Those Who Can, Teach

I'm auditing a class this semester called "Education in the USA" and, despite the fact that it's not one of my "real" classes, I probably spend more time thinking about it than even my thesis. It is a thought-provoking class in every way, but one of the best things it has done for me personally is alleviate the persistent guilt I have carried around for years about wanting to be a teacher. We've all heard the maxim "those who can't do, teach" (and those who can't teach, teach P.E.) -- laughingly, but with the understanding that yes, we actually believe it. It has been both implied and explicitly stated throughout my education that my turning around and becoming a teacher would simply be "a waste," and many of my high-achieving friends have received similar messages -- most often, ironically, from our teachers. A professor in France told me point-blank that I should be aspiring to much more. When I was in the process of applying to Teach for America (to which I was not accepted), I felt I had to defend it by driving home the point that it was only for two years, and that if I ever did make teaching a career, I would do something "real" first. While I still think there are advantages to teachers' gaining experiences other than teaching, I am now in a much better position to refute the assumption that teaching is somehow a substandard career choice.

Bon Voyage

Tonight is my last night in my own room for the next nine months. It's amazingly messy; I'm almost completely packed, and there is still a large amount of stuff strewn about. My suitcases (two, weighing up to 50 pounds each - efficient packing should be a competitive sport) are mostly full of clothing and medications; my carry-on bag contains my laptop, a folder full of important papers (if anyone wanted to steal my identity, it's all right there, conveniently packaged), and sundry travel paraphernalia (e.g. iPod, gummy snacks). The Euros/travelers checks/passport/train ticket are all traveling on my body. And that's pretty much all I'm taking. One of my beds is still covered in clothes (the "no" pile and remnants of the "maybe;" the "yes" pile went into my suitcase); my desk is still full of stationery; my bookshelf is untouched; my dresser displays all but my favorite jewelry. It doesn't really look like I'm leaving. If you ignore the large suitcases on my floor, that is.

After all the preparations for traveling abroad I've been making for the past months, it will be a relief to finally get there, although I'm by no means finished with paperwork. The French are entirely too fond of it. Although I have my long-stay visa, I'll need to apply for a residency permit once I get there, which requires a medical exam and a €55 stamp (which I'm quite curious about). According to the Poitiers transportation website, I need an identity photo in order to get a bus pass for the academic year. I'll need to obtain a French cell phone as soon as possible (in the meantime, I'll be incurring international roaming charges of $1.49 a minute - very short conversations), though I haven't decided between a year-long contract and the pay-as-you-go plans. The normal logistics of college life all seem much more intimidating when conducted in a foreign language.

However, I'm looking forward to meeting my host family and beginning orientation. From the research I've done on Poitiers, it seems like it will be a nice city to live in. The next 18 hours or so, and the leave-taking they entail, seem like the most frightening part of the whole experience. Hopefully that's a good sign, and when next you hear from me, I will be well on the way to immersing myself in la vie poitevine. 

Study Abroad

Hello, long-forsaken readers (should any of you still exist). In the next few weeks, I will be resurrecting this blog in order to chronicle my year in Poitiers. I leave Houston on September 1, stop briefly in Dallas (because that makes a great deal of sense) and arrive in Paris at Charles de Gaulle on the morning of September 2. At that point, I will meet up with a fellow intrepid study abroad student and take the train to Poitiers, arriving at approximately 16h10 (that's 4:10 p.m. to Americans), at which time I will hopefully be met by one or more of my host family (who, by the way, sound amazing). Orientation commences at 10h on September 4, so I will have a day to adjust to the time difference, unpack and hopefully explore the city a bit. I will be living here:

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with Brenda Marshall and Bruno Jorigné, as well as several of their children (including a daughter my age). I am enrolled in the Université de Poitiers, and will be taking classes in French language, literature, history and culture, as well as some math, if I can manage it.

I'm generally very excited, although I still have a longish list of things to do before I leave and there seem to be a daunting number of things to accomplish in my first week there (not to mention a daunting amount of money to be spent in doing them). I will try to post regularly, but I make no promises as hopefully I will be busy. Also, I may or may not write my posts in French once I get there, but if I do I'll be sure to run them through Google Translate for your amusement and (limited) comprehension.

