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Wednesday 18 September 2013

Parti Québécois Hypocrisy Has a New Face


PQ hypocrisy has a new face:  Jean-François Lisée, elected as the PQ Member for Rosemont in 2012.  When he was a journalist with L’actualite, I don’t remember ever feeling that he was unmeasured or unreasonable in the presentation of his ideas.  When he debated Mordecai Richler on English-language television, he seemed not only more on top of the issues but the more reserved and rational of the two.  I was therefore very curious to see how he would defend the Charte des valeurs in his press conference on RDI this week.  His presentation and responses were brisk, vague and evasive:  sure signs of a politician who knows he is skating on very thin ice, or just a man forced to defend a policy that he doesn’t believe in.

When I quoted Premier Lucien Bouchard’s address to the Anglophone community of Quebec at Centaur Theatre, March 12, 1996, in my last posting, what I didn’t mention was that Jean-François Lisée was the Premier’s speech-writer at the time, as well as  the organizer of the event.   We can safely assume he had a substantial hand in preparing the speech, if it wasn’t entirely his work.  So here, once again, is what Jean-François Lisée supposedly believed in 1996:

This week, Jean-François Lisée, defender of the “Charte des valeurs,” no longer believes in “freedom of expression” or “pluralism” or “a taste for each other’s culture.”  A “sense of fun”?  That’s not even on the map anymore!

If you want some sense of the depth of his newfound hypocrisy read the first entry of his journal on his official web site concerning the program of Africa-Quebec cooperation that he seems so proud of and moved by.  Of course, under the Charte des valeurs which  Minister Lisée now espouses, these “professionilized,”  Senegalese women in their brightly coloured costumes, which he was so moved by, would not be allowed to hold  a job in Quebec’s public and parapublic services unless they were ready to abandon their head scarves.  How’s that for a message of welcome!  And a message of respect for the people of Senegal invested in cooperation with Quebec!

What does Jean-François Lisée really believe in?  Not much it would seem. If his support for the charter of values is an attempt to follow through with the strategy outlined in his book Emergency Exit: How to Avert Quebec's Decline  and provoke a new conflict with the federal government and a referendum on Quebec’s powers within Canada, then he should say so clearly. Like the rest of the PQ, his sense of “values” this week seems pretty vacuous and negative.  Like the rest of the PQ, he seems ready to surrender his values of pluralism and openness in favour of the political exigencies of the moment. Like the rest of the PQ, he seems ready to surrender his earlier beliefs for a charter of non-values, a charter of anti-values, a charter in opposition to minorities’ expressing their beliefs and values, in a vain attempt to claim some sort of petty, short-term, ethnocentric political victory.  History, the one which won’t be controlled and written by the PQ, will judge him poorly.

Monday 16 September 2013

According to the PQ, "Loving Your Mother" Is Not a Québécois Value


Since first hearing about the Parti Québécois’ proposed “Charte des valeurs,”  I have gone through the typical range of emotions that I keep hearing all around me:  outrage, shame, embarrassment, anger, frustration, fear.  What most continues to bewilder me is the idea that any democratic government feels that it can legislate the values of its people.  If a Taliban government announced that it was planning to legislate a charter of values for Afghanistan, I could at least recognize a level of coherence.  But who ever heard of a western democracy announcing plans to legislate people’s values?

Every law, every constitution, every judicial proceeding emerges from and is a reflection in some degree of the people  governed by those laws.  The laws change as a culture and its values evolve.  Laws are the purview of legislators, but values belong to the people.  Attempting to legislate values directly is by definition reactionary conservatism; that is, it is an attempt to stop any change from happening, an attempt to make the future like the past, and to stop culture from evolving.  “Preserving culture,” an expression you hear a lot in Quebec these days, is an oxymoron.  It only makes sense if  you are talking about the preservation of artifacts.  The root notion of “culture” is “to cultivate,”  to grow, and that means change.  Attempting to legislate culture, to specify a charter of values, is  indirectly an admission that a culture is dead, that it cannot survive the current environment, and attempting to compel the people to live in the government’s vision of the past.

However, in all of this I am attributing nobler motives to the Parti Québécois than they have actually shown in their proposed legislation.  The “Charte des valeurs” is, above all, an exercise in hypocrisy.  It is presented as an attempt to create equality and neutrality, but it is all too obviously intended to be exactly the opposite in its effects.  The evidentiary intent of the charter is to appeal to an imagined xenophobic base which defines itself as “pure laine” or “de souche” and at the same time pass on the not-too-subtle message that if you are not part of this mono-culture then you should not feel too welcome or comfortable in Quebec.  This ugly real-politicking is designed to mobilize those Quebec ethnocentrists who attach themselves to the slogan “nous sommes un peuple” and discourage anyone else who might consider Quebec as home; the ultimate goal being, of course, winning an eventual referendum in favour of Quebec’s independence.


