Penny Hero (dot) Net

Part of the first comment at the end of The poet who could smell vowels, which celebrates René de Saussure’s life.

“Thank you so much for your deeply human portrayal of the man Saussure. So often, as you say, we do (or perhaps must) reduce these human idea-factories to a few memorable phrases or greatest-hits concepts. And I think Saussure, because of how widely racinated, how utterly necessary, his ideas have become over so many disciplines, is more vulnerable than most: we think we ‘know’ Foucault, have a grip on who Freud walked around as, don’t feel we need to worry that we might take Marx or Barthes out of context, while the Genevan philologist cited in every liberal arts term paper and dissertation on every continent remains just a surname in a few thousand footnotes. Now at least we can see him in color.”

–Antheia Laplante, Seattle, USA

It’s apparently 150 years since he was born.

Have I mentioned that I miss school? My regrets about not taking more math and science are now in fierce competition with my regrets about not going hard-core into critical theory.

“ New Delhi physicist Sugata Mitra has a radical proposal for bringing his country’s next generation into the Info Age”

I don’t wish to claim that this shows anything more or less than what it has shown, which is that curious kids in groups can train themselves to operate a computer at a basic level. In doing so, they also can get a generally good idea about the nature of browsing and the nature of the Internet … And, therefore, if they view these things as worth learning, no formal infrastructure is needed [to teach them]. (emph mine)

What he did was this: he mounted a camera in a tree, embedded an internet-connected computer in a wall in a “slum” area, and watched what happened.

He calls it “minimally invasive education” and believes that the key to promoting authentic computer literacy is “for teachers and other adults to give [kids] free rein, so their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves.”

Wow. Yes yes yes.

Another cool point was that the kids taught themselves in groups. it seemed that being in a group was a major component to self-learning.

How’s that for authentic education based on collaboration, social-ness, etc. de-centralized learning, and all those other literacy and educational buzzwords floating around! woo hoo!

But it makes sense. People don’t learn by rote memorization or being forced to learn something. They don’t really truly learn material by sitting at a desk and forcing it into their brains. we learn by practicing, doing, asking questions, figuring stuff out. NOT by lecture. we learn because we have a question, a problem, or out of curiosity.

lectures can help us prepare for tests, but this kind of “figure stuff out” method is what gets you to really learn something.

The thing that’s way cool is that this shows that this type of ‘decentralized’ learning model isn’t all that expensive.

So what’s the real difference between adults and kids? Just that adults “can’t” learn new things? No. it’s more like the sense of curiosity and self-confidence just fades or grows out of them or something. So the key to always being able to learn is to retain your sense of curiosity and spontenaety.

All these things are sort of “common sense”, but now there’s some sorta scientific “proof” that this is true.

I just wish that we had an educational system that matched research like this. individual teachers who model their classrooms around these ideas are awesome, but when they’re forced to “teach to the test” or their kids will fail and they’ll lose their funding… it just hurts everyone.

Anyway, gotta get back to work… just didn’t want to forget to write about this.

…and, today was just a really (???) day.

In one of my writing sessions, I totally lost my ability to explain why it was important to emphasize and focus on what the readers of her personal statement were looking for. I knew the paper was unbalanced; too much emphasis was on empty personal narrative, and more needed to be on her experiences shadowing dentists, her volunteer work with kids teaching them good dental habits, and her academic interests in dentistry. I tried to use words like “better balanced” and “emphasize this” and “can you see how you change direction pretty suddenly here?” but she wasn’t getting it. She wasn’t accepting what I had to say, and when I’d ask her “does that make sense?” she’d respond with “no”. I just crumpled, which is exactly what not to do in front of the person you’re trying to work with.

The next session wasn’t any better, and it immediately followed that self-esteem-pummeling Personal Statement appointment. A lab report, (a format that I’m not very familiar with, and I need to look up more information about) and his biggest concern was spelling. I tried to make a light joke about how my spelling is horrible too, and that I depend on spell-checking software. I laughed, but he looked at me like I’d just punched him in the gut. He was serious. (!!) The confidence level pummeled again there.

