April Reader’s Digest/Digress
An incomplete scratch of a list of media digested back in February. I meant to flesh out these notes into a post but never did. I’ll never quite know how I would have articulated the digressive threads of my media diet but perhaps the list is enough as is. I want to be less spelly-outy, anyway. A strange thing about becoming a teacher is that you have to learn to be clear and direct, which paradoxically dilutes the mystery required of a reverent (or irreverent) supplicant to language – a trait you so desperately want to affirm in your students. Any opportunities for students to join the dots must be planned out and deliberately delivered as ‘discovery learning.’ It is kinder and more democratic to take everyone on the same journey (an essential edu-cliché) rather than leave curly allusions uninvestigated or cryptic lines hanging like indulgent dust motes in the fractious air between students. But that clarity and directness sounds dull and didactic outside of the classroom. Which makes me wonder if it even has a place in the classroom after all. It will be my life’s work to abandon and unlearn the knowing tone of a trumped up teacher. Didacticism and auto-didactisism would have to be the thread this list:
Educated, Tara Westover (autodidactism, not knowing, thirst, binary family split of PhDs and zero formal education – all or nothing: eduction is addictive, worlding, re-worlding, un-worlding; climbing a perilous roof with abandon because you have the same two feet as you do on the ground),
Not Working, Josh Cohen (idleness is necessary; keep hobbies as hobbies, not hustles),
Perfectionism meditation podcast, Tara Brach (making me think of misplaced ‘vulnerability’ at work, where presenting one’s faults is less like a liberation and more like the biosecurity line at customs – I will declare this so that I can’t be punished for it),
Not Your Negro film (ugliness and lyricism forever twinned, squirming through the decades and pulsing through the screen in colonised New Zealand),
Free Solo film (climbing with privilege and oblivion; the universal void of fatherly disapproval yawns not far below),
Email Newsletters: Austin Kleon, Anne Peterson, Warren Ellis, Victoria Hannan (the treat of delivery; regularity like a metronome of hyperlinks to other worlds; freedom from the linkless land of Instgram, where the arrogant totality of the sealed square reigns supreme),
Deconstructions, Michael Frayn (discovered recently in the Red Cross op shop but recommended many years ago by Michael Hutching (not Hutchings) – a teacher, a friend, a chronic vacationer and sharer of holiday snaps in class (what else is school for?)),
Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction, Judith Grisel (frightening and familiar and another grimacing corkscrew through the decades);
Ariel, Sylvia Plath (thinking about the gifts of neurodiversity but also the life-truncating peril of pathology – what is real? Both?).