Hypertext reading
The teacher for my Geographic Thought seminar urged us to consider various strategies for the heavy load of reading. He passed out a heuristic grid, with sections boxes labeled, "Quotes," "Questions," "Connections," and "Theory." All fine, but I realized working through some of the assignments that I don’t read in any linear or analytic pattern, and probably not in these boxes, even if one is labeled connections. I know I may need to go back and squeeze into that mold to hold conversations in class, but I realize that I read in an associative pattern, which to update metaphors, I’ll now call “hypertext reading.” This fits, I believe, what I need to be doing in Geography just now—I need to be finding ways to mesh my own background experience with this new field. I need to discover and build cognitive links between the books and ideas I already have with these new concepts. (If we all did our reading on Kindle-like devices, I'd be inserting such links as I read.) That building-from-what-you-know is a pretty basic idea in reading theory, but I’m not sure it’s what people expect in the on-demand performance world of graduate school.
To illustrate:
In Biogeography, we began to go over “Changing Themes” in the discipline, with a key figure—“poster child”—for each. Interesting in its own right. Here we have the “Divine Chain of Being,” which I recognize in terms of E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (1942) and his ‘Great Chain of Being’ from Shakespeare studies--Linnaeus picturing nature as a static hierarchy, without including Lucifer nor the cherubim in his scale. We hear about William Bartrum, a plant exploiter, and of course I can connect this with a novel from a summer Native American Lit class I taught, Leslie Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes, a complex interplay between a similarly exploitive orchid procurer, a Native girl who collected seeds from the imperative of her grandmother’s lore, and a wife trapped between competing and brutal ideas. And an amazing juxtaposition of English/European folklore with Native, which should have helped my students past their scoffing at the “senseless” beliefs of Native Americans, but didn’t, fully.
We looked at Alexander von Humboldt, the “father of plant geography,” and quite a few other things we skimmed past, and I mentally linked back to the essay in David McCullough’s Brave Companions, which we had used a few years ago in our INCC/how-to-be-a-freshman class. Fascinating guy, and maybe I remember that there are more places named after him than any other person.
“Romanticism” in Biogeography, well, Thoreau, and I am an English teacher--though I haven't tackled his million word journal, which would be more relevant here.
“Change and Struggle”—Darwin. David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution, an "airplane book" I read sometime last year, came to mind (and left me feeling guilty that I have but haven't read the same author's The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions.
This section of class also brought to mind my favorite steampunk novel,
The Difference Engine, by Gibson and Sterling, in which one protagonist argues through his career on the relative merits of uniformitarinism vs. catastrophism. And notions that Lord Byron might have wound up as a radical prime minister, and the the Babbage Engine would have functionally changed industrial England...
Carl Sauer, we find out, was from Warrenton, Missouri, a drive-through when we I-70 to St. Louis.
The theme “Discordant Harmony” brings in notions of a norm of instability, rather than some ideal balance of nature, and I have to think about Chaos Theory, with periods of turbulence, strange attractors, points of bifurcation. (I team-taught an Honors seminar on Chaos Theory last fall, with two other teachers, from math and philosophy. I was also anxious about being able to contribute to that forum, but I did manage to do this same thing—I found stories and novels and videos that illustrated/connected with the main points of the seminar.)
* * * * *
In Geographic Thought, our main text is Geography and Geographers, Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945, 6th ed. The first chapter begins an overview of the discipline, in institutional terms, and continues with a survey of Kuhn’s notions of paradigm and scientific progress, and various commentators. Interesting enough, and not alien.
I’m prepping books for an October evening class on New Journalism, using Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Jon Krakauer. The second essay in Tom Wolfe’s Hooking Up is “Two Young Men Who Went West,” which looks at social and psychological influences on the people who built Silicon Valley. The paths Bob Noyce, one of those 2 young men, took seem to amply comment on the way ideas in science develops.
And also we could look at how ideas work in James Gleick’s Chaos or M. Mitchell Waldrop‘s Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos--both books we used in our Chaos Theory class.
Ok. I’m finding some connections to this new world of Geography, though I don’t yet know if my new world will care what I already know.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Being the good student, as older students are expected to be, I immediately left and did my homework, reading a couple chapters of Biogeography. Let’s not say, ‘the bubble burst,’ in pure cliché. How about, ‘the helmet on my insulated spacesuit cracked, exposing me to the cold, harsh vacuum of outer space’? There’s information in this text, yes. It’s high in bold and italicized terms, moving from definition, to sub-definition, to other categories of things to define. Do I have to memorize these ‘for the test’? (There is a midterm test. Form unknown.) How do I sample this information? What makes this relevant? Irritated. The text is generalized, outlined, abstract. It isn’t asking me to think. Pictures would help. Story would be better. Argument.
