Tag Archives: ramblings

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Friday Morning Ramblings

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Caution:  Contents may offend self-indulgent precious snowflakes.

Driving to work this morning, I was listening to PRX on Sirius XM.  It’s a newish public radio forum that plays only interviews, stories, Ted Talks, and other similar material.  I enjoy it for the most part because the station plays a fairly broad range of stuff, from Nobel Laureate scientists to street junkies, so I get to absorb a lot of material for future writings.  Normally, I just listen and enjoy.  Today, however, two pieces came on back to back that got my butt cheeks clenching, so I’ve scrapped the entry that came to me last night in favor of this one.

The first piece was a young scholar discussing the history of and debate over the “unreliable narrator” in literature.  Like all good scholars, he quoted the top experts in the field and laid out the major legitimate points of both sides of the debate.  As I listened to these quotations from highly regarded critics, I was reminded of why I despise literary criticism.  While all of them were intelligent, obviously highly well-read, and thorough in their reasoning, not a single one of them actually said anything of any value regarding anything substantive.  All of it was mental masturbation, reasoning for the sake of reasoning, debating for the sake of debate.  I’d also be willing to wager that not a single one of them could actually write a work of fiction worth reading either, but that’s another matter.  The whole thing struck me as highly self-indulgent, which has always been my problem with the upper echelons of academia.

There’s rarely if ever any practical application to real world dilemmas from the scholarly work of the humanities.  We live in an age when declining literacy is a real and serious issue that threatens the foundation of our democratic republic, yet these scholars are playing pin the tail on the donkey with abstract concepts that do nothing to promote literacy as a fun, engaging, accessible activity.  It seems to me an exceptional waste of finite time, resources, and brain power.  Instead of debating whether or not the “unreliable narrator” is a valid concept or even actually exists, why aren’t these highly intelligent people putting their efforts into developing curriculum or reading lists for disenfranchised children?  That’s just one example.  I’d be much more impressed by their work if they were doing anything that didn’t seem so damned self-indulgent at a time when people are really suffering.  In short, we have much bigger issues than the tuning of your fiddle, Emperor Nero.

The second piece was about “artistic” bands seeking corporate sponsorship for their bands.  Apparently, this is the newest trend in music to help independent musicians survive until they’ve built a following.  Maybe I’m just old and out of touch, but all of the music the piece sampled from these bands was pure shit.  I’m no expert, but I know good music when I hear it.  Also, each of the musicians interviewed went on and on about the “artistic” nature of their work.  If artistic has devolved into a synonym for “shitty,” I guess I missed the memo.  Much like the scholarly debate over the unreliable narrator, paying unskilled musicians to continue their craft seems like a frivolous waste of precious resources.  I don’t claim to be the gatekeeper for all things music related, and it’s not my money the corporations are giving away, but to me, this money would be much better spent on middle and high school musical education courses that actually teach people how to play an instrument.  Again, the whole thing strikes me as rather self-indulgent, both by the “artists” and the companies.

We face real issues today.  Inflation, living wages, energy, waste, education, healthcare, and fiscal sustainability are just some of them.  Our nation is crumbling around us.  The very fabric of our society seems to be fraying apart.  Today, we should be seeking solutions to these very real, very substantial, very important problems.  Today is not the time for self-indulgence and mental masturbation.  Sorry, but if you’re a shitty musician who plays avant-garde drivel, you don’t really deserve to earn a living when police officers, firefighters, and teachers, people who add real value to society, have to work second jobs to afford their mortgages.  If you’re a scholar wasting your intellect on ridiculous flights of fancy, please stop wasting taxpayer money.  Please, set down your fiddle, look up at the burning buildings, and do something to help put out the fires.

General Posts

Thursday Morning Ramblings

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Anyone who has suffered a severe head trauma can attest that sometimes, especially during high levels of stress, insomnia can be unrelenting.  For me, when it hits, all I can do is either take my prescription that knocks me out or simply endure the sleepless nights.  Starting Saturday night, because of the stresses of the last couple of weeks, my insomnia hit me with a vengeance, and from Saturday night until yesterday, I got about 20 hours sleep total.  Unfortunately, my prescription ran out, and I haven’t had the opportunity to go to my doctor for a refill.  All I could do was lay in bed, stare at the ceiling, and hope for sleep.

For me, when it occurs, my mind races out of control.  No matter how hard I try, I can’t slow the wave of thoughts surging through my brain.  Usually, these thoughts are about books four and five, imagining scenes and prewriting major plot points.  I tell myself the alarm will be sounding in six hours and I need to stop, but the scene keeps replaying, over and over.  I have to get up in five hours, but the story keeps gnawing at me.  Four hours, no relief.  Finally, sometime around 3:00 AM, I’ll drift off into a fitful doze, and when the alarm sounds at 6:00 AM, I feel as if I’ve not rested at all.

