Sara – Page 56

tracking trouble, day two

It’s day two of tracking my troublemaking practices on the Virtues app. Not convinced that this is the right approach for my reflecting on/assessing/building up my virtuous troublemaking. I must spend some time researching and thinking about other approaches. Anyway, I ranked myself at 3 out of a target goal of 3. Yay me! (Yes, this is a reference to London Tipton from Suite Life…RJP loves her and the show and it’s on instant netflix so I see it all of the time.) Like I did on my first day, I used the “reflection box” to pose questions about the app. I like creating space for these questions–but is it preventing me from taking the app seriously? How do I assess my troublemaking from yesterday? I still can’t imagine how you evaluate something like making/being in/staying in trouble (especially my version of staying in trouble, based on critical thinking, curiosity, pushing at my limits of knowing, being open to other ways of thinking).

Here are my comments from the reflection box:
Not sure why I’m giving myself a 3. What is the point of the score? Franklin didn’t have a score. How does ranking yourself in this way help? Are numbers important for people? What if you encouraged people to reflect without number rankings? Where do we learn what a virtuous action is? Doe we just know? Do we get it from our parents? What does Aristotle say? What does Ben Franklin say? Just downloaded free BF autobiography on iBooks.

All of these questions, make me even more skeptical of the ranking approach. They also make me think that I might need to narrow down the specific set of practices that I imagine to exemplify effective troublemaking for me. One goal of this evaluation process seems to be checking to make sure that your intentions and values are matching up with your actual practices. This goal reminds me of bell hooks’ discussion of habit, virtues and values in a “Revolution of Values” which I must reread) in Teaching to Transgress. I started writing about this section of hooks’ book way back on October 14, 2009 (just 2 weeks after my mom died). I never published it, but kept it as a draft on my wordpress dashboard. Here’s what I wrote in that draft:

This past week [for October 7th, 2009] my Feminist Pedagogies class read bell hooks’ Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. I am struck by her discussion of values in Chapter 2 (entitled “A Revolution of Values”). Her emphasis on transforming oppressive values that guide our lives and the habits and daily practices that (sometimes unwittingly) reinforce those values is helpful in my thinking about why we need to engage in more talking and theorizing about virtues. I want to add hooks’ Chapter 2 to my list of theories/ideas/writings that inspire my own promotion of virtue (which I discuss at the end of this entry).

Connection to virtue: In this chapter, hooks asks: “What values and habits of being reflect my/our commitment to freedom” (27)? She wants to shift away from reliance on “fancy” and “elaborate” theories that describe why we want freedom and focus instead on the values and habits that we actually practice on a routine basis (on the street, in the classroom). Her point, I think, is to suggest that theorizing by itself is not enough; we need Freieran praxis (theory, practice, reflection).

As I reflect back on these words [now on july 27, 2011], I am struck by how important reflection (and praxis as connecting theory and practice with reflection) are for assessing our own behaviors. For the Virtues app to be effective, a lot more attention needs to be given to learning how to be “honest with yourself”–which is the main advice that the app authors give for figuring out how to evaluate yourself (see yesterday’s post for more on this discussion). Being honest with yourself is not as easy as just committing to being honest. Instead it requires the tremendously difficult labor of developing both an awareness of your false consciousness/internalized sexism and racism and a critical consciousness of oppression and the need for social justice (this is a big goal for both bell hooks and Paulo Friere–with his idea of conscientization, or conscientização). In emphasizing a numerical ranking as the central part of the virtue evaluation process, the Virtues app encourages us to bypass reflection (and opt out of the difficult labor of thinking through how/why we fail to be honest with ourselves*) for an easy evaluation. I don’t care if my troublemaking is at a 2 or 3; I care about how/why I practice (or fail to practice) troublemaking in the ways that I do. And I care about finding ways to encourage myself to do the hard work it takes to make and stay in trouble in virtuous ways.

*I should say more about the various ways we are encouraged/trained/educated to be dishonest. Must leave that for another entry.

Note: my questions in the reflection box also made me what to think more about moral exemplars, education and our role models for developing virtuous practices. Could such reflection be incorporated into an app (maybe too much…need to think about this more).

Tracking my troublemaking through the Virtues App

After my post yesterday about troublemaking apps, I decided to customize the Virtues app with troublemaking. So, for the next week, I am tracking my practice of troublemaking. I’m very skeptical of this approach, but thought I would try it (and maybe make trouble for it!).

