We are in stagnant water. When left to our own devices some of us try to strike up a conversation, to start up the motor, to keep us moving. We might get another 50 yards across the pond but once we arrive there we decide it might be nicer to kill the motor, to just lie back and watch the clouds. Not to take part but to just observe. Tony Prichard is the current of our class, however much he wants us to create our own movement. In his absence we breed mosquitoes on the murky surface of the bog that is student motivation.
It’s true that college does require a degree of self-motivation. In elementary, middle and even high school, a teacher is always breathing down your neck: “Homework is due this day, it must be done in this manner at exactly this time and must say exactly this. If you do not turn in your homework you will be singled out and shot in public.” College isn’t like that. Sure you still get guidelines and rules (some classes more than others) and specific due dates. But if you don’t turn it in, or you don’t follow directions, all you get is a lower GPA. You don’t get a lecture or an argument or detention or anything. Some people can totally handle that.
I can’t handle that, which is part of the reason I’m a fairly self-motivated student, and also one of the students that tries to rev the engine of the boat and get us going. Tony stops talking and I (occasionally) start prodding the class for discussion. But I don’t go so far as to take over. I feel I have opinions to contribute but no ideas to motivate discussion. No ideas to ponder over or inspire a class with. And very few students do. Or they don’t want to voice them. Which is why we’re standing knee-deep in this fucking bog.
Nanotext was the captain of our little boat. He wanted to guide us: assign us specific portions of books and directly reference them in class, give us a rubric and guidelines for Thought Experiment Number One, lead us across the pond of college. Nanotext wanted to dig into our brains and pull out something squishy and bleeding and alive. To get a little graphic, he was the chestburster: living in our bodies and popping out when we least expected it, filling us with horror and dread… but those were things we could USE. We GOT something out of them and we developed new ideas. To continue being graphic, Nanotext impregnated us with ideas, wanted us to give birth to this squirming screaming bloody baby of intellect, context and consideration. And I feel we all had at least one chestburster; at least one squirming squealing squeamish baby in the days of Nanotext.
When he died (which only continues to become a more significant event to me, as the initial occurrence breezed right by), he left us with that wisdom and wanted us to raise the alien, the squishy baby, on our own. We were single mothers and fathers raising our own ideas. But we have been neglectful parents.
The Author has tried to prod us into class discussions. He’s removed the rules and regulations from Parasites and set us free. But we keep leaving our babies under our beds or in the bathtub or on top of the car when we drive off. We’re letting them starve to death or we’re forgetting about them or we’re murdering them. I’m graphic because it’s important. We’re not motivated to be parents; we’re not motivated enough to be diligent students. That is to say, to be teachers for ourselves and each other as well as being students.
Formal education exists primarily because many people don’t instinctively hunger for knowledge. If you removed mandatory primary education, what would we know? How many students would there be? Who would go to school? Now, college isn’t mandatory. Nobody says you have to have a degree to be a citizen. But they might as well say that, because if you don’t have a degree what you have is a minimum wage job and not a lot of respect. So students feel pressured by society, by their parents, by their peers and by their fears (Peers for Fears? That was my stab at Rickels) to march from high school graduation bravely into college, where they promptly party and waste a lot of financial aid, scholarships and parents’ money. True, some students work to put themselves through school, and true some students don’t party, and true many students that do party still get great grades. Some students are rare exceptions to the rule; some students really, really do want to learn.
But.
If they didn’t go to class, pay tuition and feel all the pressures I mentioned. Would they know ANY of this. Would they WANT to learn? And by WANT to learn I really mean, when they wake up in the morning or when they get off work, they go to the library or the museum or their knowledgeable friend, arriving at all this with the mindset of “Teach me, I want to learn”? I would think very few people fit into this category.
And so we march right onto campus, march to our desks, sit down, pull out a blank sheet of paper and a pen (or a laptop), and stare. We write down buzzwords (this will come back again later) and we make flashcards and we cram our short-term memories with facts. We pass the midterm and the final; we burn the notes and forget it; we move on.
