The Book of Ruth

Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting is having its annual sessions at Earlham this week. I asked if I could attend the afternoon workshops. Today I was planning to go to one called "A Conversation about Jesus" because I am quite fascinated by the different ways and levels of comfort with which Quakers talk about Jesus. 

I ended up walking past and then into another, cozy workshop on couches which turned out to be the "Friendly Bible Study: Book of Ruth" group. It also proved distressing and thought provoking. 

My knowledge of the book of Ruth is as vague as my knowledge of the rest of the Bible (especially the old testament). As we read the story memory bells tinkled faintly. 

In the story, Ruth, a non-Jewish woman, becomes a widow, but is determined to remain with her mother in law, despite the MIL's instructions to return to her family. Ruth remains with Naomi and worships Naomi's God (they Jewish God). 

These two women are without male protection or an income, so Ruth starts gleaning corn from harvest fields. In ancient law farmers were supposed to leave dropped corn on the ground for the poor to gather. Institutionalised charity, our study leader called it. Ruth chooses the fields of Boaz. Boaz sees her one day and is impressed with her hard work. He tells her she is welcome to drink and eat with the farm hands, and she can stay and glean in his fields rather than visit many different fields, for she may be mistreated in other fields. She falls prostrate with her face to the ground in gratitude to him. 

When she tells Naomi of this man, Naomi instructs Ruth to go visit Boaz in the night, and uncover his feet. This is a bold gesture, indicating her availability for marriage. Boaz is surprised by her nighttime visit, and agrees to offer her the shelter she seeks. When the man who is eligible to redeem Ruth's late husband's land decides he doesn't want it, Boaz is free to marry Ruth. He gets her land and her along with it through public transactions in the town centre. Ruth then gives birth to King David's grandfather, and is therefore the progenitor of Jesus himself. 

As we read the text, the leader asked several times for input. People commented on the beauty of Ruth's commitment to Naomi, Boaz's generosity, Ruth's strength of character. These are expected messages. But there is more in the text. These two women are in an incredibly precarious position, physically and socially. 

They have no household and no male protector. They have no money, and for Ruth at least, as a foreigner in this land, no one owes her anything according to social custom. Ruth is acquiring the food necessary to stay alive by scavenging, essentially, during harvest season. What will happen to this source of food when harvest season ends? How will they survive the winter? 

http://f.tqn.com/y/christianity/1/S/B/h/Ruth-GettyImages-91728179.jpg

Someone commented on Ruth's vulnerability in the field, while gleaning the corn. YES! The field hands could rape her, Boaz could rape her, she could be bullied or beaten, all that she had gathered could be taken away from her. 

It seemed to yell out at me from the text that thousands of women find themselves in similarly dangerous circumstances everyday. Migrant workers in our own country certainly fit this image, but there are many, many other industries in which the mistreatment of women is normalised and considered collateral damage. Industries in which their dignity does not figure in the story because there seems to be nothing to talk about. 

In chapter three of this four-chapter book, when Ruth goes to visit Boaz in the night, I can only imagine her fear. She is a foreigner. She has absolutely no power. She is taking a risk, gambling with her own safety and even her own life, in the hopes of securing a degree of safety. The man she is approaching could easily take advantage of her, and no one would know. But who am I kidding? Even if everyone knew, there would not be any retribution for him, because there would be no objection to his exercise of power over this powerless creature. 

The Bible study group focused on Boaz's goodness. Indeed, he doesn't appear to take advantage of her, (but who the hell knows what the narrator has left out - I'd like to read this story told from Ruth's perspective). But, as I tried to explain to the people sitting in the sofas, it is not this exact example of this story which causes me discomfort. It is the prevalence of just this kind of power imbalance which requires women like Ruth and Naomi to live on the margin; to scrape by on what they can get without attracting attention; to risk their dignity, their safety and their lives to achieve some form of stability which only a man can grant them (disregarding any personal toll that association with a certain man might entail). 

