Hattie of Hattie’s Web said in a comment here: “There is so much pain and craziness already in your students’ lives that they can’t endure the pain and craziness of learning a foreign language.”
This is, in fact, the problem. I have been trying to figure out what problem I should address – laziness? illiteracy? These are problems too, but their solutions are different and neither is the root problem. Hattie has identified the root problem.
Now I must see how to address it. “Lowering affective filters,” the mantra for the communicative classroom, does not help. Military style drills, which build confidence and feel structured and safe, would, but they are out of fashion. The students say they want grammar and translation but that is because they believe it would give them the illusion of control. They are mistaken.
I would rather be directing a Latin American Studies program somewhere, or at least deferring to a credentialed expert in L2 acquisition in the present matter, but in the current situation I must figure it out and figure it out myself.
Still we must thank Hattie for cracking the mystery: “There is so much pain and craziness already in your students’ lives that they can’t endure the pain and craziness of learning a foreign language.”
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
In the immortal words of the Sicilian from the Princess Bride: “Life is pain, Princess.” Thus…when our students and colleagues have been gunned down (as mine have been), as our parents die or disappoint us, as the structures we live in and simultaneously deplore and reinforce squeeze us, I always think that we must go on. Pain and craziness is not an excuse; it is the human condition. Either we find our work an absorbing escape from that pain or a source of it. My point is not to expect work to conform to you or you to it, but for that work should be a search whereby you find where you fit and what does bring you satisfaction, if not joy.
“Life is pain, Princess.”
One has to be experiencing a certain level of stability –in other words, NON-pain– in order afford to be philosophical about the issue of pain, to begin with.
Pain is the triggering of the punishment centres of the brain. The message one gets when one is in pain is, “Stop doing whatever you are doing!” Constant triggering of the punishment centres in mice have caused them to lose their physical condition, decrease their immunity, and eventually die.
Their lives aren’t stable enough. It’s not an excuse but an analysis – where does the problem lie? To pass math, or a foreign language, or anything which essentially requires you to acquire a new system you have to be in a stable enough place to feel comfortable entering into that game. This is where I think Hattie’s comment is useful.
I’m not disagreeing with Hattie. I think it may be presumed that I’m thinking in terms of a moralistic or nationalist approach. This is not the case! To the extent that I’m agreeing with Hattie, I’m agreeing that pain is a problem. But this is linked to the philosophy that it is a boon to float life itself upon the vagaries of capitalist market forces. This is quintessentially American –as is the gap between the haves and have-nots. But human biology (or human neurology) says that this produces pain — and this pain is a hindrance to learning. So out of this, you have a very basic ontological conflict between forces of capital and forces of learning.
What can be done?
It has to be fought in various ways, including ideologically.
Here is a documentation of my own battle with the forces that opposed knowledge in my life.
Take a look at this:
http://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/10/balls-on-foreign-languages/
H – great find! And yes, the problem is abysmal foreign language education in high school, followed by strange versions of it in college. I got to start in elementary school in an informal way, and had *good* foreign language teachers in junior high and high school – and had studied at least to some degree five languages by the time I graduated. I was fluent or close to it in 3 of them and had some decent basics in the other 2. I had only just now counted all this up. I am very privileged in this regard.
J – I think you and I are both disagreeing with Chaser, though. Life involves pain, work is hard, etc., and yes these students do in part need to face that. But they also have various other forces working against them that they do not fully control, and need real training to learn to control.
Yeah, depending on what Chaser actually means (expecially in terms of the extent of views being generalisable), we are most likely disagreeing.
It’s necessary to push past the pain to learn anything new. That is a fact.
It is not that we are denied educational opportunities. We have schools, colleges, libraries full of books, and many other kinds of media, as well as the means to explore our world.
When we don’t learn, it is because we have decided not to learn and want to blame others for our ignorance.
I’m glad I’m retired and no longer responsible for dealing with the ignorance of others. Dealing with my own ignorance is enough of a burden for me in my old age.
Hmm. Well, I guess I have contradicted myself. That’s nothing new. All the years of teaching have done this to me. I’m ambivalent. In one way I feel sorry for ignorant people, but mostly I think they are responsible for their ignorance.
When we don’t learn, it is because we have decided not to learn and want to blame others for our ignorance.
I’m glad I’m retired and no longer responsible for dealing with the ignorance of others. Dealing with my own ignorance is enough of a burden for me in my old age.