With him, I also lost all confidence in myself because i couldn’t make him understand the concept of “tense”… I couldn’t make him recognize that all his verbs were using different forms, let alone that this was not a good idea… I realize now that he probably just didn’t know what a “verb” was, and that he’d had very little exposure to grammar jargon. I should have recognized that, and I should have had a short lesson in what a verb is.. but I think I just panicked there, and my brain just turned off. I felt so unbelievably stupid.

The biggest problem was that I just didn’t deal with it all very well. I wasn’t there in the session. I was about five feet behind and to the left, kicking myself in the kidney for acting like an idiot, and not re-engaging.

*sigh*

So, those things made today bad.

Partly because of that, I just feel pretty empty right now. Unfulfilled. I’m not depressed though. Just kind of intellectually unconscious. (you’d never know it though, the way I’m being all critically contemplative right now.) I went into defense mode around 3:30, and I let myself become extremely bitter reading an article for the Writing Center meeting today. In my head and in the margins, I criticized the author’s reductionist advice, and the ridiculously over-simplified situations he described as “problems” with the way writing centers run themselves. I viciously attacked his misuse of the “postmodern understanding of Author“, when I probably could have let it slide… (or recognized that he was probably being ironic and actually himself criticizing those who misunderstand the Author concept he was referring to). In the meeting, many of his points were taken seriously, and I really couldn’t see the merit in it. It was too simple. too irrelevant. And… (because of the theories I internalized from someone who just died) I’m devoted to complexity.

So, about the late Derrida… Here is an article that for a brief moment made me feel less like an oil slick on a rainy day when I got home and actually read it. Someday, I would like to be seen the way I see this writer. I would like to be able to articulate my hate for the things I love the most like she does here. I would like to be allowed to bang my personal struggles out in print and make them relevant to people I’ve never even passed on a busy street.

…

So, today was a day that has led me to this moment. This moment of writing in my dusty journal, exposing and exploring problems in my fledgling academic carreer… with all kinds of thoughts I want to still pour out but don’t have the time or energy just yet. All I can do is make a mental note to try not to forget them, and to explore them before applications for grad school need to be sent out.

Derrida died….almost a week ago? no one told me. I didn’t know.

now I do.

And I’m horribly sad.

I wish I could say something meaningful.

I can’t even type.

*cries*

Our influence, beginning in the mid-eighties, was at that time incredible large, specially the philosophers, sociologists, literary theoreticians. But this was a special, very limited conjunction. Now there is the pure ignorance of the regime, who is simply not interested in ideological questions. I feel sorry for those countries in which writes nowadays play an important role. Take Serbia, where this nationalist madness was fabricated by writers. Even in Slovenia it’s the same with the nationalist writers, although they do not have much influence.

(link)

-Zizek, an interview transcribed. He’s talking about the role of the “intellectual” in government or social functions.

My comments: To be perfectly honest, I pity the countries where the intellectual does not play any important role. In the USA, it seems that the intellectual is almost romanticized as a completely ignored genius, who always has all the right answers, but to whom no one in power ever listens. This is seen especially in our movies, as it’s extremely popular for the “smart nerd” to be the one ignored, or brushed aside by the military, or the president when he/she tries to explain about some impeding disaster. This in fact is actually the entire PREMISE of most of our popular disaster movies and tv-shows. Didn’t you see The Day After Tomorrow? The X-files? Stargate? These movies usually resolve themselves with the realization that the “nerd” was right all along, and in some cases, the government or the “dumb people in power” come to realize this and it’s implied that they are going to change their ways. (The Day After Tomorrow is a great example of this.) But in others, this romantic and essentially overly-optimistic resolution is merely alluded to, and strongly denied during the Season Finale because that kind of nerd-teasing is a very effective cliff-hanger in the US for some reason. (I’m thinking of the x-files here)

Tangent: is this saying that we all are nerd-wannabes at heart? not necessarily. Fans of the x-files or science-fiction disaster movies aren’t specifically responding to the struggle that the intellectual protagonist goes through. They are responding to themes of personal struggle that are more universal. It’s the same themes that are present in most super-hero mythologies… the underestimated and isolated individual turns out to be the one who saves the world all the time. Same thing with Harry Potter, or Karate Kid, or anything else with a theme of “maturation” that goes beyond merely maturation and into a fantastic medium of some kind.