You might ask why I am ostensibly talking politics on this blog about education.  I’ve been hearing the slogan all week and then the brochure arrived in my mail announcing “Parce que nos valeurs, on y croit.”  (I am not the first to immediately ask if my tax dollars are being used by the Parti Québécois to spread their message of xenophobia and ethnocentrism.)  No doubt the government will try to claim that this is an “education” campaign.  The fallacy and disingenuousness of using propagandistic, tautological arguments under the pretense of “education” was the subject of my first posting, and, in many ways, the raison d’être of this blog.  Excuse me for quoting myself, but just to remind you, this is what I wrote on the first posting, May 15, 2013:

"Education" too often means simply replacing one set of ideas with another set that the educator likes better. Unfortunately, whenever you ask someone why one set of ideas is better than another, you very quickly find yourself running in a circle, trapped in a tautology, exhausted by a conversation that never quite takes place. 'My ideas are better because they correspond to my values.  My values are better because they correspond to my ideas.'

If you have ever tried to have an in-depth conversation with a Québécois/e who labels her/himself as “pure laine” and  “de souche” then you have already faced the passionate closure of this tautology.  The brick wall pictured on the PQ’s propaganda brochure is a good representation of what you will be hitting your head against if you attempt to challenge the project with logic or rationality.  The PQ wants the world to believe that Quebec’s ethonocentrism is an impenetrable fortress.  
The wall of cinder blocks in the PQ brochure is also an ironically apt representation of the Bloc Québécois.  Decades ago when Mordecai Richler described PQ policies as “non-violent ethnic cleansing,” I thought the description was exaggerated and inappropriate.  This week the expression seems stickily appropriate.  It is universally acknowledged that the Quebec government has a very poor record both in terms of attracting immigrants and employing minorities.  The charter is going to make that record a lot worse, and it is very hard to imagine that this result is unintended.  
Maria Mourani’s exclusion from the Bloc caucus and her eventual resignation from the party have made her the icon of “ethnic cleansing.”  It was astounding to hear her Bloc colleagues (on Le Club des ex) claim that she was excluded from the caucus because she had described the PQ policy as ethnic nationalism, when television viewers who heard her comments only moments before could recognize that that is not what she said.  They excluded her without even paying attention to what she actually said.  She had made it clear that she wanted to fight against the misperception of her constituents that the charter was proof of ethnic nationalism.  Now we know that, no matter what the context, the words “ethnic nationalism” cannot be spoken.  I wonder why?
The whole idea of a charter of values is not just an absurdity, it is a perfidious absurdity.  If it was really intended to represent what we all really believe and value, shouldn’t “loving your mother" be included as one of our common values?  What about compassion, fairness and kindness?  Shouldn’t the charter indicate that we are all against bullying?  And against fascism?  And pedophilia?  And exploitation of the young and the elderly?  The point is there are lots of values that we hold in common.  If we already hold them in common, all the less reason that we need laws to spell them out.  If those values already exist in law, all the less reason that we need a special charter of values to repeat them.
This realization brings us to a whole new level of the hypocrisy and misrepresentation with which we are dealing.  The project is not to create a “Charte des valeurs.”  This phrase is just part of the sales pitch which the PQ is spreading in the media in order to sell the idea to its ethnocentric base.  The proposals are supposedly beneficial additions to the existing CHARTE DES DROITS ET LIBERTÉS DE LA PERSONNE to encourage greater equality, clarity, tolerance and harmony.  The very serious question which I have yet to see debated or even mentioned is:  What changes is the government planning to make to the existing charter?  More precisely, what “rights and liberties” are they planning to remove?
If you take a look at the existing CHARTE DES DROITS ET LIBERTÉS DE LA PERSONNE it becomes patently obvious that the PQ’s inclusion of sexual equality in the new proposal is redundant, purely an exercise in political gamesmanship.  The inclusion of sexual equality in the "Charte des valeurs" simply means that everyone who wishes to oppose it is forced to say, “I agree with part of the charter; the part concerning sexual equality” before they can go on to register their objections to what the charter proposal is really all about.  For the same reason, the PQ has already rejected the repeated suggestion that the sexual equality and religious neutrality proposals be dealt with separately.
Here is what the CHARTE DES DROITS ET LIBERTÉS DE LA PERSONNE already says:
In other words, “égalité hommes-femmes” is already covered in the existing Charter, and what is really being proposed is the removal of rights and liberties related to religion and ethnic origin, and the amending and limiting of rights to liberty of religion and expression.  

When we come to consider the proposals for religious neutrality, the hypocrisy and perfidy of the PQ prove even more profound.  While head scarves, mandalas and turbans might be banned, the loopholes which will allow Catholic symbols not only to exist, but to proliferate and become more visible have already been written into the proposal.  The cross which will be allowed to remain in the National Assembly is the leading and most infamous example, but it is just one example of how the same loophole will be allowed to operate across Quebec.  Not only will numerous levels of government and institutions be allowed to write their own rules, but any religious symbol which is considered part of Quebec’s history and culture can also remain, ensuring that Quebec will remain dominantly and visibly Christian and Catholic to the detriment of all other religions and cultures. 
Of all the disturbing suggestions in the PQ proposal, the most disturbing for me is that the government will control history.  The PQ plans to protect religion (we can safely assume Catholicism) on the grounds that it is part of Quebec history and heritage  (and in the name of “preserving culture” we can assume that Quebec history and heritage will end the day the Charter of values becomes law).


