Going off the grid

On Thursday I begin my trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It should take about 27 hours – give or take a few – from Andover to Jacobsville, MI. Fortunately, I have the new Harry Potter on audiotape and so I’ll make it to the real bowels of the Midwest before I’m without driving entertainment (save for arlo’s continuous snoring). I’ll be borrowing a place on the shores of Lake Superior for the foreseeable future…or until I want to poke my eyes out because of insufferable loneliness. I hope to make it a month or so. It’s my mother’s boyfriend’s place and he’s been kind enough to let this poor dissertation writer retreat from the world. His description – which cracked me up – is below. Perhaps I'll befriend Harry...

I’ll be officially off the grid – no easy phone, no internet, no wires, no cables, no mass communication distractions. I figure that if I can’t be productive with absolutely no interference, I might as well hang up my macbook and retreat into the woods for good. In hopes of preserving some sanity, I plan to drive into town (40 minutes away) a couple times a week to check email and have meaningful interpersonal communications with the grocery store clerks and the gas station attendants. If you happen to be in the area, don't hesitate to stop by and say hello...

So here's the scoop:
"1. The property sits on a bluff overlooking Lake Superior's Keweenaw Bay. Across the 7-mile-wide bay is the Abbaye Peninisula (the tip of which I find one of the U.P.'s most delightful spots on a sunny, not-too-windy day). Beyond the thin green strip of the Abbaye Peninsula is another bay you can't see, and beyond that you see the Huron Mountains 25 miles away. A little to the south of them, you can see Mt. Arvon, Michigan's highest point. Looking south across the bay you can make out Pequaming, where Henry Ford built a summer house and taught locals traditional English dances on his front porch. On a clear day you can see all the way to the smokestack of the Celotex plant in L'Anse at the bottom of the bay. Looking north you can see what locals call "Rabbit Island" (Traverse Island on maps) because of that animal's abundance there. The island is directly east of the hamlet Rabbit Bay. Beyond the island you see the open water of Lake Superior, which is about 1,200 feet deep in places. A 140-mile boat ride beyond the island will take you to remote Wah Wah, Ontario.

2. Our property extends 600 feet along the bluff, from the outhouse to the south to a giant white pine to the north (where Red Rock Road turns due north). The bluff is high enough to be quite dangerous. Don't stand too close to the edge, as parts are undercut and may crumble.

3. There's a cabin on the bluff you may enjoy staying in. Another pleasant place I like to read and sleep is the nook in the dormer on the second floor of the house. It has a sweeping view of the bay and mountains beyond. Late at night you can see the flashing light of the Huron Lighthouse on one of the 3 little islands just east of the tip of the Abbaye Peninsula. North of the cabin is a screened-in porch on the bluff with a good (and safe) viewing platform from which you can look down in the water. Sometimes a pair of loons swim past, diving periodically for fish. Eagles and hawks frequently fly along the coast (we have to keep an eye out for them when Stan goes out because one could easily swoop down and snatch him away).

4. There is no cell phone service in the area.

5. It's been a dry summer. Every other day or so it would be nice if you would water the day lillies next to the sauna, the herbs in the garden on the south side of the house, and the marigolds just south of the garden. Also, Harry would probably appreciate your watering his several marijuana plants and potato plants next door.

6. If you want to explore the area, there's an historic quarry across the street about a quarter mile down the mown drive past a summer cottage. (See photos on living room wall of it when in operation in the late 19th century). It suppled some of the highest quality red sandstone in the country, used to build many Keweenaw buildings and shipped as far as NYC to build brownstones and the first Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Entering the quarry is tricky, as most of the rim is sheer and deep. If you head left along the rim, you'll find a place you can make it down (it helps to slide slowly on your butt part of the way). The lush environment is a surprising contrast to the barren landscape seen in the old photos when the quarry was in operation. Nature triumphs in the end."

from indexed.blogspot.com

reading about the horrors of Fruitlands this evening and so the above seemed especially apt.

finding the fanatics

Another day at Orchard House, but sadly, i forgot my camera. Instead, I tried to jot down some of the exchanges I happened to over hear:

This between two gray-haired dames -- one with a thick german accent and the other a boston one --

Boston: "If you grew up not feeling good about all that gender stuff, then Jo's -- who is of course Louisa -- for you."
Berlin: "Women couldn't just go acting like Jo in my father's house."
Boston: "Is that how Little Women saved your life."

