Little Gray Cells

One of the reasons I love mysteries—at least the classical, cerebral whodunits of writers like Agatha Christie and Rex Stout—is that they employ the intelligence not only of the detectives doing the sleuthing, but also that of the reader or viewer. Nero Wolfe, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple all solve mysteries using various kinds of intelligence and wisdom, and don’t depend so much on sensation as intrigue for plot lines. Good puzzles to be solved are their mainstays—not gruesomeness, or, when there is, it’s usually suggested rather than described in gory detail.

It was with some amusement, therefore that I watched the two most recent Hercule Poirot episodes Sunday night on Masterpiece Mystery—right after watching a silly and rather gratuitous story reported by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes about the latest "mind-reading" advances in neuroscience. The claim, according to the blurb on the program's website, is that "Neuroscience has learned so much about how we think and the brain activity linked to certain thoughts that it is now possible - on a very basic scale - to read a person's mind."

The research reported, on scanning brains to locate certain kinds of activities, is nothing new. But Stahl’s breathless and eager reportage implied that we’re essentially one step away from developing the ability to read people’s thoughts via MRIs and other technomarvels.

Baloney. What the report did show is that given choices between two different objects that activate different regions of the brain, the machine can tell which object is being thought about. Set up the experiment in a particular way, predispose the subject (and the machine) to think about or look at specific objects and Bingo! The stuff of science fiction becomes the stuff of reality. Only the media thirst for new and spectacular results of the hottest scientific “breakthroughs” would translate this information into something it’s not: not all that new, not all that interesting, and, ultimately, of questionable use. The researchers, drooling at the chance to keep their funds rolling in by hitting the big time on 60 minutes, play along gleefully. Yes! This is the first step toward . . . whatever.

By no means do I intend to condemn all of contemporary neuroscience with my snarky attitude toward this story. As anyone can see on the well-designed and interesting page, Brainbriefings, from The Society for Neuroscience, potentially useful and perhaps necessary research is going on all the time. And maybe it’s my own personal failing that sees the research featured on 60 Minutes as not only useless but bogus. It’s just that repeatedly hearing people refer to the brain as a machine makes my own gray matter cause me to see red.

The brain is not a machine. The brain is in some ways like a machine, but in other ways it’s dramatically different. At times seeing the brain as a computer can be useful, but the analogy breaks down very quickly. Until we have organic machines that evolve through physical experience and embody being not just in brains but throughout their biosystems, there won’t be anything like a "thinking" machine.

Computers are often referred to as mechanical (or digital or synthetic) "brains," and the most frequent metaphor employed is the same human brain/computer metaphor in reverse. The computer is like a brain. A brain is like a computer. Both are limited, and both exhaust their usefulness quickly.

A computer is not a brain. It’s programmed by human beings to collect and process various kinds of information. Thanks to rapidly evolving technologies, computers are now capable of completing more and more sophisticated tasks. That this evolution might bring us Cylons or Borg or Replicators is the stuff of a different, and equally well-loved literary genre—but we’re not there yet, and we’re actually limited by our own models (so far the only things we can imagine look like human beings and other organic life forms).

I have no doubt that without serious evaluation of emerging technologies we might eventually do ourselves in with our own cleverness. And although I’m not afraid that anybody’s going to come up with a Replicator of the sort featured on Stargate: SG1 (and Atlantis), nanotechnology does have the potential to be used badly and to cause problems we haven’t even thought of yet—precisely because we don’t take time to imagine what might come along.

Information, may I remind some of these people, is not knowledge. Knowledge grows out of experience (the broader the better), and if we limit the experiences of our kids to video games, television, personal technologies, and all things digital, I’m not sure what will emerge. It’s a mystery to me how anybody expects us to be able to develop mechanical brains when we no longer exercise the organic versions in ways that originally made all of our fancy technologies possible in the first place.

I doubt that any of the men and women who worked on ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer ever made (originally housed at the Moore School of Engineering at Penn, across the walk from where I lived on campus), could have imagined the emergence of the microchip when they were busy programming their room-sized machine. The trouble with technology, as I’ve most likely mentioned before, is that the human brains that produce it don’t often take the time to puzzle through to the consequences.

What we really need is to foster the kind of thinking and imagination employed by my favorite sleuths as they go about solving mysteries: the ability to see through the hype and sensation and get to the roots of the problems. Nero Wolfe did it by ruminating over literature and potting orchids, Miss Marple whilst at her knitting, and Poirot by employing his "little gray cells." Were we all to expand our avocations to include physical activities and a bit of reading, we might be less caught up in notions of “mind-reading” and better able to put our minds to better uses.

Image credits: The Epithalmus nicely illustrated, a low-res image from an MRI, and a detail of the back of a panel of ENIAC, showing vacuum tubes, all via Wikimedia Commons. What would I do without these people?