The thing that this intellectual-themed sub-thread of this trend shows is that the “intellectual” being denied their powers of effective and applicable reason is simply a very effective one of several. There is a very strong audience in the US who want to believe that the government and the people with power over them are stupid, ineffective, and that when some huge disaster strikes, we will be allowed to blame it on their ignorance. It’s romantic. It’s comforting to think of this. But all of this really does reflect on the apparent relationship between the Powers that be and the Intellectuals in our society.

Again, I think that the US is a country where this fantasy (either begot by the attitudes, or vice versa) exists. And I think it’s clear that the attitudes and tastes of our popular culture in entertainment is an integral part of this and reflects on (and is reflected by) this.

So, I just had these ideas and I want to write them down in a place more ‘concrete’ than a piece of scrap paper. (the internet is more concrete than paper? wow)

Derrida has “force” and “structure” working together to create meaning, to create the way we see the world… His ideas have been playing in my head for months now, and… ok, so I was reading this article about how the discovery of life outside Earth would probably lead to a large religious identity crisis on earth, revolution etc. In other words, this discovery would be just as significant as “the earth is round” and “we aren’t the center” yadda yadda, no duh.

ANYWAY

This led me to thinking about the origin of life, and thinking about life is like Derrida’s “force” or “play”. And the physical matter is like Derrida’s “structure”. It came to me that even on a molecular level, motion and force is essential. No scientist ever has reached Absolute Zero as of yet, and even if they could, it’s been theorized that the matter itself would break down, or at least be easily and completely changed with the use of precision “tweezers” that could restructure the molecular bonds once all internal kinetic force and energy was gone. (It’s like molecular anaesthesia, and could allow for matter-threatening surgery or whatever, yadda yadda)

So, using derrida’s ideas of force+structure (not to mention both sides of any binary opposite) being essential and inherent for meaning to exist, it would make sense to me if we discovered that matter and energy together is essential and inherent for anything to exist in our world (physics here).

Ok ok ok. I’m not done here.

Going back to thoughts on the origin of life. Life seems like a creative form of this force+structure thing… it does more than just exist, or float around in the universe recombining. It’s got meaning and “consciousness” and all this other stuff that makes it different from other physical things.

This seems analogous to what language is in relation to like… sound. Or even just the things that animals do to ‘communicate’. Some event? in the history of “life” resulted in language, which is really essential if not inherent to the ability to consciously think, or so it has been theorized, and so i’ve come to accept, yadda yadda, i’ll go into detail later.

language uses the relationship of force and structure to create meaning, and in conveying and recieving meaning. Similarly, force and structure (matter and energy) have been put into place in order to create life. See where I’m going?

So it could be that if we could find the ‘origin’ of language, or do more research into the origin of consciousness, we could find an analogy for the origin of life in the universe…. find an analogy that would describe the processes by which chemicals found themselves recombining in creative ways… the way sounds (in our human case) found themselves recombining and creating a language.

This analogy seems disconnected, far-fetched in the form i’m writing it now. But it’s just enough that I’d like to read more, do more, understand more, write more and explore this idea more and see if it’s got any potential.

blah. ok. i’m going to go finish reading that article now.

Something I want to think about later: The biggest problem with social and political criticism is that it is inaccessible to the masses. The masses, with their voting power and simply because culture is created by the entire body of the massive populace, are the ones who could enact change in the social and political structure.

If Foucault’s and Zizek’s ideas were in a form more easily understood by everyone, I think that real change would be inevitable, and much more rapid.

This is what I’m working on right now. A five-page essay on nietzsche.

Give me feedback NOW BITCH!