People in the Bible study wanted to see the way Boaz looked at Ruth in the field as a kind of "Hey, she's cute" (that's a direct quote), and others were quite entertained and even comforted by this, saying "That makes it an even nicer story". I said that that didn't comfort me, because it implied that Boaz sees her as a sex object. Such a reading raises questions: Would Boaz have helped this foreign woman if she were not beautiful and young? Was it her appearance, and not just her work ethic, which attracted his eye? Ruth appears to me to be quite practical, and she uses the tools she has, (feminine attractiveness among them) to survive. That's what this story is to me - a story of survival in a society which has placed no value on your survival. 

It feels very dangerous to me to entertain the kind of rosy reading that some employed today, who wanted to believe that Ruth had fallen in love with Boaz, and therefore was probably happy and "acting of her own choice" when she went to the threshing floor. I physically squirmed in my seat. What woman would choose to approach a foreign, powerful man, as a defenceless individual seeking help? She's begging him by offering herself to him sexually. Women only do that when coerced by circumstance. 

When I came home I searched to find Bible study summaries of Ruth. Most employ the sterilised version, emphasising hard work, obedience to Yahweh, and charity. This study at least referred to the feminist readings, though made no connection to the state of ongoing inequality which characterises Ruth and so many contemporary counterparts. 

One of the people in the study felt I was attacking Boaz, saying that he was a worse man than implied by the text. "What's the moral version then? How would you rewrite the story? Would you have him just give her money and let her go about her life, according to her own free will?"

I said that we cannot look at the story separate from its context. Given its context in Ancient Israel, this is the moral version. Boaz did act honourably. It is not the people in the story that are the problem, but the structures of violence that uphold the power imbalance. We do not rewrite the story, I said, but it is our job to rewrite the context. Our job as modern readers is to look at this ancient story and say "Could this story take place today? Is women's position equally precarious? Are women as dependent on the luck of finding a generous man?" If the answer is yes, this story could take place, then we have not done very well. And given how many people find themselves in Ruth's shoes, with a less generous Boaz standing over them, we have indeed not done well in restructuring society in almost three thousand years. 

That said, it is reassuring that this week the Democratic Party nominated a woman to be president. 

As often happens, anger and frustration (with society, not the Bible study group; I'm greatly indebted to today's study) often lead us to ask "What can I do about this?" I have thought, if I believe women's stories are still those of the oppressed, how can I help raise them? I believe the antidote to what I see as the misreadings of Ruth is to have more women writers, politicians, lawyers, leaders, philosophers, playwrights, professors. More women who look at the world and tell us how they see it. 




My personal mentor in this area is Jean Zaru, whose book Occupied with Nonviolence I refer to often when I seek an eloquent voice on women's plight and rights, and the necessity of paying attention to both. 

Lately I have also been reading the work of Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher who I first cited in a paper I wrote in college on female literacy in third-world countries, and a few weeks ago read about in this profile. 

Nussbaum, like Jean, emphasises the need to appreciate all human dignity as equal. Here is part of a Guardian article about her book The New Religious Intolerance. 

There are, she suggests in the book, three basic principles to hold on to: equal respect for conscience, the importance of self-critical vigilance, and the importance of a sympathetic imagination. The first of these, powerfully understood in the US constitution, enshrines legal protection of views that differ from those of the established majority. The state is obliged to adopt a position of neutrality with respect to matters of individual conscience. All human beings are to be afforded equal dignity – a dignity that extends to the ways in which individuals come to understand life's ultimate purpose. Conscience and human dignity are inextricably conjoined.

NYer

It would be unfair for me to name the sections of society who I think need to focus on the second of these principles, so I will just say that as a teacher, it is very important that I practice all three, on a daily basis. Students who enter my classroom will not see the world the way I see it, and I need to respect their conscience, because tied to it is their dignity - I cannot question one without questioning the other, as Nussbaum points out. 