Shop Talk

In previous posts on the Farm, I've outlined my fondness for William Morris's philosophy of work and the dichotomy he saw between useful work and useless toil. I'm also an advocate of experiential education, the education of the whole person (as opposed to the education of the intellect alone), and (again inspired by Morris), the education of desire--which lies at the very core of my views on the environment and sustainability.

Last week on the Colbert Report, one of the guests was Matthew Crawford, a contributing editor for The New Atlantis and author of a rather intriguing book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. I'm already thinking, without having actually read the book (it was preceded by an essay of the same name in The New Atlantis, which I have read), that Morris would love it. And its premise, that doing things is every bit as important intellectually as talking about them, is enough to make me a fan for life. After all, my own little-read tome, More News From Nowhere, describes a society built on both doing and thinking, and fosters a kind of organic education that involves both the concrete and the abstract.

Some of my students may recall our conversations about the Bauhaus, and my arguments against the separation of art and craft. The Bauhaus, after all, combined a Foundation Course in theory (including material on the study of nature and the study of materials) followed by workshops under the tutelage of craftsmen and artists that put theory into practice.

I was personally affected by the American predilection for "tracking" students in elementary and secondary schools when I returned to the States in time for high school. "Smart" kids were put onto a college prep track, and "the others" were channeled into vocational studies. What that meant for me was no home ec, no art classes, no shop classes. Only academic studies. The one time I managed to break out of the mold was when I was a Junior and talked somebody into letting me take a typing class because I argued that it would help me write papers in college.

As it was set up, tracking was overall a bad model and led to a system of inequality that still exists. What seems to have sprung up in its stead (probably in an effort to address issues of "classism" in the seventies) is another bastardization of educational management: the idea that everybody can and should go to college. Now, I'm all for equal opportunity, but what if somebody really wants to spend the rest of his or her life building cars or airplanes or houses? Of course, one can argue that educated citizens make better construction workers--but why do they have to go to college to "get educated"? Especially if these folks are going to sit and stare at their philosophy teacher with the standard "why the hell do I have to take this class" look on their faces.

Matthew Crawford points to the origins of the problem in his interview on the Colbert show, where he spoke of the "pernicious and long history of tracking into vocational and college prep" courses, based on the "dichotomy between mental vs. manual" education--which in turn is based on a perception that "knowledge work" is better than manual work. Somehow, along the line, vocational training got a bad rap, and "knowledge work" took on an elitist mantle.

The idea that four-year colleges are necessary for future success in any field is just bogus. Community colleges or technical schools that provide continuing education in basic subjects like writing, maths, and general science can foster cultural literacy, leaving more of the time students would need for practical education on how to fight fires, build homes, or arrest felons.

I'm actually a product of the basic prejudice, as the first member of my working-class family to finish college, and I've resented the fact that, as a "smart" kid, I was channeled along paths I might not have taken. Many of my generation (cousins and siblings) followed me along the college route, but ended up in rather more practical professions: nursing and civil engineering. I don't regret the emphasis on intellectual pursuits, nor even the "impracticality" of studying Classics, archaeology, and philosophy. But the emphasis on preparing myself for a purely intellectual career sidetracked me from art and design, and it was only jobs that involved developing design skills that provided the needed education. Tracking backfired and probably started me down the path toward my present anarchic stance on education.

Now, of course, I live in the best of both worlds--for me. I get to teach history and philosophy to design students, and am constantly learning to combine the intellectual with the practical. But the lingering effects of valorizing the former over the latter can be seen in recent debates among my colleagues about how we should teach our students. Some have been educated in environments that lack the structure vocational training maintains, and would prefer to inspire their students to creativity without the strictures of formal lesson plans--and the debate will continue as long as the dichotomy survives.

On the other hand, I've been inspired to focus more carefully on Morris and the Bauhaus in my history classes, in order to emphasize a different history: one in which "knowledge" isn't confined to an intellectual model, but pervades learning in both the physical and mental realms.

Since I frequently have to address the question, "what does this have to do with becoming a graphic designer?" (or a fashion designer or a filmmaker or a web guy), my response usually has something to do with "knowing what's in the box" (and I'm getting rather weary of my own version of the box cliche) I'm actually pretty good at convincing design students that knowing about art history is a valuable adjunct to creativity (if for no other reason than showing them what's been done before). But I'm not sure how we're going to keep educating people in the classics anyway, now that popular culture is hell-bent on denigrating intelligence and shortening attention spans.

As literature and the performing arts continue to lean toward the lowest common denominator, the endurance of any kind of canon is in question. We may need to turn to something like John Ruskin's Working Men's College (which still exists in London) to provide continuing education beyond the fulfillment of vocational requirements--were we to begin paying attention to the training needs of the people who do some of the most important work around. After all, where would most of the folks in Dallas be had there not been electricians to repair downed lines after the last whopping thunderstorm? I strongly suspect that the intellectual vacuum created by reality TV and inane movies will eventually drive at least some of our future plumbers and such to seek intellectual stimulation, on their own terms, just as the workers of nineteenth-century London eagerly took advantage of Ruskin's drawing classes.