So much for religious neutrality.  But what makes the proposition even worse is that a PQ government seems comfortable with the idea that they will determine how history gets written and taught.  Presumably, from now on, Quebec history will be all about white Catholics, and the artifacts and symbols will be maintained to ensure that the story gets told and taught that way.


This idea that history can be controlled by government and rewritten to suit policy is the kind of thinking we used to criticize the old Soviet Union and 1950s China and various totalitarian regimes for.  How did this mode of thinking suddenly become acceptable in Quebec?  Is there anyone literate enough in the Parti Québécois to remember Winston, the hero of Orwell’s 1984?  Winston’s job was to rewrite history for the government.

This week Barry Wilson delivered a Postscript editorial on CTV television lambasting the Charter project as ethnic nationalism, but he eventually commented in an offhanded tone that he does "not believe this will ever be voted on in this legislature because the PQ does not want it to pass." The cartoonist Aislen also claimed the legislation would never pass, and journalist Jennifer Ditchburn implied the same on CBC television.  Have any of these people done the math?  Of the 125 seats in the national assembly, 2 are currently vacant.  The PQ and the CAQ together currently hold 72 of the Assembly’s 123 seats.  By my count that is more than 58% and more than enough to pass this legislation. 
According to the party press release, CAQ (the Coalition Avenir Québec) is not only in favour of most of the Charter’s provisions, CAQ representatives claim: “We’ve debated enough in Québec. It’s time to take action.”  With the CAQ’s urgent support most of the provisions of the charter of values are bound to pass.  The CAQ’s official position is that 
The CAQ’s urgency remains as mysterious as the imagined problems which the PQ is supposedly solving with the charter.  As if to prove that their ethnocentrism and determination to legislate Quebec values are even stronger than the PQ’s, the CAQ has already announced that 
Sometimes it is easy to forget that François Legault is an old-time PQ sovereigntist with the same ethnocentric baggage and attitudes.  But the important point here is that the PQ and CAQ have the votes to pass this legislation, or am I missing something?  Why is the English-language media so certain that this legislation will not be passed?
I truly empathize with Maria Mourani because like her I have allowed myself to maintain an open mind toward the PQ and the sovereignty movement in general, believing that they could be open, inclusive, socially responsible and  democratic.  Right now I feel that my open-mindedness has been simply foolish.  I have been conned by the humanistic faces that the PQ have occasionally been able to show to the public. However, now I realize that behind every René Lévesque there is a lobsters-in-the-pot Jacques Parizeau ready to blame the “ethnic vote” for the referendum loss and a Bernard Landry ready to accost an innocent hispanic bystander with the same accusation.  We might want to think of the PQ as being like Lucien Bouchard in his 1996 address to the Anglophone community saying: 
No, none of these “values” made it into the charter, unless you count a redundant, hypocritical use of “equality.”  In fact, we can now recognize that the charter is designed to resist these values and ensure that they do not take hold in Quebec. Behind the humanist face of Lucien Bouchard there will always be the PQ reality of an Yves Michaud chastising Montreal’s Jewish community for failing to vote in favour of Quebec’s independence, and of course Drainville’s Herouxville-style Charter, and Premier Pauline Marois still pushing the PQ’s failed enthnocentric slogan, “Nous sommes un peuple.”  Et les autres?  Well now we know; they are expected to remain invisible.  

Sunday 23 June 2013

Do No Harm Part III: Don’t Joke about the Bible


Do Not presume

I hope I have made it clear that I have not lived up to my own recommendation that teachers should avoid irony.  The best I have been able to do, and I suspect this will be true for most teachers, is to be careful and to be wary of the pitfalls of irony.  In recent years I saw a dramatic increase in the multicultural mix in my classes:  students from Africa, the Caribbean, the former Yugoslavia, Iran, China, Japan and various Arab countries.   Over the years, I had learned from lecturing on feminism and what used to be called “women’s liberation” not to presume to know what individual women want or, worse still, should want.  Even though, I was supposed to be the expert on “culture” and “intercultural communication,” I think I knew enough not to presume that I understood my students' lives, and to recognize that I had a lot to learn from them.  In general, I was in awe of their openness and resilience.  H.G. Wells’ short story “The Country of the Blind” provided a perfect framework for discussing the challenges of respecting, adopting, adapting to and negotiating new cultures. I think I did alright with these students.  The group of students which proved the greatest challenge for me and who were increasingly present in my classes in the new millennium were what I would describe in general terms as “evangelical Christians.”

On Being "born again through Jesus"

A professor teaching at a university in Alabama once told me that he could not invite students to say anything personal in their essays.  As he explained, if there were 50 students in the class, he would get 45 essays describing “how I was born again through Jesus.”  The proportions I faced were about the reverse; around 10% of students in my courses would express Christian convictions if I invited them to express personal opinions as well as knowledge of literature and theory in their essays.  The presence of evangelical Christians in my classes was the opposite of a problem.  They were typically among the nicest students in the room:  they were punctual, attentive, polite, respectful, typically sat at the front of the room, participated actively and asked questions.  You can’t argue with those kinds of behaviours. 

