Teaching experiment

Today my department chair confirmed my teaching a course in the Winter term (January – April) of 2010. Originally he wanted a postcolonial theory course, but after a conversation with our undergraduate coordinator they decided instead on a postcolonial literature class. I will begin to structure the course this summer, and as an exercise I will chart that process here (or in whatever format/site/etc we decide to continue).

These updates will include not only the material itself, but also more basic questions of pedagogy: the syllabus, delivering lectures, handling student responses in papers and exams, and so on. Further, I will continue to discuss these issues and track the effective and ineffective strategies/techniques during the class itself. Are you folks interested in playing along?

Your list

I have heard several times now that people who write down a list of everything they want to accomplish in life are more likely to do so than people who keep their goals inside their mind. This makes sense to me, as the same rule applies for writing papers — the most effective way to communicate everything you want in the final draft is to write them all down at the beginning, rather than try to remember and organize your thoughts internally. I recently began a “list notebook” which contains everything from lists of things I want to purchase for the apartment long-term to what qualities great professors share. Also included is my “life list” which I just wrote this evening. It’s fairly short but (for me) comprehensive:

Exercise 4.1 from Steering the Craft

Bird’s liver, mashed with blood and ramp-juice: it wasn’t egg, but it should be wholesome and easy enough to swallow. Though he was clumsy with his right hand, Finn patiently spoon-fed the rank paste to Tant, who, in his feverish delirium, had begun to act half his proper age and was apt to spit out more than half of whatever went in his mouth. “Eat up, little one. At least it’s not more grasshopper.” And anyway, you don’t know what I had to go through to bring you this, he thought. Grasshoppers didn’t leave you with beak-gouges in your side, or dislocated shoulders. Hunting grasshoppers never involved climbing ridiculously tall trees, nor falling out of them clinging to blinded, maddened birds eight times your size. And even the biggest grasshopper was small enough to bring home without the aid of a litter – hadn’t he brought home five at once last summer?

Exercise 3.2 from Steering the Craft

Half an hour after closing my eyes, it became clear to me that I was, in fact, Dick Tracy, famous detective and star of the funny pages and, once (regrettably) the silver screen, which was odd as I’ve never really been a fan of Dick Tracy; the strip angers me, the horrible and often comically misguided little ‘crime-stoppers’ advice-nuggets in the opening panel infuriate me, and the worldview the strip presents, in which the bad are disfigured and the disfigured are the bad, is not so much medieval as prehistoric; nevertheless, I was Dick Tracy, and deeply conflicted about being Dick Tracy, famous detective and star of the funny pages and, once (regrettably) the silver screen – so conflicted, in fact, that I had abandoned my policeman’s duties and taken off to Paris, in hot but entirely unsanctioned pursuit of Mr. Ewan McGregor, being convinced of that well-known screen actor’s complicity in a far-reaching international criminal conspiracy of vague impact and intent, although I will readily confess to a dearth of specific evidence, and in fact when I did encounter Mr. McGregor in a small gazebo at the rear of an improbable Paris petting zoo (which featured, among other attractions: singing sheep, miniature pandas, carnivorous ducks with razor-sharp, scalloped bills, and giant orange kiwi birds), he was in the company of Clint Eastwood, that grizzled and concentrated specimen of 20th Century American Republican machismo, and was engaged in nothing more criminal than pressing his (assumedly unwelcome) affections on the older man, who bore it all with an air of quiet, stoic dignity, which led me to reconsider my assumptions about Mr. McGregor, for now all his actions which had once seemed so suspicious could be more readily ascribed to a bad case of unrequited man-love, and my jaunt to France was laid bare for what it was: a mere pretext for dereliction of a now unwelcome duty, a fool’s errand that had, it was apparent, left me adrift and bereft of purpose in an unfamiliar city filled, apparently, with carnivorous, scallop-billed ducks and who knew what other dangers, wandering down a garden path that led, as it happened, to Mr. Diet Smith, eccentric industrialist and purveyor of wrist-watch radios and other such gimcrack to the police, who stabbed me in the throat with a box-cutter, at which point, I trust you will understand, I awoke.