I was about to say that the Bible study lacked the third principle, of sympathetic imagination. But what we really lacked was imagination tempered with the awareness of one who is constantly "vigilant" of society's injustices. People were happy to imagine that she liked Boaz, or that he didn't take advantage of her, even that he thought she was "cute". Our imagination, paradoxically, needs to be tied a little more closely to reality. 

Nussbaum says that we curry this sympathetic imagination when reading (the following is from the New Yorker article):

We become merciful, she wrote, when we behave as the “concerned reader of a novel,” understanding each person’s life as a “complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles.”

That is exactly how I would describe Ruth's activity throughout the book: human effort in a world full of obstacles. 

I am proud that today, one woman is facing the challenge of winning a presidential election. The novelty of this challenge makes it a prize for society. 

I am distressed that so many women are facing a world similarly full of obstacles to that which Ruth faced. 

Dystopias, literary and real

Since finishing The Glass Castle, I have picked up another book on the 9th and 10th grade list of literature at Richmond High School. Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is another text I didn't read in high school. It's the story of our society several generations in the future, when a sort of Orwellian Big Brother has outlawed all books and has installed wall-sized screens dubbed "family" that alternately talk to people and bombard them with frenetic colours and jarring sounds in order to prevent them from slipping into a reverie which may engender realisation, and thus revolutionary thoughts. 

The book was published in 1953, and not surprisingly has several passages that ring true of alarmist opinions today. 

The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman, charged with responding to calls reporting book-sightings or non-conformist behaviour among neighbours. There is not Big Brother camera in homes; instead neighbours and friends are the vigilant enforcers. In the below passage Guy reflects on a burning, the night before, of a home allegedly containing books. 

Montag looked at the cards in his own hands. "I-I've been thinking. About the fire last week. About the man whose library we fixed. What happened to him?"
"They took him screaming off to the asylum"

"He. wasn't insane."
Beatty arranged his cards quietly. "Any man's insane who thinks he can fool the Government and us."
"I've tried to imagine," said Montag, "just how it would feel. I mean to have firemen burn our houses and our books."
"We haven't any books."
"But if we did have some."
"You got some?"
Beatty blinked slowly.
"No." Montag gazed beyond them to the wall with the typed lists of a million forbidden books. Their names leapt in fire, burning down the years under his axe and his hose which sprayed not water but kerosene. "No." But in his mind, a cool wind started up and blew out of the ventilator grille at home, softly, softly, chilling his face. And, again, he saw himself in a green park talking to an old man, a very old man, and the wind from the park was cold, too.
Montag hesitated, "Was-was it always like this? The firehouse, our work? I mean, well, once upon a time..."
"Once upon a time!" Beatty said. "What kind of talk is THAT?"


This kind of writing feels heavy handed to me. I'm trying to imagine a line of questioning for a class of tenth graders that would challenge them. It seems to me everything is a bit too spelled out here. 

In another example, Clarisse, a Luna Lovegood-type whose whimsy wards off the anaesthetising culture of consumption and thrill-seeking, describes the school where "they don't miss me" when she skips class.

"An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film- teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lamp-posts, playing `chicken' and 'knock hub-caps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?"


Again, nothing here will require teasing out. The moral fairly screams at children, not allowing them to draw connections to their world themselves - they are already drawn. 

Things have gotten more interesting in the past 40 pages however, mostly because of the writing. I'm not saying (how dare I?) that Ray Bradbury is ever ineffective, but some of the passages in which he compares the smouldering, dystopian landscape to romantic natural images, are magnificent. 

As the first passage foreshadows, Montag eventually finds himself at odds with the fireman's task. He is on the run, one leg a burnt stump, his lungs "like burning brooms in his chest". 

"The house fell in red coals and black ash. It bedded itself down in sleepy pink-grey cinders and a smoke plume blew over it, rising and waving slowly back and forth in the sky. It was three-thirty in the morning. The crowd drew back into the houses; the great tents of the circus had slumped into charcoal and rubble and the show was well over."

