Opalescent

 On the Del Mar beach, some brownish foam... until you look closer.

 

Beautiful? Um, yes.

Newly schooled

At semester's end, what have I learned? People always say you learn as much from teaching as your students do, but in a seminar setting I think sometimes the seminar leader makes off like a bandit. For the first year seminar which just ended, it's a little hard to say who got/gave more.

There's a good reason for this: the last three weeks of the class were given over to the students, each of whom was charged with facilitating a "model seminar" on a timely topic of their choice. This means that the last class I "taught" was before Thanksgiving. (And even that one I didn't actually teach; the topic was Sekou Sundiata's "research to performance" method and discussion was led by one of his students.) And the point throughout the semester had been that The New School has always been an asylum run by the inmates, defying received notions of what's worth knowing and how to teach it to engage the challenges of each new day - and throwing ideas of professorial authority to the winds in the process. Remember that discussion about who's best positioned to know what folks need to know today, where faculty weren't even considered?!

I've told you a little about the topics of the model seminars, and the picture of what's worth knowing they implied. But I hadn't at that point received the students' final work, a 5-7 page reflection on the process.

Most of these have been extraordinarily thoughtful, and confirmed that this was a good way to wrap up the semester. Students fretted about their own seminars, told how they'd kept to or departed from their plans, how their classmates had or had not said what they thought they would, and what they'd admired in other students' seminars. Many had never thought about leading a seminar - or about what's actually happening in a seminar discussion - before. Some described paying a new kind of attention to what was going on in in all their classes; all, I dare say, now know what it means to say that a seminar is co-created by everyone present, and will be more engaged in their classes in future. Learning by doing! We've got seminar learning down cold!

Or do we? I have to say I was struck (and a little nonplussed) at just how much discussion the students included in their 20 minute plans, and how little time they devoted to sharing new information with their fellows. Only half assigned material in preparation for their session (I'd told them they could assign up to 5 pages of reading, 10 minutes of video or 15 minutes of a writing assignment), and perhaps knew better than to assume the class had done it. In the seminars themselves a few had minimal powerpoints, only one used the board, none had informational handouts. Instead we had many activities asking everyone to do something (define art, complete a sentence, correct a grammatically questionable sentence, draw something) and share it with the class, and lots of discussion of open-ended questions. I worried that I had gone too far in extolling the wonders of seminar learning, as if everything worth knowing would emerge spontaneously and completely from a discussion even if nobody in the discussion knew much about the topic at hand.

But then it was my turn to learn. Reading the students' reflective accounts of the choices they had made in setting up their model seminars, I found out what was really going on. Engaging the class in enjoyable discussion was the aim, "teaching" secondary if not indeed rejected. They had not forgotten about content. These days you can find most content in seconds from your smart phone once you know about it and know why it's interesting - and if you're not interested, you won't remember what people have told you anyway! They were striving for what you can't get online: encountering the variety of their classmates' perspectives, and the multifaceted view of things which emerged when these diverse points of view interacted with each other.

L, one of the students (her topic was Fluxus, an anti/art movement which emerged out of John Cage's lectures at The New School), described what was going on with great eloquence:

The topic of a seminar is like the foundation layer of a house. It plays a large role in determining how smoothly the seminar goes and how well it works. Obviously, some topics open up a lot more conversation than others. To me, a seminar should be less about getting out facts to the people who are participating, and more about getting to hear what everyone thinks on the subject. So perhaps the walls of the “seminar house” would be the people involved and what they contribute. To be a true, well-functioning seminar, intriguing conversation must happen. Conversation amongst the group is such a key part of this type of learning process. I suppose that the roof would be me, the leader, making sure that the seminar is contained and does not stray too far from the topic. The person running the seminar must also try to be sure that everyone is getting something out of it, something that can be difficult. Finally, the paint on the walls of the house, the furniture inside, the fence around the house, all the aesthetic details, are the visuals used during a seminar to help relay information. I say this because in no way should the visual of the seminar be the focal point or the most important thing, even in a topic about visual art.

My notion of a seminar - a round table with a text at the center - suddenly seems very, well, old school. Thanks, class, for all you've taught me, and for the hope you give me for the ever-new New School!

In the pink

Even with a cellphone camera panorama... wow.

California winter

El Niño-inspired surf has scoured the Del Mar beach of more sand than usual. In one place, just below the Power Station, it left a layer of fine black sand (not quite as dark as this picture suggests). It makes for great sand castling, as an enterprising family of semi-professional builders showed.

Live on air

Hey, what fun - there's free wifi onboard! And so although the Flight Map is down, I can follow our progress through the website Flight Aware. (I often use it to follow the travels of people I care about.) I just discovered that there's a way to overlay all other flights in the air. Wow!

Flyover

Winter break travel's first leg (actually from JFK)! On to Shanghai Jan 3.