Why question when God is the answer to everything?

Nonetheless I was compelled to announce in my classes that while I was aware and respectful of the psychological comfort which a belief in God and religious faith might afford individuals, the context of the courses I gave was science, rationality and reason. I typically explained to students that Nietzsche’s aphorism “God is dead,” which had taken hold in the 20th century, was a pithier version of the physicist Laplace’s much earlier declaration that “God is a hypothesis of which the world no longer has need.”  We created God (and gods) because we needed answers to so many questions about the world we found ourselves living in.  As science began to answer these questions, the need for God as an answer to these questions faded.    The disadvantage of a firm belief in God and of religious faith dominating our thinking is the same reason we call the Middle Ages the Dark Ages and the Age of Reason which followed the Enlightenment:  God can be a quick and easy answer to every question  and consequently slow down if not outright prohibit rational and scientific inquiry.  Why go through the hard work of thinking if you have a ready-made answer to every question?  God did it!  It is so because God wants it to be. 

How to talk about the Bible?

This was the warning I issued to students:  don’t use God to avoid the hard work of thinking through an issue.  This caveat was accepted with varying degrees of willingness, but where I was eventually taken to task was on how I talked about the Bible.  My comeuppance came in the form of a mature and able student, a mother of adolescent children, who was planning to open a religious-based school with her husband after graduation.  The student made an appointment with me to discuss very seriously (“complain about” would be an accurate locution but one she avoided using) the way I talked about the Bible. 

The Bible is a book worth reading

Her concern was that I was discouraging students from reading the Bible.  This was a contention that I took very seriously.  In the first place, I counted myself among a relatively small number of professors in my field who required students to read parts of the Bible as a prerequisite to the study of literature.  More importantly, I regularly informed students that, although it did not sound particularly elevated or refined, what I taught was reading. (Although the titles used to describe what I taught kept changing—English, English Studies, Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies—the skill set I was passing on and encouraging students to develop remained the same: reading and writing.  I must confess that my secret desire has long been to be known as a “philologist,” which not only has a high sounding tone but fairly accurately described what I researched and taught.)  While I thought she was wrong to think that I discouraged students from reading the Bible, she gave me pause to reconsider the ironic tone with which I exposed the Bible to students.

Adam and Eve; Pandor and Epimetheus

I typically began an introductory course comparing the Biblical story of Adam and Eve with the Greek myth of Pandora and Epimetheus, noting for example how women consistently get the blame for introducing evil into the world. Do these stories prove that this is the way women are?  Or maybe what explains the stories is that they were written by men.  However, what got my student on my case came much later.  To introduce Shakespeare, I had to explain the Elizabethan Age, which of course meant introducing Elizabeth, which in turn meant explaining Henry VIII and at least the first two of his many wives, Catherine of Aragon and Elizabeth’s mother, Henry’s mistress and second wife, Anne Boleyn.    


Henry VIII, Deuteronomy and Leviticus

Henry’s problems began with the Bible.  When Henry’s older brother Arthur, the heir apparent, died, political exigencies dictated that Henry marry Catherine of Aragon, his brother’s widow, to maintain an alliance with Spain.  Henry was worried that marrying his sister-in-law might be incest.  Such moral dilemmas were of course resolved by reference to the Bible.  Luckily for the political wonks of the time, the Bible seemed quite clear, even insistent on the subject:

Deuteronomy 25:5   If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband unto her.

The Bible indicated not only that Henry could marry his sister-in-law, but that he must marry her.

However, as time wore on and Catherine failed to produce a male heir (yes, despite biology, women always get the blame!) and things were getting cozy (for now) with Anne Boleyn, Henry had a second look at the Bible.  This time Leviticus confirmed his original suspicions and gave him grounds for divorce.  Sleeping with your wife’s brother was incest.

Leviticus 20: 21 And if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless.

As you can probably tell already, my tone in discussing the Bible was not as serious and reverent as many people might think it should be.  Nonetheless, up to this point, I think I was on fairly solid academic and pedagogical ground, but then I strayed into a number of irresistible tangents that were not directly relevant to my lecture on Shakespeare and his times.

Leviticus is that part of the Bible which explicitly condemns homosexuality. 

20: 13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

I’m not sure how people who claim to read the Bible literally, as the word of God, can square this pronouncement with contemporary laws against hate crimes.  As they read this proscription, I encouraged students to put it in context, noting, for example, that Leviticus commands that children who curse their parents be put to death.  I also found myself asking students if they agreed with Leviticus that brother and sister who saw each other naked or husband and wife who had sex during a menstrual period should be expelled from the community.  I should have stopped there, but I didn’t.

Levitcus also commands that:

20: 15 [. . .] if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast.

