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

group "dissertating" on the pease house porch. take a good look, this one's going to get a job in 6 to 9 months.

my spartan summer office.

The academic placement gods seem to have been with me this summer. After feeling miserable about writing for months now, I show up at Andover, meet my 14 students from 10 countries, and soon realize that they are universally eager, excited, and ready to participate. Today the fairly shy, taciturn Nick from Indonesia was whispering his ideas while Long Island Tawana and Athens Alexia were loudly duking it out about whether or not Gregor in Kafka's Metamorphosis understands more about his transformation than we, as readers, do. No one would have heard Nick, but Nigerian Anthony politely interrupted, turned to the class and commanded: "Yo guys, Nick here has somethin' to say. Let him talk." Nick, in at a nearly imperceptible volume proceeded to explain that Kafka makes Gregor's transformation vague (is he vermin? a bug? a beetle? a rat?) such that as readers we are in the same state of confusion as Gregor. As he's trying to figure himself out physically, we gain measured insights as he does. No dramatic irony. No privileged position. Equality between vermin and reader. I then asked one more question about pronouns and the class managed a 30-minute discussion with no prompting, no clues, no disclosures. As I've said to others recently, I think I'm beginning to accept the fact that creating such a class has very little to do with my actions and so much to do with enabling a critical mass of students to develop this sense that engaging fully is a really very cool thing to do. They, of course, have to feel like it was their idea to feel that way as well. You know something extraordinary is happening when they stay after class today just to tell you how much they enjoyed the poetry explication.

Can someone please remind me why I would ever take a 4-4 at the University of No Man's Land at No Mansville? A life of this would be just dandy, if you ask me...