Season's greetings

Thanks

to the Los Angeles Times, whose caption reads:

Ever new

So Final Syntheses have come and gone. It's always a moving experience, even when you take into account the pretty-much obligatory "I got a lot out of this class" business. Lang students aren't shy about criticism, though - nor about sharing what really matters to them. The generosity and vulnerability can be overwhelming. And, given the opportunity to express themselves in "a medium that matters to you," they do some pretty cool stuff. Often personal, I can't share most of them. In a way it's nobody's business but the members of the respective class, and part of the joy of these final sessions is feeling the commitment students demonstrate, one last time, to the collective enterprise we've been engaged in, to the community of learning.

I can, however, tell you about my final reflections (which I always do, and share). I'll save the Theorizing Religion reflection for another day - it's about the consequences of making "religion making" the frame of the course, and how to make the class a welcoming place both for prior learning and for concerns in other disciplines and vocations than the academic study of religion. I'll tell you instead about the first year seminar which offered a survey of New School history and devoted its final fourth to "model seminars." A reminder of the course description...

Because the "model seminar" preparation process began before Thanksgiving, the actual coursework of the class seems like a distant memory. (The student whose final reflection I post above provided a welcome reminder of the variety of things we read.) Instead we were treated to seminars on a remarkable range of subjects:

Urban Campus vs College Town • Fluxus • Education for Syrian Refugees • Black Mountain College • MOOCs • Health Crazes • What is Safe Space • The Kim Kardashian Effect • Grading Systems • The Value of Liberal Arts • Educational Access for Girls • Priorities and Life Balance • The Museum of Feelings • Learning from Popular Music • Dress Codes

There were a few connections to what we'd done together - Fluxus from Cage, Black Mountain College as an echo of New School experiments, Frank Alvah Parsons' ideas on art and advertising, various discussions around education - but not that many. There weren't supposed to be. The choice of topic was to reflect students' sense of "the urgent demands of now," or at least something they wanted to share with their classmates. They were interested in each other's choices, too.

As my Final Synthesis I reminded the class of our inconclusive discussion, in connection with the New School College experiment, about who was in the best position to know what an education should offer. The New School tradition suggests that received curricula and disciplines should be scrutinized, that the ever new constellations of social and cultural life demand ever new courses and formats. What's needful for first year college students now? Our discussion was inconclusive because the class came up with arguments for - but even stronger arguments against - entrusting the First Year Curriculum to graduating seniors, to sophomores, to students who'd chosen majors, to recent and not so recent alums... (That faculty in fact make these decisions didn't come up!) At that I suggested that, as they navigated our "open curriculum," they consult as many and and as many kinds of people as possible.

Today I suggested that we might learn from ourselves. What did the topics they had chosen suggest a relevant Lang First Year Curriculum in 2015 might look like? They seemed quite taken by my suggestion:

Art, Values and the Market

Equity: Local and Global

Learning from Popular Culture

Self-Care

What do you think?

Seeing through itching

A text I'm considering for next semester's course on Job and the arts is Hanoch Levin's Sorrows of Job (1981). Even in translation it sings/stings.

Later on it gets very very dark. Trans. Barbara Harshaw in Modern Israeli Drama in Translation, ed. Michael Taub (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993), 23

Semester's end

Today saw the penultimate sessions of my classes, with discussion of "non-exclusive identity," white supremacy and the once and future category of religion in Theorizing Religion, four final student-led "model seminars" in Seminar in the City. Everyone feels a little played-out this 

late in the semester; tyou might think there's nothing left to do but say goodbye. But (surprising even myself, a little) I have high hopes for the alchemy of "Final Syntheses," both for individual learners (I always do one too) and for the class as a whole. Wednesday it all comes together!

Advent 3

The world, said a visiting preacher in church this morning at the end of her sermon, is too dangerous for anything but truth, and too big for anything but love. That's a quotation, the internet instructs me, from William Sloane Coffin, but it spoke powerfully to my feelings about the present moment.

Others, too, sense a gathering of clouds of war, a big one, whether in the proto-WW1-like conflicts on the margins of empires or the proto-WW2-like rise of near-fascist political movements. I quail at the thought that one of those hundreds of millions of guns making sport of our national security will be misused in a way which sets off an avalanche.

I'm thinking of some vigilante Islamophobe, not of the police in their continued murder of young men of color. But that may be because, while in Shanghai, I missed another avalanche. The year I was away seems to have been an epochal year for America, one in which the dream - "the Dream," Martin Luther King's dream, the "arc of justice" dream - died, or nearly. Can we do this? Have we the will?

Even in this unseasonable warmth - New York came close to hitting the high set for this day in 1925 today - the darkness of the season gets to you. The detritus of a year's getting and spending starts to block your view, even of yourself. Hope seems harder to maintain, more clearly a theological gift, a grace.

Light another candle. Maranatha, come Lord Jesus.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden, snowless December

'Tis the season

The tree has gone up outside the Washington Square Arch. But in this unseasonably warm year, where it still feels like Fall, this tree-within-a-leaf, still green months after I picked it up, seems more suitable.

Into the Wilderness

I lost a favorite scarf tonight - grey and purple herringbone, perfect with my red-lined charcoal peacoat - but I find I don't mind. It seems like a price worth having paid for being able to see the two Thornton Wilder one-acts on the way to which the scarf must have slipped from my shoulders. The plays were "The Long Christmas Dinner" and "Pullman Car Hiawatha" (both published in 1931), and Peccadillo Theater's evening at the Theater at St. Clement's was called "A Wilder Christmas."

