After my recent post on the uselessness of Schools of Education, I’m getting a feeling that people are starting to see me as somebody who hates pedagogy, which could not be further from the truth. I believe that pedagogy is extremely useful. It is a great mistake that college professors who are not in foreign languages receive zero training in the art of teaching. I took years of courses in the methodology of teaching (in foreign languages, we all do), and they were enormously helpful. I started reading books on the pedagogical theory before I was 10 years old and I still remember parts of them by heart because I read them many times. And as a result I’m now an extremely effective teacher. So I’m definitely not a pedagogy basher.

The reason why I find the School of Education model problematic is that there isn’t enough there to justify an entire field. A field needs to grow, develop, and produce useful NEW content all the time. If a discipline cannot produce new knowledge, it is a not a field of scholarship. There is absolutely no room in pedagogy to produce anything new that would have value. Teaching is a set of skills that do not and cannot change in a significant way on a constant basis.

Schools and Departments of Education struggle to justify their existence as independent fields of knowledge (and not purveyors of a  limited set of mechanical skills, which they really are) by coming up with tons of faddy and useless “innovations” that have zero substance. They try to move forward in an area of human endeavor where there is no place to move. Have you ever wondered why the extremely important art of hair-dressing cannot be a field of scholarship? Because aside from a set of specific practices, scholarship needs theory. That theory should be, by its nature, endlessly renewable and capable of transformation. And until human beings learn to sprout something radically different than hair on their heads, there can be no theory in hair-cutting.

To avoid recognizing that there is nothing but a set of (hugely important and valuable) mechanical skills in education, the “scholars” in this “field” attach themselves to fads that they hype up to the skies in vain attempts to pretend that it is possible to contribute anything radically new. Take, for instance, online learning. As I’m planning to say at my conference in a couple of hours, the current online learning fad is so old that it is nothing short of boring. Distance learning has existed in a variety of forms for over a century. In the late 1800s, there was an obsession with correspondence courses that were hailed as the radically new and transformative direction of pedagogy. In the 1930s, there was a similar wave of interest in teaching through radio. Then, there were courses offered through television. Now, it’s the Internet. Time and again, these fads fail to offer a valuable alternative to teaching by a live human being in an actual physical classroom. Departments of Education pretend to be unaware of the long history of failure behind distance learning, hoping that this new fad will save them from their own vacuity.

It would be great if all graduate students who are planning to teach took at least one skill course offered by a professor with a long experience of successful teaching in this particular field. Every department has such people, and it makes sense to share skills that are native to a specific discipline. Obviously, the teaching of languages is somewhat (although not hugely) different from the teaching of math or chemistry. But there is no need of whole Schools and Departments to provide this form of instruction.

So my Nicaragua class was being observed today. By the new Chair. And obviously I wanted to make a good impression. I prepared my activities, my photos, my slides, everything,  and uploaded it all to Dropbox. And of course, for the first time in my life, the Dropbox didn’t sync.

Yes, I could have printed out the activities but I hate wasting paper when I can have it all on the screen instead.

So I’m standing there in front of the Chair and 39 students and realizing that the class has started and I’ve got nothing. Of course, I can speak about Nicaragua without props, but this was not a warm and fuzzy experience because I had to come up with stuff on the spot.

The Chair said that he enjoyed the class and that my voice shone through even in the absence of the props but I was still seriously rattled. And now I have to rush home to get the materials for my next class because they didn’t upload either.

I also need to calm down because I’m still rattled.

Today in my Latin American conflicts course I’m teaching about Nicaragua. The Sandinistas, Somoza, the Iran – Contras thing, etc. Every time I teach the course, I check the news to see what’s happening in the country we are discussing to give students a feel for the way things are today.

So I check the news for Nicaragua, and what do you think I find? Nicaraguans are signing some shit deal with Russians, of all the fucking evildoers in the world, offering to buy Russian fighter planes. Nicaragua, the second poorest country in the region after fucking Haiti, suddenly finds itself in desperate need of Russian fighter planes, and what the fuck? At the time when every normal person on the planet spits on Russia and its threats of nuclear strikes on peaceful countries, Nicaragua welcomes Russian officials to discuss their common interests in the region? Stupid, hopeless mess of a country.

So on the wave of this joyful and light-hearted mood, the tone of my lecture begins to shift towards “Our great President Reagan did the only thing that made sense under the circumstances, worked hard to stick it to the stinky Russians, and thank him for that, the talented leader that he was.”

OK, I’m not going to say this because I don’t gush in class but I’ve got to tell you, since Russia invaded Ukraine, I can’t help but see everything that happened during the Cold War in a different way. I can’t pretend not to understand why stopping these idiots’ drive to burn up the planet does become the leading priority that trumps everything else. And back in the 1970s-1980s, the Russians were not even serious about their anti-Americanism, nuclear strikes, rejection of modernity, etc. They weren’t stopped in time, and now the have gotten serious about all this crap.

So it doesn’t look like it will be easy to remain dispassionate in class.

You know what I never tried? Ordering at a drive-through. I never even sat next to a person ordering at a drive-through, so I’m completely ignorant of the process.

I want to try but I’m too intimidated. Maybe I should seek a YouTube video to learn the process.