Sometimes the Bible made me laugh and I shared the joke

No matter what your sexual morality, it seemed unfair, to me, to kill the animal.  (Okay, definitely a tongue-in-cheek observation.) At the same time, I couldn’t help noticing that among these numerous, detailed rules governing sexual behaviour there was nothing against lesbianism.  (At last, one small advantage in being woman!) I should have stopped there, but I didn’t.

Deuteronomy 25 outlines a scenario that is oddly specific.  I would imagine it to be quite an anomalous situation, but Deuteronomy treats it as a regular occurrence which must be governed by a specific law.  Imagine two men are fighting, and you are the wife of the man who is losing.  Seeing that your husband is about to be killed, you enter the fray and grab your husband’s attacker by the testicles to subdue him.  (I’m not making this up.  It’s in the Bible.)  The question is:  what should happen to you, the wife who saved her husband?  Deuternomy’s answer is that you should have your hand cut off, the one you used to grab the attacker’s gonads.

Here’s the exact wording from Deutoronomy:

11When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets:

12Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.

My Student was right to complain

My student was right to complain that I had no particular reason to draw attention to this passage (beyond the fact that it had drawn my attention).  It seemed clear to me that this passage was not “the word of God,” but I could imagine it having been written by some man who had once had his gonads savaged by the wife of some guy he was putting the boots to (make that “sandals”). (Despite postmodern gibberish about “the death of the author,” it is always useful to consider who the author might have been as you attempt to fathom the meaning of a text.)

And yet I was right to question the Bible as a guide to modern morality

To my surprise when my student had discussed the problem with her pastor, I had to agree with what she reported his opinion to be.  The Bible was written by relatively pragmatic individuals, with a narrow range of experience, dealing with the specific, down-to-earth problems of their tribal group or community.  I couldn’t agree more, but I was left to wonder how evangelicals get from this reasonable observation to the idea that the Bible is “the word of God” and should be used to determine modern morality.

But Toning down the irony was the right thing to do

Nonetheless, I had to agree with my student that I should (and I did) tone down my irony in discussing the Bible and avoid lingering tangentially over Deuteronomy.  I think we reached an agreeable compromise and managed to maintain mutual respect.  The student chose to do at least one more course with me and when I met her a couple of weeks ago in the grocery store she suggested I might want to teach in the school she and her husband were setting up.  (Of course, now I have to wonder if she wasn't being ironic.)

Monday 27 May 2013

Do No Harm Part II: Avoid Irony


In Education, sometimes less is more

I used to teach a course on Public Speaking.  It took me three years to figure out how to properly organize and deliver the course.  I think I finally did it right in the third year.  The trick was to abandon my teacher ego (a subject for a future post), get out of the way, take care of administrative and secretarial necessities of the course, and allow the students to perform and to educate each other—as much as I could (which was never easy for me).  A majority of the students who took this course were from the Faculty of Education and consequently destined for careers as educators.  One message I passed on to all the students, especially those planning to become teachers:  avoid irony. 

Every Joke has a victim

This is very complicated advice because if you ask students to list the five features they appreciate in teachers, a “sense of humour” is bound to appear consistently in the list.  (Here is another issue that I suspect teacher training programs never deal with.  Are there any education courses out there on “how to be funny”?)  At the core of any “joke” there is bound to be some form of irony and a victim.  I will try to avoid giving one of my three-hour lectures on the subject of irony, but if you are curious you might look at Linda Hutcheon’s book, Irony’s Edge and/or Paul de Man’s “The Concept of Irony” in Aesthetic Ideology.

Verbal Irony means saying what you don't mean

Verbal irony is saying one thing, but you really mean something else quite different.  The lowest form of verbal irony is the most familiar:  sarcasm.  A teacher being sarcastic with students is trying to be hurtful.  Unacceptable, but that is only part of the problem.  Irony by its very nature is always ambiguous.  No matter how clear or obvious a teacher might think s/he is being when being ironic, the fact is a number of different messages are being transmitted to students at the same time, and individual students are going to have to figure out which message is the right one.  Whatever message they choose, they are going to be wrong because the “real” meaning of an ironic statement doesn’t exist.  Irony is deliberately confusing; it does not transmit clear, singular meanings. If you ask someone what an ironic statement “really” means they are bound to be wrong.  According to Linda Hutcheon, the question would be the same as me asking you what this picture “really” represents.



 
If irony has to cross languages or cultures there is an exponential increase in the possibility of its being grossly misinterpreted.

Faced with verbal irony, you are never supposed to ask "what do you mean?"

Verbal irony can be quite innocent and lighthearted or unintended or very aggressive.  The problem is we can never know, with certainty, which.  Let’s try a case.  You arrive at work one morning and your colleague says:  “you’re looking sexy today.”  If your colleague is old and creepy, you begin to contemplate your sexual harassment suit; if young and attractive, you flash your brightest smile and strike a pose.  However, there is something in your colleague’s tone that puts a question mark in your mind.  (With irony, tone is everything.)  Does your colleague really mean that “you are looking sexy” or is the colleague being ironic and therefore intending another meaning? So, of course, you ask with an earnest glare: “What do you mean?”

