Back to work

And onwards! After a little Shanghai downtime, it's back to Beijing, this time for an international (Sino-Hibernian!) symposium. I'll be back on Thursday; if there are no updates in the meantime, assume I'm rapturously absorbed in questions of "Art and Spirituality, East and West."

Back to Australia for the boys

They're on their way home, after 12 days of China. What fun we've had!

Shanghai for boys IV

Back in Shanghai we confirmed that here the smiley-face is reserved for Excellent; back in Beijing the Satisfactory  face was already smiling in relief. We also went to the museum and emporium at the base of the Oriental Pearl Tower long enough for it to be night and spectacular light shows all around when we resurfaced!

Yanghshuo for boys II

The twenty-thousand kaarst formations around Guilin/Yangshuo are too numerous to name, we heard, except for this one, Moon Rock 月亮山. Fifty meters high, from different stages along the 800-step ascent if appears a crescent and a half moon, and from afar it appears round! As for the view from its strange stalactity eye, look for yourself!

Yangshuo for boys I

Today we traveled along the 漓江 Li River between 桂林 Guilin and 阳朔 Yangshuo, one of the great sights of China. (The pic above is from close to where the 20 RMB bill depicts, a place we passed through, too.)

We were part of a posse of "bamboo rafts" (plastic in bamboo shape) which were more like go-carts, zipping along the river surface with noisy little motors: I dare say the boys loved it! The grown-ups were amazed at the lush foliage covering all but the sheerest of the limestone cliffs. Tomorrow we cycle along a tributary before heading back to Shanghai.

Onward, boys

And... we've left the megacities behind. We're  surrounded by Seussian kaarst wonders in Yangshuo, in the famous region of Guilin, three flying hours' south from Beijing. Better pictures will perhaps arrive, though it's already clear that this is not an easy landscape to (a) stop taking pictures of, and (b) take pictures of. One reason is that there are so many of them that you practically need to be moving to let them dance for you. Tomorrow we'll watch the dance from a (faux) bamboo raft on the Li River, and Wednesday from bicycles. Nice change of pace!

Why are you having us do this now?

Between excursions with my nephews, sister and parents, I managed to cobble together an application for a seminar for faculty from different schools across the NYC area committed to defending and deepening liberal arts general education for students in every kind of school. Whether I'll be accepted I don't know, but it was enjoyable to fill in the application. One of its questions was

What would you say is the most significant thing about teaching that you have learned from doing it? What did you experience that helped you realize this?

After some reflection I decided to answer this way:  
 
It is a cliché that the teacher learns as much from teaching as her students do. What I think I have learned is that there are ways that sharing this experience with students deepens their commitment to learning, and to teaching themselves and others. Part of this presenting oneself as a fellow learner, something I am aware is easier as I get older – and easier for someone who “looks like a professor” (white male). It is something I have largely learned from the transition from teaching at Princeton (mostly lectures) to teaching at Eugene Lang College (almost all seminars), and learned from my students here. I offer two illustrations.

1. From Lang students I learned to give real reasons for why were were reading/doing what we were doing in a course – at Princeton, students assumed I was an authority but at The New School students aren’t interested in authority or authoritative reasons (such as “this is what everyone’s reading” or even “this is what the most scholarly/experimental/progressive/etc. people are reading”) but in something more situational: why are you having us do this now? After initial deer-in-the-headlights experiences in the face of such questions (which I initially mistook for an unwillingness to learn) I’ve learned to anticipate and even encourage them. I now routinely ask students “Why do you think we read this? Why didn’t we read this before that other thing? Should we have read it before? What else might we have read? What do other people read?” The result of this isn't (or intends not to be) skepticism for skepticism’s sake but a sense that knowledge is generated, transferred, reformed, challenged, extended by people like them – along with standards, methods, and values (what matters?). Students should feel they can be part of the generation of knowledge, a business individual but also collective and social.

2. When I first switched from lecturing to seminar teaching, I essentially brought fully prepared lectures to class and tried to coax students into giving them through Socratic questions. When students’ answers weren’t what I was after I cut them off to get back to my notes. But after some time things began to change. Students’ answers would be unexpected and unexpectedly interesting and, since our class sessions are long (100 minutes), I would let discussion go where it listeth… sometimes at the expense of what I had planned. Other times the class discussion found its way to the main issues I was planning to cover, but in a different sequence than I had planned. As a result my course preparation has changed. I no longer bring a flowchart of the discussion I want us to have but a list of topics to cover/passages to focus on/activities to do. I let the class discussion wend its way between them. Often I will put an abbreviated list of topics on the board; when we get to the fourth thing on the list before the third (for example) I’ll draw arrows indicating the change. Students may initially find this odd but soon grasp (I trust!) that I understand my responsibility as facilitator as thinking about the whole discussion as it unfolds and letting it build its own momentum and direction – while not just letting it “free-flow” any old where (a common student complaint in seminar discussions). At some point I’ll make sure to tell students what I’m doing and why. If I’m surprised or even delighted at the unexpected way we’ve ended up somewhere I’ll say so, and that that’s one reason I’m so happy to teach in a seminar college. Depending on the students, I might also level with them when a connection I thought would flow doesn’t (perhaps not until the next class) and offer them my guess as to what went wrong/why that didn’t work in this setting. The point is never to fault people for trying to understand things in their own way (unless they’ve slacked in preparation, etc.) but to get them to understand and, in a way, share the work of teaching. Increasingly I have been asking students to imagine syllabi as a way to encourage them to think like teachers – and ask them, and have them ask each other, the why are you having us do this now? questions.