So my blogroll was right: Netanyahu won the elections in Israel. There will be a delay to the two states. I’m not knowledgeable enough to express a valuable opinion on whether the delay makes sense. But I do have an interesting story to share.

Zygmunt Bauman, one of the world’s greatest thinkers, is a Polish Jew. Bauman was born in 1925, which means that this year he will turn 90. When the Nazis occupied Poland, Bauman and his family fled to the USSR because back in 1939 it was still a decent place for Jews to be. Bauman fought in WWII, taking part in the battle to liberate Berlin. After the war, he, a passionate Communist, collaborated with the Soviets at persecuting the Ukrainians who were fighting for their independence from the USSR. He was also a KGB informant.

Bauman was doing really great at that job until his bosses found out that this father, as passionate a Zionist as his son was a Communist, had approached the Embassy of Israel with the hopes of emigrating. Bauman was completely incensed and broke off all contact with his father. The future philosopher had no use for Israel and considered it to be a stupid bourgeois project with no value.

Time passed, Bauman read and studied a lot. Eventually, he realized how shameful and stupid his collaboration with the Soviets had been and became increasingly disgusted with Poland’s pro-Soviet government. Zygmunt Bauman became a great thinker and philosopher.

In the late 1960s, a shameful anti-Semitic campaign was unleashed by Poland’s pro-Soviet anti-Semitic secret police. Bauman was first kicked out of his professorship at the Warsaw University. Then he was kicked out of the country. Nobody wanted him, so he went to Israel. When worst comes to worst, where’s an unwanted, still-not-that-famous Jew to go but Israel?

Bauman taught at the Tel Aviv University for a while but then left for the UK. He realized that he wasn’t finding what he needed in Israel. After leaving, he remained highly critical of Israel, going as far as accusing it of  “taking advantage of the Holocaust to legitimize unconscionable acts.” Because a Jew remains a Jew, and will always put everything in doubt and be critical of everything because that’s what makes him a Jew. Bauman has been one of the harshest critics of Israeli anti-Palestinian policies.

Zygmunt Bauman, I repeat, is among the greatest thinkers humanity has ever produced. We all make mistakes but his are counterbalanced by the enormous work he has done for the benefit of all of us and that none of us here have been able to match. If I have gotten over his input into the persecution of Ukraine’s Liberation Army, you can get over whatever bothers you about his life path. The point of the story is not to criticize Bauman but to illustrate the complex relationship of the Jewish Disapora with Israel.  

When I speak of the civil society coming into existence in Ukraine, this is what I mean:

Gosh, I grew up around these village bus stops, and they were always the saddest, most depressing places that made you feel like you were surrounded by people who hated being alive. They stank of piss and excrement, the walls were covered with peeling paint that looked like it had been applied back in the 1950s.

But more and more often, the village bus stops are beginning to look like this:

And it isn’t just bus stops. I’ve seen photos of those ugly Soviet residential areas buildings that stood ugly and drab for decades until last year people decided to paint beautiful, colorful images on them. And now the entrances look like sunflower fields or cherry orchards* instead of concrete gray blocks.

* Chekhov was from Ukraine, of course, and his famous cherry orchard was based on traditional Ukrainian imagery.

“I’m a tenured professor at our School of Education,” a colleague announced at a meeting. “As I’m sure you all know, the field of education is known for its outstanding. . . erm. . . lack of rigor and  . . . erm . . . exceptional intellectual shallowness.”

I laughed so loudly that the windows rattled. Everybody else looked embarrassed at stared at the table in front of them.

So? What’s up with the elections in Israel? Who won?

Zygmunt Bauman was one of the first philosophers who started talking about the erosion of the nation-state and the growing fluidity of existence back in 1999. The following quote from his foundational volume Liquid Modernity explains things such as the mattress-carrying battle against terrifying articles at Northwestern U that I blogged about earlier today:

The body has become the last shelter and sanctuary of continuity and duration. . . It is becoming safety’s last line of trenches which are exposed to constant enemy bombardment, or the last oasis among wind-swept moving sands. Hence the rabid, obsessive, feverish and overwrought concern with the defense of the body.

The higher education is being eroded. Nobody knows how to hang on to everything that made higher education worthwhile or even verbalize what is happening. The anxiety produced by these feelings of helplessness intensifies the need to protect what is perceived as the only territory that one still kind of controls, namely, the body.

The boundary between the body and the world outside is among the most vigilantly policed of contemporary frontiers.

No other boundary is safe from erosion, which is why the need to protect this very last frontier from fading becomes so urgent and fraught.

I keep hearing that things are bad for women in tech, but how can they improve if this kind of idiocy keeps happening (emphasis is mine):

The Ipsos Girls’ Lounge is . . . creating a safe haven for women at tech, media and advertising conferences, including SXSW. The group believes it can foster networking and deals between women and help empower them through pro-female programming facilitated by manicures, makeup and a bit of bubbly. . .

“Guys do deals,” Ipsos Girls’ Lounge CEO Shelley Zalis said. “Girls create relationships. I think there’s confidence in the pack. We’re creating an environment where women feel comfortable, where real conversations happen and you have time to spend together.”

Every single word of this is offensive in the extreme. I would not be caught dead at any event where it is acceptable to insult me with the condescending “girls create relationships” and “let me empower you with a manicure.” It’s 2015, how is this shit still possible?