The Multiple Meanings of an ironic utterance

We’ve all been there, so we know the answer will be something like:  “oh nothing,”  “just kidding around,” “don’t be so serious,” etc, etc, dodge, evade and duck (or is it a rabbit?).  Now you are left to try and figure out what your colleague really meant and, of course, the more you think about it, the more the number of possibilities expands.  The least likely possibility now seems to be that you are looking sexy this morning; your colleague earnestly thinks so and said so.  You enumerate the possibilities.  You had to get dressed in a rush this morning, missed the bus, etc.  Your colleague is telling you that you look a mess, or at least below your usual standards.  Option two, worse still, you are the least sexy person in the office and everyone knows it.  It is a big joke to describe you as “looking sexy.”  Or maybe the message is quite the opposite; it’s that you are trying too hard or you have overdone it and gone too far.  Your apparel is, in fact, too sexy.  You’ve gone passed sexy to slut/pimp. You are inappropriately dressed for the office.  At the same time, you infer that your colleague wants to initiate a “sexy” conversation with you.  What’s that about? 

Hopefully you are beginning to appreciate the problem.

What teachers say matters

Contrary to popular stereotypes, students are affected by what teachers tell them.  Moreover, there is a pretty good chance that the most passive-aggressive student in the room is also the most thin-skinned and insecure.  Imagine you are a student and your teacher is in the habit of being ironic.  Not only has your teacher confused you with multiple messages that you are unable to decode, but some of those messages, as far as you have been able to figure them out, are personally insulting and hurtful.  Your teacher on the other hand is thinking that s/he has such a great rapport with students that they have a fine time joking with each other.

Humour is a double-edged sword

It may not sound like it from this blog, but humour is an important part of my lecture style, my teaching in general and my personality.  I absolutely believe that teaching by example is the most important kind of teaching, and where teachers most often fail.  (I am convinced that if they were giving a lecture on “The Importance of Punctuality,” a number of my colleagues would show up late—and would have trouble understanding why that was a problem!)  Nonetheless, I have certainly been guilty of irony in my classes.  I have tried to mitigate the potential damage by warning students that I tell jokes (or at least relate anecdotes and recount comic examples) for two perfectly justifiable pedagogical motives:  The first is that I am illustrating a point in a fashion that I hope will make the point memorable (and I beg the students to remember the point I was making and not just the joke).  The second motive is that looking out across the room I can see that everyone is on the verge of falling asleep.  Whatever significant knowledge I was hoping to get across at that moment was DOA, so I might as well stir the room with something random with the hope of rekindling curiosity and concentration a few moments hence.

Comedy and ironic distance

However, tell yourself any two jokes that you know well, and chances are they both involve a victim.  Stories are funny because someone is or does something foolish or something unfortunate happens to them that makes us laugh.  We need a certain distance from these characters in order for us to laugh at what befalls them. Northrop Frye calls this distance “ironic” in his categorization of the modes of literature.  We cannot be too close to the characters, too sympathetic or concerned, or the joke won’t seem funny.   Generally, we feel superior to the characters in a joke or funny story.  


Cuckoos and cuckoldry

In late medieval humour the most common theme was cuckoldry.  A cuckold (just to remind you, because it is not a word often used these days) is a husband whose wife has sex with another man.  (There is no equivalent term for a betrayed wife, but the etymology isn’t quite as sexist as it sounds.  The origin is the cuckoo bird which was known for laying its eggs in other birds’ nests.  The implication is that a cuckold suffers not because his wife has sex with someone else but because he might unknowingly end up raising someone else’s offspring. People who have seen the movie but not read the novel will likely not recognize the intimations of betrayed masculinity—as well as insanity—in the title One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest).  In more contemporary times, until the recent ascendency of political correctness, the “victim” was usual a gendered or ethnic or regional or class stereotype. 


Teachers:  are you ready to be the butt of your own jokes?

If you are going to “be funny” with students, you have to ask yourself:  what is the relationship between the victim of your humour and your audience?  One way you as a teacher can be sure you are not going to victimize someone with your humour is to make yourself the victim.  I do on occasion make myself the butt of my own jokes, but this is not a gambit I recommend for any teacher who may be having concerns about maintaining status, respect and proper decorum with students.  If you observe stand-up comedians these days, self-mockery or at least putting themselves in the role of the “dumb” character is a common strategy.  It is also worth noting that the word “irony” derives from the dissembling character in ancient Greek comedy called the eirôn who appeared to be inferior and unintelligent but would triumph over the braggart in the end.

"No dark sarcasm in the classroom / Teachers leave them kids alone"



Wednesday 22 May 2013

Do No Harm

"Do no harm"

It was always my intention and ambition as a teacher to honour the basic tenant of the Hippocratic Oath:  “Do no harm.”  It sounds simple enough, and I assume most teachers feel as I do, but for people with sadistic impulses the classroom must seem like a tempting playground.  Since the oath was intended for doctors, much of what it proposes would not apply to teachers, but even some of its tenants like honouring gods and mentors, not using a knife on patients, and not providing abortions seem odd promises even for ancient Greek doctors.  On the other hand, the proscription of having sex with patients or revealing their confidences could and should also be applied to teachers with their students.  (These proscriptions, in my mind, go hand and in hand, and will be discussed in a future post.)


