Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2007-06-08 03:03 am
tenlittlebullets) wrote2007-06-08 03:03 am
I don't want to interrogate the text, I want to discuss the goddamn book.
I've been procrastinating for ages about finding another school to go to; most of my classes at Simon's Rock caused me a lot of mental scarring and blocks around things I thought I would enjoy, and made me leery of academia and institutes of higher learning in general. I left that place with the impression that I had just seen academia and my brain Did Not Work That Way, and it made me feel dumb. Helpless, out of the loop, slow, "differently abled," kind of like a slug sitting on the pavement watching a flock of sparrows peck at assorted pastries--or the kid who sat in the back row of class in high school, cracking inane jokes to try to make up for the fact that he had no grasp of the material. Hell, I was the clever kid in high school, the one who ate that same material for breakfast and then wandered off in the middle of class to read the AP textbooks out of sheer boredom. What happened at Simon's Rock wasn't the shock of no longer being the best because I was surrounded by the same sorts of people--it was the shock of realizing that this school wanted its students to do an entirely different thing in an entirely different way, and the shock of finding out that I was really bad at it.
I'm still not quite sure how to quantify or articulate the difference; part of it might have been the attitude that quantification, in general, was Beneath the Higher Concepts they all liked to natter about. Intelligence, for me, was always about making connections, taking information and finding out how it worked and how it was related, figuring out what unspoken rules and methods governed things, systemizing and putting a name to all the inchoate and unconscious processes in my mind. The fun of learning, for me, was usually in letting my intuition loose and finding new things to analyze, finding out how that intuition worked. When people tell me I'm smart, it's usually because my intuition has worked out the intermediate steps of a problem so quickly that even I'm not quite sure how I got the answer. I have to go back and think about it in order to explain. It doesn't mean I skipped the intermediate steps entirely and came up with the answer by magic; it means that any sufficiently quick thinking, like any sufficiently advanced technology, is indistinguishable from magic--until you muck about in the innards of the machine to see how it did what it did. The bare intuition itself is intelligence, I suppose; it's a lot of fun to unleash it, especially when you can use it for flashy things like doing complicated math problems in your head or memorizing foreign-language vocabulary without studying or writing at the twelfth-grade level when you're in sixth grade because you "have a feel" for the ins and outs of style. But while it's fun, it's not ultimately bettering anyone but you. If you can't explain how you got where your intuition led you, to somebody who's not as quick off the mark as you are, how the hell are you going to feel when someone smarter than you can do calculus problems in his sleep, but not tutor you in calculus because he can't explain how he does it?
It should be noted that this entire post is an attempt to do just that--to take all my unconscious, disorganized thoughts about learning and intelligence and academia and Simon's Rock, and give voice to them, and hopefully refine them in the process. The post itself is unpolished, imperfectly explained, and not entirely developed--if it were an essay, it would be a rough draft. But I'm just trying to get these thoughts, which have been stewing for a long time, out there so I can poke at them better. Because this process, of verbalizing unconscious insight, doesn't just apply to the maths and sciences and other things that deal with hard facts--it can be brought to bear on ideas as well. And when I left for Simon's Rock, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I was under the impression that it was aaaall about doing just that. Taking things we "knew" on some level and having to explain how we know them, or having the steps of some more advanced intelligence explained to us.
I'm still not sure what happened when I got there, whether the problem was with me or with Simon's Rock. The bottom line is that the undercurrent of ideas and insights and whatever, the intuition that you have to put into words, was not there for me. The more material got shoved down my throat with strict instructions to react to it and give my opinion, the less I felt like having an opinion at all, and the more shell-shocked and apathetic I became. From that point of view, not being able to see what ideas other people might have any better than I could come up with them on my own, the discussions in class started looking like meaningless, trivial games of verbal ping-pong, and my own occasional contributions were accordingly meaningless and trivial.
I'm still trying to work out what caused it. One of the biggest things I noticed was that the joy of learning and making connections and systemizing was not there, was ignored and even actively discouraged in all my humanities classes. Systemization and organization of ideas just weren't postmodern enough for Simon's Rock, I guess. All I saw was the batting about of meaningless opinions, the games of more-erudite-than-thou, the jaded sneers levelled at anyone naïve enough to like something and be enthusiastic about it because it was neat and shiny and fun to play with and turn over in your brain. Simon's Rock, like most liberal arts colleges, claims to teach you how to think; that was what I was being taught, and for two years I felt like the retarded kid in class because my mind stubbornly refused to accept it.