Here is a shot of the virtue detail screen:

Check out my definition of troublemaking. Not sure if it is the best description of what I’m trying to do, but I put it together really quickly. Also, I wanted to make it short so that it would fit into a screen shot. A key part of this app is the ranking system. At the end of every day, you reflect on how well you did in practicing your chosen virtue by ranking your performance on a scale of 1 to 5. The scoring is subjective; you determine what you think your target score should be and also what counts towards achieving that score. Since they recommended not making your target score too high when you are first starting the app, I went for a 3.0. Seems arbitrary. In their about section, they advise you to “be honest with yourself” about your ranking because “only you know.” How do you know and what should you base that knowing on? “Only you know” doesn’t seem to fit with such a scientific and logical approach (with numerical ranking). Maybe there should be a box on the virtue details page where you can write in your criteria for reaching your target number? Not sure. What I do know is that this ranking system really puts me off. I’m willing to give it a chance; hopefully by the end of this week I will have figured out more why it bothers me so much and/or developed my own system for evaluating (or reflecting on…does reflection = evaluation? my own troublemaking behavior without target numbers.

DAY ONE: MONDAY, JULY 25TH

Here’s my first day of evaluation. Of course, I’ve already screwed it up. I forgot to “reflect” last night and had to quickly do it this morning. I gave myself a 2.5. Why? I was curious and critical yesterday, but not that much. As I began thinking through and typing out why I chose 2.5, I found myself asking lots of questions about the app, some of which are included in this screen shot. Here are the rest: When is it too much? How does this app account for excessive practice of certain virtue? Where do you establish criteria?

Hmm….maybe I’m using this box to practice some troublemaking instead of merely reflecting on it…One last thought: Underlying all of these “self-help” tools is an ethos of (hyper)individualism where self-improvement is almost only about the Self, without any awareness of others/Others. Is this built into any virtue system OR more the result of the specific virtues that we value? Still pondering this one…

Troublemaking? Is There an App for That?

While I wrote last spring about how much I love my iPad right after I got it, I really haven’t had a chance to play around with it that much. I don’t have that many apps for it. I also don’t have that many apps for my iPhone. Maybe that’s partly because the few times that I have actually gone to the app store, I have been overwhelmed by the number of (cr)apps that are available. Yet, I can’t stop thinking about how a troublemaking app, one that enabled you to practice the virtue of troublemaking (being curious, thinking critically, asking questions, disrupting common sense assumptions), might be fun and useful. I am still uncertain about the value of an app. Is is the best platform for what I want to do? Why is it better than just using a blog? Since I imagine my app to be connected to a larger vision of public pedagogy and making ideas/theories about troublemaking accessible to a wider range of folks, is an app, which usually (but doesn’t always) cost something, the best approach? Sigh…like a “good” academic, I need (and want, because I am a nerd too) to do some research on these questions. Hmmm…I wonder where I can find some critical essays about smartphone apps? Suggestions?

So what would this app look like? I’m really not sure. As I imagine the possibilities, I thought I’d archive my thoughts about some apps that I’ve encountered:

In early June, I started running with one of the many Couch to 5K apps: C25K. note: A few weeks after starting the program, I found a blog post about it on ProfHacker. Here’s how it works: You run with the program three times a week for 30 minutes–or, as I am doing it, every other day–and gradually build up strength and endurance as you alternate between walking and running. The program tells you when to run, walk and cool down. The simple format (which thankfully has few extra, pointless features) coupled with an underlying philosophy of the repeated and deliberate practice of gradually building up good habits, seems like a great model for an app. Repeated and habitual practice is key for my own thinking about cultivating virtuous troublemaking; you need to ask questions regularly and practice thinking critically, subversively, transformatively, creatively all of the time. I also like how it uses GPS to map your route so you can see (and share with others) your route and archive it for later. It also has a journal, so you can write about and archive the run (how it went, the weather, terrain). Finally, you can share your progress with others on facebook or twitter.