Exercise 3.1 from UKL’s ‘Stirring the Craft’

The bird flew from its nest. This was the moment. Finn silently uncovered his bark-shrouded hole. He gripped the thorn sword tightly. He was silent as he climbed. The bird might return at any moment. A woodlouse scuttled past, nearly toppling him. He swore under his breath. He needed that egg. His family needed it.

Hand over hand he climbed. Looking down was not an option. Three more lengths separated him from dinner. Then it was two lengths, then one. He peered over the nests edge. There they were – seven sky-blue eggs. It was enough to feed an army. But even one was far too heavy. If only the others would come!

‘If’s didn’t bring home any eggs. He vaulted the edge of the nest. His water-skin was empty. His thorn was sharp and fire-hardened. This had to work. He raised the thorn to the nearest egg.

But Finn never pierced the first hole. A rustling noise made him look up.

There was another bird. It was watching him, waiting. They’d used their own eggs as bait.

Exercise 2 from UKL’s “Steering the Craft”

He stepped across the edge and then it was too late for turning back too late to discover a path out of the precipitous dive and fall and tumble of it of the water reaching up white and green tongues to lick at first his shoulder then his arm and ear and then the whole of him engulfed in the splash and tumble and the sharp screed of pain as the rusty iron of the seawall the jagged edge of corrosion and decay tore at the meat of his right thigh in the thrash of the wave and the just then solid thump of the slime and weed as they lubricated the rock to which they clung and sped his general downwardness turning what might have been an end into the start of yet more water now billowing red in the faltering light where it was mixing with the profligacy of his blood in its nearly joyous leaping escape from the gash in his thigh that only now after long seconds began to knit itself to itself to itself and close itself flesh to flesh and he was down now in the silt the weed the muck that sucked at him and he was eyeless for a moment as the weeds wrapped his face and he was stunned and battered by light and rocks and walls and mud and his bruises fled as quickly as his wound and he tried to force his mouth to open to drink no breathe the cold and throbbing lake but the body was not fooled by his insistence and resisted for a full three thrumming minutes before it came to the end of its endurance and drew in what it knew to be death and found that everything the body knew was wrong.

Exercise 1 from UKL’s ‘Steering the Craft’

I can’t have the North Woods – the ducks, black lakes of pike, the crackling winter wild and ice-cold crystal needles of the pines. I can’t have the whitewhite reticence, the isolated strangeness, the solitary wisp of human kindness. I can’t have the forced air heat, Chihuahua sized mosquitoes, blackflies, bonfires, gridlessness. I can’t have the rifles and the venison, the violence of a land that wants me dead. I can’t have the islands and the isthmuses, the leaking sieve of glaciated ground, the population 374 sign.
But I want them.

Stress and Exertion

Chart of Stress vs. Exertion

Current Project Dump – Open Projects, Discussions

1)

A model of people, data and groups. In particular, people as nodes. If the throughput of information(->) is limited to the processing capabilities of people are limited to +/- 7 chunks of information (minus X, where X is the number of R-operator chunks)* The limits of the throughput operator are:

chunk size, vocabulary, language, most highly valued representational system, the number of interfaces, the Gravesian level, Morphological cross-map tolerance operator**, most highly valued logical level, overall I/E orientation (introverted extroverted.)

Then in the analysis of groups people Group analysis is affected by

a) identifying subgroups and the internal (->) score, with attention to which if any particular nodal throughputs are reversible.

b) identifying aggregate (->) scores for subgroups.

*the R-operator refers to what chunks we are attending to consciously (see Patterns 2, which you have.)
**the “Morphological cross-map yadda-yadda” is just a way of describing 1 of two things; how well a piece of information functions as ametaphor or analog of another piece of information, and the threshold of a person’s ability to draw connections between two dissimilar kinds of information (i.e. “How is a raven like a writing desk?.”