As a final note, my mailing address in Poitiers will be:

Hallie Gammon
Chez Mme Marshall
2 allée des Aubépines
86550 Mignaloux-Beauvoir Poitiers
France

À bientôt!

This Is Why I Love Math

Today in calculus, my professor was scribbling definitions and examples on the board in full flow when he hit the end of the board. He jokingly suggested that for his birthday, he wanted a round room with a neverending chalkboard. Somebody in the class called out to ask him when his birthday is. It's sometime in October, but I don't think anybody in the class remembers the date because we were all too busy trying to work how old he'll be. His age will be a product of primes for the third consecutive year, and this is the first time in his life that this has occurred. I love how he already had that worked out and didn't even have to think about it. So, how old will Professor Schmitt be?

Musings

There's still quite a buzz about the new logo, but it seems to have shifted away from the design itself to the issue of lack of student input in the decision-making process. Now, I am honestly not trying to be condescending or inflammatory or what-have-you, and I certainly welcome anyone's opinion who cares to give it, but this whole thing has had me wondering: exactly how much right do we, as students, have to expect that the administration will consult with us before administrating? Not having experienced any college other than Middlebury, I don't have any authority for anything I'm about to say, but it seems to me that it wouldn't be practical anywhere any larger than Middlebury to try to let students have a hand in decision-making processes unless it was something really major. (Yes, you've guessed it, I don't consider a change of logo really major, but that's more or less beside the point.) One of my best friends goes to Texas State, and it continually surprises me how little she has to do with her school. She lives in a dorm and goes to classes, but she and her friends just don't seem as involved in the school - there are plenty of other things to do around town. Maybe it's another effect of our Midd bubble; there's nothing to do other than get involved. And our size does make us better suited to a more collaborative approach. I'm really of two minds about the whole thing. I think it's great that the administration listens to the student body as much as it does; on the other hand, the adminstration's job is to administrate, and I'm not sure they owe it to us to let us help them do their job. We students seem to feel that we have some inalienable right to be involved in the administrative process, but I'm not convinced that's the case. I guess some people might come to Midd for that opportunity, but to be honest that's not something I ever thought about or expected from the college experience. I mean, by all accounts, if we were at university in Europe and tried to get involved in college decisions like this, we'd be laughed at. Big universities don't necessarily even need to care about their students as individuals with opinions - there are plenty more who would be happy to get in. Maybe places like Midd are the way of the future, with education becoming more of a collaborative effort and less of an adult-student hierarchy. Or maybe it's an effect of our generation. I've been reading a lot of magazine articles about Gen Y lately. It's kind of amusing to see myself and my friends generalized like that, but there are some grains of truth. The consensus seems to be that we dislike hierarchy and being told what to do, but value cooperation and getting involved with causes we care about. Oh, and we feel the world does actually owe us something. All those things seem pretty symptomatic of the recent reaction to the logo. Maybe we're misguided and maybe we aren't. I realize I haven't actually concluded anything. If you'd like to conclude something for me, leave a comment.

Academic Snobbery

Since everyone has been weighing in on the new Middlebury logo all day, I'll throw in my two cents' worth. Personally, I think the reaction is silly. I checked Midd's home page out of idle curiosity when I saw a reference to the new logo on Facebook, and I can't say I'm a big fan, but I didn't think about it again until it started cropping up on people's blogs. I laughed out loud when I got an invite to a Facebook group protesting the new logo. Of all the "causes" you could devote your time and energy to, why pick one protesting a mere logo that isn't negatively affecting anyone in any material way?