Even the thumpy, round sound of the words evokes the warm, soft habitat of an infant: bedded, down,  pink-grey, plume, blew, waving slowly, back and forth. This time-defying image contrasts with the matter-of-fact "It was three-thirty in the morning" that follows. This paragraph evokes three strains of energy present in the scene: oneiric wonder at a magnificent and objectively beautiful spectacle; a keen awareness of time, and a suspicion that a stopwatch counts down to Montag's death; the presence of other people, who, unlike the mercifully liberated cinders, have to trudge on in this dark universe. 

Here is another, describing Montag's view of the city as he evades the police. 

"A great whirling whisper made him look to the sky.


The police helicopters were rising so far away that it seemed someone had blown the grey head off a dry dandelion flower. Two dozen of them flurried, wavering, indecisive, three miles off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, and then they were plummeting down to land, one by one, here, there, softly kneading the streets where, turned back to beetles, they shrieked along the boulevards or, as suddenly, leapt back into the air, continuing their search."

Bradbury often employs double entendre to combine benign and violent meanings. The combined images of someone blowing off the head of a dandelion, and someone blowing off the head of an opponent with a weapon, inject this passage with enormous energy. The imagery gets hard to follow at the end of the passage, perhaps evoking Montag's frazzled mental state. 

Before I picked up Fahrenheit 451 this morning, I read last week's fiction from The New Yorker, a bizarre story, also of dystopia, in which a company of past-their-prime circus performers, including a dancing bear, a King, a steward and a scout. They search a derelict fairground, encountering evidence of a failed, frightened population that fled. 

The setting evokes an alternative to Bradbury's police state: collective disintegration as a society: 

The padlock and the chains undone. The gates wide. The whole of the park laid bare. The King of Retired Amusements shuffles across the threshold into his dominion. They are strange places, these abandoned fairgrounds and shipwrecked boardwalks and dry, cavernous water parks. Something more than people has deserted them, made the world turn its gaze elsewhere and not look back. Often they are barren craters, worn and ruined beyond remembering. But Liebling’s Sunday Morning Carnival and Midway is another Pompeii, as preserved and perfect as a fly in amber. The Ferris wheel, still fully erect, regards the party like a cold and distant sun, its carriages creaking in a shovel of wind. Flags still flag on their poles, and bunting still hangs from the ticket booths. Only the main courtyard shows signs of dereliction. The statue at its center, a bronze, top-hatted Gustav Liebling himself, has been toppled, his magnanimity run aground, his outstretched arms now bidding welcome only to a patch of broken flagstones and soft dirt, which, after a few more good rains, will surely swallow him whole.

The image of an abandoned fairground is somehow doubly sad, since even the fairground in full swing presents a depressingly consumerist vision, of fluffy desires only half met by fried dough and oversized stuffed toys. We are not convinced, somehow, that the fairground is abandoned and the earnest search for truth taken up. 

One of the toughest images for the 11th graders and me at RFS to get our heads around this year in Ted Hughes poetry, was the one at the end of the final stanza of "The Seven Sorrows", likening a departing year to a tatty fairground, like that described in the story: 

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

How would the person looking through the year if he sees the departing year in this way? What will his legacy be? One as undistinguished and even embarrassing as that of the fairground?

Reading too many stories of this sort might inspire despair. 

I'm also reading an anthology of Quaker Writings. The first is from George Fox's journal. In the famous passage where he recognises that the world is sordid, he seems to be facing a similarly depressing landscape, struggling to stay afloat of despair, which he clearly considers a sin (and I'm inclined to agree with him, from my privileged position of never having experienced true despair). 



Now during the time that I was at Barnet, a strong temptation to despair came upon me. Then I saw how Christ was tempted, and mighty troubles I was in; sometimes I kept myself retired in my chamber, and often walked solitary in the chace, to wait upon the Lord. I wondered why these things should come to me; and I looked upon myself and said, "Was I ever so before?"... Temptations grew more and more, and I was tempted almost to despair; and when Satan could not effect his design upon me that way, he laid snares for me, and baits to draw me to commit some sin, whereby he might take advantage and bring me to despair. I was about twenty years of age when these exercises came upon me; and I continued in that condition some years, in great trouble, and fain would have put it from me. I went to many a priest to look for comfort, but found no comfort from them...