And then there was the delicate matter of all those pesky opinions that didn't quite fit into the liberal-arts-college orthodoxy. My complete lack of interest in... I don't even know what to call this particular array of issues, but it pervaded everything. Apparently because I could write a paper without a single reference to the patriarchal heteronormative classism of hegemonic imperialism (oh wait, I forgot racist, it must be a function of my white privilege!), I was a heretic of some sort. Look, these are important issues that need addressing, but that is not the set of goggles through which I want to look at the world--and nobody seemed to realize that to someone outside their little women's-studies clique, the language they used and their insistence that everything was about that was profoundly alienating and really not the way to encourage rational discussion. (I say women's-studies clique, because women's studies has about as much to do with feminism as linguistics has to do with learning French as a second language--they're closely related, but no amount of debate on consonant shifts is going to teach you how to say "Where's the bathroom?" Difference being that I don't expect anyone around me to give a flying fuck about consonant shifts.) Let's not even get into my horrified amusement that the only economics courses on campus were taught by a leading Marxist scholar. One of the other things this school professed to teach you was how to form and support an opinion, but forming and supporting an opinion that diverged too much from the general liberal climate of the campus was about as easy as being the only person singing the harmony part in a 300-person choir--and then having your neighbors elbow you and tell you to get back on pitch.
Anyway. I won't keep listing the factors; I'm not entirely sure what they all are yet. But earlier tonight I was lj-surfing and came across an analysis of some poetry, and I was struck by the fact that I felt like both the poet and the person writing the analysis thought writing was fun, dagnammit, and derived joy from analyzing and explaining, and that the reader was included in the fun. It was enthusiastic, and it made my brain move, and it felt like an us, not the perpetual them of Simon's Rock. It was the alienation that killed me, that and the sheer joylessness of the whole affair.
Then the kicker--nobody noticed. In this school that was supposed to take bright students out of high school and nurture them into budding academics, and provide more support and oversight than an ordinary undergraduate institution, nobody noticed or gave a shit that I was slowly asphyxiating in the fucking sewer-gas atmosphere of a place where earnest enthusiasm for anything just wasn't postmodern enough. I slipped through the cracks; I failed a class and had to withdraw from two or three more; I couldn't do any of my work; I had no friends; I was clinically depressed--and if anyone, usually a teacher or my pitiful excuse for an advisor, bothered to remark upon my academic progress, it was that my grades were falling because I "didn't grasp the material," was "unmotivated," "lacked self-discipline," "needed to apply myself," or "didn't keep up with the coursework." In other words, I wasn't living up to their shitty standards because I was dumb and lazy, and it was my own goddamn fault.
(Sorry for the outburst of profanity; I'm still really touchy about that part of the whole ordeal.)
And now I'm looking at schools to transfer to, and I keep getting excited about places and then seeing certain phrases and retreating to the corner to rock back and forth. That whole experience has conditioned me to dread hearing things like "self-motivated young scholars," "critical thinking," and "liberal arts," and to run as fast as I possibly can in the opposite direction. That kind of language just has such a strong association in my mind with alienation--alienation from the material, alienation from the other students, even alienation from my own ideas--and a further association with being treated like the stupid kid who conned his way into the honors class, instead of being brought back into touch with all this stuff I'd ordinarily be interested in. I don't know if all of academia is like that; I certainly hope not. But even if it isn't, I have no idea how I'm going to choose a school now, because there is no fucking way I'm going through that ever again and I don't know how to find a school that's not like that. Every time I see something that makes me think "Oh my god, they're nerds just like me!" thirty seconds later I think "...that's what you thought about Simon's Rock."
I'm still not quite sure how to quantify or articulate the difference; part of it might have been the attitude that quantification, in general, was Beneath the Higher Concepts they all liked to natter about. Intelligence, for me, was always about making connections, taking information and finding out how it worked and how it was related, figuring out what unspoken rules and methods governed things, systemizing and putting a name to all the inchoate and unconscious processes in my mind. The fun of learning, for me, was usually in letting my intuition loose and finding new things to analyze, finding out how that intuition worked. When people tell me I'm smart, it's usually because my intuition has worked out the intermediate steps of a problem so quickly that even I'm not quite sure how I got the answer. I have to go back and think about it in order to explain. It doesn't mean I skipped the intermediate steps entirely and came up with the answer by magic; it means that any sufficiently quick thinking, like any sufficiently advanced technology, is indistinguishable from magic--until you muck about in the innards of the machine to see how it did what it did. The bare intuition itself is intelligence, I suppose; it's a lot of fun to unleash it, especially when you can use it for flashy things like doing complicated math problems in your head or memorizing foreign-language vocabulary without studying or writing at the twelfth-grade level when you're in sixth grade because you "have a feel" for the ins and outs of style. But while it's fun, it's not ultimately bettering anyone but you. If you can't explain how you got where your intuition led you, to somebody who's not as quick off the mark as you are, how the hell are you going to feel when someone smarter than you can do calculus problems in his sleep, but not tutor you in calculus because he can't explain how he does it?
It should be noted that this entire post is an attempt to do just that--to take all my unconscious, disorganized thoughts about learning and intelligence and academia and Simon's Rock, and give voice to them, and hopefully refine them in the process. The post itself is unpolished, imperfectly explained, and not entirely developed--if it were an essay, it would be a rough draft. But I'm just trying to get these thoughts, which have been stewing for a long time, out there so I can poke at them better. Because this process, of verbalizing unconscious insight, doesn't just apply to the maths and sciences and other things that deal with hard facts--it can be brought to bear on ideas as well. And when I left for Simon's Rock, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I was under the impression that it was aaaall about doing just that. Taking things we "knew" on some level and having to explain how we know them, or having the steps of some more advanced intelligence explained to us.