I understand that a school's logo is in some sense its face to the outside world, but I really think people are overestimating its importance. There are two or three schools whose logos I could immediately identify (UT's Hook'Em and A&M's Gig'Em spring to mind), but they're all within a close radius of my home and are inextricably linked with sports. The academic reputations of schools are linked to their names, not the pictures that appear on their t-shirts. I got piles of mail from colleges when I was applying and I don't remember a single logo, even from the schools that I ultimately visited. My point is, for a college at least, a logo is a fairly meaningless graphic that happens to appear on a lot of college material. It may attract some loyalty in its immediate environs or among its sports fans, but it would take a heck of a campaign to for a college to embed its logo in the national consciousness the way, say, Apple or Nike have. A college and its reputation are identified by the name. If all someone can associate with a college is a picture, what have we gained? To have a high opinion of Midd's academic standing, there are already thoughts involved that have to be expressed in words.

Even allowing a logo to have slightly more importance than I've made out, a change in logos in no way warrants the sort of vociferous reaction it has received. I reiterate: find a new cause. If you have that much hate to spare, take it out on world hunger, disease, war, politics, anything that actually matters outside the Midd bubble. I think we MiddKids are so used to having our opinions matter that we rush to have an opinion on everything and make mountains out of molehills in our self-important opinionatedness. Some things just aren't worth having this violent an opinion about.

Do What You Love

Life is full of pithy but overly simplistic bits of advice like the above. How do you know what it is you love? What if you love too many things? I had more than a few crises as I neared the end of my first year of college (I can't believe I've finished a year of college), but I finally made up my mind to double major in French, which was basically a given (and on the practical end of liberal arts), and math, because I really think it's what I love. I realize many people find math unlovable. I loathed it through middle school, was skeptical through pre-calculus, and only really started to appreciate it when I got to calculus. They don't usually teach you the cool stuff, like linear algebra, in high school. Remember chemistry class when your teacher told you the only way to balance chemical reactions was an educated version of guess-and-check? Actually, there's a simple, foolproof method involving matrix reduction that will give you every possible way to balance an equation every time, including some solutions it would be basically impossible to arrive at by the eyeballing method. Nifty. Well, a lot of subjects have cool tricks up their sleeves. How do I know math is what I want to do for the next three years of my life? It was a small clue when my first meeting with my potential adviser turned into an hour-long lecture on the braid group and I didn't get bored. That evolved into my going to office hours on the (legitimate) pretense of getting homework help, but really just so I could sit and listen to the math professors talk. I heard rants ranging from how the sciences are corrupting pure math, to how math in movies is invariably wrong (and how the professors here invariably know the people hired to be math consultants in said movies), interspersed with mini-lectures about arcane principles of mathematics. As terrifically nerdy as it sounds, those were some of the best conversations I had all semester, and those are the people I want to spend the next three years learning from. I will leave you with a joke that, even if you never find mathematics lovable, you have to admit is pretty hilarious:

Q: What do you get if you cross a mosquito with an elephant?
A: (mosquito)(elephant)(sinθ)

Q: What do you get if you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?
A: Trick question. You can't cross a vector with a scaler.

Motivation and Justification

Why do we do the things we do? (This isn't an existentially angsty post.) I started thinking about this after our senior week Chamber Singers concert. We chose an ambitious amount of music to learn, worked hard at it, and generally agreed that we pulled it off as well as could be expected. But I think most of us didn't really enjoy giving imperfect performances of songs we could probably have learned nearly flawlessly with more time. Who did it benefit then? The audience? If so, why do we always thank our friends for coming in a slightly apologetic tone of voice? And why does half the audience fall asleep? Maybe it benefited our conductor, then. I know he appreciated all the work and effort we put it, but judging by his repertoire of expressions ranging from anxious to stricken, he was relieved we made it through the concert without any train wrecks. I would bet that the reigning sentiment in that concert hall at the end of the program was relief. So what possible justification did we have for creating an experience that was slightly uncomfortable for everyone involved?

I feel similarly about the new Ayres CD (and the old one, for that matter). Now, I think it's really cool that I'm on a CD, and recording it was a fun if exhausting experience. But it's not like I sit down and listen to it. I would far rather be singing those songs than hearing them. And I have to wonder who actually does listen to our CD. Madrigals have a limited audience anyway, and when you could be listening to the King's Singers, why would you listen to the Middlebury Mountain Ayres? Yes, we're quite good for a college a cappella group, but I'm fully aware that there are better versions of those songs out there in the world. Most of my friends have bought CDs, but I have no expectation that they're going to end up on their iTunes most played lists. Basically, we've created a product of very little actual usefulness to anyone, rather like those little knicknacks that are so cute you just have to have them but end up sitting around collecting dust.

