To Be in a Time of Higher Education

To wake up to your phone buzzing. To see your old friend’s name light up the screen. To not know what to say – again. To decide to go back to sleep. To hear your alarm sound an hour later. To know the importance of starting your work. To decide to get up.

To sit down at your exams. To know the quadratic formula. To know stoichiometry. To know Latin. To know how to draw the periodic table – from memory – in cursive. To feel your phone buzzing in your pocket. To not know how to respond to months of unspoken tension. To decide to deal with it later. To go to lab. To know how to create a chemical reaction. To hear the fire alarm. To know how to perform a fire drill.

To walk down the hall. To see the flyers overtaking the walls. To see the weekly times for chess club, debate, improv, and band. To see a poster for the biennial ‘how to take care of yourself and others’ elective workshop. To know the difference between the words biennial and biannual. To know the definition of the word elective. To know you have varsity cross country practice during the event.

To drag your feet as you walk home. To feel your shin splints with every step. To want to slow down. To be reminded of cross country. To pick up your pace. To balance your textbook in your hands. To walk past the crazy lady preaching about the state of our world, the crazy newlyweds arguing, the crazy children begging to play outside. To see the words on your page. To learn their meaning.

To take a detour from your normal route. To know it’s to avoid seeing your friend. To tell yourself it’s for the scenery. To realize you haven’t actually seen him there for a while. To briefly wonder why. To feel your shin splints again. To sigh. To regret taking the longer way home.

To tiredly push your front door shut. To be yelled at for slamming it. To flop on your bed. To check your phone. To read your school email first. To see an email entitled Sad News. To open it. To read your friend’s name. To not know how to respond. To think about his messages. To know you can’t respond anymore.

To go to a job interview the next morning. To be asked what your greatest challenge was and how you responded to it. To think of the Sad News. To know you wouldn’t be able to answer the second part of the question. To say learning how to draw the periodic table – from memory – in cursive. 

Process Notes:

In writing this, I pieced together aspects of some personal experiences I have had to construct a narrative that looks into the daily life of a student in higher education. I chose to focus on the term “higher education” in my title because I thought it provided the means for explaining the type of tension I was aiming to expose in my writing: although higher education is supposed to prepare us for the world in an advanced way, it often neglects educating students on fundamentally important aspects of life such as how to take care of yourself and others. This neglected subject is what I entitled the workshop that couldn’t be attended in my assignment. I found that to be the most direct indication in my writing of the issue I am discussing; thus, when reading over my piece I removed some lines further explaining everything that was felt regarding the workshop to leave space for the reader to consider what they might feel if they were presented with it. Throughout this assignment I aimed to emphasize the dichotomy between what is learned in school and what is left out and how this impacts how we see the world and can respond to challenges that we face. The only moment of communication comes at the end of the piece in the interview. I was inspired by the way in which Adnan in To Be In A Time Of War frequently portrays the tension between what one may want to say or do and what one actually says and does and how both of these parts together give a fuller understanding of someone’s standpoint. Thus, although the communication with and loss of one’s friend in this story is known to be the greatest challenge, it is not communicated because it is not something one learns how to address. Instead the illusion that what is taught in higher education does prepare us for all of our greatest challenges in life is reinforced in the eyes of the interviewer, but hopefully not in the eyes of the reader.

Keene begins with a writing style akin to historical textbooks, utilizing an impersonal, unemotional tone that he seems to criticize through subtle moments of irony. For instance, when Grace de L’Ecart is considering how she will deal with “mulattoes grown so presumptuous as to declare themselves on equal footing with their former masters” and is said to be willing to “weather it” (98) and when describing the convent’s estate as being on the grounds of “one of the region’s first white settlers” with the acknowledgement that it was also “partly constructed on the site on an Indian burial mound” (111) briefly thrown into the midst. The only personal glimpse we get into Carmel’s character is through her perplexing drawings until Keene departs from this narrative style into a section wherein Carmel’s diary entries are presented. This section poses a challenge for the reader in understanding what is being said through her various language transitions and adapted grammar. In creating this space, Keene seems to similarly emphasize Hartman’s belief that understanding lost voices is incredibly difficult, especially those that would be so differently constructed from the prose contrasted at the beginning and within our history books; this does not however mean it is unimportant. In the final section, Keene shifts into a first-person narrative of Carmel, wherein the reader finally gets a deeper understanding of Carmel’s unmuted reality. As Kat noted, this shift from her diary entries to her inner voice allows for the readers to confront the fact that Carmel cannot be fully realized until we can see her from her own perspective and not our own or others’ presumptions. She is only recognized by the other characters and readers as she vanishes at the end with the covenant, initially described as a “forget-me-not” (86) and now pronounced to be a scene that “reminded (her) nothing less of a forget-me-not” (158). This interestingly mimics Hartman’s point that such individuals are often “only visible in the moment of their disappearance” (12).  Lastly, I found it significant that Carmel gains power and a voice in the end when she is able to mute the voices of oppressive characters, which seems to say that for voices such as hers to be actualized, certain ones must be silent.

