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While reading the Jane Thompkins for Jody's class, I found myself disappointed in Thompkins during her transition from Bryn Mawr for undergrad to Yale for Grad school. At Bryn Mawr,  students are unique, have the space to express their intelligence unashamedly and own their education. However, when Thompkins, as a BMC graduate, described her experience at Yale, she had to be sure she was right before speaking up, she felt dumb if another student beat her to an answer and she did not freely, along with her peers, express her love for her interest in English and poetry.

I am disappointed by Thompkins because as a graduate from Bryn Mawr, I am surprised that she did not carry with her the characteristics of a Mawrter to Yale. Perhaps her experience at Yale is not a reflection of her inability to be a Mawter (and perhaps this term need to be unpacked more) beyond Bryn Mawr. It could be that the culture of Yale demanded a different type of student--one that was more competitive and closed-off emotionally from the material. So, now I wonder if BMC does the same. Does the nature of BMC call for a "type" of student and/or experience? Is there a pressure unique to BMC that makes us act a certain way? If so, what is it? How and when and, above all, do we pretend to be something we are not under this pressure?

After yesterday's discussion about Hunger Games, I do not think I have been convinced by the inclusion of Hunger Games into the curriculum. While KCHarris made a fantastic suggestion of putting Hunger Games in conversation with another text, I'm still not sure that I would consider the text to be of great value to a classroom -- it just seems that there are other books out there that might address some of the things that we discussed.

1. I felt that a lot of the emotions surrounding the inclusion of The Hunger Games revolved around how it would motivate students to "read". But what do we mean by "reading"? Do we mean (as N. Katherine Hayles talks about in her essay, "How We Read") hyperreading, close reading....? What about the motivations for reading? To be able to think about how The Hunger Games would really affect the ability/love of reading, I think that these are important questions to consider.

2. I do see the point that some of our classmates made passionately about tailoring books to fit in with student's backgrounds. While I didn't take the comment about not being taken seriously in certain contexts personally, I do urge the consideration of how well these students will be prepared to enter college. (Since this seems to be the path that MGuerrero mentioned as being the "model") Would The Hunger Games prepare students to do the type of analysis/close reading required by freshman seminars? I can't speak generally, but probably not at Bryn Mawr.

In thinking about my site sit today I had a plan: I know there were some plants, some bushes at the base of the beech tree behind my bench. I knew that when I had collected leaves they hadn’t all been the same leaves. What could I find from Morris Woods at my site?

Surprisingly little. Or perhaps not so surprisingly. Morris Woods was once cultivated, a farmland; but since it has been left to its own devices, native trees, shrubs, and plants taking root while slowly but surely non-native plants creep up and across the landscape from the direction of English House. My site is manicured. The oak trees of senior row were planted and aligned, spaced apart. From the pairing of Hurricane Sandy with a sudden drop in temperature the leaves from the trees dropped, and sometime since last week the groundskeepers have not only cleared the leaves, leaving the ground bare save for some patchy grass on death’s doorstep, but also cleared of the plant life that, when I began my site sit, were densely packed around the base of the beech tree. No longer there, I can approach its root system, and its trunk that bears a plaque. A human mark on this easily scarred tree. Everything feels so bare.  Everything I like to look at has been cleared. The evidence of the loss of life has been stripped away, and the emptiness of my site in comparison to the (mostly) uncleared and dense Morris Woods makes me feel bare. I am no longer sitting amongst things, but rather against them and alone. 

As stated in the title line, this is Julia posting from Esty's account (which she kindly lent to me until my own is restored). 

I've probably made clear in one or many classes that I consider Adrienne Rich to be my favorite poet and perhaps even writer of all time.  The first poem of hers I ever read was "Diving Into the Wreck."  Here is a link to the poem from Poets.org.  The poem ends:

We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

I found myself thinking continuously about this poem when reading "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying."  The phrase that grabs me the most is, "by cowardice or courage."  Rich mentions both throughout her piece on honor, but I don't think she discusses either enough. 