I am aware also that this form of teaching is not appropriate for all students, or not for students at every stage of development. The meandering discussion frustrates some students, who pine for the lecture-disguised-as-a-discussion; it is also true that it is not easy to take notes in such a learning environment, and difficult to retain the connections and discoveries of the discussion. Further, a welter of interpretations of what’s important can produce a nihilistic paralysis in some earnest students which disguises itself as relativist laissez-faire; to less motivated students it seems to countenance know-nothingism. The “who decides?” questions must be carefully deployed, and are perhaps best saved until students feel they are able, or are on their way to being able, to participate in the making of knowledge, of deciding what is important, in this learning community setting, and, if only potentially, beyond it.

Beijing for boys III

 

We went outside Beijing today on what turned out to be a perfect day for it - heavy rain overnight had scrubbed the air clean, making for great visibility. Our destination was the 慕田峪 Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, and what a destination it is! The steep mountainside was dotted with blooming cherry trees, the gentle snow of whose petals was joined by a few big-blooming snowflakes. Otherworldly, hyperreal!

Beijing for boys II

It was great fun to return to the Temple of Heaven with my family, part of a day which began at a Holiland bakery and ended at the Sichuan restaurant next door to our hutong-hostel, and which also included ribbon-dancing in Tiantan Park, pedal-boating at Houhai Lakes, the Drum Tower. Tomorrow it's the Wall!

Beijing for boys I

The boys' first Beijing day was grand, too - grand in the classic manner. We went to that big square and that vast imperial palace, something to do with a forbidden city. It's still early Spring up here so we were treated to cherries, forsythia, blooming quince, lilacs, judastrees and magnolias. The weather was warm, the sun even sometimes piercing the haze (which you can see in the cupola of the not-very-high round pavilion in the Imperial Gardens, above). And amazingly one never tires of courtyards of glazed-brick halls, provided they're all, well, grand!

Onward, boys

And we're off! Just shy of five hours on the fastest bullet train and Shanghai's just a blur. (One of my nephews kept tabs on the speed and found that while we were usually going 302km/hr the average for most of the trip was slightly under 300 as we slowed to the low 290s or even high 280s in curves.) We're in Beijing! Already spoiled by Shanghai we were a little aghast that the Beijing subway has smaller and rattly and doesn't have escalators in every exit. But once we found our way to our little converted hutong-hostel/hotel, Beijing had begun to win us over. The enormous avenues are balanced by the wonky three-wheeled mini-taxis on the sidewalks, as the oversized buildings are by the entirely human-scaled hutong districts. Ready for Forbidden City?

Shanghai for boys II, III

Days 2 and 3 in Shanghai have unfolded beautifully, despite the fact that 2 was rainy and cold. We spent the day doing Chinese (boys asked for another lesson!), getting to know the Shanghai Metro, exploring the Urban Planning Center, with its huge scale model of Shanghai 2020-as-envisioned-in-2010, navigating the newly reopened Shanghai Station to buy rail tickets for Beijing, marveling at an emporium near the station which will furnish eyeglasses and lenses carved in 20 minutes for $30 if you bargain (which my sister can), and finally having our first hotpot. Did I mention there was a foosball table in the Urban Planning place?
Day 3, by contrast, was warm and bright. If Day 2 offered the somewhat overwhelming scale of the city, Day 3 took us through a well-worn circuit guaranteed to generate wows. We started at the endlessly varied and diverting Yuyuan Garden, pushed our way through the touts to the Bund and a ferry to Pudong, then walked along the base of the tallest buildings to the ICF Mall, on the 52nd floor of whose Ritz Carlton is a bar with staggering views, then past the Oriental Pearl Tower and through the pointlessly pointless Bund Tourist Tunnel to find that the Bund's palaces of imperial capitalism , which seem mere model railroad props from the Ritz, are in fact very grand indeed, and finally down the neon wonderland of East Nanjing Road to meet one of my friends for dinner.

The boys enjoyed it all (especially climbing through rockeries and racing escalators). And as we made our way across the Huangpu River my sister started a refrain, the English versions of すごすぎる, beyond amazing. This is a pretty spectacular place I'm getting to spend a year!

The wows should continue over the next week as we head Thursday to Beijing and then onward to Guilin on Monday. As ever, though, travel means I can't promise I'll be able to access and maintain the blog. My Australians have found their China legs, however, and I'm sure we'll just go from strength to strength. There'll be much to tell!

