Delta Autumn: Discipline, Desire and Punish

As someone passionate about historiography I enjoyed (what I assume was) Dr. Mullins precis of Delta education and Southern values.  And from the section on teaching social studies I took away more than a few points, such as:

1.  Use political cartoons in class.  Of course!  Higher thought processes combined with the visual, and the chance for classroom discussion and disagreement, is perfect for getting kids involved.  Plus they are often funny.

2.  Develop a classroom library.  Good advice, but I wonder if Google and Youtube have made this advice outdated.

3.  Reading aloud is good practice.  That said, clear reading does not equal comprehension.  The teacher must facilitate  comprehension through a dialogue with the students.

4.  Hang up timelines created by the students.  This will help the students get a sense of the whole and go towards reducing the adverse effects of a curriculum that separates socio-political-economy into three or four distinct classes that students may not realize are connected and intertwined.

5.  Use a journal for frequent writing.  Have them read from their journals.  This builds confidence and allows the students a chance to project themselves onto our shared social world.  Maybe that will give one of them the courage to stand up at a City Council or PTA meeting years down the road.

6.  It's okay to use supplemental texts.  Find them and use them.

7.  Use whatever works.  History is broad and deep, and it is more than reading about past events; it is also music and literature and culture and much else.

Yet what I thought about the most (after the very wise advice to have a full life outside of work) was classroom management and discipline.  And so this also meant thinking about desire and how ego can get in the way and lead us to make poor choices.  Desire is, of course, a very mysterious thing.  Even the underlying etymology is a mystery.  English acquired the word from thirteenth century old French 'desirer' and  its roots are in the Latin dēsiderarē, a word formed by connecting the Latin prefix dē, meaning from, with sīdus, heavenly body or star.  It means "awaiting what the stars will bring."  

Thus long before the modern desire meant want it signified lack, in the sense of lacking what only the stars above might provide.  But the semantic and linguistic links connecting the ancient astral to the modern 'lacking’ are tenuous if not altogether absent. The life story of a language is both subtle and amorphous, and every one of its words admits of many meanings, not all of them compatible with one another.  A word can mean one thing here and another there: with no standard for clarity, understanding is a matter of practical use, not ostensive definition.  This vagueness, this imprecision, is not always a defect.  It gives language a certain poetic, perspectival density.  For this reason etymology does not define; rather, it merely suggests.

One interpretation, among others, is that desire is the need to make oneself what one is not, to possess what one does not have, to fill some lack within oneself, to take into oneself otherness, to negate some aspect of one’s being through acquisition, purchase, or possession.  Yet that inner emptiness returns after every new acquisition, every new purchase, every new possession—the metropolis of the soul, in its animated vacancy, is never full, and desire seeks a new object of attention, ad infinitum.  

This drive of desire toward an empty inner circle explains the philosophical quip that humans desire not the objects of their desire but rather desire itself.  And it exposes why, for at least one world religion, desire is the root cause of all suffering.  Thus there is a real sense in which the etymology of desire leads one to the etiology of desire.  

And this is why I made the comment in class about letting the kids save face-it's about the students, not our egos and our sometimes (or oftentimes) small and petty desire driven expectations.  It is about instruction and a climate of instruction.  

For example, when a student makes fun of you or me or one of us, or calls one of us a racist or an Uncle Tom, it's not about us; rather, it is about bringing the student and the class back to a place where everyone can learn.

It takes a strong sense of self not to be hurt by these kinds of comments.  I hope that we are up to the task.