Please don't get me wrong. I love singing in Chambers and recording a CD was a neat opportunity. Sometimes I just have to stop and wonder what purpose all these things have.

Moral Ambiguity

You encounter a lot of new things at college. Middlebury in particular promotes diversity and the value of difference, be it racial, religious, socioeconomic, or simply a difference of opinions. I've run into all these in my nine months at Midd, and for the most part I've appreciated the new perspectives and ideas I got out of such encounters. But a few things have occurred that caused me to stop and wonder: at what point are you allowed to stop appreciating ideas that differ from your own? Do I have to accept a diversity of values and moral standards? Are right and wrong really relative? (If you think I'm going to answer this question in one blog post, you're going to be sadly disappointed.) In theory, I think it's fine for people to have personally defined moral codes. In practice, I hate it when people do things that I consider wrong. It's a different sort of discomfort than when I'm confronted with an opinion that disagrees with my own. Opinions aren't necessarily fundamental; I consider them more thoughts than feelings. My most basic values aren't going anywhere, and I'm not sure I could explain all of them rationally. There are things I do and things I don't do. (Anyone read Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Saga? It plays with that question quite a bit.) So while I'm all for my opinions and ideas being broadened by diversity, I don't consider it necessary or even right for my values to be "broadened" or changed. Does that make me close-minded?

Elvis Is Watching You

Trivia of the day: What do Elvis, Hades, and videos have in common?

According to my Greek professor, who knows more about etymology than ought to be humanly possible, all three words come from the same Indo-European root, wid-, meaning roughly "knowing through seeing." This root came into Latin unchanged (the sound [w] was written as v) in the verb videre, "to see," whence the English word "video." In Greek, the [w] sound was represented by the elusive digamma, which was lost very early on, leaving id-, one of several roots of the verb "to see." With the addition of an alpha privative (the fancy grammatical term for an initial alpha that negates the meaning of the word), we get the adjective aïdes, "unseen," and as a substantive (with the iota turning into an iota subscript somewhere along the way), Hades, "the unseen realm." Now that I've bored you with linguistic details, we get to the good part - how Elvis fits into all of this. If you take his name apart, "vis" is another variant of the root wid-, and "el" is a cognate to the English word "all." So Elvis is "the all-seeing one." Now does it really matter if he's alive or not?

This post was made possible by Etymological Storytime with Pavlos, a daily feature of ancient Greek class.

Offer Good While Supplies Last

We all know them - maybe you're one - those people who do everything. Every club, every academic event, every play, everything. I was one of them in high school, but in my naïveté I thought that was a phenomenon limited to tiny schools (I graduated in a class of nine, to give you a sense of scale). Not so, as I've discovered here at Midd. The group is larger, but correspondingly so is the number of activities they do. I am convinced that passion is a limited resource. With every activity you take up, the amount of energy you commit to it is just a little less. When I graduated from high school, I decided I was done with that. I don't miss being overextended, overcommitted, guilted into doing things simply because there isn't anybody else to do them. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed most things I did in high school, but I don't regret passing on the role of "girl who does everything" to someone else. Here I've been able to pick just a few activities that I'm truly passionate about, and I have plenty of energy to commit to them. But that brings its own set of challenges. Now that I'm not part of the overcommitted set, I get frustrated with them - perhaps unfairly, since I know what they feel like - because they have a smaller fraction of their energy to commit to activities that I care deeply about. I don't know what the solution is. It would be hypocritical of me, formerly one of those people, to tell them to narrow their priorities, but I hate it that doing something I love is becoming more and more stressful because it's being pushed to the bottom of other people's lists. Maybe I should go sign up for a few more activities to distract myself.

