"Ich bin ein Berliner"

Ja, Herr Prezident, ICH bin Berlinnerin. Wir sind ALLE Berliner!

So, ok, today after the guided tour of the Reichstag (equivalent of the U.S. Capitol building), I stepped into the Kennedy Museum at the Brandenburg Gate, influenced by the fact that it was close and they probably had a bathroom (yes!) and maybe a cafe (no).

It's the equivalent of about 3 rooms, mostly archival photos but also some artifacts of a lesser sort - a dress shirt, JFK's designer briefcase, handwritten notes, pens. There's quite a lot of material about JFK's 1963 trip to Berlin and how he sort of went off-script vis-a-vis the administration's policy of appeasement of the Soviets, because he was so incredibly appalled by seeing the Berlin Wall. (They took him on a 53-km drive of the wall in Berlin, which was the majority of his eight hours there.)

A side note: Some interesting notes from Jackie directing the addressees not to pay particular bills that she or Jack or others in the family had incurred. There was no context given for this, but my guess is that some stuff was "loaned" (jewelry, say) and other stuff was to be paid for by friends or the campaign rather than the Kennedy family personally.

I am not sure the Berlin Wall thing fits into my research outline but it's pretty interesting that there is all this stuff in Berlin. The museum was not well attended though. Taking photographs was not allowed (lots of copyright-protected iconic photos by famous photojournalists) unfortunately, so I ended up staying longer than I really wanted, to write down photo captions. Then in the bookstore I saw two books about JFK in Berlin, so probably this is well-covered territory. But, no one has yet analyzed the textual materials in this particular exhibit, I'd say. So there is room for some peripheral treatment, by me. Gotta write my field notes while all is fresh. More later.

interpreting the past

I arrived in Berlin on Tuesday afternoon. I toughed out the jet lag by visiting the Topography of Terror installation (the Nazi SS headquarters site, now excavated to show the basement remains), with interpretive panels and a new Documentation Center with facsimiles of photographs and other documentation of the SS atrocities.

This is one way to interpret history - present the evidence and hold the interpretation to a minimum. Even so, what's opaque to the viewer is the selection process - which pieces of evidence were selected? Which were passed over? In a museum setting that judgment is not just a matter of historiography but also a question of aesthetics to some degree: what documents will "read" best for the viewer?

Yesterday I visited the DDR Museum, a documentation of a different sort. The approach taken here is to use the actual material culture (of communism) in display cases, but find ways to make it interactive, through the way the displays are framed and through supplemental activities incorporated in that framing. I am not usually a big fan of the multi-sensory "hands on" approach because I think it often results in "hands on" for its own sake - and that is partly the case in this instance. Also, the frame often (and in this case too) visually and experientially overshadows the artifacts. Materials for this kind of frame are usually cheaply constructed because intended not to be permanent. However, I think the interpretive text panels are very well done.

The message I received: communism was a time of scarcity (that theme is very prominent, due probably to the focus on daily life) imposed by possibly well-meaning but certainly incompetent leaders. Actually, now that I think of it, there's little agency in the text pieces: it's "the Party" or "the GDR" or simply the agentless passive voice.

I'm glad I'm writing this - I wouldn't have caught that absence necessarily otherwise. In textual analysis, absence can be hard to see.

milestones, birthdays, etc.

It's been 6 days since R. died and between that and the dread that I feel when facing a solo trip (especially abroad) I have been in a bit of a funk.

There has been an outpouring of online tributes to R., most of which I (harshly; B says this is about me, and surely he's right) find WAY too self-involved. My grief is private and I don't feel it necessary to share it on my university list-serve. Also NB: 90% of the tributes are written by men. R. had some women students (not many, and all outside the mold of traditional feminine, whatever THAT is) and a lot of women colleagues, and yet women have not found it necessary to proclaim their sorrow online to their colleagues.

We celebrated Mom's 88th birthday today. My brother asked if she ever dreamed she'd live to be 88, and of course she did not, but she mentioned that both her mother and mother's sister died at 88 so clearly she's thought about that. She is as sharp as ever - up on all the news; clearly articulated views; lots of hobbies and activities.

I am melancholy about old age, even middle age. To me, it's roads not taken, friends lost to death, and abilities reduced. Maybe after I lose 30 pounds (my birthday gift to myself this year, starting when I get back from Europe) I will feel differently about the reduction in abilities. Let's hope. I am definitely NOT feeling that surge of middle-aged delight that Carol Gilligan has written books (a whole genre) about.

Sorry. The next post will be more cheerful, I promise you.

feeling blue

The blue haze that hung over us yesterday from the smokey fires in Quebec matched my mood. My advisor (see prior post) died on Sunday afternoon, and I learned the news yesterday morning.

There has been a lot of emailing about our collective shock and grief, but we don't have any information about arrangements. Yesterday I threw myself into ferocious gardening, but today it's raining so I'm at my desk, with too much time to think.

If there is any consolation to be had, it's that R. went out doing what he loved: riding his motorcycle on a cross-country adventure to visit friends. Had he survived the crash, he would not have been satisfied with a life constrained by the effects of his injuries, which were severe.

Feeling inadequate

Today I was part of an interdisciplinary faculty team of about 6 people that provided advising and registration help to about 30 entering transfer students who are undecided as to their major.

It was just deeply, deeply unsatisfying on every level. First, the goals and agenda for the session were provided less than 24 hours in advance. I am the kind of person who mentally prepares for things in advance - meaning that if I have a presentation to give in a couple of weeks, my mind (on some level, if washing dishes, showering or even sleeping) is thinking about this at odd moments and envisioning what I'll say, how I'll respond to questions, what I need to know to prepare, etc. When I have no time for this, I feel mentally unprepared.