I think this issue is well worth pursuing in later posts, so this is by no means my final take. For related earlier comments on Owl's Farm, see the links to the right, and stay tuned for further ruminations.

Image credits: "Workshop" by Felipe Micaroni Lalli; Bauhaus image by Jim Hood; John Ruskin, self portrait, watercolour touched with bodycolour over pencil, all from Wikimedia Commons.Ruskin.jpg

Venus Revisited: Out of Africa?

So busy was I protesting the innate sexism involved in interpreting Paleolithic art that I neglected yet another, and perhaps even more important intrinsic bias: racism. All too frequently this aspect of the Big Picture escapes my notice because I'm comfortably ensconced in my lily white skin. It's fortunate, therefore, that the likes of John McWhorter exist, and I do get reminded every now and then that my views are not the only ones--nor the only reasoned ones. McWhorter is a linguist and fellow of the Manhattan Institute, and one of the most eloquent and thoughtful conservative columnists around. I've started looking on him as the true heir of William F. Buckley, and he's given me a reason to start reading The National Review again.

At any rate, McWhorter's May 15 column for TNR, Big Bosoms and the Big Bang: Did the Human Condition Really Emerge in Europe?? (bowdlerized in the Dallas Morning News on Sunday, May 31, using the subtitle as the title) pointed out a glaring omission in my assessment of the Hohle Fels figure: the underlying assumption behind most descriptions of art from Pleistocene Europe. What McWhorter argues so elegantly against is the notion that some kind of mutation allowed us to become truly human--in Europe, about 30,000 years ago.

Now, as I always point out in my first History of Art & Design I lecture, fully modern human beings provided evidence of artistic inclinations in southern Africa at least 70,000 years ago, by incising designs into bars of ochre, and apparently decorating themselves with shell necklaces. Not only that, but aboriginal rock drawings in Australia date to as early as 40,000 years ago, and some specimens from the south Asia may be even older. (See, for evidence, articles at Aboriginal Art Online, and Robert G. Bednarik's 2007 paper, "Lower Paleolithic Rock Art in India and Its Global Context.")

Just as Martin Bernal alerted us to the Eurocentrism involved in our understanding of how the Classical tradition arose in Greece (although he overstated his case by insisting that the Greeks "stole" ideas from Africa and the Near East, and his assertions about the origins of Greek culture in general are highly controversial; see his book Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization), McWhorter does us a favor by noting that if we look at human origins through the polarized lenses of Anglo-American archaeological tradition, we end up ignoring very good evidence that if we "became human" at any specific moment, it probably took place in Africa, Asia, or Australia, (or all of the above) rather than in Europe.

Although all archaeological evidence is problematic because the record is, by nature, incomplete (rendering female impact sketchy at best, if we spent our early years weaving and gathering and tending babies), the idea of locating our humanity in one small region at one particular time is just silly--whether it's Germany or India or the northwest coast of Australia. So many factors seem to have gone into making us what we are, that a small female figure, a carved penis, a disemboweled Bison, a design scratched on a pigmented mineral, or a stone adze don't even begin to tell us who we are or how we got to be us in the first place.

To my mind, if you're looking for Big Bangs, pick up Richard Wrangham's new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Now that language, tool-making, and even laughing seem to have been taken out of the list of possibilities of what makes us "uniquely unique," the remaining difference seems to be this: that we're the only species that cooks its food.

Image credit: A bar of incised ochre and other tools from Blombos Cave in South Africa, dated to about 70,000 years BP. Copyright held by Chris Henshilwood, photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Women, Sex, and Paleolithic Art

This is a subject upon which I rant in class with measurable frequency (at least once per quarter, two classes, four times a year). Although my students have been spared this quarter because I've been on leave, I was reminded forcefully of the problem by recent headlines about a little carved ivory figurine found in Hohle Fels Cave in Germany. The tiny figure, possibly meant to be worn around the neck on a string, has been described as "Prehistoric Porn" and by University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas Conardas (who should know better) as being "sexually charged." A series of detailed photos are available at Spiegel Online, and it's pretty obvious that media hype took over on this one fairly quickly.

I've already mentioned this event (because the media silliness has overshadowed the discovery itself) on The Farm in the "Nature and/as Nurture" post. But it's time to inflict my angst on any hapless reader who finds this essay (and they well might if they're looking for prehistoric pornography, due to the tags I've chosen), because the story is really about ignorance and the need for enlightenment. I am bloody well sick and tired of bad interpretation in general and in particular the idiocy surrounding the steatopygous figures (so-called "Venuses" even though they have nothing to do with the Roman goddess of erotic love, who didn't come along until several thousand years later) found in prehistoric Europe and Asia Minor. It's another example of bad metaphor at work, and probably more evidence of the impact of what Elizabeth Fisher calls "the pernicious analogy."