2)

Ecological Systems/ Games – Neural Net/ Evolutionary Progression

Starting with a post from SP on 9/11/2002:

The Existence of Morality and Karma as Scientific Entities

I was in a car tonight thinking of Dave and his constant references to ‘karma hits’. I let my mind wander, because i haven’t ever let myself take karma seriously in a mystical sense, but the idea of things coming back to you has clearly, at least for most people i know, manifested itself enough times to leave its existence as a given. ‘How can this be?’ i thought, ‘there must be an underlying principle I’m missing.’ Anyone at the summer meeting will remember my numerous references to systems. For those of you not there, currently , the best model for living i can come up with right now is based on the idea of everything being a part of a hierarchal set of systems, anything that relies on recurrent patterns to perpetuate is a system, so for purposes of my philosophy, everything from hurricanes, to people, to civilizations are systems. Visually systems are like overlapping and concentric circles (well, spheres are better, but no need to make this more complex than necessary). Incidentally there is an uber-system that everything is a part of, and effects from actions ‘bubble down’ through internal systems. For a bit of clarification for instance – a sociological phenomenon would be systematically BELOW humans, as sociological hoo-ha relies on the existence of humans. For anyone confused of interested i can explain further, or go out and mix fractal geometry with game theory and you’ll have an idea, but for now i’d like to move on to the main ‘thrust’ of what i wanted to write.

Imagine we have a relatively isolated system, which we will call ‘Herbert’ (are you ‘one’ Herbert?)

here he is!

___________________
|x o x o x o x o x o x|
|x o x o x o x o x o x|
|x o x o x o x o x o x|
|x o x o x o x o x o x|
|x o x o x o x o x o x|
|x o x o x o x o x o x|
|x o x o x o x o x o x|
—————–

boy he looks primitive, doesn’t he? – Let’s begin with the obvious; if you look at him, he has an internal pattern. This is something a system must have by definition, some sort of recurrence. (incidentally recurrence is a function of self reference, another important systemic idea). anyhow if Herbert stays in this particular configuration he is ‘healthy’. He will live until his ‘disorder factor’ reaches more than say 85%.

It is then obvious that [for Herbert's purposes] order=good, disorder=bad. this is because there are only a limited number of configurations that will allow Herbert to continue living his primitive, boring existence (just like you and me!).
first let’s set aside the whole idea of recency vs. primacy – it fits into the framework of my ideas, but is cumbersome to work around (and we ARE dealing with a simplified model here)

generally Herbert only likes to do things that increase or hold steady the amount of order in his system,
BUT he is also a moral system – this is because:

he will often sacrifice order in lower systems to increase or maintain order in his
he will sometimes sacrifice order in sideways placed systems to increase or maintain order in his own
he will almost never sacrifice order in a system above his (it would be counterproductive, and in reality, pretty difficult anyhow)

amoral actions , or random actions both increase the disorder of a system. in my observation, a good 80% of amoral actions are the result of someone wanting to do less work. Usually bad and random things require less work than doing something moral [in Herbert's frame-or reference] or good. What makes a system amoral is when it refuses to aknowledge the harm or disorder its actions will cause other systems (which like Herbert can only function in certain configurations) luckily a system can absorb a fair amount of disorder before they are completely destroyed. Unluckily increasing disorder in something else causes it to seek order [(if it can) in order to preserve its own existence, or when order is the least-energy state], which often causes disorder elsewhere, as self-reference is created by involvement, the more disorder you introduce into systems the more likely the disorder will find its way back to you in one form or another, while by the same token, working to increase order in a completely ‘moral’ manner increases the ‘environmental’ order around you, ensuring, for systems like Herbert a [somewhat precarious] life of leisure.

Now some notes from 2008 regarding a drawing of “Herbert” in the context of a mind map I made.