I’m really interested in thinking through how to use new technologies, like smartphone apps, to develop and practice virtues. So I decided to check out what virtue apps already existed. After searching for “virtue iPhone apps” on google, I found Ben’s Virtues. In this app, which is based on Benjamin Franklin’s chart of 13 virtues (temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, humility), you can chart your daily conduct. According to the “about” page on the app (unlike C25K, I have not tried this one out, although I did download it–it’s free), you review your conduct in relation to one of the 13 virtues at the end of the day (you do a week on each virtue). If you fail to practice that virtue–for example, industry (“Lose not time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut of all unnecessary actions”), you tap the day’s date to place a mark. This app is based on Franklin’s own chart for logging his virtuous behavior. It doesn’t offer any additional features, like posting your failure to follow a certain virtue on twitter or facebook. Wow…can you imagine if an app like this did have such a feature? Confessing your moral limits through social media? In case my tone isn’t clear, I find this idea to be extremely problematic, yet interesting from the perspective of how we develop our moral selfhood in relation to others. I haven’t spent that much time looking through this app (and I haven’t spent much time critically reading/reflecting on Franklin’s virtues–are they the basis of Franklin planner stores…ugh?), but I find both the set of virtues (masculine, business-oriented) and the format of the chart/app to not be useful for my own project of troublemaking (a practice of daily reflection = marking digressions on a chart doesn’t fit with my own undisciplined approach). Additionally, the app doesn’t give you much guidance on what Franklin’s virtues actually mean (they do suggest buying Franklin’s autobiography at Powell’s books) or how we are supposed to interpret what is or isn’t an unnecessary act (see definition of industrious above). It makes me wonder about what other ways people can think about using apps to promote and cultivate virtuous practices? Instead of having a chart to mark, what other features could an app offer that would allow you to critically reflect on your day and how virtuous behaviors work in relation to a broader ethos (like social justice or feminist models)?

After doing a little more research on the interwebz, I found some other bloggers writing about Franklin’s chart and his virtues, like Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders (a STA/room34 favorite) and their post, Ben Franklin: Keeper of his own ‘Permanent Record’, and the Art of Manliness and their 13 week series on Being Virtuous the Ben Franklin way. I also found another app, Virtues, by Equilibrium Enterprises. While Ben’s Virtues was free, this app costs 99 cents. It is based on the same chart and the same description of virtues, but it has many added features, including a much lengthier description of how to use to app and what to to with the chart. It also allows you to develop your own rating system (out of a scale of 5.0, pick your “target” number for a certain virtue) and your own custom virtues (should I add troublemaking, perhaps?). When you rate yourself, you are required to type up a few comments about your rating, your day, etc. I like that you can customize the app with your own virtues and that daily critical reflection = evaluating yourself with a number rating + typing up some thoughts (as opposed to the Ben’s Virtues’ approach of only marking your failures in a chart). However, I don’t like using a numerical ranking system (how do you evaluate a day’s virtuous behavior on a scale of 1 to 5?). Even though I’m not sold on this app, I might just have to try it with a customized troublemaking virtue.

Well, I’m not even close to being done of my research/reflection on what a troublemaking app could/should look like, but I need to end this blog entry now. For next time, I want to spend some time discussing feminist troublemaking apps by starting with bitchmedia’s Revenge of the Feminerd: There’s an App for That and the app, Hollaback!

Burning up and burning out

It’s hot again today. Well, not as hot as yesterday. Today it is only 91, but feels like 95, at 10:30 AM. Still, without air conditioning it’s pretty hot in my house. Since I’m burning up, it seems like a good time to talk about academic burnout. In my last post, bad teaching, burnout and bell hooks, I hinted at possibly being burned out. But, what does that mean? How do you know if you are burned out? And what can you do about it?

Post Academic (which I found via the totally awesome Worst Professor Ever) writes about job burnout in their entry, Job Burnout: Do You Have it? Citing a 2006 New York Magazine article, they identify several key aspects of it. Here they are, with my responses*:

1. Working too much
Yes

2. Working in an unjust environment
Yes

3. Working with little social support
Yes

4. Working with little agency or control
Yes

5. Working in the service of values we loathe
Well, loathe seems a little strong. I would say, working in the service of values I often disagree with or that can come into conflict/at the expense of my own values is a better way to phrase it.

6. Working for insuficient reward, whether the currency is money, prestige, or positive feedback
Yes

*For now, I’m just giving my brief responses. I don’t think I’m ready to expand on what they mean…yet. In fact, I’m not even sure what they mean.