Crap, I thought, I missed the prior conversation on Alcott as life saver. But at least I caught the rejoinder:

Berlin: "She [Jo] was the primal source of my passion"

Kinky, huh?

The talk that I had been looking forward to was disappointing, mostly because it was exclusively biographical -- a real hit with the Alcott fanatics (as were the speaker's joke about Bronson Alcott being no Brad Pitt) -- and also a good reminder about what to avoid. But the audience was enraptured, hearing-aids turned to full volume, and a rather rotund but eager fan kept uttering (audibly, very audibly) "yes" and "Ahh" and "yes" and "oh yes" and "umm." It was cracking me up and I exchanged knowing glances with the octogenarian sitting next to me. It seems we were equally bemused and annoyed.

These last two days have reminded me how extraordinary the fanatic can be. She's read everything any of the Alcotts wrote and she accepts it with an unwavering sense of devotion. There's no real room to trouble her neat narrative, reading, as she does, Alcott as minister, mother, master. She evinces a kind of total commitment to that which we, as academics, are trained to be weary. I've realized that there's part of me -- or that there was part of me -- in the fanatic, and on some level it frustrates me that my work has diminished my love. At the end of her talk this morning, Lisa Stepanski mentioned that she thinks all Alcott scholars are engaged with their subject on a personal level, that they play out their own relationships to their father and mother in their work. As she said this, i wanted to stand up and say, "not me, not me," but I suspect that what I really learned from the fanatics today was that I'm as guilty of that charge as anyone. I do wrestle with the legacy of my family when I write about Bronson and Louisa, but I certainly hope those conjurations don't bleed too heavily into my work.

I've spent the last week or so reading and thinking about the shifting notions of childhood in nineteenth-century America. Jacqueline S. Reinier's From Virtue to Character proved a help as did the classics on childhood as a historical category, i.e. Philippe Aries' Centuries of Childhood. I'm realizing how expansive this field is and just how little I know. Having to reconcile constantly my need to get something on paper and my debilitating anxiety about not knowing, about having huge gaps where I need huge stores of information, feels mostly overwhelming. I suspect a healthy dose of ego would help, some sort of transcendental sense of rightness, but alas, I'm stuck with my brain and my nerves.

I spent the afternoon at Orchard House, Alcott's home in Concord, MA. It has been preserved as a museum, and out back still sits the old, stained barn that opened each summer for the Concord School of Philosophy, Bronson Alcott's final rendition of teaching. I heard Sarah Elbert (Hunger for Home) on LMA's engagement with race and imperialism in her sensation stories. I also heard John Matteson read from his not-yet-released (August 2007) book Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. Before this afternoon, I had no idea that this study was about to come out, nor did I know it was even in the works. Panic set in when I walked in a bit late and heard him arguing that Bronson never took advantage of LMA's popularity to jump start his career after 1871. I was frozen for a moment. Isn't this in fact the exact opposite of what I've been arguing? Normally, I would have quickly sat down with a racing heart, took furious notes, and cried on the way home, terrified that as usual, I'd entered the game in the 9th inning. But something strange happened this afternoon: I thought he was sort of wrong. I thought he was misreading Bronson and ignoring the newspaper accounts that I had been reading in the Houghton Library in March. Perhaps this may sound anti-climatic to you competent academics out there, but this was really the first time when I believed that my reading was more accurate than another's, especially someone whose book on the topic is soon to come out (see above). With that said, I've been sitting with the book (I got an advanced copy) for an hour, and so far it's quite good (and he does scoop me on Jesus and Alcott) and I'll probably be panicked by 9 pm. But... I spoke to Matteson afterwards and pressed him on some of my concerns, and he back-pedalled pretty quickly. Hmmm.