Fisher's book, Woman's Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society, was published in 1979, but I knew nothing of it until I read Ursula K. Le Guin's essay, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (reprinted in 1996 in The Ecocriticism Reader, and available online through Google Books; I first read it in her essay anthology, Dancing at the Edge of the World, published in 1989). I located Woman's Creation at the university library, and later copied it in toto because it was already out of print. In her book, Fisher introduces an interesting hypothesis, which is probably even more convincing now that we know more about early technologies than we once did.

Here's the basic problem. When I first studied anthropology in the mid-sixties, the current notion of human nature was as homo faber: man the maker (emphasis on man, for my purposes). What made us human, and significantly different from other species, goes the idea, was that we made and used tools. Of course, later evidence emerged that smudged that theory pretty seriously, when other animals (primate and otherwise) were seen to engage in tool-making and -using. But the initial observation was based on a bogus idea in the first place--and one you can see working in the "Dawn of Man" sequence of the Clarke/Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. What makes us human in that film is 1) influence of a higher intelligence that 2) teaches us how to whack each other over the head with "tools" made of animal bones. (If this sounds familiar to Farm readers, I've probably already held forth on a similar topic; while I was looking for such mention I discovered just how repetitive I tend to be.)

One of the problems with the archaeological record in the first place is that it's always incomplete. It consists only of artifacts that have managed to survive the millennia. This automatically precludes anything perishable: tissue and fiber especially (unless preserved in a medium like a peat bog or ice). So anything woven from plant materials is very likely to have been devoured by the same little beasties that make sure human flesh doesn't stay on buried bones. If, as Elizabeth Wayland Barber (in Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years) and Elizabeth Fisher both claim, women's technologies had to do with carrying babies and food (weaving, basket-making, etc.), little of that activity will be represented. All we find (even in my own limited experience as an archaeologist) are sturdier materials, such as the stuff of which tools are made. Hence the original assumption.

The neglect of women in early considerations of human nature is based on the absence of evidence, not its presence. It's also based on a notion of male prowess and sexual power that may have been entirely different during the late Pleistocene than it is today (with our current preoccupations with drugs to alleviate "diseases" such as "ED" and "Low T"). Elizabeth Fisher suggests that until human beings settled into more or less permanent agricultural communities with their recently domesticated animals, men may not have known that they had anything to do with "fathering" children at all. Sex and parenthood even in some extant small-scale societies are separate functions, because children are seen as gifts from spirits or gods. Fatherhood in such situations is a social role, rather than biological, because the "actual" father may be different (especially in cultures where young girls are married off to much older men). Women are the givers and nurturers of children, not men. The relationship between sex and procreation becomes clearer once the consequences are observable in animals with shorter gestation periods, and that's when any egalitarian relationship between men and women that may have existed before settled agriculture begins to erode.

The year I started college, 1966 marks a sea-change in the understanding of hunting and gathering cultures. As research by Richard Lee and Ervin DeVore among peoples like the !Kung San in southwestern Africa showed us, gathering was responsible for a substantial portion of any group's caloric intake. Not hunting: gathering, performed by women collecting food and carrying it home in baskets, nets, and other containers, also created by women.

Settled agriculture and the planting of seeds changed all that, as Fisher makes clear. Not only did men discover their role in making babies, but they began to imagine a connection between the planting and growing of seeds and the "planting" of "seeds" in the womb of the mother. Of course we know now that the analogy is faulty because a seed is itself a fertilized ovum; a man cannot "plant" a baby in its mother--he needs the mother's egg. But back on the early farmstead, one can imagine the scenario:

Women are powerful creatures. They bleed every month, have babies, give milk, gather and prepare food, weave clothing and containers. Men hunt occasionally, distribute the meat, make tools to hunt; later, they perhaps make the implements to cultivate crops, and they may plant the fields. Perhaps they harvest. And then one of them rises up, beats his chest and says to his buddies: We are the planters of the seed. The woman is only the dirt in which we plant the seed that makes the child. She is an empty vessel. We have the power of life.

Hence what Fisher calls the "pernicious analogy": semen = seed. So it shouldn't be surprising that when modern males (even some who are smart enough to know what the role of women was really like) uncover voluptuous-looking figures of women they're quite comfortable seeing these figures as the prehistoric equivalent of Playboy.

I always thought it odd that men might carry around miniature dollies to arouse their passions, and thought it far more likely that the shape of these figures might instead provide an inspiration for women. Since gatherers don't usually carry around a lot of body fat, if they fall below 10% their monthly menstrual/ovulatory cycles cease and they can't conceive. Women with a substantial amount of body fat, however, especially in the breasts, stomachs, hips, buttocks, and thighs, are surely fertile or have already borne children.

So before folks start going off on porn, perhaps they should consider the very real possibility that these examples of portable art were carried by women as fertility talismans. Men were undoubtedly too busy polishing their spears (ahem) and telling hunting yarns to play with dolls. In truth, the only thing it's really possible to know about these figures is where they were found, what they were made of, and about how old they are. The date might be interesting (we, homo sapiens sapiens, keep getting older and older with each new discovery), but more bad metaphors don't do anybody any good.

