Day: April 2, 2015

I was at a workshop this morning enjoying the stylings of Myrlin Hepworth and I noticed how immature the students in the back of the room were. I started making attributions, remembering the ‘type of students’ that sit in the back of the room and thinking about maturity vs. immature behavior and really considering why students would act in this fashion. Let me begin by saying that I don’t teach high school. I’m a college professor and with that comes a built in set of expectations of student behavior. Of course, those expectations are shadowed by another set of expectations–the expectation that students are going to remain immature children who will create any opportunity to make the class stupid and rather pointless–in other words, they will create a reality that mirrors their concept of what class is.

I’m struggling between the two divergent sets of expectations. The standards are in fact a spectrum. On the one end you have immaturity. On the other hand you have understanding and commitment (perhaps misnamed). Two students showed up 30 minutes after the session began. These are the behaviors of children and children experience life (generally) in a carefree ‘in the moment’ sort of fashion. I don’t know that I entirely dislike that but I am working to appreciate it and to understand what it means.

To hear it from other instructors that immaturity comes from a lack of appreciation of the subject, from boredom, from an inability to connect with the material being shared, from nervousness, fear, apprehension, sometimes even as a direct result of the growing awareness that they are entering a world of responsibility and are utterly unprepared for that. This last impression of meaning stems from watching students live lives within the boundaries of everything they already know–in other words they never explore the world outside of the reality their parents created for them.

Maybe that’s okay. It isn’t okay for me or even for my job and role on this earth. My goal in life is to get people to realize that there is more–that they actually want more, which is often why I focus on the ones who are so limited and why so often they are the ones who piss me off the most.

Some Thoughts:
1. 1792 was the first year the USA celebrated Columbus Day. Thus began the indoctrination of a lie. I speak of it on the eve of another lie–the like of Easter. What is Easter supposed to represent? Easter predates the resurrection of Christ as does the tradition of Easter eggs (representing the struggle between good and evil) and the idea of resurrection as embodied by the Phoenix. None of this has anything to do with a bunny either, so what the heck are we celebrating?

It may take a bit to get to the point here. I have a lot of thoughts swirling around on this topic and as I write the facts and ideas coalesce into something meaningful. I think I’m starting to understand why people get so angry about concepts like gay marriage.

I was working with Myrlin Hepworth today and he was reminding my students about the difference between concrete and concept. As he talked it triggered a swirl of thoughts in my head. Love is a concept. Belief is a concept. Marriage is concrete. The Bible is concrete. These things are houses for what are essentially indefinable concepts. When I think about the idea of love and communicate that with figurative language I relate love to the concrete things and actions I define as love-related. Someone else may have the same conversation and pick a separate set of relational objects. One thing we are both supposed to agree on is the Universal Language of Marriage.

 

This is where things get tricky.

 

For a large portion of the religious population, marriage is defined by the bible (a concrete house for belief/faith) as the love-based binding of one man and one woman. Marriage then appears to be the concrete house for both love and faith for these people. On the other hand, people like me believe in marriage as the concrete house for love alone. There is no added component—no roommate named faith associated with that. As such, the idea of marriage between two men or two women is just marriage and doesn’t pull a big bad wolf on my house in any way.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Watched my son mail-in a practice today. He was very much the Allen Iverson of practice and this reflects negatively on him in the eyes of the coach. It reflects negatively on me as a dad who is supposed to prepare his kid and a coach who is supposed to expose his players to athletic rigor Clearly none of this surfaced tonight. Instead I watched a kid who was obviously checked out in the days leading up to his first home game. Speaking of that game, I can almost check ‘watch my kid play a tackle game’ off the bucket list. Everything following is about him and his (apparently limited) desire to play the sport. I didn’t (consciously) push him into it and I refuse to push him to continue if his head isn’t in the game. Then again, maybe he’s just having an off night.
2. Napolean Bonaparte was elevated to commander in chief back in 1791. Earlier that year the Big Bottom Massacre in Ohio kicked off the Northwest Indian War. Rough year.