Hmmm…looks like I have burnout. The signs have been there for awhile. Check out this passage that I wrote in a comment on KCF’s post over at It’s Diablogical!:

There are all sorts of ways that we could discuss this question, but I am thinking particularly of my feminist debates class this past semester and our repeated discussions about feminist education. Early on in the semester (on this day), we read an excellent article by Joy Castro: On Becoming Educated. Castro is critical of the “trickle-down” theory of academic ideas/theories/knowledge and the inability of much academic work to ever reach audiences who need/hunger for it. She doesn’t want to reject academic knowledge, but to expand it (maybe include internet knowledge as academic knowledge and/or spread ideas cultivated in academic spaces across the interwebz?). Check out this passage:

The academy—as we fondly, misguidedly call it, as if it were some great, unified thing—is lumbering along amidst eviscerating budget cuts, pressures to corporatize, to streamline, to justify its existence to hostile anti-intellectual factions and a skeptical public, to become purely instrumental, a machine that grants job credentials to twenty-two-year-olds so they can get on with their lives. In the face of such intense and varied pressures, the academy must find ways to preserve itself as a place for thought to flourish—yet everyone needs to be invited to think. The discussion has to matter to everyone, and everyone’s voice must be heard.

I like this passage from Castro because it also reminds me how much I cherish critical thinking. I find that it can be hard to remember this when working in certain academic spaces; critical thinking is presented in such narrow ways and is often used to shut people out and to actually shut critical/creative thinking down. Personally, I feel that the pervasive attitude within the academic spaces that I inhabit is extremely damaging to my creative and intellectual spirit. While I have had some great experiences with many of my classes and exciting conversations with some colleagues, much of the “good stuff” seems to be in spite of the academy and not because of it.

I also wrote the following in a post on surviving the academic industrial complex:

When I first started writing the entry I was already feeling burnt out and disenchanted with the academy. Those feelings have greatly intensified over the course of the semester as I daily confront the limiting (and debilitating) logics of the academic industrial complex.

In their post, Post Academic links to a burnout test that you can take on the site, Stress Management. I scored very high. After taking the test I clicked on Recovering from Burnout. For those of you who don’t score quite as high as I did, you can click on How to Avoid Burnout. Here are the different ways that they suggest people cope with burnout:

Do nothing
Change career
Change job
Use burnout as trigger for personal growth

Notice how, “take a break,” isn’t listed as one the options. Apparently, once you hit burnout, summer vacation or the semester break just aren’t enough. Stress Management strongly favors the fourth option, devoting a huge portion of their article to understanding why we burn out and how we can move on and find new direction for our lives. As a teacher (and daughter of a devoted fan to the self-help genre), I must admit that I can appreciate the emphasis on critical self-reflection and the call to learn from our experiences. However, as a feminist who has spent a lot of time thinking about the limits and possibilities of individualized self-care, I am also troubled by these solutions, especially the language of “personal growth.” Ugh…too self-helpy for me (and neoliberal-y, but let’s leave the jargon out for now). Note: I have self-help on the brain right now. Must write more about it soon. Personal growth? Makes me think of an exchange between Tony and Stephanie in Saturday Night Fever:

Stephanie: Nobody knows how much I’m growing!

Tony: Why don’t you go on a diet?

But, seriously. While focusing on one’s own care and physical/spiritual/mental health are extremely important, analyzing the problem as an individual opportunity for growth can fail to address the larger structures that cause burnout in the first place, structures that may affect us in different ways, but that contribute to a more general academic culture that demands too much, values too little and excludes too many.

Here’s another passage from my post on surviving the academic industrial complex in which I talk about the dangers of making survival about our individual ability to cope:

In her article, which is part of a roundtable discussion on “Got Life? Finding Balance and Making Boundaries in the Academy,” Smith argues that our attempts at negotiating between academic and personal/activist lives require more than searching for ways to balance our various demands. Instead, we must ask why, as in: “Why has being a good scholar and academic come to mean that one should be working incessantly at the expense of doing social-justice work, having fun, or maintaining interests outside academia” (141)? And we must “deconstruct the logic of the academic industrial complex to see how it has trapped us into needlessly thinking we must choose between academia and having a life” (141). Yes! Finding a balance is not enough; the struggle to find that balance places the burden on individual academic laborers to adjust their lives while leaving the larger system that prioritizes academic production over personal/activist practices intact and untroubled. We need to interrogate why the academic system functions as it does and why it so often encourages (and demands) that we be unbalanced (and by unbalanced I mean an overemphasis on work over life and a dysfunctional approach to work/life that contributes to emotional/physical distress).

As I finish this entry, it is 2:15 PM and 96 (feels like 103). So, what I am going to do about my academic burnout? Not quite sure. I think I’ll start by continuing to write and engage with other writers. I’ll keep reading Worst Professor Ever and her reflections on why Teachers Can’t ‘Do’ Because They’re Too Freakin’ Burned Out and her guest posts by people like Dr. Karen Kelsky who document the death of a soul (on campus). I’ll also look closely at Lucy E. Bailey’s essay on women’s experiences as contingent instructors. And I’m planning to reread Teaching to Transgress for the tenth time, giving special attention to passages like this one:

The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries to transgress (hooks 207).