"Spare the rod and spoil the child"

But I’ve never been able to get passed the basic “Do no harm.”  It is a burden and a challenge for any teacher once you start thinking about it.  Are all your students better off because of the experience of having been taught by you?  Have you ever hurt a student?  As a student in the 50s and 60s, I certainly witnessed a great deal of corporal punishment, but those were the days when a sadistic streak was considered a necessary requirement for high-school (and even elementary) teachers.  Even the enlightened educator of today is likely to have done some harm or injury to a student without ever being aware.

"You've just been wasting my precious time"

Under the rubric “do no harm,” I also find myself asking if I have ever wasted my students’ “precious time.”  (Hope you get the Dylan allusion . . . Zimmerman not Thomas.)  If your answer to this question is that if students weren’t in your class, they probably wouldn’t be doing anything worthwhile anyway, then you shouldn’t be teaching.  The human instinct is to learn.  No matter what environment you put a human being into, the human reaction is to satisfy curiosity, to try and learn something.  (Have you noticed that when people talk about “drug education” or “sex education,” what they mean is teaching young people not to take drugs and not to have sex, even if this "education" means spreading misinformation?) My biggest preoccupation with educational systems is that so often they seem designed to ensure that students learn less rather than more. The frequency with which I encounter educators who have tacitly surrendered to this conclusion shocks me.  The school is a prison, outside the school is a jungle; the only debate seems to be about which one is worse.

The Best way to spend three hours and learn something

The most typical scenario within which I taught was the three-hour lecture.  It’s a tough question to ask but I did ask myself:  Is my three-hour lecture the best possible way these students could be spending their time?  They could be at home in bed catching up on three hours of much needed sleep.  Making love.  Reading a book.  Browsing the internet.  Making progress on a challenging video game.  Day dreaming about the future.  Taking care of loved ones.  Having a conversation.  Exercising.  Taking a walk.  Watching a blockbuster movie that cost 40 million dollars to produce.  Inevitably they would be learning something, even if it were only about each others’ navels, or how easy it is to waste 40 million dollars.  The 40-million-dollar blockbuster movie-- that was my competition and I always thought I had the advantage because I could use a film in my class, but no Hollywood producer had requested my skills as a lecturer.   Actually, that’s not quite true.  When I requested a 16-dollar budget so that I could show six minutes of Romeo and Juliet in a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre from the DVD version of Shakespeare in Love, my request sent shock waves through the department, the faculty, the library and upper echelons of the financial administration.  The department did not have a “pedagogical budget,” but a section of the library agreed to purchase the DVD if I promised not to show it to students (no, I’m not kidding), because group showings would, according to the library, contravene copyright law.  The moral of the story is that if you want to “do no harm” to students, if you want to teach well and insure that they learn something that sticks with them in every class, there is a pretty good chance that you are going to have to break somebody’s rules to do it (the subject of another future post), not to mention forking out the cash to buy your own DVDs.

Triggering past traumas or helping the healing?

I remember once having the privilege of teaching a class that was small enough that I could invite students to introduce themselves in the first class.  One of the students explained that he had only recently discovered that he had been an orphan, had been adopted, and that he had met his biological family for the first time over the summer.  It was a striking revelation; one that stuck with me throughout the course.  The student was very upbeat, but it seemed obvious to me that he was still processing his recent discoveries.  The problem for me was to suddenly realize that every second text on the course I was giving seemed to involve an orphan.  The infant Oedipus is left on a mountain top to die, but survives, is adopted, and returns to Thebes unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother in the process.  Earnest Worthing is left in a hand bag at a train station and grows up not knowing his own identity.  And, in the short story, “Who am I this time?” by Kurt Vonnegut, Harry, the central character, is a brilliant actor but is incapable of developing a “real” personality or social life because he was a foundling.  I remember hoping that the texts would prove beneficial to him, that they would give him the opportunity to consider the significance of being an orphan from a distance and from varying perspectives, maybe allow him to laugh about his orphan-hood, or consider himself lucky that he was no Oedipus.  In fact this idea, the possibility of a distanced and even disinterested or ironic perspective and the opportunity for calm reflection on the world’s and one’s own personal problems became for me, however unfashionable, a justification for the study of literature.

Romanticizing suicide

I live in an area where the second most frequent cause of death for young people is suicide. This fact certainly got me thinking about the number of literary works I have taught which romanticize suicide. Romeo and Juliet is the most obvious and influential example. Actually, our unwitting romanticization of suicide was brought home to me when I was teaching Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's novel tells of a near-future dystopia in which young women were required to become birth mothers for powerfull, infertile couples. In the middle of a classroom discussion of the novel, one student, a bright and always charming young woman, announced very earnestly to the room that she would never accept to live in the circumstances which the Handmaid was enduring. No doubt, in her mind, the student was simply sharing her feelings, but at the same time she was implying that suicide was the right thing to do and criticizing the central character, the Handmaid, for her decision to survive--a decision which Atwood makes explicit in the novel. Since that day, I have found myself repeatedly arguing against the grain of certain literary works, or at least popular interpretations of those works, which present suicide as the logical and even heroic consequence of dramatic events. While I think I have demonstrated sound pedagogy and sound interpretations of the literary works by demonstrating how fictional suicides are to be interpreted as misguided, short sighted and cowardly, I can't help but think of all the years I taught these literary works without stopping to say the obvious.