By definition Herbert is non-static … disorder from other isolate/systems feeds back into Herbert by his “self-actualizing processes” among which are scabs, amputation (only effective for removing non-crucial sections when an individual system becomes so disordered that by removing it, the overall disorder % drops to a significantly non-critical level.)

Disorder “bubbles up” through logical levels into higher systems, but once the environment (ecological level) becomes disordered, then the bits that Herbert brings in to self-actualize will negatively effect his disorder level.

Herbert’s “self” is a combination of components. The animate other, the non-animate other, the nutrative other, the non-nutrative other, and that which is not other. Understand that in this case, nutrative merely refers to something that can be used in self-reconstitution once disorder begins to manifest.

As stated, Herbert must monitor his internal consistency to make sure the disorder factor doesn’t drop below a critical %, but the monitoring process must also be monitored for process consistency. And so on. The trick here is that there must be a maximum monitoring depth. Herbert must be mindful and on guard for “convergent autism,” that is – he is so concerned about monitoring for consistency that he becomes “neurotically autistic” – he fixates on consistency and a lifetime of energy is spent on an instant’s worth of monitoring. In this case, the answer to “Quis custodiet ipsos custoded.” is nobody, hopefully. In the human mind this is usually resolved by both architecture and by electronics. Because recursion is so important to the way that the human brain operates recursive autism is a danger but because neurons and neural connections don’t get smaller than a certain level. Also electrical charges that travel along neurons need to be a certain strength before they get passed along to other neurons, and so the fact that recursive convergent autism is pathological and maladaptive prevents the neural pathways that would constitute it don’t get reinforced, there isn’t enough charge to overcome the resistance.

ugh – I am tired, I will continue in another post tomorrow.

Incidentally to see what Dave and Angeli had to say about this the first time around: here

Apartment Photos

East Garfield Park Apartment

Our current place

The Project

Hi all,

Angeli invited me to play in y’all’s yard, so here goes.

For a while now, I’ve been throwing around a collection of ideas I think of as the Project (yeah, capital ‘P’). Mostly, the Project rises in my thoughts when I’m asked about my religious affiliation. What follows is a rough, short list of the statements of faith I think of when I think of faith – the beginning of my answer. Each statement on the list could be expanded to an essay, or a book, or a life’s work; I know it’s simplistic, but it’s a start.

The Project

1. Life creates forms.
2. Forms can outlast individual life.
3. Information is more resistant to entropy than matter.
4. The potential information content of the universe is infinite.
5. The heat-death of the universe is coming; what are you doing about it?
6. Sentience creates novel forms
7. Sentience is anti-entropic.
8. The unique potential of sentience lies in the creation of novel forms.
9. The creation of novel forms is dependent on maintenance of existing forms.
10. Destruction of existing forms is entropic.
11. Sacralization of existing forms is entropic.
12. Religion can be entropic.
13. Religion can be anti-entropic.
14. Noise is entropic.
15. Lies are pure noise.
16. Truthful communication is anti-entropic.
17. Communication implies, creates, and requires community.
18. Involuntary restriction of access to information is entropic.
19. Voluntary reduction of noise is anti-entropic.
20. Art is the creation of novel forms, and is therefore sacred.
21. Art is the preservation of existing forms and is therefore sacred.
22. Science is the creation of novel forms and is therefore sacred.
23. Science is the preservation of existing forms and is therefore sacred.
24. The future is sacred.
25. Entropy itself is anti-entropic in that it is essential to life and sentience.
26. A moral code can be derived from these statements.

State of things

I have decided to stop sending e-mails updating my ‘progress’ in Canada. Very few people respond to the messages and the blog affords me the opportunity to perform the same gesture in a more productive way; at least you two will read and (possibly) respond to them, and I know you at least remain interested. This also helps me visualize where I’ve come from and where I am going.

Completed:

I delivered a modified version of the paper I posted below at a conference hosted by the College of the Bahamas and gained some valuable insights regarding my work. I also created an account at Flickr to host pictures of Nassau.