Do I believe this? I hope so…

on bad teaching, burnout and bell hooks

Today is another very hot day–according to my weather channel app it is 94 but feels like 120. Yes, 120 (thank you, Minnesota humidity). It is Tuesday and it has been this hot since Sunday. This is very wrong. Especially since I don’t have central air. As I write this, I am holed up in one of the 2 bedrooms in the house that has a window air conditioning unit. As you can imagine, these conditions are not the most conducive to writing and thinking and engaging. I am struggling to focus my ideas. I have been at this since 10:30; it is now 3:51 and I really don’t have much to show for it.

I wonder, is it just the miserably hot and humid weather that is stopping me from writing? I don’t think so. I am also struggling because I feel compelled to write about my feelings of burn out, my disillusionment with teaching at a big research University, and my uncertainty over whether or not I can survive in the academic industrial complex. While I am compelled to write about these things, I don’t know how to properly (do I want to be proper?) or effectively express what I am thinking/feeling/experiencing. I can’t imagine going another day without putting some of my ideas on my blog (hmmm…why is it so important to me that I make these thoughts public? I might need to reflect on that in another blog post) so I am forcing myself to write right now. Since I don’t like coherent, smooth (untroubled) narratives and because I can’t imagine producing any like that in this heat anyway, I want to offer a few fragments of experiences, ideas, sources that are slogging around in my head.

I’ve been thinking a lot about bell hooks and Teaching to Transgress lately. In particular, I am reminded of her description in the introduction of the bad class that she taught one semester. It was a very early class and she would have frequent nightmares that she overslept and missed it. The students lacked energy and were very resistant to engaging with new ideas. hooks hated the class.

I came to hate this class so much that I had a tremendous fear that I would not awaken to attend it; the night before (despite alarm clocks, wake-up calls, and the experiential knowledge that I had never forgotten to attend class) I still could not sleep (hooks 9).

Before my class even started in the spring, I dreaded it. It was a big class (almost 3 times bigger than any of the class that I had taught before) and I was doubtful that I would be able to develop it into a effective and transformative learning space. Once the class began, I was certain that my feminist pedagogical principles/tactics (such as: discussions instead of lectures, frequent small group activities, student-lead activities) would not work. I hated that class. Unlike hooks I wasn’t afraid that I wouldn’t wake up and would miss the class. Instead, I had fantasies about not going to class and just walking away from the university altogether. I wondered, what would happen if I just didn’t show up?

For reasons I cannot explain it [hooks’ class] was also full of “resisting” students who did not want to learn new pedagogical processes, who did not want to be in a classroom that differed in any way from the norm. To these students, transgressing boundaries was frightening. And though they were not the majority, their spirit of rigid resistance seemed always to be more powerful than any will to intellectual openness and pleasure in learning (hooks 9).

I did have some great students in my class that semester. Some students who probably got a lot of the class and were excited to be exposed to new theories on sex, gender and sexuality. And who liked using the course blog and critically analyzing popular culture. But the students I remember most were the ones who complained. Who were unwilling to engage with new ideas. Who refused to claim their education or think for themselves. And whose “spirit of rigid resistance” made the class increasingly difficult to endure.

More than any other class I had taught, this one compelled me to abandon the sense that the professor could, by sheer strength of will and desire, make the classroom an exciting learning community (hooks 9).

Even as I grew to strongly dislike the attitudes of some of the students, I knew that their resistance wasn’t simply because they were lazy and didn’t want to learn. The more I taught, the more I realized that my painful teaching experience had so much to do with other factors beyond mine and the students’ control: the alienating space, the institutional emphasis–heightened by the economic crisis–on increasing class enrollment instead of enhancing engagement, and the overall conditioning of students into passive learners who aren’t prepared (or willing) to experiment with new ways of engaging with ideas and each other. These factors aren’t just accidents; increasingly, they seem to be built into teaching at a research university. It makes me wonder, if these factors are part of the teaching experience, (how) will it ever be possible to cultivate exciting and transformative learning communities within the University?

It is now 10 PM. After an extended break, I am back to finishing up this entry. It has cooled down (ha!) to 91. And it only feels like 105. Yes, at 10 PM it feels like 105. Anyway, I think the heat is finally melting my brain. I had intended to write even more about bad teaching, burn out and bell hooks today, but I think that’s it for tonight.