Shanghai for boys I

Showing my nephews around Shanghai is lots of fun. They're seeing China for the first time, and Shanghai, but this is also their first big city with speedy subways, big crowds of people, etc., etc. Still, what they remember most probably will be the idea of one of my colleagues here who has boys of her own: badminton with two Chinese boys on the 22nd floor (of Fudan's tower), surpassed only, perhaps, by the faculty table tennis room on the 25th floor with a huge box of orange balls: why play with just one? Pachinko meets pingpong!

Crossings

Amazing what you can do these days - like track the progress of the flight on which your relatives are coming to visit you online, along with every plane aloft at the same time! (Here, and even cooler here.) And guess what they brought from Australia on this Easter Day: hot cross buns, a perhaps very awkward  也许非常别扭 fit with the green rice 青团 qingtuan of today's 清明 qingming (tomb-sweeping) festival...

Good Friday

Good Friday at Francis Xavier (董家渡) was, well, good. I've not been alert to Lent this year, beyond noticing Ash Wednesday ("so soon?") and Palm Sunday ("already?!"), so I was glad to have the chance to go tonight - hope to attend a Vigil tomorrow night, too. Dongjiadu hosts one of the international Catholic congregations so this was in English. The horror of the story being told was hard to escape, starting in Deutero-Isaiah, where God "is pleased" to condemn an innocent to suffering (53:10). John's Gospel with its many pedantic asides was read; there were many parts for the congregation, none of them edifying. Prayers for Pope and clergy, catechumens and church, Jews, those who don't know Christ or God, political leaders and the healing of the world, each accompanied be kneeling and a priestly blessing. Adoration of the Cross followed (I'm accustomed to the Episcopal Church's simple wooden cross, wasn't sure what to do with the statue of Jesus on the cross here), as the choir struggled with something like the Reproaches, and Communion from the reserve sacrament. The choir didn't know how to navigate the reaches of "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" but it didn't matter, suddenly my face was wet with tears. I'm there now.

Spring (continued!)

This is quite a long Spring we're enjoying here - I think I've been posting pictures of it for the last seven weeks at least! And still it feels early.... Before we know it, though, I'm sure everything will be in full leaf. These blooming cherry and judas trees are all on the Fudan campus.

すごすぎる

I think my Japanese friends had a very enjoyable first visit to Shanghai. Here, in strict chronological order, are some highlights of the trip.


Details of the Peace Hotel, the Bund, where they stayed

  

Flowers and a classic ride at Luxun Park

 

Neighborhood where early 20th C. Japanese-Chinese literati gathered

 

Scenes from Suzhou, including Hanshansi, a temple devoted to a poem about that temple, and home to what may be the world's biggest bell

Not included are scenes of assorted delicious meals (for which the hotpot below will have to stand in, along with the view at top from the window of a pricy place on the Bund). One of my friends studies early 20th century Chinese literature, and has come to China once before (to Dongbei!), also in search of traces of a time when China was an important part both of Japan's imperial ambitions and cultural self-understanding, so they sought out the site of the bookstore run by Uchiyama Kanzo, friend of Lu Xün, buildings at Jiaotong University built during the Japanese occupation, etc. If the reaction to Shanghai was that this recent history was 言い難い hard to talk about, Suzhou produced a different reaction again (a reminder that Shanghai is relatively easy for foreigners to digest). Outside 寒山寺 in Suzhou, named after a poet who wrote before writing arrived in Japan, she said that China's ancient history made her as a Japanese feel ばかばかしい like a provincial dolt. Her summary word for the trip was すごすぎる too great. Even without "world's top Xs" it is indeed a bit much, this China!

Stones of Suzhou

I don't even know what to call them, but Suzhou's signature openwork-window-screen-grille thingies are trippy to the point of delirium!

Values creep

The Core Values of Socialism 社会主义核心价值观, which I spotted all over Beijing, have come to Shanghai, a bit different in each district. The above I spotted Saturday in Honkou 虹口; the rather disconcerting one at left is from Xuhui 徐汇 (where they're just our values 我们的价值观).

We're The New School (again!)

So the New School has a new "visual identity," the third since I've been associated with the place. But it may be the first I like. (It's actually animated: see it here.) The team which put it together, working together with a celebrated logo-designer (MoMA, Metropolitan Opera, etc.), doesn't mention the New School visual identity of its first several decades - they do mention that the two lines recall the Joseph Urban building at 66 West 12th Street, echoed also in the new signature building - but there's clearly an influence. I appreciate that continuity.
This is part of a much broader visibility campaign. We're a "design-inspired, human-centered university" offering an "integrated, flexible and personalized" education, something conveyed by the fact that the custom-designed font - called (of course!) Neue - has three widths for each letter and an algorithm which determines which to use when. This makes for the endearingly wonky look (my words here, not the adminstration's!) while communicating that the divisions are related but distinct. E.g., Lang's and Parsons' As are different sizes. Kinda cool!