Intrinsic Good in Practice

My annual turkey nap was cut short this year. “Meredith,” said my brother Stephen, “get up. We’re playing Bananagrams.”

[A brief and entirely unnecessary analysis of Stephen’s motives: my mother had told us that we were going to play a family game, and we were going to do it before he could go over to his girlfriend’s house. I hold no animosity towards him. Madison is wonderful.]

So we played Bananagrams. (def. Bananagrams – a game that’s like scrabble but doesn’t take as long). And it was good.

After Stephen left, I stayed at the kitchen table and fooled around with tiles. My dad came back and sat with me. And I’m not really sure how this happened, but we started playing “Hobbit Scrabble,” which wasn’t actually Scrabble. It was Banagrams, but it was better, because we were making up Hobbit words.

We read our creations, and defined them, and laughed. According to me, “Telpsy” is a feminine Hobbit name. My dad thinks it sounds like a Hobbit disease. He came up with “Bopsak” (a Hobbit’s backpack), “Pogwig” (a sort of mushroom that grows in the Shire), and my personal favorite, “Farquarzone.” That word doesn’t mean anything at all.

I’m thankful for my dad.

Good

Prompted: Use own words to define intrinsic good, list 20 things that are intrinsically good, talk about a time you experienced something that was intrinsically good.

Definition:

Intrinsically good things can be seen as good without having to look at the results. The means justify themselves.

Intrinsic goodies:

-Reading out loud

-Splatter painting

-Baking

-Running

-Gardening

-Taking walks

-Sending letters

-Looking at old photographs

-Laughing

-Hugging

-Helping people

-Listening to music

-Creating music

-Listening to other people create music

-Backpacking

-Reading books you aren’t required to read

-Enjoying books you are required to read

-Sabbath-ing

-Surprising somebody

-Waiting for a long time (if something is worth waiting for, then the wait is worth something)

Storytime:

When I was in third or fourth grade, I spent a whole evening dancing on my deck to the Dragonheart soundtrack. I dragged the boom box out there and plugged it into an old socket on the outside of the house. The trees in the backyard were green, the wind was brisk, and my feet were bare. My mother told me to watch out for splinters. And I just danced. It was only artistic by the standards of not giving a rip about standards. I waved my arms around and pointed my toes. It wasn’t for anybody or because of anybody. But my dad did stand on the deck and watch for a while. I only pretended I didn’t see him.

CHA - CHING

An excuse:

J-me, this is way over 250 words. I skipped the edit because I wanted to rant.

 A prompt:

Write about a time where you felt “banked” in a classroom setting. Describe your experience. No names.

A definition:

Banking – A process in which teachers deposit their information into the brains of the students. If the students store the deposited information correctly, they will have success when the teachers come to make withdrawals. Banks that return what was deposited upon demand of withdrawal are given high scores, and banks that fail to do so are given low marks. It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that the only information that will need to be regurgitated by the little brain banks is the information the teachers have placed there. Anything else would be unjust. The students are only responsible for the information the teacher has deposited in their heads (as evidence: everyday conversation in schools across the nation – Student speaking to other student or parent or teacher or anyone else on the planet: “I can’t believe that was on the test, we didn’t even go over it in class, this is so unfair, I hate that teacher”).

A tangent:

I want to start riots. But I am not lost. I will not be lost. Just because I have been a willing product of this system does not mean that this system is everywhere. It is not inside me always, it just has been before, and will be again, but that does not mean that I have to be lost.

A story:

Once upon a time in the class of an unnamed teacher at an unnamed high school, I answered a question correctly. We were reading the T.S. Eliot poem, “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock.” My teacher had asked, “What is the significance of the repeated phrase: ‘In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo’?”

Silence in the classroom. I raised my hand. I can’t remember what I said (although, just now, I did try to recreate something impressive). Something about idealized figures and how the speaker feels greater insignificance because he cannot match up to/feels great disdain for the ideals of his society. All I remember is my teacher beaming at me like a person who had received a large amount of interest on a deposit.

An example:

I’m in a classroom (well, an English classroom, this example doesn’t exactly work with math), a teacher asks a question. Students offer various answers, to all of which the teacher says, “Yes, what else?” The yes sounds painful. Finally, a student brings up the correct answer [in this case, “correct answer” is interchangeable with “the answer the teacher was thinking about”]. The teacher changes the tone of his “Yes,” and the teacher no longer feels the need to repeat, “what else?” because the original question has been answered. The teacher is satisfied.

[WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE (to the girl who defines herself by her GPA) BETWEEN TEACHER SATISFACTION AND TRUTH?]

I have always been good at satisfying teachers. It got me into college.

Back to the story:

Looking back on it, that situation was banking. The correctness of my answer hinged (almost entirely) on the satisfaction of the teacher. I had assimilated enough information about him and the way he treated literature into my bank to produce good withdrawals more often than the rest of the class.

The same teacher once asked me, “Don’t you think that most questions are really statements in disguise?”

[I’ll let you enjoy the irony of that one without hindering it with an explanation]

OF COURSE I DO. I think that because YOU think that. I’ll argue with you if you want me to.