As I read the rest of the Quaker writings, I'll be judging whether the tatty fairground of 1650's England was abandoned for better things!

The literary rabbit hole

When this long weekend dawned (we had no school on Friday) I felt the warm breeze that carries the promise of a literary retreat. "I get to read this weekend." I thought. "Read" in this sense refers not only to the action of reading commentary and school reading during the week, which is indeed enjoyable. On a weekend in a house to myself, though, reading means pursuing every whim, researching each writer, idea, piece of literature that crosses my path. I set down the rabbit hole of reading, and thanks to my computer and the public library there is never a light at the end of the tunnel signalling the cessation of searching. 

The opening to the tunnel often lurks surreptitiously, as it did that Saturday in June when I watched this video of Damien Lewis performing Antony's monologue from Julius Caesar; or two weekends ago when I was perusing an 11th grade American Literature text book and read this excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr's book Stride Toward Freedom (link is a classroom handout). 


In the first instance, I tumbled into an obsession that led me to reference Julius Caesar in nearly every conversation I had for the next two weeks. It also furnished reading material for the 13 hour flight from Amman, Jordan to Chicago, which I spent swiping back and forth on the screen of my iPhone in order to read the zoomed-in PDF pages of the play (Ben Gurion Security confiscated my larger e-reader devices). 

In the second instance, I read King's allusion to the verse in the gospel of John in which Jesus says to Peter "Put up thy sword!" (John 18:11). Fresh from a Quaker conference during which I mulled over a lot of theology and Christology, I recognised this command as an essential fragment of scripture for opponents to violence. (There was a bumper sticker on the car that I rode out to the conference in: "When Jesus said 'love thine enemies', I'm pretty sure he meant don't kill them.") 



For the rest of the weekend I thought about Jesus's command against violence, especially when Sunday's sermon covered what I consider a confusing text: Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42). Yes, Mary gets the goods by listening to Jesus rather than cleaning house, but every church community I've ever felt good in had a crew of people serving as Marthas. Capital Church in Salt Lake City, with its tireless team of greeters, coffee makers, popcorn poppers, child care takers, flyer printers, providers of sweet-smelling foam soap in the bathrooms, is a prime example of a church well-endowed with diligent Marthas, who address all the decidedly non-spiritual touches which made the church building a warm space fit for community- (and spirit-) building. Anyway, the link back to Jesus and non-violence had to do with the reminder that violence, ("the sword") is wielded in many ways, especially against women, that don't involve a sword. 

Now for this week's tunnel, the opening to which was tucked into the practice test for the Indiana State CORE Teaching Assessment, the test I must pass in order to teach English in this state (the same one I was preparing for when I came across the King excerpt). 

The practice test I bought included the following excerpt. 

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.

To be sure there was always the next station, where one might descend and return. There was the great city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not so very far away, even once she was in Chicago. What pray, is a few hours a few hundred miles? She looked at the little slip bearing her sister's address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift review until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be.

First of all, I got the question related to this text wrong on the practice test. I said that the passage indicated "a controlling ambition" in the main character, Caroline Meeber. To me she seems controlled by the ambition to leave her town and pursue life in the city. Despite her hesitations, she does what Joyce's Eveline cannot: she breaks the ties with home, and faces into the headwind of change.

The test said that this passage indicates an "internal conflict" which I thought was not very bold. Every main character has, at some level, an internal conflict (right? I'm actually not sure about that). And I don't sense a conviction in Caroline to stay where she is. A recognition of what one is leaving, even a recognition that it has been good, is not an indication of a desire to stay. I can say this with confidence after my recent departure from Palestine. 