Or connection. I jump to Wendell Berry, [and more on his books], a now-cranky-and-beloved Kentucky farmer, who uses his Masters in English to write about connections of land and people. In his collection, What Are People For?, one key essay, “The Work of Local Culture,” he states:
[Interesting side note: "Wendell Berry Takes Back His Papers"]
And in my first week of being acculturated into the world of Geography, I find eager technicians, but have heard nothing of connection to any place.
On the up side, I began Reading the Forested Landscape. The author describes his own teacher, John Marr, as “a rare ecologist who stressed the importance of having a strong emotional connection to landscapes alongside an analytical one” (p. 14).
Maybe yet there will be a place for poetry alongside GIS pinpricks.
Or connection. I jump to Wendell Berry, [and more on his books], a now-cranky-and-beloved Kentucky farmer, who uses his Masters in English to write about connections of land and people. In his collection, What Are People For?, one key essay, “The Work of Local Culture,” he states:
As local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside. As the exposed and disregarded soil departs with the rains, so local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities or are forgotten under the influence of homogenized salestalk, entertainment, and education. This loss of local knowledge and local memory—that is, of local culture—has been ignored, or written off as one of the cheaper “prices of progress,” or made the business of folklorists. (p. 157)Berry will point out more in his essay on this disjunction in education—that universities, and really, K-12, teach general knowledge, universals, at the expense of the local or regional. This fits, he continues, for young people who will move, over and over, following career. We become dis-inherited cogs in a larger economy, losing region, community, extended family. Perhaps some find Facebook as a replacement for this change, but I suspect we are now so far removed from any sense of location, that few people would be able to name this loss.
[Interesting side note: "Wendell Berry Takes Back His Papers"]
And in my first week of being acculturated into the world of Geography, I find eager technicians, but have heard nothing of connection to any place.
On the up side, I began Reading the Forested Landscape. The author describes his own teacher, John Marr, as “a rare ecologist who stressed the importance of having a strong emotional connection to landscapes alongside an analytical one” (p. 14).
Maybe yet there will be a place for poetry alongside GIS pinpricks.
It begins
8/23/10 First day of class. I was out late (playing Dungeons and Dragons), didn’t walk the dogs last night, so they were cranky this morning, my alarm wouldn’t reset so I had to reset the time to try to figure the right hour, no caffeine at home… Then I realized I’m a student, and didn’t need to shower or be presentable—I just had to find parking, put a ball cap on my morning hair, buy a cup of coffee, and get to class. I did.
Biogeography. This is a combined senior and grad level class. I like the teacher, though had a spurt of dread when he came in and plugged in his laptop, to begin his PowerPoint lecture. I’ve avoided ever using PowerPoint, not because it looks too hard, but because I dislike the way it pushes most teachers to a disengaged monotone, as if they had taught the class in making the slides, and the students in front of them were merely troublesome and ephemeral objects who might interrupt. Fortunately, this teacher uses the projection most for main headings and a great deal of illustration, while still talking ‘off-screen.’
We find out that Biogeography is in itself a somewhat marginalized facet of Geography, its subject matter often subsumed into other disciplines. (I rather like not starting in the mainstream, whatever that may be.) The books—Biogeography by Glen MacDonald and Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels—are appealing, new, and really why I signed up for this class. I had browsed the shelves in my first bookstore excursion and couldn’t quite put these out of mind. I’ve read William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England and the notion of “reading a landscape” appeals to me. My teacher [as yet nameless—haven’t decided if I should put in the names of my teachers] suggested this field urges us to “go out and look at the world,” while “looking for the clues to a place.” In the school travel blog, I found myself wishing I could have done this in Spain, tracing the history of trees and flowers, trying to sort out what might have been native, from the riot of life imported to Seville and Lisbon from the New World. I much envy Gary Nabhan’s ability to do this in his Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves—An American Naturalist in Italy . Maybe such ability is one reason I’m exploring Geography.
And so many other books by Nabhan I need to read:
Unnatural Landscapes: Tracking Invasive Species
Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine
Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food
Tequila: A Natural and Cultural History
So. I’m able to make a few connections.
8/23/10 First day of class. I was out late (playing Dungeons and Dragons), didn’t walk the dogs last night, so they were cranky this morning, my alarm wouldn’t reset so I had to reset the time to try to figure the right hour, no caffeine at home… Then I realized I’m a student, and didn’t need to shower or be presentable—I just had to find parking, put a ball cap on my morning hair, buy a cup of coffee, and get to class. I did.
Biogeography. This is a combined senior and grad level class. I like the teacher, though had a spurt of dread when he came in and plugged in his laptop, to begin his PowerPoint lecture. I’ve avoided ever using PowerPoint, not because it looks too hard, but because I dislike the way it pushes most teachers to a disengaged monotone, as if they had taught the class in making the slides, and the students in front of them were merely troublesome and ephemeral objects who might interrupt. Fortunately, this teacher uses the projection most for main headings and a great deal of illustration, while still talking ‘off-screen.’