Writing Assignment:

Definition of “special education” from The Education for All Handicapped Children Act 94-142 enacted by the United States Congress in 1975: “The term ‘special education’ means specially designed instruction, at no cost to parents or guardians, to meet the unique needs of a handicapped child”

“10 years old!! Double digits!” Fortune’s mother squealed as she woke her daughter with a tight squeeze.

“Ahgg, you’re crushing me, Mom!” Fortune groaned as her mom released her grip, as of today she wasn’t a child anymore and wouldn’t be treated like one.

As she skidded into her classroom, Dalia and Felicity ran over, embracing her tightly. This time she chose to hug back.

“Ohmygosh! How does it feel to be ten?” the nine-year old girls eagerly questioned.

“It’s a whole new world, ladies” Fortune asserted with confidence, leaning back in her seat.

What was different though? …something. Where was Kennedy? It had just been his tenth birthday too and she wanted to celebrate! Was he the latest victim of the disappearing act that had taken Tristan, Portia, and that other boy who never said his name or really anything at all?

She found herself missing the outlandish doodles only he could make; self-assured grumbles letting the teacher know she was moving too quickly, something we would all agree on but never felt sure enough to say; and energetic hugs he would give out at recess. She wanted to hug him back, but guessed the adult world doesn’t allow for that.

“How was school today?” Her mother asked eagerly as she shut her front door.

“Eh, boring, quiet, normal, I guess.” Fortune replied as she plopped down on the sofa beside her. A brief pause filled the room, “…Kennedy wasn’t there. It’s like he just disappeared, and no one said anything about it.”

Her mother sighed, petting her head as she explained that the school was worried Kennedy was holding her class back, so he was getting the special help he needed in a school with other kids like him, with Tristan and Portia.

Fortune sat confused, wondering how taking away unique personalities could help her class learn more rather than less, if becoming an adult meant people who stood out had to be removed to an unseen world, if Kennedy chose to be able to hug only other special kids.  I guess there would be less distraction and rule-breaking? she puzzled.

Later that night she completed her homework: What does it mean to be 10?

1. I am an adult now.
2. So, I get to choose what I do, where I go, and who I hug every day!
3. But, I won’t get to do 1 & 2 if I don’t fit in.
4. And, I can’t have 1 & 2 if there are special people around.

When her teacher received Fortune’s paper her grin quickly turned to a frown, where could she have gotten such ideas? Surely, not from her education here.

Process Notes:

I decided to use the definition of “special education” from The Education for All Handicapped Children Act 94-142 enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1975. This definition has always stood out to me in the sense that I believe great harm can be done in segregating children with disabilities from “normal” children, often perpetuating rather than solving discrimination. This was a challenging piece for me to write because at first glance I agree with and can see the good idealized by the creation of individualized special education schools, but I remember in my middle school when all of the students with disabilities that “stood out” were suddenly gone.  At that point, I remember naively and wrongly thinking that to succeed in the world, you had to fit in and those that didn’t were seen as people who would hold the rest of “us” back. I believe a great deal of attention should be paid mind to such removed students, but I found it interesting to show how this seemingly beneficial concept of “special education” that is said to be of “no cost to parents or guardians” has an unspoken cost on every student in the education system. In considering the tone of John Keene’s Counternarratives, I found that seeing the way the world shaped reality in the eyes of youth in characters such as Carmel and Eugénie was an engaging way to show how an innocent and naïve blank-slate view of the world can be contrasted with violent corruption. I aimed to show this contrast especially in describing the heavy concepts of stripping self-identity and autonomy from children with disabilities with the idea of them not being able to choose where they go to school, “who they hug,” who they can largely interact with, and show/get love for/from. I also included the nameless boy along with Tristan and Portia in thinking about Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts to show how the voices of these students with disabilities are often left unheard and forgotten as well. At the end I also attempted to show how the teacher herself was unaware of the harmful effects of her own schooling system on her students. Lastly, in thinking about unspoken meanings, I directly named the main character Fortune and her friends in school other names generally meaning “good luck” alongside naming the students removed from school names unknowingly to the reader related to misfortune or disorder, aiming to give an underlying narrative that the only thing that really separates the fates of these two groups is unjust, unacknowledged luck.