When we turn on the tap and water doesn’t come out, it is because we have decided that we didn’t want water to come out, and are intent upon blaming the government?
? I do not get the analogy. My point on the original point (Chaser’s) is that there are disabling situations.
The thing about university education is that it is self-education really: everyone is educating themself including faculty, discovering things, and collaborating in different ways, including by having classes. But even in a class people are still responsible for teaching themselves.
I really do not understand this “I refuse to learn but I want a passing grade because this course is required for graduation and graduation is required so you are required to get me through it” attitude.
I think the problem is, is that the threshold for pain has been moved too far over to the wussy side.
It is as if “suck it up” is now out of the question and is confused with real situations that require a true need to “suck it up” in order to survive, survive being the key word instead of thrive at a higher level of guarantee thriving that is already in place.
Just my opinion. My head got tired of rolling my eyes when I sat in class, in the library, at the student lounge. All the “problems” that the kiddies were experiencing thus causing them not to read or do their homework were problems I could only wish to have when I was there age or even problems I could wish to have at that moment while I was juggling to get through school. I may be very prejudice, but many, perhaps not all, but many, do not truly understand the concept of possibly not having or losing food, shelter, or clothing.
That’s also true. But the only ones who seem to actually understand “suck it up” are the real middle classes, the Iraq veterans, and the poor. People from business elites, and people with middle class incomes but not middle class skills, are the ones in the worst shape.
The way in which they are in bad shape is that they feel so entitled, and they need to drop that, it is true, and the only answer is NO MERCY. However: I think that as products of the current society – remember they were born around 1988 if they’re 19 now, that’s after 8 years of Reagan, etc. etc. – they come from this commercialized authoritarian place with no exterior to it and a lot of weird pressures, expectations, and ignorance. I think it *is* a painful place and a crazy one.
Have your read “The Organization Kid”?
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200104/brooks
I had to read and write about it a few years ago. Along with Doris Lessing’s “Group Minds” and Stanley Milgram, Erich Fromm, and Philip Zimbardo’s “The Mind is a Formidable Jailer.”
My God. And they are doing this with all the advantages of being Princetonians. Mine are trying to do the same but in a subpar situation – with parents who think they can carry 15 hours and work 40 hours and attend to the needs of an extended family even if it conflicts with school. And with no actual college prep education.
I wonder if this is what faculty is now supposed to be like, too. I think so. No wonder we are all so stressed! Your paper sounds great – great reading list although I haven’t read the Lessing and don’t even know Milgram or Zimbardo. Will have to look for these things.
But the only ones who seem to actually understand “suck it up” are the real middle classes, the Iraq veterans, and the poor.
That is the American situation?
I start to understand perhaps some of the moral rhetoric that I sometimes hear, and that is sometimes directed towards me.
….if the middle classes are genuinely stoic…
The class that is stoic here is ONLY the blue collar class.
Would you really call them middle class, or, working class who look like middle class? Just saying. I think at first glance one would think where I live is middle class, but as I observe more and find out the work that these people do and how they rely on renting out half of their house or a room or two, I am convinced that they are in fact working class (not necessarily blue collar) and not middle class.
The ones who have all this trouble are the business elites, and the working class with middle class incomes or who otherwise “look” middle class. This class emulates the entitlement of the business elites. The traditional middle classes don’t have trouble in school and know what school is. The business elites and the classes that imitate them are anti-intellectual.
The business elites and the classes that imitate them are anti-intellectual.
Traditionally it is the lower middle class who are “aspirationals” and therefore anti-intellectual. In Germany it was the disenfranchised petty bourgeois (shop keepers etc.) I think this is John Howard’s self-identified class.
In Australia, the middle classes are also anti-intellectual, but not moralistic about their bootstraps — as I suspect those in America are.
Those in America are moralistic about their bootstraps, by and large, although it’s hard to generalize. And many are anti-intellectual as well.
Aspirationals, yes. It’s hard for me to really understand anything that is happening now, though, because … of postmodernity? because things have gotten so far out of joint under the Bushes? I feel as though I come from a different world, one which used to exist and no longer does.
Aspirationals, yes. It’s hard for me to really understand anything that is happening now, though, because … of postmodernity? because things have gotten so far out of joint under the Bushes?
Both those things, no doubt. But postmodernity is just a form of moral relativism and capitalist window-dressing. Not really anything in itself.
I think that one of the real culprits is the newish-fangled educational approach of skinnerian behaviourism. People brought up without a moral compass behave like rats. The do not emotionally or intellectually mature. They are prepared to do little tricks for token rewards. They believe that punishments are there to make them conform more. They see everything that happens to them as being in relation to the System, operating over and above them.
