School Daze

Well, it’s back to school time, which seems to come earlier each year.  Actually, the K-12s started at least 2 weeks before the university did, so I suppose I should feel lucky.  The kids in our culdesac were waiting for the school bus as we were driving off to the beach for a much needed end of summer vacation. 

After 15 years of teaching, I find myself still getting oddly anxious at the start of each semester, making last minute changes in a syllabus I’ve taught four or five times, waking up from nightmares in which I show up late and unprepared and can’t teach anyway because the students won’t sit down and be quiet.  All of which is bizarre because my students are about the most docile, eager-to-learn, eager-to-please young folk you can imagine.  But there’s still that little voice in the back of my head saying, “Who are you kidding?  Where’s the real professor?”  This semester, I have the particularly odd fortune of having front-row-center in one of my classes a guy who is a dead ringer for one of the few people who has ever been able to completely pummel my self-esteem with a single raised eyebrow.  It’s a night class, in a basement room with weird lighting, and it threw me momentarily for a loop.   And I was screening scenes from The Matrix that evening, just to add to the weirdness of it all.

In reality, I’m teaching one of my favorite regular classes and a new one that I’m really excited about, my students seem happy to be there and eager to learn, and to genuinely believe I have something to teach them.  Several have taken other classes with me previously and apparently do not think I totally suck.  So I’m starting to feel like a real professor again.

And, since I seem to need a fictional alter ego for everything these days, I’ve decided that for pedagogical purposes, I am Morpheus.  I stand before them in my long black leather coat and my mirrored shades and my shiny bald head and I say things like:

• I’m trying to free your mind. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.
• What is “real”? How do you define “real”?
• I didn’t say it would be easy. I just said it would be the truth.

And they respond:  “Will you be posting your lecture notes on the web?”

To which I can only say (to myself, and anyone else who’s listening): ”You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it. . . if you are not one of us, you are one of them.”

Ah, nuthin’ like delusions of pedagogic grandeur.  I really do need to get some mirrored shades, though.

Tomorrow: Plato’s allegory of the cave in the morning, Marx’s Fetishism of Commodities in the evening.  An oddly perfect combination.

Undead Math Poem

From the archives.  See, I did do something in Precalc besides moon over hotties. 

Sets
(2/17/86)

If you take what is Natural

and add Nothing,

the result is Whole.

And yet Whole is merely

half of that which is Integral,

and that which is Integral is only

a part of everything we call Rational.

The Rational, combined with

what we call the Irrational,

make up what’s thought of as Real.

Reality…

and still there’s more—

what else but Imaginary

Imaginary being, of course,

what does not really exist

but can still be manipulated by human means.

What remains is Complex…

 

Another Gem from the Undead Poet

In response to DavidB’s recent haiku on things electrical, my own much lengthier free verse, written after touring a coal-fired power plant near Price, Utah, with my dad and 20 or so other middle-aged nerd guys and their hapless family members.  I believe this was, in fact, the last poem written by the Undead Poet before her 18 year hiatus, and it may be one of the best, since it was about neither 1) stupid boys, nor 2) my navel.   Although those of you with a penchant for symbolic interpretation will undoubtedly assume it is both, and Dr. Freud would undoubtedly say you are right.  But I hope at least David will believe me it was in fact INTENDED BY ITS AUTHOR as a literal description of something real.

Power Plant
(6/17/89)

Even in the dim light
the heat presses against your skin, insistent
except for icy ripples dance amid the warmth
upon your legs.

Clanking, pounding, grinding
fill the air until you no longer hear them
hear nothing but a sustained, unending whine
screaming above you into the back of your mind.

In the mist of the activity
springs suddenly the emptiness
which presses the heat more strongly.

The sharpness of the greasy smell
as the nose hears decibels
of the endless scream you can’t ignore

The ironic cleanliness of it all
shiny metal and pain
beneath the oily screaming stench

Every bit of your body tense and awake, alert (not alive)
as if waiting breathlessly and terrified
for whatever may be

A glimpse, when a door is opened
in the gaping black mouth
a furious orange pulsing mass of flame

Like a peek into the pits of hell
furious and potent
and attractive.