Anyway, I enjoyed reading this extract, and found by googling a few phrases that it is from the book Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser. I had never heard of Dreiser before, so what did I do? Yes! And here's the article I found: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/04/21/the-cost-of-desire

When reading New Yorker articles, especially book reviews like this one, I am often awed by the journalist's apparent breadth of awareness, confidence in making bold assertions on the topic of six recently-published tomes he is reviewing, and ability to touch on several ideas central to human existence in a satisfying way without coming to a conclusion about any of them. And yet still they end the article in a way that makes my mind smile.

I was so smitten by this article that I looked up David Denby, who is now 72, and who was known primarily as the film critic of the New Yorker until 2012 or so, and is now a staff writer. (The article above was published in 2001.) 

I found quickly that he is also well known for writing the book Great Books in which he describes his experience of re-enrolling at Columbia College, decades after he graduated from that institution, in order to take the Literature Humanities course, whose syllabus consists of the pillar texts of the western canon, through a new lens. 

My friend Kaitlin actually gave me this book during our senior year of high school, once I had been accepted to Columbia and was looking with excitement at my very own pile of those Great Books. I don't think I made it past the first chapter of Denby's book. Which means I probably read as many words in that books as I read of most of the books on the course syllabus - not through any wilful neglect: I am a slow reader, and reading a book the size of Metamorphoses each week was not feasible. I think I learned more about Ovid ogling the ceilings of the Morgan Museum on Madison Avenue than I did in the Lit Hum classroom). 

Denby's most recent book is one I'd like to read in its entirety: Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives. Denby spent time in tenth grade literature classes to see what kind of readers kids are now that they have near-constant screen access. In this article, he explains his project, and provides a look at one of his classroom experiences in a Manhattan school. 

Denby finds that the kids are rather dark when writing poetry. (Truly, take a look at the excerpt in the above link, if only to read the poetry the students wrote in response after reading some poems by Sylvia Plath.) I have often been struck by the same darkness he notes. When given the chance to write poetry, no student writes pastoral reflections on the beauty of life; they recount the unforgiving realities of their lives. This was evident at Ramallah Friends School, where the students who submitted writing to the literary magazine wrote about the difficulty of life under Occupation, but it's also true in the other examples of tenth grade poetry I've read in Changing English articles. While the consistency of the trend is surprising, the fact that students write dark content somehow isn't. Why not flex one's ability to comment, with acid, if possible, on the many ways in which teenagers are wrangled like wild horses? 

The tunnel this weekend has had another branch. This one sprung from a podcast I listened to on the way to the Richmond Museum of Art. Actually, I should make this another post. 


This song is playing in the coffee shop where my jaw is contracting from the caffeine from the (single shot??) americano I just drank: 

Earlham College Leadership Academy

This week is the first of a two week summer school / summer camp that the Earlham MAT students help orchestrate for about 40 kids from area middle schools. It takes place in the morning, and involves typical camp activities like games and teamwork challenges and more academic skills like graphing and reading and analysing texts.

My partner in teaching is Mr. Bell, and we are having the opportunity to apply some of what we've been reading about in our lesson plans. We have a group of 7 students we are working (the self-named "Alpha Leaders"). As a group, they must prepare a presentation that presents some element of life in 2050. At the end of camp there will be a grand presentation of all the group projects, and each group must give some background information on the element of life they're focusing on, and what it will be like in 2050 based on their predictions. This is all about using past knowledge to make educated guesses about the future, one of my favourite academic tasks (as I have written about in reading drama especially).

Our group has a mix of ages, personalities, academic strengths and senses of humour. It is such a delight to be back in the classroom. Students are so great. Always surprising, amazingly smart, quick on the uptake ...

Recently I was reading an article by my favourite economist, Thorstein Veblen, who points out that 

"IT is one of the commonplaces of the received economic theory that work is irksome. Many a discussion proceeds on this axiom that, so far as regards economic matters, men desire above all things to get the goods produced by labor and to avoid the labor by which the goods are produced."

Veblen acknowledges that he is making grand generalisations, but is this not true? Going to work is, for the most part, seen as undesirable. 