Our truths are often created for us.  They can be conditions that we do not choose but that we often must choose to disclose.  I wonder how important the distinction between cowardice and courage are.  Is one always lying and the other always honesty?  If I find myself in the wreck, does it matter if it is cowardice or courage that caused me to arrive there? 

 One main connection that I noticed between Monday’s class and my site sits are the presence of humans .We are on a college campus with a densely populated surrounding area, so we have no choice but to come in contact with other people. I’ve been thinking about are the subtle ways that humans have changed the landscape over the past few hundred years. They have build buildings, chopped down trees, planted trees, etc., and they have also influenced the spread of “invasive” species in Morris woods. This is something that I would not have even been aware of, had I not participated in the class. It’s interesting how something as seemingly “natural” as a wooded area, can actually be quite artificial, and greatly influenced by human actions. I feel similarly about the wildflower area. I think that I have the unconscious, and obviously erroneous idea that all plants that I see on campus somehow got there “naturally.” This circles back to the sticky question about what exactly “natural” means. For me, I think that “natural” signifies something that has been unaffected by human activities.

Another idea that I’ve been meditating on since Monday’s class is that of trust. The trust activity made an impression on me because not only did I feel like I really did “get to know my tree,” I was astounded at just how vulnerable I felt without my eyesight in the woods. I can’t imagine doing this trust activity in a more wild environment than Morris Woods. I think I would have been very apprehensive if I hadn’t known that people were just a few feet away.

I'm opening a thread for these topics so please comment if you have something to add to this discussion.  I apologize if one does exist and I just didn't see it.

Thanksgiving Break

- I think we should meet in person, meaning that we either should find a time on Tuesday that most people can make or we should simply have class on Wednesday.  I think having class on Wednesday would be the easiest option, but if we want to consider moving the class to Tuesday we could start a Doodle.  I will not be in a place where I can access internet after I leave campus so the online options for me would be difficult.  I also think that discussions would be more productive in person than online.  Meeting in-person would allow us all to bounce from person to person more easily than trying to go back and forth in this format.  Finally, this class is all about thinking ecologically which means thinking about how we are connected to eachother and the "natural" world around us.  I do not think Serendip (or any online forum) promotes that.  Blogs simply feel like big walls to me.  Or to give you a picture, blogs make me feel the same way that I feel when I'm listening to someone talk, but the head of the person in front of me is completely obscuring my view and no matter how much I move, I still can see the speaker.  I know I don't talk a lot in class (I never have.  I tend to process more slowly) and the blog does allow me to participate more, but I still do not see it as som

Blackout Poetry

Yangon, Myanmar (AP)
earthquake struck
feared
slowly,
extent unclear
response
lost
devastating
reported no
epicenter
collapsed
on state television

deaths
of the
clash
massacre
coldbloodedly
clash
looking for communication
holding up assault
wounded
clashes
cause
death
war
promised
deadly clashes

--------
among
possible violation of
process
Educational
a single poor
complaint offers
devastating
flaws
who can afford
to be a good
performance
further
discriminatory
including leadership....

--------
hurricane was
powerful
mighty
had
windows,
"There they go.
distressing. I grew up with those trees."
insulting
not yet
downed
memory

--------
the country
housing
two million units
black-listing
impossible for them to rent--
But many see no alternative.
"I could not let my children and my grandchildren starve."
squat-
squatting
squat
qui-
embarrassed
protesting
"shame on you"
The crowd
outnumbered police
But one day, he said, he got a call.

Today in class, we began by writing about how our families and their relationships to the earth have shaped us and our relationships with nature. I'm overly fond of my family history, so this was a really fun exercise for me. I started out by going on and on about a lot of different family members, but after writing in class, I realized that my mom has actually been the biggest influence on my relationship with nature. Having moved around a lot in the US, one of the constants has always been my mom. Of all of my family, her relationship to the earth has really shaped me the most. Don't get me wrong--my father and my mother have both instilled in me an appreciation of the beauty of nature. But the other aspects of my mom's relationship with nature, and her family's relationship with it, has molded my feelings the most.