Second, we as faculty are completely unprepared to advise outside our own discipline. We can get students to find the major worksheets online (none were provided on paper) but we don't know the optimal course sequences, prerequisites, or conventions of scheduling - how often a course is taught, and which semester. Why not require ONE rep from each department at each advising session to deal with this? My session had, like 3 English profs, 1 chem person, and a communications person. Some fashion people showed up later. NOT a complete effort. Not a complete slate of resources.

Third, there was no handy reference sheet of General Education courses that are offered in fall. (These are the 12 (!) courses that every student must take to be well rounded and whatnot.) This lack is part of a larger problem - the misplaced desire for paperless advising - but it's a mistake. ONE sheet of paper in the packets could have solved a lot of problems - it's just too hard to toggle back and forth between different queries on Gen Ed on the screen.

Fourth, students were dropped into the lab and the on-line registration system with little or no help as far as I could see. No one was in charge, and it was that chaos of working with a class all on computers: you walk around learning tips and sharing them as you go, but it's all VERY haphazard.

Fifth, the organizers did a very BAD job managing expectations. Turns out that transfer students are in the worst position of all for fall registration. Lots of courses are still entirely reserved for first-years and there were very few seats available in the required Gen Ed sections. There was no general discussion of how to deal with this through the summer - monitor the system; check in after first-years register; contact profs for overrides, etc.

One girl I was helping was quietly crying as we worked. She kept turning away to blow her nose and wipe her face. I felt so bad for her. Can't we do better? This is a horrible introduction to our college.

Vacation? What vacation?

Orts of my life:

1. The semester has ended, and yet I keep finding myself on campus - a meeting, two (!) days of training, graduation, another meeting. I have two meetings on Wednesday this week, and a local meeting on Thursday (part of my service to the community, expected of college professors), but tomorrow is ALL MINE.
2. For those of my readers who know me IRL, my dissertation advisor was in a very bad motorcycle accident six days ago, and is in an ICU unit in Ohio. He was on his way here to see his son graduate from college, and he and his partner planned to stay with us for about a week (she had planned to fly out). He has a lot of broken bones, but more seriously some head trauma and now a blood infection (not unusual in this type of situation, the doctor says). I spent a couple of days in a bit of an emotional tailspin last week: it's so frustrating not to be able to DO anything for him or his family.
3. Also I have had a bunch of pernicious computer viruses, and finally ended up getting my computer re-imaged today to get rid of them. Computing has been ad hoc and improvised lately; I found myself in the GIS lab today (of all places) reading emails and printing out stuff I have to read for the Fulbright seminar. Now I am re-installing all the files I backed up last week (boy were they impressed in the IT office that I actually had a backup! Thanks, B, for being my IT God).
4. Mom and Dad came over for dinner and just left a little while ago. I like how we can just be casual and have them over for something relatively simple. For dessert, we grilled pineapple - as we've had in our favorite Brazilian BBQ place - and B totally nailed it. Fabulous.

Joe Sixpack goes to college

I have been to two pedagogy workshops in the last several weeks that touched on (to me) a very disturbing set of beliefs that some college professors have about their students.

The assertion is made that our students are predominantly from Working Class families and thus have been socialized much differently than we have been as the Professorial Class. Therefore, it behooves us to understand the habits of The Working Class and how they affect students' ability to adopt the (desired) behavioral norms of the college environment.

I have so many problems with this line of thinking that I scarcely know where to start. First, I find the terms "working class" and "middle class" problematic these days. The speakers tended to use them as metonyms for particular lifeways, somewhat (although not totally) independent of household income. Thus a Working Class family stresses the importance of family, obedience to authority, no interest in their children's development as thinkers, and no focus on enriching their children's cultural or intellectual lives through family trips to museums and the like. The Middle Class family, on the other hand, values the intellectual growth of its children; they "perform" at the dinner table by reporting on their day, and the parents validate, probe, question, show interest. They are taken to museums and given other cultural opportunities that connect them to a wider world of ideas and diversity. And so on.

All this strikes me as wildly stereotypical and not a little bit elitist. Second, since class distinctions usually relate to income levels, it's curious that at my institution, the median family income is over $90,000 a year, not really very working-class in my opinion.

Third, these faculty members seem undecided about the degree to which they should be pushing students to adopt traditional collegiate values over the ones they've supposedly grown up with. There's a sort of awkward cultural relativism at play: on the one hand, these professors profess to believe in open inquiry, questioning authority, pushing for social change, celebrating cultural difference and the like. On the other hand, their left-leaning inclinations make them not want to privilege these elitist values over the proletariat's values of family, obedience and all that. But they can't have it both ways: what values SHOULD they be teaching?

Fourth, there is something very patronizing about the notion of a bunch of college professors sitting around looking down from on high at the proletariat they deign to teach, and talking about what backgrounds they have to "deal with" and what values they should be inculcating, and that REALLY bothers me.

Fifth, this business of generalizing by the unclear marker of "class" reduces students to known, simplified (and simplistic) categories and encourages faculty to deal in abstractions rather than the flesh-and-blood reality of the student in front of them. While I know it's the business of the so-called social sciences to categorize in order to explain, I don't find the categories persuasive or useful.

The offending professors are quite a bit younger than I, so this isn't some ivory tower rose-colored dream about "how students used to be." Rather, it's a bizarre manifestation of some grad-school-learned radical ideas run amok.