The first does indeed take place on Christmas Day - indeed, on Christmas Day over ninety years: we see several generations of a family appear and pass on, the ritualized informalities of the family meal continuing through time, through joy and loss. As characters pass away the actors rise from the table and move through a portal at back stage left, usually wordlessly, as activity continues at the table. It's hard not to weep at the fatal inevitability of it, at the loneliness of the departing characters.

The second is less obviously Chistmassy but more, well, Christian. Among the things it's about is a soul's ascent into heaven, reluctant to leave the earth and protesting that it's "unfair" that she not have to be punished for her failings in this life. But it's also about this world of ourse in all its unremarked complexity and splendor: at one point the actors playing passengers in a train's sleeping car - their characters are almost all asleep - sit up and turn to look at the audience, which is put to work giving voice to the land being traversed. Audience members are given brief texts to read, as towns, as the weather, as a field full of hibernating gophers and fieldmice. A ghost of a workman killed in the building of a rail bridge being crossed appears and speaks (in German). The Stage Manager, the master of ceremonies readying for prime time in "Our Town" (1938), has everyone read their scripts at once, including the actors on the stage - this is the sound of the earth! Then it's joined by the sound of other planets, audience members given Tibetan singing bells to chime, and three young women dressed like something from Vaudeville representing the hours of the night, and philosophy. We were sitting in the front row, so surrounded. All were invited to sound together, a cosmic din.

And then, coup de théâtre on top of coup de théâtre, the black curtain behind the stylized train car opens to reveal a big open sky and an angel (actually an archangel, and the actor who plays the Pullman porter) atop some stairs, who comes slowly down (to music by Arvo Pärt) into the car full of sleeping passengers, for the woman who has died...

Describing it seems like doing it a disservice: it was so theatrical, so much the power, the magic, of live performance. (Why didn't we include this in "Religion & Theater"?) So I'll say no more - see it if you can, and I hope my staging spoilers won't spoil it. It's all very knowing, very "theatrical" - one is very aware of letting oneself be party to its telling artifice - so it might not.

I have a long history with Thornton Wilder - I sensed an affinity of sensibility long before I knew he was gay - and I vaguely recall reading the first of tonight's plays once upon a long time ago. Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey was the starting point for my "Problem of Evil" lecture course at Princeton, and something which has stayed with many students who took it. I directed a Wilder play at UWC long before that, "The Matchmaker," being already by that time a fan from his novels The Eighth Day and The Ides of March. I came late to his most famous works, "Our Town" and "The Skin of Our Teeth" (only the first of which I've even seen, in that splendid David Cromer production at Barrow Street in 2009). These last are most like the plays I just saw (it's impossible not to see tonight's one-acts as stepping stones toward them)... the magic is there already. So glad I got to see them. And in some strangely cheerful way resigned to the passing of my scarf. All things pass, but art, and love, remain. (The pictures are of the stage before the start of the first play, and after the end of the second.)

New Yorker cartoons

No, and yes.
(From December 7, p69; December 14, p65)

Chills

In the Guardian stunning aerial photographs by Daniel Beltrá of Greenland's glaciers in crisis. Unspeakable beauty, and calamity.

Art!!

Quite an artistic day we had in Philadelphia, starting with one of the city's famous murals (actually one of a pair, the other, in similar colors, faces it) made possible by the widespread rowhouse construction. But the highlight was the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a third of which we explored. Wonderful to rediscover PMA's splended medieval European collection, including this "Holy Kinship" (attributed to Matthäus Gutrecht the Younger) from around 1500. The Virgin Mary's (and so Jesus') extended family?! Mary's mother Anne married three times, dontcha know, with progeny (and of course husbands) each time. Overflowing with babies on their mothers' laps this is a Christianity unrecognizable to the religious imagination today, whether of the image is male Protestant Trinity or celibate Catholic saints. Ave Mariae!
And then the Monets, each a work pulsing with life. In the first I saw, a landscape on the isle of Saint Martin, you become aware that the wind you see playing in some tall grasses in the distance is also scudding clouds over your head, beyond your field of view. In others, colors morph as you watch from blue to a rose-tinted brown, or from pink and yellow to sun-spangled green, and green sea currents roil powerfully. (Photos, including the museum's, don't begin to do justice.) And in 1873's "The Sheltered Path," you find yourself hurrying to catch up with the man ahead of you, who's just turned - or is just about to turn - back, but in any case wants you ion that path with him. How can you not follow?

In parts of Prospect Park

Autumn still reigns!

Liquid illumination

Wondrous light show along the Schuylkill River walk in Philadelphia.

Brotherly love

My Chinese friend is heading back to Shanghai next week, so we went on a final trip out of town - to hang out with a friend in West Philadelphia. It's another world than this New York/Brooklyn one, and in not unappealing ways. Blocks of shambling Victorian houses, murals all over the place, walls full of Monet landscapes, and street cars, too! Details anon.