Veblen points out that "The avowal does not cover all effort, but only such as is of some use; it is, more particularly, such effort as is vulgarly recognized to be useful labor." We do not shrink, for example, from "the effort that goes into war, politics, or other employments of a similar nature. And there is commonly no avowed aversion to sports or other similar employments that yield neither a pecuniary gain nor a useful product." 

This is surely true for students. They have boundless energy, which they happily expend on activities of their own choice, but somewhere along the line they learn that school work is odious. What I have enjoyed about working with the middle school students so far is that, while they may roll their eyes at the idea of doing a "useful" task, they quickly become invested in the actual work associated with it. Today during a graphing project, everyone was 100% engaged in a challenging and immediately satisfying task of plotting charted data on a line graph. 

I think it is one of the joys and challenges of teaching to come up with ways to stave off the perceived "irksomeness of labor" (Veblen's title) which creeps in through mediocre schooling. How do we do this? It shall surely be my lifelong challenge to find out. 

Certainly trying to incorporate student choice into the classroom helps. Can they choose some of the topics covered? Can they choose texts? Can they choose the subject and method for a presentation? 

Another source of irksomeness is boredom associated with listening silently to someone else, then having to do what they say. How a student's voice is involved in a lesson is key. I spoke about this with a friend, who pointed out that we should think about what verb we place int he blank in the following sentence: 

As a teacher I try to _______________ my student['s] voice.  

Do I give my student voice? 

Do I incorporate my student's voice?

Do I celebrate my student's voice?

Empower his voice?

Challenge?

Seek?

Listen to?

Is it enough to give a student voice? Is it too ambitious to hope to celebrate the voice of each student in a 25 person class? Certainly, my job is less irksome when the students are doing more talking. The MATs, in their feedback session this afternoon, acknowledged the glee they felt when students willingly participate in a lesson or discussion. There's no better feeling that knowing you've successfully gotten the students invested in the topic at hand. But if I've chosen the topic and questions, how much of their pure voice am I really honouring? I don't know the answers to these questions. 

Switching gears some, on the topic of irksomeness of the teacher's job, versus the joy of it:

When I made the decision to take on debt to pursue this program, a pragmatic friend told me that it was a fine idea, as long as I was ready to sacrifice the fun of pursuing whatever I want after the program is over, in order to service the debt. "You can't go get another passion job," was the friend's conclusion. 

This attitude aligns with the phenomenon Veblen identifies, but I rankle at it. Am I not pursuing this degree because I feel a level of passion about the job that the degree will permit me to do? Teaching is the passion job.

It is nice to feel as though my job is enjoyable when I do it well. If I plan poorly and it's just me and the sullen students in the classroom, it's irksome. If I plan successfully, and kids are engaged, it's energising and satisfying. I suppose we all have a level of influence over the irksomeness of our work, depending on our attitude and our preparation. I feel this is especially true for teachers. 

The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art

One of the joys of free museums is the opportunity to enter a museum with 35 minutes of free time and take a marvellous tour through the galleries that expose you to new artists and art forms. I experienced this joy today at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, which is having its annual "Free Summer" days.


I'm attending the United Society of Friends Women International Triennial in Cedar Rapids, and this afternoon there were buy-in tours of area interests. I did not sign up, and held my own self-guided tour of downtown Cedar Rapids. The highlight was the small art museum, which I would not have visited were it not for the free days.

Here is a smattering.

This exhibit sought to answer the question, "What makes American art American?" What themes or ideas have inspired an art form that is notably different from that of other countries? In the 18th century American artists generally travelled to Europe to train in the art schools there, but by the 19th century (this same phenomenon happened in literature, actually) artists were basically conducting their own training here, establishing their own methods and techniques. 

These show a bit of the diversity in the museum's collection of the styles that emerged. I love that each of them, either in its style of its subject, is cheeky. I think cheekiness is a definite theme in American art.

