Bo has written a serious posting on our travels, and I promised I would too. We have been on the road for 2 ½ months now, and getting ready to fly to Merida. We have been thinking about taking this journey for several years and planned for it for at least a year, and now we are half way through our four month trip. It doesn’t seem possible that we have been living in a 22 foot trailer for all this time without a major argument, and we have met many interesting people and seen lots of fascinating things. We miss our children and granddaughter very much, as well as our other family and friends. My mother has learned how to skype and it has been a blessing to be able to see and talk to her once a week.
Bo has been reading Walden, and I have been reading many books on my ‘retirement reading list,” many of these on my new Kindle (thank you Anthropology Department!). In real book form, I have been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, a book I somehow missed in the 70’s. It is a slow journey as I read it mainly in Laundromats and places I don’t want to take my e-reader, and it is also slow because it is very philosophical and worth a midlife review. In the book, the narrator is traveling with his son on a cross country motorcycle trip and reviewing his own struggle with mental illness, referring to his alter-ego in the third person. He describes Phaedrus’ fall into mental illness as a crisis in faith in what he calls classical thinking, what we call the scientific method, and the struggle between scientific knowledge and romantic thinking or subjectivity. This, of course is a major tension in the discipline of anthropology.
Bo is retired, but I am still a faculty member, thinking about teaching four sections of anthropology in the fall—book orders are due next week- sorry Russ, not happening. But a major section of the book concerns education and Phaedrus’ dilemma in trying to define “Quality” as a teacher of rhetoric. How to define it and how to measure it. If we are teaching students about quality writing (or thinking or research), how do we define it? To be scientific, it must be quantifiable. What are the criteria for quality? How does a teacher know it in a student’s work and how does a student know how to duplicate it for a good grade? Is there an essential “quality” or is it what the teacher “sees?” Something like “I know it when I see it.” If it is quantifiable and has criteria, who determines these criteria? And if students follow all the criteria, does that mean that their product is quality? And does the rigor of defining quality smother creativity? So I have been pondering these questions (anew, not for the first time) in thinking about teaching and how to give our students a “quality education” and what that means. Since Phaedrus ended up in a mental institution undergoing electroshock treatment because his inner struggle destroyed him, it’s probably best not to become too obsessed about things for which there are no easy answers. The book is embedded with the question also, of what is insanity and who defines it, giving the book a quality of “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” in which we are left with the question of which of the alter-egos was actually sane and what price Phaedrus paid for his questioning of the status quo.
Well, enough philosophizing, we are off to Mexico in a few days and we will be able to return to the village of Yaxkukul, hoping that we can hold a conversation in Spanish. I look forward to visiting our friends in the village again, and in attending the SfAAs for the first time. We will not have regular internet access, but will try to blog when we find an internet café. Cheers for now. Cindy