I'm headed back to Orchard House tomorrow to hear Lisa Stepanski on LMA and "mother teaching." Rest assured, I'll feel duly incompetent as of noon tomorrow. Also, I'll try to remember my camera (perhaps I can nab a shot of varsity Alcott scholars in barn!).

running thoughts and amendments

okay, so i continued to think about maura's concern about the novel and the way in which i seem to turn it into an actual space as i was running in the andover "sanctuary." this seems essentially to be a concern about the utility of utopian thinking. i'm totally happy to acknowledge that LMA's representations of learning are idealized (and perhaps untenable), but utopias can be usable -- and ultimately pragmatic -- blueprints for the future. so LMA never opened Plumfield (or Lawrence College in Jo's Boys), but as I was trying to think about resonances of her pedagogy in progressive america, my mind drifted to my old pal Jane Addams. Addams claimed that Alcott was one of her most beloved authors and her novels were part of the curriculum at Rockford Seminary where Addams was educated. One of my central contentions about Alcott is that she constructed individual pedagogies for each of the students at Plumfield. For example, when Jo realizes that Dan has a natural proclivity toward identifications in nature (of trees and bugs and things), she offers him a large cabinet where he is to sort his "collections" (might she be thinking about teaching classification?). Jo capitalizes on Dan's treasure trove of prior learning to further the sophistication of his thinking and to integrate new knowledge with the old.

Okay, that's well and good, but you still say that it's only a representation. It doesn't carry the weight of ABA's project. But let's think about Jane Addams -- a devoted Alcott "student" -- less than twenty years after Little Men, she opens her Hull House Labor Museum, and that very project and its attendant pedagogy centers on her ability to meet the "student" (the immigrant child and parent) on his own terms. Instead of imposing a standard curriculum, she enables the immigrants to learn and teach from their own knowledge, experiences, and pleasures. She provides them a space to undertake this learning and she has authorizes their use of it, but then she encourages them to further their learning on their own and with one another.

So I guess I'm thinking that we cannot and should not dismiss what appears to be utopian, because at least in this case we needed Alcott to plant the seed for pragmatic pedagogues like Addams and Dewey. Without a doubt, all of these thinkers recognize that this kind of teaching cannot happen in the classroom (and perhaps that's the mistake that ABA made, thinking that the classroom in 1836 could ever be a space of invention). That I'm willing to acknowledge.

novel v. the classroom

addressing the smart concerns about the novel as a educational tool...

thanks go to maura and aaron for raising some terrific questions about the novel as a mode of education. i'll be thinking about this in the coming weeks, but for now i want to quick react:

1. LMA was a teacher in a classroom in front of living students. While she eventually retired her chalk, she always maintained that what she was trying to do was solve the problem of american education in a real, pragmatic way. but you are all correct, when she was composing, she was free from the all-too-real exigences of the classroom. you are also right to suggest that this genre allowed a level of freedom never open to ABA. but we have to remember that her liberated representations of pedagogy DID enter in a very real way into the American classroom. Her novels were bound as textbooks and assigned by American teachers. So while it may seem that her representations of teaching can never really be fruitfully compared to her father's pedagogy, I would argue that she "taught" in a way not wholly dissimilar to ABA. Teachers, in fact, wrote her letters explaining that they modeled their own teaching after her representations of Plumfield. She, not her father, was credited as the originator of progressive education.

2. as per her publishers: i've never seen anything to suggest that they dictated anything in Little Men. They insisted on a sequel to Little Women, but nothing else.

3. i have no intention of conflating the activities of ABA and LMA. you are all right, it's slippery and my own pedagogical concerns often intrude. but i still believe that it's a potentially fruitful exploration. presumably all of us believe in a very real way in the pedagogical utility of the novel. we're not teaching straight aesthetics, right?

4. i do intend to hook both father and daughter's educational thought to shifting notions of the child in the period. this will help clarify their very different textual representations.