Tony, Nanotext and The Author, bless them all, they are pushing us to access our long-term memory. To store something away. To see what sticks. They are all throwing things at us, sticky popcorn balls of theory and creative writing and prompts, and hoping to see us get up and walk out of the classroom COVERED in these things. Just covered, so that students on campus all turn their heads and say “Who are those kids covered in popcorn balls?” And we’ll say, “We’re Tony’s students.”
But I am still standing in this marsh with my legs stuck in the mud. Swarms of mosquitoes waiting to infect me with the Dread Malaria of forgetfulness and dismissal. The farm of my knowledge will be desolate because I didn’t strive to kill every last one of those killers.
“Yes, we’ve got to kill every one in the house” (Disney ’43 - The Winged Scourge).
Actually, at this point, I’m drowning a little in my metaphors, but it’s okay. Long as I can keep my head above water, or muck.
On March 8 we were left alone. Not in the traditional teaching methods of The Author (the “pretend I’m not here” discussion—he inevitably has to rev the motor for us anyway because we get stuck in that damned marsh), but in the real “I’m actually not here” sense. (At least not physically. He was with us on plurk at least some of that time.) And what did we do?
Well. I brought up Thought Experiment #3; wanted to know what people were thinking for it. Surprisingly that lasted conversation stayed afloat for awhile. Then a lot of YouTube videos happened. Some of us kept running back to the helm, trying to steer the boat, but we were going in circles. We were the students outside of a formal education setting. And it was apparent we weren’t all self-motivated.
Now it may not be fair to base that statement off of one day. In fact, I really don’t want that to be taken as a judgment of our characters or our motivation on a grand scale. There’s the undeniable appeal of “The parents are away; PARTY TIME!” that everyone feels. Adults in office buildings are overjoyed when their boss is absent for the day, and they might spend all day playing Minesweeper (which we also watched a YouTube video on)… uh, or they’d probably play WoW. We did actually come back to the topics of the class a little more than I expected. But mostly people wanted to share YouTube videos or chat about social things. Some people wanted to express frustration at the texts (although as a general rule not Filth: the students are digging Filth). Some people expressed feeling stuck knee-deep in the bog of the class as a whole.
I think the death of Nanotext left a lot of students with the sense that their professor had left. There was a lot less direction. Everything was discussion based. Taking notes was difficult. I’ve never taken notes for this class. I can’t fathom how I would.
I mentioned this on March 8, too. When I take notes I am just getting bulletpoints. Things that for a “traditional” class I would expect to be on the multiple-choice test. And that is just simply impossible for this class. I have been on board with “throw things at you and see what sticks” for the whole quarter. Now I admit not as much has stuck as I wish had. But I’m definitely glad I haven’t taken notes.
On the days I’ve brought my laptop to class I mostly sit there staring at the screen, waiting for a plurk update to read. I probably couldn’t tell you a fucking thing about what happened that day. Not a thing. I don’t know how people can concentrate with screens in front of them. I guess it’s an individual thing. That’s why Tony left it up to us. He’s not going to ban screens from the class. It’s not elementary-middle-high school; there is no “If you don’t put that thing away right now it’s going to be mine” (remember that?!). Tony knows that if you can concentrate with screens, that’s great, that’s fine, you’re welcome to it! After all, he does it too. And he knows that if you can’t concentrate with screens, you’re going to have a hell of a time getting anything out of the class. And you’re going to probably have a very dull thought experiment.
I suspect that has something to do with why he declared on March 5 that the students were going to discuss, and he was going to take notes. No one but Tony was allowed to take notes. He even prohibited comments on his notes thread on plurk (Notes for 3/5).
So I control my screen time in Parasites, because I want to get out of these acrid marshes. I want to find some ideas that help me figure out how to start the engine on this boat. I want to hear it (the boat:the engine:my brain:my creativity) roar. And I am writing this Thought Experiment as it goes because I didn’t know what to write about. I find there is nothing better than sitting down and writing when you don’t have any ideas.