No Artistic Ability Required

My latest assignment for Creative Process, reading Drawing on the Artist Within and doing some drawings, has given me some serious food for thought. Let me ask you this: can you draw? If you said no, why is that? Maybe you think you have no artistic talent, but here's the thing - according to the author, that has nothing to do with it! Drawing is not (necessarily) art. It's a skill, like writing, that can be learned by any normally functioning human being. Children are taught to write; we don't expect the skill to spring fully formed from their creative inner nature. We don't worry that teaching them to write will squash their native artistic skills. Writing is a tool. What's so different about drawing? The author's claim is that we think of it differently because drawing is a visual skill, whereas writing is verbal. The process for learning to draw may be different than that of learning to write, but it is no less attainable. I should say that by "drawing" I mean "producing a realistic likeness." Remember, drawing is not art, the same way a middle schooler's essay is not literature. Drawing is the technical skill used to produce art, just as writing is the means to producing literature. It is teachable and learnable. The author's claim is that the only block to your learning to draw is that you can't see correctly - your left brain gets in the way. It doesn't really look at objects; it recognizes and names them. To draw something, you need to really look at it to see the shapes, lines and shadows it is composed of - the right brain's strength. I won't summarize the book for you in this post, but I strongly recommend reading it. Next time you catch yourself saying "I can't draw," remember that you could - you just need to learn!

Surprise

I turned 18 on Tuesday, and was planning on having a pretty average day - which I was, until my mom walked through my dorm room door. I have never been so surprised in my entire life. Now you might be thinking "How horrible!" - after all, isn't this the scenario college students have nightmares about? I won't pretend it's not a little awkward, having my mom on campus, and it definitely makes me a little self-conscious, but I also won't pretend I don't think it's totally worth it. Those studies that have gotten a lot of attention lately about how college students are more dependent than ever on our parents make me a little angry. There is nothing wrong with having a functional relationship with your parents and missing them when you're away from home. That does not mean I am dependent on them. Once you're capable of living your life independent of your parents, I think you're allowed the luxury of missing them and being happy to see them. Besides, my mom is happy to now be able to envision what I do with my time up here. Good thing I have nothing to hide - sometimes it pays to be a goody two shoes...

The Creative Process

I had my first Creative Process class this morning. It will either be the best experience of my college career or the class I spend all semester hating. This class is all about the things I am most terrified of - public performance, improvisation, sharing my feelings, and general touchy-feely-ness. Our first assignment, due Thursday, is a one-minute musical. We must sing a song of our choice and use it to tell a story, which must have a beginning, middle and end, an identifiable character, and some kind of choreography - all in one minute. If I'm going to get through this class, I have to learn to shut out my inner cynic. The actual class activities today were really fun, though. It was mostly about body and spatial awareness - we did a lot of wandering around the classroom with our eyes closed. I think this is going to be a really good class. If nothing else, I will be getting way outside my comfort zone.

Personality

When you go to the gym, most people are sweating and slaving away in their own little bubbles of "don't-look-at-me-don't-talk-to-me-I'm-working-out". But there's one guy whom I see there fairly often who pretty much makes my day - he runs (at what would be, for me, a crushing pace) while lip-syncing, complete with gestures and flamboyant head jerks, to what appears to be some kind of punk rock. His expressions are priceless. No way would I have enough extra breath or energy to do that. Would there were more like him - going to the gym wouldn't be half so monotonous if everybody were doing silent karaoke!

Fiddle Me This

Music was a pretty big part of my life in high school, but here at Midd I feel like I practically live and breathe it (not the way music majors do though - they're just nuts). J-Term feels so incomplete without music rehearsals nearly every day, but I've been making up for it by going to see some interesting musical performances. A friend from home commented that I've been in Vermont too long when I start getting really into folk music, but I've found a new love - fiddle. It doesn't even have to be particularly good fiddle playing. There's just something about the sound that's really energetic and happy. I love the campus band Dawn's Basement, who play rock music with fiddle, but this weekend I experienced fiddling in its natural habitat - Appalachian folk music, performed by the female duet Mayfly, who are a subset of the folk band Sugarblue. I've never liked the idea of folk music, possibly because I thought it didn't involve good singing. Obviously I'd just never heard good folk music. Mayfly's close harmonies, catchy rhythms, and of course fiddling make for some pretty exuberant songs. Also this weekend, I saw a Slavic-language folk choir, which was the most entertaining concert I've been to in a while. Slavic folk songs have the greatest lyrics, an inordinate number of them involving cabbage. In a sort of bizarre connection between these two concerts, it turns out that members of both of them participated in Village Harmony programs, possibly the coolest music camps I've ever heard of - though I wouldn't go to the one in Republic of Georgia, as the description says it's not for those who require daily hot showers. Singers among you should check it out though.