Among the many related concepts explored in “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense”, Nietzsche describes a human existence in which it is impossible to ever directly experience or understand what reality actually is. He bases this philosophy on the idea that because we are unable to remove ourselves from our world and see it from an objective viewpoint, we can never hope to perceive more than the stimuli that reach our senses. According to Nietzsche, it is merely the “nerve stimulus”(82), which is already once removed from the original source that is then transferred into an “image” (82) or thought, no more than a metaphor, and then into sound and finally words. These then become our understanding of our world. However, these several degrees of separation between the original “thing in itself” (82) and our understanding of that thing prevent us from truly grasping its truth. Keeping this aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy in mind, an inescapable paradox reveals itself when it is recognized that Nietzsche cannot hope to effectively convey or discuss the actual truth or reality implied by his essay using human language. A discussion of just the diction used in the text of the essay, even in a translated version, provides evidence that language can never be used to effectively convey the exact truth that Nietzsche hopes to reveal. This paradox then turns back upon itself when it is realized that the fact that language fails Nietzsche not only undermines and weakens the validity of his idea of an inaccessible truth outside ourselves, but also provides the strongest evidence in support of it.

Yeah. that is one paragraph. The intro at that. But according to MSword, it is a full page. :) So… only four more like it to go. And btw, ignore my incorrect citations. Fuck figuring out which citation style he wants.

Yeah… you know I secretly love this shit, right?

A noon-ish English lecture today had me feeling the same kind of butterflies that are usually reserved for when I meet an interesting person. Looking at my notes now, I hope to summarize what had me so… stimulated.

Something about how the idea of a “noble savage” shows up in mythology and in literature at times when a culture becomes self-critical and insecure. The ideas of both an inferior savage and a superior, noble savage are equally ethnocentric and stereotypical. Neither of them allow the people the image is projected on to be considered real people. The more benign stereotype shows up when a society is feeling particularly wretched…

How does this apply to the individual? Everyone has a certain “type” of person that they like, or dislike more than others. For example: academics may feel superior to pop-music loving teens… Others might feel inferior to the accelerated students in their classes… But these are still stereotypes… and they don’t attribute any kind of intellectual complexity or uniqueness to these people. It reflects on a person’s own self-criticism and/or a lack of understanding of reality.

And no, I didn’t copy any of that from the chalk board. When I scribbled some of this down, the Prof was still talking about the New Garden of Eden and the ideas Europe projected on North America to effectively invent the new world, rather than discover it.

After English… I met Eriko at Java II and we spent a good 3 hours working on Japanese when what was due actually only took about 15 minutes. Eriko had the brilliant idea to do all the reading/comprehension assignments for the term ahead of time so we wouldn’t have to do them later. I giggled and went along with it. I think I may not have to do any real Japanese homework for a long time…. tee hee. The fact that we were actually able to finish all that work with very little effort has me wondering if maybe I should try to test out of Japanese 211… and skip to 311. (Didn’t I do that in High School too?)

Later, Eriko and I became hungry… and exchanged the following conversation:
Me: I’m hungry.
Him: Me too. Let’s go find something to eat and then go see a movie.
Me: Ok… but you’ll have to feed me because I have no money.
Him: Well, all I have is rice…
Me: That’s ok.
Him: No it’s not. Let’s go to Non’s place. He always has food.

Apparently Eriko is a big leach. And Non knows it so he keeps his fridge stocked with yummy leftovers. I ate excellent Thai Curry… WOW…. yummy. I only found out later that it was from some Asian restaurant in Salem.

The three of us saw Sweet Home Alabama (and on the way I told them about my two might-be-nightmarchers experiences from when I lived in Hawaii.) The movie was entertaining… and slightly nostalgic for me. Back when I was growing up, Newberg wasn’t quite as big as it is now. I grew up around horses and freezing water-pipes in winter… and wet-dog smell. And the kind of small-town feeling where everyone knew who I was. (As a matter of fact, just before I returned to campus, my second grade teacher came up to me at the store and asked how I was!) I remember going to rodeos with Kim and her friends… and feeling almost like a north-western version of the southern hick… So the movie, while not terribly insightful, was fun and had a nice message about how a person can have “roots and wings” at the same time, which I related to muchly.

Then I came back and… learned I was obsessed… Perhaps embarrassingly obsessed. But at least I found what I was looking for… and also found something I wasn’t looking for but now I’m pleased I did. I have to sit on my hands to keep from creating a shortcut to it on my desktop.

In other news: It’s 4:00am… wtf am I doing up this late?
*removes contacts*
*sleeps*