I found the combination of illustration with text in Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Sabrina to be especially intriguing in that it allowed Drnaso to alter the emotional perception of a scene by deciding for example which aspects of a frame are not depicted with as much detail and which colors are used in a panel to portray feeling rather than just the naturally expected shading. In daily life, our psychological states determine which aspects of the sights we see around us should stand out in detail, be left unfocused on, and be perceived as dull or vibrant due to how our personal experiences and expectations shape the world around us, but Drnaso takes on our mind’s work in Sabrina by showing us scenes through the lens of his own perception. As Kat noted, Drnaso’s minimalistic illustration style does seem to speak to how the news should display the truth: “in a black-and-white manner.” In considering this, the final dream Calvin has in Sabrina particularly stood out to me. This dream is illustrated in black-and-white, potentially representative of the idea of truth, yet Sabrina’s murderer is presented as a masked figure whose words are merely repeated phrases from various characters throughout the graphic novel rearranged to create his voice during an imagined conversation with Calvin.  This concept of past voices of others, even of oneself as Calvin’s words are spoken by the dream attacker, falsely constructing a present “black-and-white” reality of the murderer’s identity, and in turn masking the potential for seeing any truth, stood out to me as a final marker for displaying the terrifying capability for false narratives to both become and conceal the truth.

Meme: https://memeguy.com/photo/335253/toxic-relationship

Writing Assignment:

As I looked at my reflection, I didn’t recognize the sickened girl before me. Her brown eyes now red and swollen, her soft skin now slick with sweat and dotted with hives, her stable hands once admired for their grace at the piano now trembling frenziedly.

I thought of him while I slept.

The words of affection framed by his charming smile. The spit flying from his roaring mouth.

The thoughtful flowers he gave me. The shattered vase he gave me.

The beautiful necklace he put around my neck. The violent hands he put around my neck.

Beauty. Violence.

Scientists say dreams are meant to help us sort through complicated feelings, but my brain couldn’t seem to do that when it considered him.

RING RING RING. I awoke from my confusion to the sound of my phone. Saved by the cell.

When I picked up, my friend’s troubled voice poured out from the other end as she tried to console me about the boy I thought I had loved but had now left.

“You know, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince” she concluded.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of middle school biology as I hung up, her words still settling in. I recalled our survival unit and the alluring images of vibrant, brilliantly patterned frogs, the ones most likely to attract you and to harm you.

He came to mind.

I recalled the images of individuals infected with their poison, swollen eyes, drenched in sweat, covered in bumps, and plagued by tremors.

The girl in my mirror came to mind.

Still exhausted from the night before, I fell back asleep.

I thought of him while I slept.

His welcoming bright white grin. The poison frog’s welcoming bright yellow skin.

My sickness from getting too close to him. The infection from getting too close to a dart frog.

The fairytale of the princess and the frog. The survival guide to toxic animals.

Scientists say dreams are meant to help us sort through complicated feelings.

As I awoke, I thought: if only I had been armed with something other than romanticized fairytales, with a survival guide to interacting with human and not just frogs.

I could have known which ones not to kiss.

I could have understood that some of the most entrancing ones are prepared to harm you.

I could have never been poisoned.