We find out that Biogeography is in itself a somewhat marginalized facet of Geography, its subject matter often subsumed into other disciplines. (I rather like not starting in the mainstream, whatever that may be.) The books—Biogeography by Glen MacDonald and Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels—are appealing, new, and really why I signed up for this class. I had browsed the shelves in my first bookstore excursion and couldn’t quite put these out of mind. I’ve read William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England and the notion of “reading a landscape” appeals to me. My teacher [as yet nameless—haven’t decided if I should put in the names of my teachers] suggested this field urges us to “go out and look at the world,” while “looking for the clues to a place.” In the school travel blog, I found myself wishing I could have done this in Spain, tracing the history of trees and flowers, trying to sort out what might have been native, from the riot of life imported to Seville and Lisbon from the New World. I much envy Gary Nabhan’s ability to do this in his Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves—An American Naturalist in Italy . Maybe such ability is one reason I’m exploring Geography.
And so many other books by Nabhan I need to read:
Unnatural Landscapes: Tracking Invasive Species
Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine
Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food
Tequila: A Natural and Cultural History
So. I’m able to make a few connections.
Learning Curve
On Sunday, Aug 15, I got an email formally admitting me to the Masters program in Geography at UMC. On Friday, I registered for my first two classes. None of this should be at all unusual, except that I have absolutely no formal background in Geography, I applied to the program 6 months past the deadline, without GRE scores from this century, and I’m an English teacher, across town from the University. And I’m 54.
There were more than a few glitches along the way getting admitted, getting letters, and so on, which I can spin out as anecdotes for friends. But my purpose here is more to trace and reflect on what it means to be an older student, while starting a completely new academic discipline. I expect a steep learning curve [ah, I initially mis-typed ‘curve’ as ‘curse’—perhaps Freud knew a few things about how we think]. I am most anxious about the technical side of contemporary Geography, where young technicians gleefully focus on ‘remote-sensing systems’ and satellite imagery with a precision that would make any anti-terrorist drone pilot confident.
I know none of the technical side, nor even the details of the sophomore mapping science class. My academic specialty is 20th Century poetry. I don’t think I mentioned poetry at all in my Statement of Purpose essay to the MU Geography Department, perhaps believing that “poetry,” taken seriously, would finally be the factor that would make these new profs shake their heads and turn away. So, my hidden dark side—the Humanities.
Why Geography? I do have an interest in learning and teaching human cultures, and I have a stronger interest in the environment. I teach courses involving these now, but there’s always that line where others seem to doubt my confidence and credentials when I veer this far from English.
But I’ve started this new program. Two classes—Geographic Thought (Wed 4-7) and Biogeography (M-W-F 9 am.) The 9 am may kill me. I still teach Tues-Thur evening classes, 5-10 pm, and an ESOL class 1-3:20 TR. And the 3 online classes… And 5 new courses to teach in October.
We’ll see what happens.
On Sunday, Aug 15, I got an email formally admitting me to the Masters program in Geography at UMC. On Friday, I registered for my first two classes. None of this should be at all unusual, except that I have absolutely no formal background in Geography, I applied to the program 6 months past the deadline, without GRE scores from this century, and I’m an English teacher, across town from the University. And I’m 54.
There were more than a few glitches along the way getting admitted, getting letters, and so on, which I can spin out as anecdotes for friends. But my purpose here is more to trace and reflect on what it means to be an older student, while starting a completely new academic discipline. I expect a steep learning curve [ah, I initially mis-typed ‘curve’ as ‘curse’—perhaps Freud knew a few things about how we think]. I am most anxious about the technical side of contemporary Geography, where young technicians gleefully focus on ‘remote-sensing systems’ and satellite imagery with a precision that would make any anti-terrorist drone pilot confident.
I know none of the technical side, nor even the details of the sophomore mapping science class. My academic specialty is 20th Century poetry. I don’t think I mentioned poetry at all in my Statement of Purpose essay to the MU Geography Department, perhaps believing that “poetry,” taken seriously, would finally be the factor that would make these new profs shake their heads and turn away. So, my hidden dark side—the Humanities.
Why Geography? I do have an interest in learning and teaching human cultures, and I have a stronger interest in the environment. I teach courses involving these now, but there’s always that line where others seem to doubt my confidence and credentials when I veer this far from English.
But I’ve started this new program. Two classes—Geographic Thought (Wed 4-7) and Biogeography (M-W-F 9 am.) The 9 am may kill me. I still teach Tues-Thur evening classes, 5-10 pm, and an ESOL class 1-3:20 TR. And the 3 online classes… And 5 new courses to teach in October.
We’ll see what happens.
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