Gold Stars

(I was prompted to look at an alternative approach to education and consider the differences between it and JBU/ throw my own life in there somehow. Life is funny, and I just happened to have this little freak out this morning that pertained to the prompt… so I rambled a little longer than normal)

At about 10 a.m., 10/26/11

I am freaking out right now. I am freaking out because I have half of a research paper left to write for my Lit. class by tomorrow and about 30 more pages of Confessions to understand before Western Civ. I am having trouble with Augustine… probably because I’m trying to read it so quickly, but it doesn’t matter, it MUST be done, and it must be done soon. Oh, how glad I will be when this week is over.

Why am I freaking out? Well, because if I don’t understand and read all of Augustine, Dr. Moore will give us one of those in-class reflection questions, and I won’t do well on it, and it will affect my grade… and if I don’t finish that paper, and finish it well, I’ll get a bad grade, which will affect my grade, and GPA, and job/family/happy life in suburbia….

GOSH I WISH THOSE STUPID BELLS WOULD STOP RINGING, I CAN’T CONCENTRATE! Don’t they UNDERSTAND that I am TRYING to get GOOD GRADES HERE!!!!!!!!

Oh, why do I always wait until the last minute to do these sorts of things? It makes everything feel so meaningless. I weary of working for the little gold star stickers (at least the figurative ones, real gold star stickers would be AWESOME), they are never enough, anyway… I think I want understanding for the sake of understanding, but I’ve been hardwired to get straight A’s. After all, is there a difference?

About 12 hours later

So, what this blog was actually supposed to be about:

I thought about going to St. John’s College. I like books, and I like the idea of learning by studying and discussing books, but I was pretty much scared away from the college by the tuition.

The real appeal of St. John’s lies in this: the abandonment of grades and the embracing of the great books leads to a fuller understanding of the intrinsic value of knowledge. The motivation to learn does not have to be divided between the desire for good grades and the desire for understanding. Also, the students have more frequent access to the source of the knowledge found in textbooks. It’s not that I would really want to study calculus out of Newton’s Principia, but there is something freeing about it. The idea sort of tickles my romantic fancy.

I’m not saying that the students at St. John’s have completely pure (understanding for the sake of understanding) motives. Most of them are planning on some profession, and some of them must use what they learn for appearances sake (then again, who doesn’t).

Since JBU does give grades, grades will always be a potential motivator for students. So does that mean we eliminate grades? Do we eliminate the factor that has placed me above my peers and told me who I am? Heck yes. Or, maybe I should just eliminate the grades from my own mind… hmmmm…

The Impossibilities

Laying in the ravine next to the Honors house on Sunday at 5:43 p.m. - I started thinking:

1. What if there were gumdrops inside acorns?

2. What if there were people who lived in the clouds and looked down on us and watched all of the things we did? Would they find us funny, or sad, or just crazy? Would they be transparent people, or  blue people, or cloudy looking people, or could they change with the weather?

3. What if one day the world just cracked open like an egg and the center spilled out all over space? (and then I started getting all philosophical and wondering if I could make that image mean something... I think I was trying too hard) But anyway - would the yolk start frying? Is space hot enough for that? Which way would it spill out? How do we know which way is up? What if we had it all wrong all along?

Then I stopped thinking, got up, and walked away. So, that wasn't seven... I am not disciplined with my impossible thinking.

J-me, we have a problem...

When I'm no longer bound by secrecy, I'll talk about it... I think I'll learn from this failure, but mostly I'm discouraged by the amount of time I spend concentrating on myself, and the "mission" is making it uncomfortably clear...

What I Want 2.0

Prompt: (Go outside, then blog) And I want you to be real honest with yourself. Don’t listen to the voices in your head..don’t listen to the pressure you feel from either yourself, your parents, your friends, or any other source. I want you to listen to your heart. To truly listen to your heart. And then after you have spent time with yourself...I want you to go back inside and write. Write about it. Write about your dreams, your fears. Write about whatever tugs at your heartstrings. Just write.

I sat down with myself today to discuss the possibility that I’m focusing too much on introspection.

I am sick of her and her sympathetic expressions, her quiet condemnations.

She smiles at me and says, “Perhaps you do think too much. If you thought less, well, if you regulated what you thought about…” She leans over and pulls the mirror out of her purse and hands it to me. “We could be better.”

I see in it my reflection. “Here,” she says, pointing, “these parts are not quite right.”  She flips open her notepad and begins to write, listing fixes, “Watch fewer chick flicks, memorize a chapter of scripture every week, develop more friendships, try harder in cross country, do more community service…”

I think about lying on the floor of an art museum. I think about three year olds. I think about reading Oedipus the King while sitting in the ruin of a Greek theatre. I think about ice cream, and hymns, and really, really big trees. I think about my dad and how we dance around the family room singing Donovan songs, belting out phrases like, “Antediluvian Kings.”

She hands me her list. “God will just LOVE this, and I know we can do it!”

“Like hell we can.”

I touch the corner of her list to the end of my cigarette.