5. finally, i have no real desire to destroy ABA and champion LMA. Instead, I want to use ABA to point us to this pedagogical concern (how to allow the child freedom and simultaneous shape her -- as we all want, on some level, to do) and then consider LMA's pedagogical formulations as a kind of answer to that concern. Of course, Plumfield does not exist, but I think that her hybrid pedagogy -- acknowledging and advocating a central authority and only then opening a space for children to guide their own learning (in the end of Little Men Dan and Demi have struck a deal without Jo's knowledge to teach one another. Dan will teach Demi natural history and Demi will teach Dan self control and christian ethics) makes sense to me. As a teacher, I never forget my authority and I know that wherever I stand in the classroom, I'm the one standing. But when I put on a charade and pretend that the students are calling the shots, we all know it's a ruse and they seem to resent the false sense of control. Perhaps LMA is right, that only when we leave the schoolhouse -- and go inside the novel or outside into nature -- can we actually drop resolve the problem of authority.

but these are just quick reactions off the top of my head. more to come.

I can't thank you enough for engaging with me on this project. I've always said that I'm no good in isolation.

--Anne, not the autodidact.

revised thinking

This is a call to all those of you who read the miserable draft that was my Alcott chapter. For the last week I've been walking around Andover racking my brain for a way to rethink the chapter. I've finally come to this rough formulation and now I need a bit of feedback. For those of you patient readers of the previous draft, does this seem a more promising line? I have no idea how I'll use all of my work on circulation, but in any case.....

Beginning with Rousseau and continuing today, teachers have struggled with the inevitable dilemma of trying to free the child from the strictures of education based on indoctrination while simultaneously shaping her at the same time. I want to show the ways in which Bronson Alcott's early attempts at the decentered American classroom expose the stakes of this pedagogical conflict, trying as he was to elicit the child's natural intelligence and goodness without realizing the very ways in which his attempts at drawing out the child became the tools through which he too fell into a kind of indoctrination. After using Bronson Alcott's teaching as the means by which I work through the stakes of this problem, I will them turn to Louisa's pedagogy as an answer to this problem. Her janus-faced pedagogy -- both recalling her father's work and heralding progressive education -- resolves the problem of shaping the child while empowering her to control her own learning. Her pedagogical hybridity earnestly acknowledges and honors the traditional authority of the teacher and authorizes the child as a master of learning worthy of transmission to her peers. Somehow, of course, I will have to face the fact that our ardor for her pedagogy is tempered by the constraints that Bronson Alcott faced in the classroom, a space endowed with the legacy of the teacher as the central authority. It seems that the novel itself is a privileged site of pedagogical freedom unconstrained by the physical and pragmatic limitations of the schoolhouse.

Otherwise, teaching Benito Cereno and facing the above dilemma.

place and space

I’ve been trying to figure out why I’ve had such an auspicious start with my students this summer (which is not to say that things will continue this way, especially because we're onto Benito Cereno this week). As far as I know, just one thing has changed this year. I’m teaching in a room with a large seminar table (i.e. Harkness table) instead of moveable chairs. So 16 of us (14 students, 1 TA, and me) face each other directly, and no one can risk falling asleep, zoning out, staring at the clock (there isn’t one). There’s simply no place to hide. But beyond making classroom management cinch, students naturally direct their response to one another. Instead of the teacher at front and center, any student can be – literally and metaphorically – at the head of the table. My seat is no different than theirs, suggesting, I suppose, that my ideas are of equal relevance. But I should be clear: I don’t absolutely buy into exclusively student-centered pedagogy. After all, my instincts tell me the instructor should not shy away from sharing her accumulation of knowledge when it’s needed to elucidate a particularly tricky concept or inscrutable stanza.

Most of my students come from schools with moveable desks, and the change to a single table would seem to force a student to shift his conception of his role as a student. One behaves differently at a table with others than she does at an island desk alone (i.e. she could be carving KISS in zig-zagging letters into its laminate top without the teacher noticing). Coupled with this kind of action switching is the historic heft of the table, generating, it seems to me, some sense that sitting around it may inspire unusually keen insights.

I can’t imagine a way to transport the seminar table into the public school classroom of 35 students. But I want to try to think about why it feels so different discussing around a table compared to at desks pushed together in a circle.

Photos to come later, I promise.

On the Harkness method: http://www.exeter.edu/admissions/147_465.aspx