Process Notes:

The meme I picked made me consider the idea of how fairytales are largely the only medium that children interact with when learning about romantic relationships with others. In this meme there is a depiction of a princess gazing at a brightly colored frog, then kissing it, and ultimately collapsing as she has unknowingly been infected with its poison. The idea of a princess “picking the wrong frog” is never addressed in fairytales and while schools teach young children about interacting with dangerous animals in nature they tend to not teach about interacting with dangerous people. I wrote a narrative about someone who recently removed themselves from a toxic partner and is reflecting on the idea that if only they had been told about the potential for stories such as the one in this meme they could’ve avoided a great deal of pain. I thought it was interesting to show how this at first glance humorous meme could have serious undertones. Also, in thinking about the graphic novels from this week, I played with the idea of picking a few moments over the course of a few days, similar to panels, rather than writing out every moment over time to see how cohesively and completely I could represent time passing during this story in doing so. Following that, I considered the idea of whatever you are reading at the moment being “the present” in taking the same thought pattern at the beginning and end of the narrative with different conclusions being made about it later and the initial conclusions eventually becoming a part of the past.

In Walter Lippmann’s Liberty and the News, as he describes the press “snooping at keyholes” I pondered Sartre’s concept of “The Look,” which here places reporters in a position of transcendence, agency, and the rest of us in a position of immanence, passively having meaning projected upon us. However, humans do not tend to thrive in positions of immanence and so Lippmann allows for us to gain some much-needed transcendence by “looking back through the keyhole” and impressing meaning on the reporters themselves.

As Allison brought up, reporters and institutions practice a “destructive form of untruth,” producing sophistry and propaganda to position themselves in a “good light” and as Lippmann notes, abiding by confirmation bias. In response, I agree with Lippmann’s call for language training to be necessitated for reporters. However, in continuing to give readers the agency to “look back at” reporters, I would consider the education that “makes men masters of their vocabulary” a central interest of liberty for all people, and that this type of schooling can “transform the dispute into debate” chiefly when both reporters and non-reporters can take part in it. Lippmann points out that “it is difficult to decide just what reporting is,” so how can readers examine the press without any emphasized language training themselves.

Language education is severely lacking in the modern world, which speaks to the type of shared ignorance Lippmann notes from which we all suffer. This piece largely led me to the conclusion that once language training is emphasized in a way that allows people to understand the power of words and means of liberty within them, free speech will not be plagued by “a mere contest of opinion” but will allow for a more accessible, equitable, and open form of communication in both reporting and public debate.

Revised First Description:

The talking stick bears a dimension that is roughly the stretch of a matured individual’s arm, the willowy cylinder of its physique culminating in a swollen sphere at its head akin to a clamped fist contesting towards the sky when raised. Yet, when elevated, it commands more potent attention to itself than what it is parallel to. From the outstretched fist being perceived to the talking stick. Must we change the construction of an object meant to command respect so that communication regains its utility?  As I confront this tool intentioned to designate control, instead a feeling of defenselessness devastates me. A feebleness forged in the face of a failure to uphold equitable dialogue in its humblest form, from inside ourselves and our own limbs rather than within an instrument constructed by the hand it is meant to replace the occupation of.

Its body is dressed in minuscule beads, each of which on its own could be cleared off a table in the manner of dust, but when arranged together demand recognition. The dyes of each bead, largely unseen to the eye when isolated, become both clear and vibrant in their harmony while the significances meant to be embodied by each shade emerge. Further, the unity of these beads is stabilized by a core fragment of wood. In considering this form, the structure of human society is shouted to mind, with the lone technique of perceiving meaning and understanding in one individual necessitating seeing the entire crowd while perceiving that of the entire crowd demanding bringing together all characters along our shared roots.

In ultimately realizing the outsized globe capping the head of the stick, the most arduous aspect of nourishing communication is spoken: although the core wood of our collective roots and the myriad of beads and colors of our divergent opinions must constitute the build of conversation, a leading spearhead seems to still be obligatory to finalize the object’s true form. Yet, the talking stick resists the scepter in that it is not itself unless it is spread from hand to hand, permitting influence to be held by and instilled in all and any who grasp it.

Perhaps this device need not then be condemned for its substitution of the up-stretched arm, but rather should be realized as an impermanent, yet crucial tool with the resolve to retrain our sense of how that which it mimics should be utilized most constructively in communication.

Re-written Description:

The talking stick could be said to resemble the raised hand, calling for attention, or perhaps the elevated scepter, silently commanding authority, yet it is neither, so what makes it itself? Further, what constructs the purpose of “talking” in this object – what transforms the humble fragment of wood at its core, an object which is constantly existing around us yet often unnoticed, into a tool?