I submitted a twenty-something page essay last week for my doctoral seminar. In it I examine two recent post-Civil War Liberian novels which have not received any critical attention. I argue that each takes the form of a political bildungsroman and features a dominant narrative in which characters from the ruling minority ‘grow up’ and accept their indigenous counterparts, yet the text also reveals a counter-narrative in which, perhaps, the idea of national unity is instead naïve and they ‘grow up’ in a very different way. Regardless, their use of language and behavior suggests they haven’t really embraced the notion that the descendants of black colonists and indigenous Liberians belong to the same national unit. As you might imagine I draw from nationalism studies, particularly the theories of Walker Connor, among others.

Fiona and I have decided to move in together after learning that the English department has accepted her into the PhD program, i.e. she will be in Ottawa for the next several years. Our leases both finish in May and we will look for a two-bedroom apartment in the downtown area, roughly near where I currently live. When we finish with it—especially if one or both of us gets the OGS grant—you will be jealous.

Currently working on:

I have three essays to complete in the next three weeks (in addition to my duties as a TA and other work for my classes). One will focus on rhetorical strategies in the later speeches of William V.S. Tubman, a long-serving Liberian despot. Another concerns the recent work of Liberian poet Patricia Jabbeh-Wesley. I don’t know what I will concentrate on for the third essay, probably either the first Liberian novel or the works of its first truly indigenous writer, a man named B.T. Moore. I haven’t even begun to consider an approach yet. As you can see, I use my classes as an opportunity to delve further into Liberian literature, about which I have become increasingly excited. They say the hardest thing about working on a PhD is maintaining enthusiasm… thankfully I haven’t burned out in the second semester.

I have finalized my panel for the 2008 MLA Convention in San Francisco and decided that rather read a paper, I will simply contextualize the proceedings and introduce the speakers. This gives them more time to speak and frees me from having to work on something at the last minute.

Future projects:

The chair of my department has asked me to organize a graduate conference for next year, and I have tentatively accepted. I have thought about organizing it around late-February and will need to form a committee and discuss it further. If this happens, we will need posters and fliers. Perhaps some future work for you two? I’d need to work it out with a committee, of course, but I have you both in mind.

Once I complete my papers, I will begin working on polishing a few of them for publication. I have two in mind specifically, one for Research in African Literatures and another for Comparative Literature Studies. I will keep you informed.

A personal extracurricular syllabus

This syllabus is meant to express a convergence of the networks of personal interest I maintain. In a broad sense the syllabus represents what I think I need to know in order to accomplish what it is I want to accomplish – but more on that later. I have all of the books that I reference except for Polya’s Solve It! and Ray Jackendoff’s Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation which are on my list of “someday books.” The books are in order as well as I can figure it now, though I am sure that all of this will change shape and shift as I go.

Math
1.
A. Technical Calculus with Analytic Geometry
B. Understanding Infinity
C. A Vector Space Approach to Geometry
D. Introduction to Partial Differential Equations with Applications
E. Differential Geometry
F. Complex Analysis with Applications

2a.
A. Differential Games
B. Evolutionary Games an Equilibrium Selection
C. Combinatorial Algorithms
D. Information Theory

2b.
A. Matrices and Linear Algebra
B. Modern Algebra

Philosophy

1. 1000 Plateaus
2. Difference and Repetition

Systems/Heuristics

1. Code Complete
2. The Mathematical Approach to Physiological Problems
3. An Experience with Populations and Communities
4. Solve It!
5. Spiral Dynamics

Brain Stuff

1. Accelerated Learning for the 21st Centrury
2. Mind Performance Hacks
3. Flow
4. Lifehacker
5. Speed Math
6. Photoreading

NLP/Linguistics/Semiotics

1. Patterns 2
2. NLP vol 1
3. Changing Belief Systems with NLP
4. Modeling with NLP
5. The Spirit of NLP
6. Semantic Structures
7. Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation

Whew- well that should be easy. Also, then there are “assignments” which I ought to be adhering to; writing based on what it is that I am studying at the moment, for instance, as well as writing for writing’s sake, that is to say organizing and collecting the various ideas that i get from time to time that I think are work remembering. Not to mention the school work I get from actual school and maintaining a healthy marriage/social life.