The museum also had several pieces from Rodin's work representing important people in French cultural life. The pieces of Balzac, Hugo and Claude Lorrain evoked what must have been the larger than life personalities of these men. The whole placard on Lorrain is worth reading; I love that Rodin tried to let the light dance off the statue in a way that would mimic the effect Lorrain admired in the sun (which he is presumably observing); both the subject and the audience are enjoying the same light effect. That's cool.

One of the things I like about my one-time-local art museum The Farnsworth in Rockland, Maine, is the gallery devoted to the Wyeth family painters. There is something gratifying about looking at a family of artists, imaging these people in the same home, the love of their work being passed down as much across breakfast conversation and rural vista-viewing as in DNA.

A similar exhibit at the CR Museum of Art showed the Lasansky family, primarily father Mauricio and son Diego, print makers both.

There was a video which nicely showed the technique involved in making a print, which I hadn't known at all. I love this wall of Martin Luthers.

This bearded man is from Mauricio Lasansky, the father and "one of the most important print makers of the 20th century."

I didn't photograph this painting's plaque. Here is the info from the museum website, for this exhibit on the women of the collection. It's called Ladies of the Club, which I found diminutive, with a "ladies who lunch" connotation. This piece is by Ann Royer.

Art. A Marriott in the Mid West seems like it would be an artistic wasteland. And indeed it is, except for the market place packed in the suitcases of Kenyan and Jamaican Friends women. Also, the outfits of the Kenyan women make up for the deficit of any number of bland hotels along this state route. Not to mention the emotional power and spiritual heft of their singing, which we have been treated to daily.

The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art

One of the joys of free museums is the opportunity to enter a museum with 35 minutes of free time and take a marvellous tour through the galleries that expose you to new artists and art forms. I experienced this joy today at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, which is having its annual "Free Summer" days.


I'm attending the United Society of Friends Women International Triennial in Cedar Rapids, and this afternoon there were buy-in tours of area interests. I did not sign up, and held my own self-guided tour of downtown Cedar Rapids. The highlight was the small art museum, which I would not have visited were it not for the free days.

Here is a smattering.

This exhibit sought to answer the question, "What makes American art American?" What themes or ideas have inspired an art form that is notably different from that of other countries? In the 18th century American artists generally travelled to Europe to train in the art schools there, but by the 19th century (this same phenomenon happened in literature, actually) artists were basically conducting their own training here, establishing their own methods and techniques. 

These show a bit of the diversity in the museum's collection of the styles that emerged. I love that each of them, either in its style of its subject, is cheeky. I think cheekiness is a definite theme in American art.

The museum also had several pieces from Rodin's work representing important people in French cultural life. The pieces of Balzac, Hugo and Claude Lorrain evoked what must have been the larger than life personalities of these men. The whole placard on Lorrain is worth reading; I love that Rodin tried to let the light dance off the statue in a way that would mimic the effect Lorrain admired in the sun (which he is presumably observing); both the subject and the audience are enjoying the same light effect. That's cool.

One of the things I like about my one-time-local art museum The Farnsworth in Rockland, Maine, is the gallery devoted to the Wyeth family painters. There is something gratifying about looking at a family of artists, imaging these people in the same home, the love of their work being passed down as much across breakfast conversation and rural vista-viewing as in DNA.

A similar exhibit at the CR Museum of Art showed the Lasansky family, primarily father Mauricio and son Diego, print makers both.

There was a video which nicely showed the technique involved in making a print, which I hadn't known at all. I love this wall of Martin Luthers.

This bearded man is from Mauricio Lasansky, the father and "one of the most important print makers of the 20th century."

I didn't photograph this painting's plaque. Here is the info from the museum website, for this exhibit on the women of the collection. It's called Ladies of the Club, which I found diminutive, with a "ladies who lunch" connotation. This piece is by Ann Royer.

Art. A Marriott in the Mid West seems like it would be an artistic wasteland. And indeed it is, except for the market place packed in the suitcases of Kenyan and Jamaican Friends women. Also, the outfits of the Kenyan women make up for the deficit of any number of bland hotels along this state route. Not to mention the emotional power and spiritual heft of their singing, which we have been treated to daily.