I'm still not sure what happened when I got there, whether the problem was with me or with Simon's Rock. The bottom line is that the undercurrent of ideas and insights and whatever, the intuition that you have to put into words, was not there for me. The more material got shoved down my throat with strict instructions to react to it and give my opinion, the less I felt like having an opinion at all, and the more shell-shocked and apathetic I became. From that point of view, not being able to see what ideas other people might have any better than I could come up with them on my own, the discussions in class started looking like meaningless, trivial games of verbal ping-pong, and my own occasional contributions were accordingly meaningless and trivial.
I'm still trying to work out what caused it. One of the biggest things I noticed was that the joy of learning and making connections and systemizing was not there, was ignored and even actively discouraged in all my humanities classes. Systemization and organization of ideas just weren't postmodern enough for Simon's Rock, I guess. All I saw was the batting about of meaningless opinions, the games of more-erudite-than-thou, the jaded sneers levelled at anyone naïve enough to like something and be enthusiastic about it because it was neat and shiny and fun to play with and turn over in your brain. Simon's Rock, like most liberal arts colleges, claims to teach you how to think; that was what I was being taught, and for two years I felt like the retarded kid in class because my mind stubbornly refused to accept it.
And then there was the delicate matter of all those pesky opinions that didn't quite fit into the liberal-arts-college orthodoxy. My complete lack of interest in... I don't even know what to call this particular array of issues, but it pervaded everything. Apparently because I could write a paper without a single reference to the patriarchal heteronormative classism of hegemonic imperialism (oh wait, I forgot racist, it must be a function of my white privilege!), I was a heretic of some sort. Look, these are important issues that need addressing, but that is not the set of goggles through which I want to look at the world--and nobody seemed to realize that to someone outside their little women's-studies clique, the language they used and their insistence that everything was about that was profoundly alienating and really not the way to encourage rational discussion. (I say women's-studies clique, because women's studies has about as much to do with feminism as linguistics has to do with learning French as a second language--they're closely related, but no amount of debate on consonant shifts is going to teach you how to say "Where's the bathroom?" Difference being that I don't expect anyone around me to give a flying fuck about consonant shifts.) Let's not even get into my horrified amusement that the only economics courses on campus were taught by a leading Marxist scholar. One of the other things this school professed to teach you was how to form and support an opinion, but forming and supporting an opinion that diverged too much from the general liberal climate of the campus was about as easy as being the only person singing the harmony part in a 300-person choir--and then having your neighbors elbow you and tell you to get back on pitch.
Anyway. I won't keep listing the factors; I'm not entirely sure what they all are yet. But earlier tonight I was lj-surfing and came across an analysis of some poetry, and I was struck by the fact that I felt like both the poet and the person writing the analysis thought writing was fun, dagnammit, and derived joy from analyzing and explaining, and that the reader was included in the fun. It was enthusiastic, and it made my brain move, and it felt like an us, not the perpetual them of Simon's Rock. It was the alienation that killed me, that and the sheer joylessness of the whole affair.
Then the kicker--nobody noticed. In this school that was supposed to take bright students out of high school and nurture them into budding academics, and provide more support and oversight than an ordinary undergraduate institution, nobody noticed or gave a shit that I was slowly asphyxiating in the fucking sewer-gas atmosphere of a place where earnest enthusiasm for anything just wasn't postmodern enough. I slipped through the cracks; I failed a class and had to withdraw from two or three more; I couldn't do any of my work; I had no friends; I was clinically depressed--and if anyone, usually a teacher or my pitiful excuse for an advisor, bothered to remark upon my academic progress, it was that my grades were falling because I "didn't grasp the material," was "unmotivated," "lacked self-discipline," "needed to apply myself," or "didn't keep up with the coursework." In other words, I wasn't living up to their shitty standards because I was dumb and lazy, and it was my own goddamn fault.
(Sorry for the outburst of profanity; I'm still really touchy about that part of the whole ordeal.)
And now I'm looking at schools to transfer to, and I keep getting excited about places and then seeing certain phrases and retreating to the corner to rock back and forth. That whole experience has conditioned me to dread hearing things like "self-motivated young scholars," "critical thinking," and "liberal arts," and to run as fast as I possibly can in the opposite direction. That kind of language just has such a strong association in my mind with alienation--alienation from the material, alienation from the other students, even alienation from my own ideas--and a further association with being treated like the stupid kid who conned his way into the honors class, instead of being brought back into touch with all this stuff I'd ordinarily be interested in. I don't know if all of academia is like that; I certainly hope not. But even if it isn't, I have no idea how I'm going to choose a school now, because there is no fucking way I'm going through that ever again and I don't know how to find a school that's not like that. Every time I see something that makes me think "Oh my god, they're nerds just like me!" thirty seconds later I think "...that's what you thought about Simon's Rock."