Addendum: A more recent article in the Huffington Post offers a different interpretation, and points to the existence of a goddess culture in Paleolithic Europe. As sympathetic as I am to ideas other than the notion of "Venuses" and pornography, the jury on the goddess culture is still out--for reasons that I address above: we can only be certain about the location, the material composition, and the date of these figures. The older they are, the harder it is for us to know anything else.

Image credits: I pinched the Hohle Fels figurine image from this excellent Science Daily article because it invited me to "enlarge" it. The Woman from Willendorf is from Wikimedia Commons and taken by Oke.

Losing Language, Losing Meaning

In my first outing post-surgery (after being told by my surgeon that I was well on the mend and good to go for driving, fewer than three weeks from the day he cracked my chest), my daughter and I celebrated at Starbucks and then headed for Half Price Books. I always look in the nature writers and science fiction sections first, and was rewarded on both counts. The best find was Ursula LeGuin's Lavinia, a story based on the last part of Vergil's Aeneid, and on a woman (Aeneas's "native" wife) barely mentioned in the poem. But no one is better at imagining worlds not her own than Ursula K. LeGuin, and I snatched the book up in a nonce. Well, maybe two nonces (you'd have to be a fan of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to get that one). Please note that the owl is only a coincidence.

LeGuin's opening remarks lament the loss of Latin, and the fact that it won't be long before nobody will be reading Vergil in the original. Already I have to explain to my students who Vergil was and why Dante would be following him around in the Divine Comedy. My own Latin is barely functional; I learnt what I know only because it was required of a Greek major at U.C. Riverside, but I can find my way through the geography of grammar and syntax with the help of a primer and a dictionary. But I know exactly what she means. These languages are on their way to the cultural dustbin and will soon become the sole purview of wizened scholars and other odd folk.

If only we knew what we were losing! If only today's students understood how much richer their own language and their lives would be were they supplemented by the words and wisdom of the ancient world (people who already made the mistakes we're in the process of making now). But even the basic etymologies of English words are becoming lost to them. They no longer care or are even vaguely interested in why our words are shaped the way they are. They not only don't know what "sanguine" means, but they're not even aware of its subtleties: it can mean both optimistic and bloody (as the character Zoe points out in an episode of Firefly; but that show was canceled, so there goes another ed-op).

Speaking of blood, which is actually where all this is headed, I'm now a member of a very large community of people dependent on the drug Coumadin (generic name Warfarin), an anticoagulant that will keep my blood flowing freely through my shiny new mechanical aortic valve. Unfortunately, these drugs also suffer from lost language and bad metaphor, because they are commonly known as "blood thinners." But they don't thin the blood at all; that's simply somebody's lame attempt at helping the dumb and dumberer understand what "anticoagulation" means, without simply pointing out the etymology of the term: "anti" = "against"; "coagulate" (from the Latin coagulare, to curdle) = clot; hence a usable definition as "prevention of clotting." It has nothing to do with the "thickness" of blood, but apparently people have less trouble with inappropriate metaphors (they can understand thick and thin better than clot-prevention for some reason) than they do with knowing that a word was derived from a more useful metaphor: the curdling process involved in cheese-making. (It occurs to me, as an afterthought, that most people know longer know much about how cheese is made, so perhaps that's the reason for the bad metaphor.)

So better metaphors are out there; after all, it would be quite simple to understand that you want the consistency of your blood to be like single curds flowing freely in whey than like mozzarella! Or, for that matter, to keep the consistency balanced so that it isn't entirely whey and certainly doesn't become even as dense as ricotta. The "whey" would represent the condition (not thickness) that might generate free bleeding (the absence of clotting), and the flow of curds through whey as having the potential to clot when necessary (so you don't bleed to death), but not clot so easily that the offending conglomerations would jam up and cause a stroke. "Thick" vs. "thin" is not only simple, it's simplistic; it doesn't even come close to describing the process.

In the world of tweets and twitters and twits, there's no room for the subtle--especially if it takes up more characters (anticoagulation =15; "blood thinning" = 13, not counting the space). Also, if you don't know anything about language, you have to look the word up in a good dictionary. How many folks even own one any more?

Where does this leave us? Not in a happy place, I think. Several years ago I began to notice that students were becoming less and less able to identify where artists were from by looking at their names. They can no longer tell that Leonardo or Michelangelo are Italian, that Chardin and Watteau are French, that van der Weyden is Dutch, and that Turner is English. They can't identify a Russian or a Greek name without being told where the artist is from. They're better at Spanish names, and Arabic, which makes sense, but they've lost everything else unless they've studied a language in high school (no longer a requirement for graduation, or if it is, they just take Spanish by default) or have parents or relatives from other parts of the world. Asian names seem to be recognizable in general, but not those from specific countries (they can't tell Korean from Japanese from Chinese). I attribute this vague familiarity to manga, anime, and video games, which tend to be only vaguely Asian and not ethnically specific.