A Bright Idea

I really, really love this place. So many smart people! At lunch today, a friend told me about Bright Card, a local start-up credit card company with a simple but brilliant plan - instead of the usual airplane mileage or magazine subscription rewards programs linked to credit cards, why not take that money and do something good for the world? Bright Card, it appears, is just a normal credit card, but every purchase you make earns you carbon offsets - about the most painless, effortless step toward carbon neutrality you could take. The card hasn't been launched yet, but you can put your name on the list to hear about it when it's ready. Yet another reason to look forward to my 18th birthday!

Jaw-Dropping, Mind-Numbing Stupidity, a.k.a. MTV

Having lived in a cable-TV-free home for most of my life to this point, I am still surprised at the depths to which popular culture can sink. I'm also fairly surprised to have that revelation in a setting like Midd. You would think that, bright, intellectual students that we are (that was only partially sarcastic), we would want to watch something that might engage our big brains just a tiny bit. Far from it. At the gym today, I caught the end of My Super Sweet 16 and the beginning of Next, both of which left my jaw literally hanging open at the sheer tastelessness of it all. The former was nothing of a revelation, really - seems like a lot of reality shows are about pointless extravangance, cattiness, and girls acting too old for their age. The latter, though, seemed like something that ought to be a SNL parody of a dating show. The whole thing was so badly conceived and executed that I'm amazed they manage to get funding. The premise of the show is that one person has a lineup of dates to choose from, and at any point on the date can reject them for the next in line - the dates receive money for each minute they stay in the running. As a concept it could be a lot worse, but the sick, juvenile, spiteful "humor" was so contrived and over-the-top as to be utterly, unbelievably unfunny. Here's what I remember of one exchange among the prospective dates, some of whom had already been rejected: "What's that on your face?" "She put kabuki on me." "She did a dookie on your face?" "You look like dookie!" - all punctuated by raucous laughter. Painful to read, isn't it? That's the sort of joke third grade boys might find funny. I cannot fathom any girl ever dating one of those guys. And this is the sort of cultural message one of the nations more popular entertainment networks is broadcasting. Drugs are illegal because they make you stupid. Shouldn't shows like this be illegal on the same premise?

Copaceticism

I'm pretty sure it happens with all teachers or professors - probably with all people, but most don't have the opportunity to talk to you day after day for hours on end - they have one or two "crutch words" or phrases that they use repeatedly, often without thinking and sometimes apparently without context. My Greek professor, for example, uses the phrase "rough and ready" to refer to the book's translations of vocabulary words or case usages, his point being that Greek is much more subtle and variable than our text makes out.

What actually prompted me to write this post, however, was his use today of the word "copacetic," which was possibly my high school volleyball coach's favorite word ever. She used it as a general sort of positive interjection, e.g. "Is that play clear? Copacetic!" Dictionary.app offers this definition:

copacetic |ˌkōpəˈsetik| (also copasetic)
adjective informal in excellent order.

Interestingly, the word has no known origin (my etymological dictionary doesn't even have an entry for it), so you can use it however you want.

How to Become a Dictator

Step 1: Speak in the Future Most Vivid.
This is possibly the best thing we've learned in Greek so far. It's a form of conditional statement implying a cause and effect that is so because the speaker says so, e.g. "If you don't do what I say, you will surely perish." As another student in my class said today, "It's the first thing we've read in this book with some life in it!"

I don't actually know how to become a dictator - sorry if I got your hopes up. The way Greek class is going though, I may have more thoughts on the matter in the not too distant (and most vivid) future.