor, lying prone or
leaning on elbows.
 
Still others mounted the tables and stood and declared.
One female balanced on one leg  and sang. Argument
going on all the time. Fragmented, admittedly.
 
No on-task. cover-the-ground, getRdone, agenda-
confirming, measurable aims and objectives compliance
happening at all..  Students taking over if not charge,
commanding the learning environment for a moment
if not their learning.  Maybe their learning. It depends
on how we define learning and "it.".
 
In college I spent three summers teaching sailing and
water skiing at a family resort on Lake Champlain a
mile south of Canada.

The resort was managed and run by college and grad
students:  from front-desk to stables and waterfront,
rooms and cabins, laundry and maintenance, children’s
recreation and nightly adult-entertainment: bingo games,
dances, talent shows, bonfires and kumbaya sing-alongs…
 
After summers of being-in-charge of  groan-up response
abilities and fooling around,  we went  back to school 
for instruction and accreditation. .

In those days, large-scale lectures,  augmented by discussion,
were  considered standard educational deliverance systems.
Overhead projection sometimes. Mimeographed handouts
on occasion.Blue books for examination.
 
My first day at lecture,  I  squeezed between a Jack Heinz 
& some Jock Pillsbury inside Silliman Strathcona with a
couple hundred other dillar a dollar scholars.

Up front a fellow studied The New York Times, shaking
and patting down its pages into  submission under the gnosis
of  Professor Robert Brumbaugh, noted Platonic scholar.
 
All around, smokers and smoke rings. This was before
second-hand smoke had been invented.  
 
I in no way provoked or suggested anything of the kind of 
sortie expressed in Jensen 206 last week.   A surprise to all
of  us. Spontaneous combustion.
 
Made no sense at all. Surreal. Makes no sense now.
 
Imagine if that happened in YOUR class.  Would you love it?
Love it love it? It could  be demoralizing. Undercutting everything.
How are we going to get serious after that, take our selves seriiously,
take IT seriously?

All the kings horses and all the kings men.

xxxooo, Sam