While I was still in hospital, the fulcrum of multiculturalism in otherwise xenophobic America, I played a game, at which I ended up batting about .850: guessing staff-members' nationalities by their names. I missed one, because his surname (Tan) was a remnant of the Chinese in his ancestry, but all of his immediate family were Philippino. I guessed Chinese, of course--even though he didn't look it (the Philippines have a more varied ethnic background, including European and native islander, than most Chinese do, and it shows in their physiognomy). I also spent three of five years in Taiwan being educated by Philippina nuns, so I've had a lot of experience with both. At any rate, I caught the Thais, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, and even (sort of) the Danish Colombian gas-passer who ministered to me during surgery. I guessed Swedish, but he forgave me.

Video games and anime have done their part in spurring some students to learn some Japanese, and sometimes Chinese, but there's less of an interest in European languages, seemingly because "they all speak English." Meanwhile, the State Department, the armed forces, and the CIA are on constant vigil for speakers of Arabic, Farsi, African dialects, and even French, German, and Russian--but I'm pretty sure they end up having to train most of their promising candidates in specific languages.

The only spark of hope in the current situation is the increasing evidence on language and aging. Studies indicate that acquiring a second or third language engages one's brain and helps to sustain cognitive function. This doesn't make much sense to a twenty-year old, but if you're my age (and in danger of stroking out if you don't take your meds properly), any such news is good news.

Now, where did I shelve that Latin grammar?

Image credits: Æneas lands on the shores of Latium with his son Ascanius behind him; on the left, a sow tells him where to found his city. (Lavinia's father was the king of Latium.) British Museum. Roman marble relief, CE 140-150. Copyright Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons.

Blogging, the Bauhaus, and Short Attention Spans

Last week I walked into my Friday afternoon section of History of Art and Design II to find a number of students busily engaged in reading--or trying to read--my blog. Specifically, they were trying to fathom my latest post on Owl's Farm, Gardeners and Cobblers and Tailors, Oh My. Of all the posts they could have been reading, that might have been a good one (I do have fashion design and fashion merchandising students in the class), but I heard a sigh as I walked into the room: "But she writes so much!"

I recommended to this sweet person (she really is charming, and tries very hard to keep up with what I dish out) that she read my obituary for Biscuit instead, but by that time we needed to get started on a film about the Bauhaus and on talking about final design projects. But the episode made me wonder about how much shared information and background is required for students and their teachers to be able to communicate ideas within the blogosphere.

One thing I decided before I even began writing on The Farm was that my posts would consist of well-considered essays rather than blurby little snippets of opinion. I would only post if I wanted to articulate some idea, or to express a view on those situations that seemed worth comment; I would think them through carefully and research them if necessary before I opened my mouth, as it were, online. I also vowed never to dumb down my vocabulary or message in order to draw more readers. At the same time I knew that I wanted to offer a tempered viewpoint that might resonate with people who otherwise might not always agree with me. My blog was, then, going to appeal to readers like me, with varied interests and fairly open minds.

Some of my first readers were students who had suffered through more than one class with me, and with whom I had already established frequent e-mail correspondence. Most were upper-classmen and women or those who had already graduated and were out pursuing the careers I hope I helped them prepare for. I also attracted a few Canadians and Australians, with whom I seem to have more in common than Texans, as well as fellow skeptics and even some more religious folk who appreciated my not running roughshod over their beliefs (at least most of the time). Some commented on the blog, some e-mailed me, some discussed the posts with me in person. Conversations ensued, which is what I wanted in the first place.

But the inability of many of my students to stay with a long (or long-winded) essay is somewhat disappointing. It's also evidence of an increase of shorter attention spans (which I blame, in part, on their having been raised on Sesame Street and commercials), and a decrease in the number of words in standard twenty-something vocabularies.

And things will only get worse if we keep partitioning our students' brains into compartments that look like multimedia screens or CNN broadcasts. If fads like Twitter (no I will not post a link; I'm trying to forget that it exists) persist, attention spans will ultimately be truncated into 140 character bursts, just as Sesame Street trained millions of two-year-olds to pay attention for 1.5 minutes, and commercials narrowed that down to 30 seconds.

I've even found myself affected by this modern urge to get to the point immediately, with no rumination, no thinking-through: the need to come up with an answer in a "blink." Not long ago, I picked up George Eliot's Middlemarch, one of my favorite books ever, and snuggled down for a good long read. I knew that the novel takes some 250 pages to begin to come together, and for Eliot to start spinning her tale. But this time I wasn't really ready. I kept reading ahead, looking into later chapters, and essentially spoiling it for myself. Even though I already knew the outcome, I was impatient to get on with it. I can't even imagine a single one of my students who would be willing to work his or her way through this novel for the first time--at least not when they can go to NetFlix for a video version that cuts out all the "unnecessary description," as I've heard them say even about Tolkien.