The Tipping Point

Yes, I know perfectly well, as do you, that no-one is going to go and commit suicide because they read Romeo and Juliet, but I wouldn’t want anything I taught or said to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.  I didn’t want to be the butterfly that caused a hurricane (yes, there is a future post coming on pedagogy and chaos theory).  I also believe, as Malcom Gladwell underlines in The Tipping Point, that “the people who die in highly publicized suicides—whose deaths give others ‘permission’ to die–serve as the Tipping Point in suicide epidemics” (224).  By the way, if you see a sign that someone is contemplating suicide, call 911.  It sounds obvious, but people don’t do the obvious.  I understand why . . . perfectly.  The first reaction is that if it were true, someone else would call.  Then you call, and you feel foolish, because of course you really don’t know, in fact, the more you think about it you become convinced that the person really isn’t seriously contemplating suicide.  You will tell yourself that you sound foolish, hysterical.  911 will ask you questions that you can’t answer.  But 911 will take your call seriously.  The police will respond.  When it’s all over, the student will tell you that it was all a big mistake.  You will never be able to say you prevented a suicide, but your student will thank you anyway, and praise you because you were the only person to react.  So call 911.

Honouring confidences

While I calculated and hoped that the study of literature would have a salutary effect on individual students, I repeatedly found myself stymied and second guessing myself as I tried to anticipate how a particular student might be affected by what I was teaching.  As I write these words, I find myself on the verge of breaking the oath which this post is intended to promote.  I don’t want to tell tales about my students.  But in order for what I write to be useful, meaningful and credible, it must be grounded in lived experience.  I intend to be discreet, and consequently somewhat vague, even though I know perfectly well that the salacious details might make for more interesting and credible reading.  I certainly would not want this blog to “out” any of my former students or reveal personal information that could be traced back to a particular individual.

Talking about rape and guilt and trauma

The instances I am thinking about, for example, would include the student who met me in the corridor outside the classroom to apologize for missing the previous class because she was testifying in a rape case in which she was the victim.  My lecture that day was centered on the rape scene in Streetcar Named Desire.   Over the years students have told me about their breakups, their unwanted pregnancies and abortions, of being battered by spouses, the suicides of friends, their struggles with depression and schizophrenia.  I am still haunted by a young mother’s story of how she was responsible for the death of her child.  A Rwandan student’s accounts of her father and sisters being murdered, her mother hospitalized and her brother in a refugee camp simply left me numb.  Knowing that these students are in my classes didn’t change what I taught, but it made me careful, reflective, and aware of what I was saying and how it might affect or be hurtful to a particular listener—and still I can remember the times when students told me I had not been careful enough.

Sometimes "caring" is all we can offer

Of course, there is no solution to the problem I am pointing out (unless you have an answer), except that it prompts the general counsel to be careful.    I have been told that I bring the problem on myself, because students recognize that I am sympathetic and willing to listen.  It has also been suggested that I allow myself to be conned.  I always assumed that students were telling me the truth unless I had proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” to the contrary.  That presumption of innocence, that trust, always served me well in my relationships with students.  It's effect was, in my experience, almost invariably, mutual respect.  The idea that a student might be conning me to gain my sympathy never disturbed me because it was always my intention to be as understanding and generous with students as possible—no special pleas were necessary.   On the other hand, my conscious generosity was only possible because in every course I taught I would set up a substantial variety of methods of evaluation.  In my experience, if you give students ample opportunity to gain or lose marks, they will over the course of time determine their own grades.  I consistently attempted to set up my evaluation structure so that my sympathy could not overwhelm the outcome. 

Objectivity matters

Am I saying that I was consistently objective and egalitarian in my treatment and assessment of students?  No.  In fact, I would say that teachers who are convinced of their own objectivity are very likely to be the opposite.  Perfect justice and objectivity are the sorts of things we must constantly strive for, all the while recognizing that they cannot be achieved.  I know it is impossible that I was absolutely fair in equal measure with each of the students I came into contact with but I also know that I always tried to be.   If we want to “do no harm” then teachers have to be diligent and confident enough to rigorously evaluate their students but, at the same time, self-doubting enough to question themselves and their tools each time that they do.   The student who has been given an inflated impression of his or her achievements and abilities may, in the long run, be as harmed as the student made cynical because the work is too easy or too hard, or the student whose self-esteem suffers because of a low mark or a failure.  There are no magical, “silver bullet” solutions to these kinds of challenges, except to recognize that they exist and to strive against the complacency, cynicism and fatigue that facing these challenges are bound to engender.

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