Some nights, like Sunday night/Monday morning, I give up, get out of bed, and attempt to be productive.  Monday, I got to the office before 4:00 AM and graded 20 essays before my 8:00 class.  By noon, I was so exhausted I could barely stand myself, so I went home and napped for about three hours before getting up and starting the whole maddening process over again.  It’s frustrating to be completely exhausted, hardly able to function, yet lay in the dark room with a racing mind unable to drift off to sleep.  During these episodes, a few times I’ve attempted to write, hoping that would ease the insomnia, but the quality of writing is pure rubbish, so much so that I often have to discard all of it and restart fresh.

I’ve lived with these bouts since 1989.  For the first few years, they happened quite often.  Then, I discovered that my natural sleep pattern post-accident is from about 4:00 AM to around noon.  Something about the trauma shifted my internal clock, so for many years, I taught mostly night classes and wrote from midnight to 3:00 or 4:00 AM.  While I was able to maintain this schedule I rarely suffered an episode and usually slept a regular 7-8 hours most nights.  Unfortunately, today, my work schedule doesn’t allow for this.  I have to be to work by 8:00 AM most days, so I have to be in bed and asleep by midnight to get at least 6 hours of sleep.  Most of the time, I can do it, but I’ve found over the last 3-4 years that I’ve had many more frequent bouts with insomnia, especially when stress levels get high.

To further complicate matters, when I don’t get enough sleep, my neurological symptoms flare up as well.  Since February, the worst of the issues have mostly subsided, but after a sleepless night, all of them come back.  On Tuesday and Wednesday, I shook, trembled, and stumbled around all day.  It was like reliving October, November, and December all over again.  Today, after a good night’s sleep, I feel much better, and most of the issues have eased off.  I’m hoping to get my prescription refilled next week and not have to suffer through another bout of this any time soon.  That’s all for now.  Hope everyone gets plenty of rest tonight.

General Posts

Wednesday Morning Ramblings

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Here’s an illustration of what’s wrong with education today.  First, for the last five days, I’ve graded almost non-stop because all of my sections started out overfilled, and now, at the end of the semester, I’ve still got as many students as I normally begin the semester with.  There’s almost a sadistic mandate from the highest levels to overwork us and burn us out.  It truly seems purposeful, as if administration views educators as a disposable commodity with an infinite supply.  Perhaps there is an endless supply of warm bodies to proctor a course, but in my experience, it takes years to develop professional educators, and the percentage of people who can grow into professionals is relatively small.  So one major flaw in our system today is the best quality educators, at least from my perspective, are being driven from the career because of burn-out and mental fatigue.

The second major flaw comes from how the K-12 system has created a generation with no concept of accountability.  Yesterday was a perfect snapshot of this mentality.  A student had flubbed her internal citations for a major paper; she wasn’t even in the ballpark of what I had taught.  After asking me to explain to her how to do it properly, she continuously interrupted me to tell me I was wrong and that she had in fact done it correctly.  Again, she wasn’t even close yet believed she knew more about MLA style than I do.  I was so irked by her disdain for my authority on the subject I literally had to walk out of the room.

From talking with colleagues, I’ve found that this particular mentality is becoming more and more prevalent among freshmen.  How dare we question them or hold them to standards!  For their entire academic careers, all they’ve had to do was show up and put something down on paper to get passed along to the next level.  While many honors and advanced programs do maintain certain standards, what we’re seeing is that the less rigorous ones seem to have none.  Showing up is all that’s required.  As a college instructor, I’m indescribably frustrated by this erosion of principles because as a composition teacher, often I’m the first person to hold these kids accountable for their lack of ability.  Therefore, I’m the villain for ruining their opportunity for higher education.

Like the old cliche states, children are our future, and from my vantage point, our future as a world leader is on shaky ground.  Without standards or accountability, children are coddled into believing that quality does not matter, and as quality evaporates, so does competitive edge.  In a global economy, competition is more fierce than ever, so at a time when we need it most, we are robbing our children of their competitive spirit because of a flaw in the system that encourages passing along children regardless of performance to maintain funding.  Older teachers who have worked in the K-12 system know exactly what I’m talking about, and many of them either already have or soon will flee the system because they are “encouraged” to lower their personal standards to meet the declining abilities of students.

The real crux of the problem is that most administrators have very little in-class experience.  Some do, but most don’t.  Most are trained administrators, so the system has evolved into one where the people with the least experience with classroom management and course development have the most say-so in setting the guidelines for how the system works.  To me, that seems like backwards thinking.  I know other sectors, such as manufacturing, have gone through similar struggles, where the people making decisions on how a particular line runs have never actually operated the machines, but education is not manufacturing or food service.  Education is the foundation for everything else, and I do mean everything, so we as a nation are setting ourselves up for failure because we have broken our own foundation.  All I can say is it’s a frustrating time to work in this profession.