My reluctance to buy into the latest techno-gizmo or web-sensation isn't helping. Even though I'm having some fun with the new apps I've added to my iPhone (now nearly a year into its two-year contract), I can't play a game (I only have two) for more than a minute or two. It's just a silly way to spend time. The light saber sound effects are cute, but now that every Star Wars fan with an iPhone has it, about the only thing we can do with it is have silly duels in the hallway. I do belong to a couple of online forums (properly termed fora, but I've learned how to choose my battles), but I will not, under any circumstances open a Facebook or MySpace account, won't go anywhere near Twitter (I only like tweets from birds, and quite frankly don't care to know when my congressman plans to scratch). I haven't joined LinkdIn despite numerous invitations (all from people I'm already "linked in" with in some way, and who have my e-mail address). I'm happy to take advantage of Google's many free services (like Blogger and the aforementioned e-mail account), but I have to draw the line somewhere.

When so-called social-networking and communication websites start taking the place of real conversation, and when sound bites substitute for substance, we're in trouble. When the trivial and banal take the place of real information, we're laying the ground for a future characterized by mindless, contextless blips of miscellaneous data. Reality TV and Twitter both seem to be the products of the same alien plot to disintegrate human minds.

And so a plea to my impatient students: take the five minutes or so required to slog through one of my posts, if only occasionally. You might learn something interesting, but if nothing else it will show you how to express a sustained train of thought, how to explore a path arising from curiosity, or just how to spend a few quiet moments reflecting on something that we will then have in common.

The students of the Bauhaus, about which my own students learned last week, had none of the electronic gadgets we now take for granted. Shunted from one city to another as the Nazis became more and more afraid of what imagination and creativity might mean to the future of the Third Reich, the students and instructors made do with what they had, and created the modern design school. Without them, our school wouldn't even exist. What made the enterprise successful, however, was the marriage of physical expertise and creative thinking--talents we're in danger of losing if we spend too much of our time plugged into our iPods and too little time just letting ourselves be curious.

Teaching Teaching vs. Doing Teaching

A debate of sorts (mostly one-sided, with me on the one side) has recently arisen on campus about the distinction between "professional development" and "faculty development," because our particular corporate culture thinks that college teachers constantly have to be taught how to teach, no matter how long they've been at it.

A few years ago, I wrote a rather infamous letter to our then-HR person when the faculty development (they weren't making much of a distinction then) requirement went up from twelve hours per academic year to eighteen--because we had been so good at meeting the twelve-hour requirement. I can still remember the opening line of the letter: "I don't know how you spent your summer vacation, but here's what I did"--and proceeded to recount everything I'd done on my two-week break between the spring and summer quarters. These included museum visits on the drive between Dallas and eastern California, visits to national parks, archaeological site-visits to photograph stuff I talked about in class, all in the ten days it took to drive there and back again. I even got in a couple of days' visit with my folks.

I returned to a notice during our "in-service" period (it's called Twelfth Week, but I don't think any connection with Shakespeare was intended), that we needed to jack up the hours we spent learning how to teach (or what to teach). Never mind that we almost never don't teach. This is a proprietary four-year college, in session forty four weeks per year, and full-time faculty are on campus thirty hours per week, teaching a required load of five four-hour classes (or combinations of course loads that add up to at least twenty hours). Comparable community college instructors teach five three-hour classes per semester (fifteen weeks), for two semesters, with extra pay for teaching summer classes. And although they are expected to show evidence of professional development and academic citizenship during their annual performance reviews, there is no "clock-hour" requirement and no distinction between "how" and "what" they teach when it comes to doing so (they can publish, go to meetings, participate in symposia, etc.). The semi-annual all-college gathering usually features a speaker who talks about new educational trends, but there are no required "PowerPoint and the Future of Education" lessons.

Okay, so we're different. Our faculty members are, for the most part, artists and design professionals who have not necessarily been mentored into teaching like most college teachers. New instructors (no tenure system here, so we're all "instructors") are required to attend faculty orientation sessions which include training in how to teach, the concept of a learning-centered environment (as opposed to a teaching-centered environment), and if, during their first few quarters they run into problems, they're provided with tools and training to help them get over the hump. The requirements are the same for both program and general studies instructors, even though gen ed graduates have almost always spent time teaching under the supervision of their professors.

Lately, however, the Powers That Be have decided to increase the faculty development quotient; we're now responsible for twenty four "clock hours" of training on how to teach what we teach. This is in addition to a less well-defined component of professional development, which encompasses fields of expertise. Because we are accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), our instructors are now required to earn master's level advanced degrees (with corporate pressure to make these terminal degrees, such as MFAs and PhDs). This very fact makes professional development a no-brainer for people in grad school.