You do have ideas.
They’re just a little deeper in the muck, but you always have ideas.
I don’t want to draw in my other two thought experiments to this one. I think this is a cumulative thought experiment without being a reiteration. I sort of feel like they would be concrete bricks tied to my feet holding me down in the muck. And this is an apt metaphor for something that came up in class on March 8 in Tony’s absence.
I told you that buzzwords were going to come back. Well here they are. It was discussed for some time that many students have clung to the buzzwords of this class, in hopes of grasping something concrete (but now they sleep with the fishes). It’s been a giant contest: who can bring up the buzzwords? Who can tie what we’re talking about to “parasites”? How about to “context” or to “interruption”? How about: depending on “context”, “parasites” can be an “interruption”? DING DING DING! You’re our GRAND PRIZE WINNER!
I have no assumption that this is what Tony wanted us to do. I think it’s only natural that we as students gravitated this way in our endless quest to please the teacher. This is what you wanted, teacher, isn’t it??? To tie all these concepts together in a neat little package wrapped with a bow of buzzwords?
And I’m not innocent here. In fact I’d venture that everyone who has ever spoken up in class at all (or on plurk or on Wave or some other way) has used these buzzwords and felt proud of it. But how many of our connections really meant something, really helped us advance our thinking, and how many of them were just so we could name ourselves the Grand Prize Winner, the Diligent Student of the Day. Can any of us say that these tidy little packages were the best thing we got out of this class?
That is why I say these buzzwords are the concrete bricks tied to our feet holding us down in the mucky stagnant water of student motivation! Even here, even this damn Thought Experiment is absolutely wrought with buzzwords and metaphor and cute little packages! The package metaphor is ITSELF a cute little package!
This is the part of the Thought Experiment where I headdesk.
Okay, so backing up. The simplified no-bullshit version of what I’m saying here is that students as a general rule don’t lead themselves. And leading your own education is ultimately what professors want (to varying degrees; I believe Parasites is an extreme case of this). So there’s a conflict. And I’m just going to play into the buzzwords thing again.
With every parasite there is a struggle, a conflict. Generally, the parasite wants to stay in the host, and the host wants to expel the parasite. What better example than Bruce Robertson. Although the tapeworm readily admits that Robertson is probably a dimwit, he has no greater desire than to remain in Robertson’s bowels, feeding off of his nutrients. The tapeworm is grateful to its host, but the host is so, so ungrateful. Robertson is disgusted by worms. “If you drink whisky you’ll never get worms,” Bruce says on page 64. It’s repeated later. Robertson is all about repetition. When Dr. Rossi confirms Robertson has worms, he readily consumes the chemicals necessary to flush out the tapeworm. Understandably, this pisses the tapeworm off.
“00 no no no no 00 oh no you bastard” (253).
But we come to find out there is more than one worm. And the next worm really isn’t happy that its companion has been flushed. But what impact does the tapeworm have on Bruce? Minor inconvenience. Creepy-crawly feeling; desire to get rid of it. Bruce’s impact on the tapeworm is a life or death matter.
So what have I accomplished here? I’ve acknowledged that students as a general rule are only after the grades. I’ve admitted that this is present in varying degrees and changes depending on a number of factors. I’ve pointed out the futility of buzzwords, then I’ve played into them only to dismiss them again. I guess this only proves that buzzwords really are what we hang on to in a class. We really do need these concrete things to guide us right to the pond floor. Maybe we’re still stuck in this swamp of motivation. But maybe we shuffled our feet a few times. Maybe we grabbed a stick to help us stay afloat and push us a little closer to shore.
Works Cited
“Disney ’43 – The Winged Scourge.” 30 March 2008. YouTube. Web. 12 March 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y68F8YwLWdg
number six. “Notes for 3/5.” plurk. 3 March 2010. Web. 13 March 2010. http://www.plurk.com/p/41e4mp
Welsh, Irvine. Filth. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. Print.
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