They do not see that there are real consequences for their actions, because they no longer have an operating concept for “real”. (Is this a form of postmodernism?)
Precisely speaking, they have not been brought up to be moral agents operating within a real world. Instead, they’re always looking for triggers to push to receive an instant reward, or for leverage to prevent punishment (the consequences of their actions) from reaching them. This is how they operate — and despite all the leverage they can and will bring against you as “an authority”, their condition of not being given the skills to be moral agents is disempowering.
brave new world
That sounds exactly right. And in postmodernity everything is a simulacrum anyway so there is no real. (And modernity is/was more complex and contradictory than the postmodernists allow, so there.) Brave new world, indeed.
(And modernity is/was more complex and contradictory than the postmodernists allow, so there.)
I think the neurological wiring of those not brought up to face hardships as individuals does not allow them access to the complexity of many of the Modernist texts. Such people can read these texts, but the effect for them is flattened and bewildering.
—
Ultimately, what does it mean to be ignoble? Words are sound signals for
ideas; but ideas are more or less firm image signs for sensations which
return frequently and occur together, for groups of sensations. To
understand each other, it is not yet sufficient that people use the same
words; they must use the same words also for the same form of inner
experiences; ultimately they must hold their experience in common with each other.
That’s why human beings belonging to a single people understand each other
better among themselves than associations of different peoples, even when
they themselves use the same language; or rather, when human beings have
lived together for a long time under similar conditions (climate, soil,
danger, needs, work), then something arises out of that which “understands
itself,” a people.
In all souls, a similar number of frequently repeating experiences have won
the upper hand over those which come more rarely; people understand each
other on the basis of the former-quickly and with ever-increasing speed-the
history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation. On the
basis of this rapid understanding, people bind with one another, closely and
with ever-increasing closeness. The greater the danger, the greater the need
quickly and easily to come to agreement over what needs to be done; not to
misunderstand each other in danger is what people simply cannot do without
in their interactions.”
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/beyondgoodandevil9.htm
Interesting re Modernism and readers thereof. Makes sense. I am going to post on this meta rock show the Blue Man when I get around to it. It’s this post modern group experience that is superficially subversive but not really.
I *really* need to study Nietzche.
P.S. to everyone: do you think it was cruel of Clinton to announce that everyone should go to college?
The people in pain over their grades are in pain because they simply cannot rise above a C, D or F and they know they are expected to. Is this unfair?
I meant, basically, that if you are going to wait for “conditions to get better” or for “things to settle down” in order to do things for yourself (like learning or healing…or exercising…or anything for yourself) you can wait a very long time for those conditions to prevail in your life–and there can be real costs to you of waiting.
It’s a bit reductive to paint my comments as being part of the “suckitup” school of thinking. As somebody who spent 14 years as a foster kid and went through 22 homes before the age of 15, I waited for mercy. Never showed up. Had I waited for things to settle and for my pain to stop, I’d still be waiting. Instead, I said “chuck you” to everybody who made predictions that my failure in life was inevitable due to the pain of my situation. (I generally said “chuck you” to everybody; no real brilliance on my part here, just good fortune that my way of saying “chuck you” involved scholarship rather than drugs.) I have a lot of excuses for who I am and what I do, and most of those resided outside my control. Yet the only person who really suffers from my inability to get my shaving cream together is me, ultimately, and the people that care about me.
I do not believe that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Sometimes, what doesn’t kill you makes you wish you were dead. But these things you do for yourself (like learning) I think need to be prioritized. Investing in yourself, whether through learning or exercise or healing, are things that should not be put off, no matter what the circumstances, because these are the things that heal over debilitation. And if they are not healing acts, then they must wait until you can figure out what does heal.
In no particular order:
“Investing in yourself, whether through learning or exercise or healing, are things that should not be put off, no matter what the circumstances, because these are the things that heal over debilitation.”
YES.
Damn, Chaser! I’d have adopted you!
I think though that Hattie’s point is not so broad psychologically or philosophically … it’s about the state of mind or mental calm you have to have to be able to do foreign languages. It’s very disorienting to actually acquire one, you’ve got to displace your native system, and these people I am trying to understand have chaotic minds and no calm/meditative space. I think where the pain she is talking about comes from is from inauthenticity in their lives / lack of self / lack of actual connection to self / something along these lines.