And then there are the long-term projects which I would like to complete: My as-yet unnamed prime number inquiry, analyzing a city block both ecologically and semiotically, priming essays and works of fiction to communicate deliberately with both the conscious and unconscious mind.

What I suppose I should start with is a project that integrates what it is that I am currently learning at any given moment and can be easily scaled to match the resources I am able to commit at any given moment. And I am totally willing to take suggestions as that goes. Currently it seems to me that the most easy project is to try an post an entry here as often as possible.

What I Do: Conference Paper

My parents know I work as a student of course, but they didn’t become familiar with the specifics of my doctoral research until a phone call immediately before coming to Ottawa for my master’s graduation, in which I told them, “We should go out to dinner with my thesis advisor. Oh, do you know what I study?” You two are probably in the same boat: I study Liberian literature… and that may be the extent of your knowledge on the matter. You know I write papers, attend conferences, etc. You also know that I really love speaking in public, but unfortunately other than a hastily unprepared ’speech’ a half-decade ago at Bughouse Square I can’t remember whether you’ve ever seen me in my element. Maybe that will change: in November the African Studies Association will host it’s fiftieth anniversary conference in Chicago and I will try my best to get on the proceedings and deliver a paper. If that happens I will sneak you both into the event for sure. But until then, maybe you’d find a paper I just completed for the upcoming Bahamas conference interesting? It will not read the same as a normal paper, nor can it approximate the experience of a paper delivered, but if nothing else I’d like to share with you two what I do lately.

Some general rules about conference papers: organizers usually give you fifteen minutes on a panel with two or three other presenters; that equals seven or eight double-spaced pages. You should expect that: a) no one has read the books you analyze or know their author/s; b) no one knows the relevant historical or social context; and c) in a conference like this, where most people will present on history or sociology, very few know anything about literary theory. As such the content of my conference papers tends to read more general in nature and also a little more colloquial than in a formal essay (the paper below still reads too formally in my opinion, but I will make changes on the plane). Other than in direct quotes, I allow myself a couple of uses of the verb “to be” in conference papers and formal essays. You’ll note that I have e-primed this paper as I do normally, and that I qualify most of my uses of the verb “to be” to eliminate it’s troublesome implications. Tell me what you two think.

The subject of the conference is “Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: Telling the Story”.

Incidentally, though I don’t expect it, should someone other than Angeli or Ed read the following presentation, I should remind them that it remains my intellectual property and that any use of my words or ideas requires the necessary citation, which you can find at a web site like The OWL at Purdue.

Photoshop Portfolio

This is a selection of images from our Photoshop class final.

Ed and I enjoyed Photoshop. As soon as we got into class and learned where a few things were, I think we understood the logic of the program. We then knew how to apply our PSP and general program knowledge to the confines of this program. The same thing happened for us in Access, Illustrator, Quark, and InDesign. The teacher knew that we were moving ahead and were fairly disinterested in what she was doing. It was also pretty obvious that she knew nothing about computers and believed in computer magic. Basically, she asked us to work together on a project.

I’ll start off by saying that I’m pretty happy with these. They have a theme, but there is no higher message or secret code. I expect there to be continuity in a final portfolio. I was looking for a formula that would still allow the images some individual personality in a limited set. Obviously, if I continued with this theme for much longer, it would be too easy and worn out. I think for a limited set, this works. The abstract of the theme centers around unsettling images. The positioning of everything was very intentional. The images were cut off abruptly. Each image starts to focus more and more on the wallpaper pattern (the negative space). There is repetition of wallpaper, a person, mundane objects, and ornate objects/frames. The story theme is loosely strung together from the ideas of a Grimm fairytale or Mother Goose (think of the pre-cleaned versions) or a haunted house full of self-reference and repeating moments (psychic imprints).