But here's my problem: why do we have to distinguish how we teach from what we teach in the first place? Socrates would most certainly be rolling around in his grave, since teaching and doing philosophy were, to him and to most of us who have adopted him as a model, the same thing. You are, as I keep harping, what you do. This is how philosophers see the world; one can't even really do philosophy without teaching it, because that's what writing and interpretation is all about. Some colleges, like Kent State, seem to make little distinction between the two, and I'm sure they're not alone.

I'm not saying that how-to-teach seminars can't be useful. A couple of years after my post-summer break tantrum, we had a workshop on how to create rubrics that describe what each grade we post actually means. What constitutes an A or B? What distinguishes a B from a C? This turned out to be such a successful strategy (because it solves the "numbers" problem for those of us who find it difficult to quantify learning) that I immediately went through my courses and objectives and made beautiful charts to help me determine how well my students were achieving the objectives. These are now tied to evaluation sheets that accompany every graded project my students submit.

I also balked at the idea of lesson plans (that's so high school, I smugly complained), but after laying out week by week and topic by topic what I wanted to cover over the quarter, and how I wanted to assess my students' accomplishment of goals, I was hooked. These plans have changed over the years as I modify content and approach (after using my reflective assessment process to figure out what's working and what's not), but they're also coming in really handy as I prepare to take a quarter off to get my heart working properly again--so I can go on teaching for as long as anybody can stand me. Sessions on how to construct good lesson plans would, therefore, be useful, especially for general studies types like me who are more used to seminars where everyone reads the same stuff and then discusses, interprets, and writes about it.

Art and design history courses, like those I mostly teach, require careful planning to make sure students are exposed over and over again to images, their context, and their history. They require critical analysis as well, which is difficult to accomplish in a school (and a world) where students just don't read. I can assign readings until I turn purple, but unless I test them on the content, they won't even click on the link that takes them directly to the pages I want them to consider, much less read and take notes on the content. I don't give true/false, multiple-choice, scanable exams, so students have to spend most of their time creating workbooks that contain images and notes based on the lectures. Nobody else I know of does this, and so over the years I've flown by the seat of my pants. I have to learn by doing, as I have this quarter, that just assigning the stuff isn't working. I'm going to have to develop activities for the workbooks that take them beyond the lectures (where they're often quite engaged and even curious), and more deeply into representative artists, works, and movements. I have to work even harder at finding ways to encourage them to actually think about what they're seeing.

In order to do this, I read books, scour the internet, read the Chronicle of Higher Education, and pore over popularized treatments of art history like Ross King's books (Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, Brunelleschi's Dome, The Judgment of Paris, etc.) and Margaret Wertheim's wonderful explorations of the junctures of art, science, and technology (The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace). In fact, I read about thirty books a year on science, culture, art, and history--and I'm not sure why that doesn't count, even though these books--in teaching me about stuff I don't know and making me think--are teaching me how to teach. I also blog my brains out, which requires me to explore topics I might never have even thought of considering, as I respond to what others are teaching me.

The upshot is this: I cannot separate how I teach from what I teach. They are forged continuously together like the shards of Narsil into a complete sword, or knitting into a sweater, or layers in Photoshop into a finished image. Of course, nothing is ever finished, because everything flows--as the early philosopher Heraclitus famously noted. You may never be able to step into the same river twice, but if you attend to what you're doing, you'll notice how the stream changes, and detect patterns that might help keep you from falling in and drowning.

Enough with the bad metaphors. But my plea is that education, even in a corporate setting, be more accommodating to innovation and accident--and to process. Three hours spent sitting through a "stress management" session amounts to three hours I can't be reading a good book that will help me become a better teacher because it engages my little gray cells and causes me to make useful connections. If you want to manage my stress, get me a massage (we did that once; it was wonderful!).

Or, offer more of what a colleague and I did before this quarter began. One of our chef instructors and I discovered that we have a common interest in the history of food and how cultures develop their distinctive cuisines. So we put together a presentation on Egyptian food and culture (called, rather absurdly, "A Taste of Tut") that showed how the humanities and the culinary arts interact. In order to get it accepted as a suitable topic for faculty development training, we had to stress the interdisciplinarity of the project, and the co-operative aspect of the "teaching." But we had a great time, attendees learned some things they didn't already know, and the chefs made some great beer.

Now that's faculty development. But it's also professional development. So maybe we should re-think the distinction and become more generally interdisciplinary in our approach to how we teach what we do. I can almost guarantee that the faculty will be more content, less cantankerous, and more engaged--which, I suspect, would be good for us all.

Image apologies: Hendrick ter Brugghen's Heraclitus, at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The Naples Socrates, by Domenico Anderson, in the Museo Nazionale di Napoli. Both via Wikimedia Commons. Heraclitus's tattoo is courtesy P22 Fonts (Acropolis Now) and one of Patrick Lynch's heart diagrams (see the Cabinet for more). I stole the idea for Socrates's mustache, of course, from Marcel Duchamp.