It is in essence a device of allowance, a stick which intends to permit conversation to unfold in a fruitful, equitable method. The natural wood is thus dressed in a particular manner to command this effect, just as the fleshy body of a person can suddenly give off the effect of authority imaginably through the adornment of a crisp suit. Beads so small that they are almost indistinguishable making up segments of unified, vibrant colors are what the talking stick wears to work each day, topped with a dark, globular mass of a hat. This human-made arrangement on the naturally born form of wood seems to speak to its societal purpose, to what we see that we can impress upon the natural world so that our human world can function.

The bulbous sphere at the head of the stick is what foremost grips my attention, acting as the core of the object’s meaning even in the face of the wood being the core and origination of the object’s physical form. Its dark and heavy mass fills me with a mixture of admiration and fear, in imagining the hand that grips it lifted towards the sky this orb would shout for enlightened conversation, but if that same hand were to throw it down, it could become a weapon.

Although the hand which seizes this object could alter its reality, on its own it seems to aim towards the upward motion of non-violent, tolerant interaction.  I say this in considering its base, a cylinder adorned with the aforementioned beads.  Each bead is small and ordinarily unseen on its own, as our own voices are when we do not bring them into conversation with others. Following that, although the similarities in the beads’ structure allows them to form a clear image when arranged together, it also allows their differences to appear, with divergent colors meant to represent distinctive values adorning the finalized talking stick.

Thus, in considering this object as a whole, it seems to be structured in a way that represents its purpose of promoting productive conversation. A foundation of strength in unity being instantiated in recognizing both our differences and similarities when we come together can be uncovered in the arrangement of the beads, which uplifts the mass of leadership at its crown, pleading for it to remain uplifted and non-violent in its use and exchange.

Process Notes:

When I first glanced at the directions of this assignment, I was confused and under the false assumption that my perspective of my chosen object would not be drastically altered over such a process. While I did come into this in alignment with the shared belief and “vertigo” mentioned in Exactitude that the “possible variants and alternatives” in relation to an argument give me a certain anxiety about what I choose to include and leave out in conversations and descriptions, I had not fully considered the importance of how emphasizing certain parts of an object above others can truly transform essential opinion. After reading Mr. Palomar, I decided to put into practice the act of closing my eyes and looking at the object anew various times throughout my writing, and, in doing so, I noticed a dramatic shift across my revision and re-writing.

Chiefly, I noticed that I without hesitation approached the analysis of the object from opposite standpoints than I had started with in my final re-written description. In considering my object of choice, a talking stick – speaking to my desired goal of discussing how we can better educate ourselves on healthy communication, I first analyzed it from the bottom of the stick up and from analyzing the outside decoration and how it clings to the internal structure, yet in my re-write I transitioned to describing it from its head to its tail and its internal wood to the external decoration that dresses it. The transformation of order in how I addressed these same relationships allowed me to discover potential functions and feelings that the object could produce that I had not originally been aware of.

Following that, I also noticed that in my re-write instead of focusing more so on the similarities between my object and alike others to define it, I began focusing on the dissimilarities between my object and those akin to it which make it uniquely what it is. This reminded me of the discussion concerning Musil in Exactitude in which he is said to have considered how particular ideas or solutions can be brought together to form a general idea or solution. By acknowledging how parts of my object relate to particular shared aspects of other known objects, I could at first give a general understanding of what I was discussing, but in the rewrite I found the importance of pointing out differences from known particular concepts in defining my object so that it could be seen as distinctive.

Lastly, I was in admiration of the way in which William Carlos Williams breathed life into the “inanimate” crimson cyclamen in this week’s reading and felt as though it was easier for me to connect with this object when its description shared qualities that I can or do bear myself as a person. Thus, I attempted to give human-like character and occupation to my object to gain a deeper personal insight into its workings, but I found it difficult to assign meaning to something that cannot speak for itself.  However, in taking a class on The Myth of Reality this term, I have learned the importance of understanding that each of our own realities is based on biased perspective and experience and although not necessarily universal is still a reality; when I embraced this concept and the notion that my description is true, “real,” and “exact” even in the face of it perhaps not coinciding with some universal definition, the anxiety I had experienced throughout this assignment seemed to fade.