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Tuesday, July 28, 2020

COVID Chronicles: Some Sense, Some Chaos, What will School Look Like?


 

My institution of higher learning continues to barrel ahead with its plans to open.  That said, some funky things have begun to show up.  Because teachers have invoked ADA as a shield, many of our classes are being offered only online, so 75% of our incoming first year students will have at least one online class.  Only 10% have three or more (of four) classes online.  Some students are trying to decrease online classes, but others are trying to INCREASE them.  These students do not want any more exposure than they have to have, and I continue to think this is wise.  One student that I know of, known for her devil may care attitude and impulsiveness, is surprised that school is going on at all.  Can you imagine that?

 

Meanwhile, Major League Baseball has started up again.  Even though teams are limited to 30 players and about 10 coaches, at least three teams have at least one player infected.  The Nationals and the Reds have at least one, though the Reds may have more – two players are on the disabled list for unspecified reasons, and the Marlins have so many players infected that they have suspended play (in a season shortened from 162 to just sixty games), and the team they played against is also not playing as a precaution.  Yet the games go on with the Reds continuing to play the Chicago Cubs (and perhaps infecting them) tonight.

 

Speaking of Chicago, the reluctant son was slated to go back there for his senior year, but all four of his classes this fall are online.  Does it make sense for him to go and sit in his dorm room to take classes remotely?  Especially because he comes from a state that, by the time school starts, may have enough cases that he would have to completely quarantine for the first two weeks?  We think it likely that he will be taking classes from home. 

 

Some Universities are coming to their senses – I hear from reluctant cousins that George Washington has decided not to have students on campus in the fall.  I assume that they will be offering courses online.  The cousins wonder, “What is the sense of this?  How should we manage this?” 

 

First of all, I don’t think this is all bad.  When not writing these Chronicles, I am learning about how to teach in this environment.  There is a seminar tomorrow and I am reading about optimizing zoom rooms.  Courses will, for the most part, not be true on-line courses.  Except maybe in California and the Ivies, we really haven’t had time to prepare for truly on-line classes because we have been in limbo preparing to teach in person, in a hybrid classroom and online.  My hope is that this will mean that courses will include at least some synchronous work – meaning working with a live teacher – interacting with him or her – and, my guess is, a lot more in class interaction than is usually the case.

 

Look, as faculty, we all know that when we get lazy, we lecture.  Because it is live and, at least at my University, classes are small enough, we interact with our students – and I think that, by and large, this makes for a somewhat interactive space – where students are more active than they would be watching T.V.  This is good, because we KNOW that students learn better the more actively they are engaged.

 

The challenge this fall, whether with all remote or hybrid classes (which all of ours will be at first because some of our students, if they are sick, will be encouraged to participate from home or the dorm room), will be to keep students engaged.  Break out rooms and one on one encounters, not to mention chat functions can be creatively used to help students discuss with each other aspects of assignments.  This will improve their engagement – and will help me be a better teacher when I can be in a traditional classroom again.

 

Will this be the same experience?  No, but good teachers will be focused on helping students get to know each other and work together in ways that they have never done before.  Some of the “college experience” will now be happening in the classroom.  As an ice breaker, I am planning to ask my students whose face they would paint on their mask if they could assume that person’s identity while wearing the mask.  If we can bring the “college experience” to life more fully in the classroom, college will be a better place.

 

Will it?  Last spring, three of the reluctant son’s four classes, when they went virtual, became asynchronous.  Teachers posted canned lectures or just had students do readings and turn in busy work.  One of the classes remained synchronous.  He was excited about each of the classes and they were going well before they had to turn on a dime and go virtual - it was a quarter that he was really enjoying when it changed.  Two of the three asynchronous classes were allright.  The synchronous class was tiring to attend, but kept his interest. 

 

In fact, at the end of the semester when the University decided to make final exams and other late assignments (term papers, for God’s sake) optional if the student was OK with the grade that he had at that point, the reluctant son finished all of the assignments in the three courses that were going well.  He didn’t need to in any of them.  And he did finish the readings in the fourth class, but he didn’t bother doing the scut work that he was assigned as a final project.  He told me he wouldn’t remember what that work was about in a year so why bother? In the other class, he felt he had been given a contract to achieve a certain grade and that he needed to fulfill that obligation to receive the grade.  The three classes that he finished included final projects that helped teach him important concepts and he also decided to do them, even though he didn’t need to, because organizing the concepts for the exam or in the paper would be a useful exercise.  Even though he felt some obligation in the fourth class, he was able to override it as it didn't feel like a worthwhile exercise.

 

Btw, the teacher in the synchronous class sent a note when the University put forward the policy of not grading the last bit of the semester apologizing for this stupid decision.  The professor noted that University classes rely on the confluence of multiple motivational factors to optimize learning – both the excitement of gaining new knowledge, but also the competition inherent in trying yourself against the standard of an examination or having your writing evaluated.  While I want to think that my students are motivated by the desire to learn, I know that he is right, and I really appreciated his articulating this idea to the students, to the reluctant son, and by extension, to me.

 

“But what about the total college experience?” the reluctant cousins want to know. 

 

Students choose a particular college these days because they go on a visit and it “feels” right.  There is a culture, there is a sense of belonging.  Oh, sure, they care about the aid package.  They care about the “value” of the diploma – what is the prestige level of this or that school.  But they want to belong to a group and to connect with the people – and they want to work out in a nice gym (but I digress).

 

For students, especially first years, who don’t get to go to schools this fall, they will miss out on important aspects of this experience.  They will be part of the COVID interrupted generation of University students.  This will become part of the narrative of their experience of going to college.

 

Some will use the connections that are afforded through the classroom to develop virtual relationships that they will follow up on – or not – whenever they are able to actually get to campus.  At the University where I teach, relationships often get cemented into place the first weekend, when students create their cliques.  Fortunately the school I went to as an undergrad was much more fluid than that.  Some of the people that I hung with at first just weren’t a good fit for me.  We actually had two campuses and I was able to “start over” on a second campus (though a lot of us from the first campus made the trek together and formed a kind of base to explore the second campus from).

 

The point of my meandering in the last paragraph is that every student creates their own narrative of their “college years”.  It is a lived experience that varies tremendously and, as much as we would like to plan it, the true delights are frequently the random elements that we get exposed to as the result of a variety of chance events, including that some of the people who become our lifelong friends could very well have chosen to go to another institution, but for whatever reason didn’t.


The scenario we are looking at this year is, "Remember my first year in college when they shut down the school after we all got sick and then it took me six months to be able to breath right again?"  (This example is on my mind after talking with a student yesterday who is still recovering from a bout of COVID that she caught right before we shut down in March).

 

Two of our children are choosing to go to school and I think will stay there come hell or high water.  They are welcome to come home, and it was a truly unexpected delight to have them here in the spring.  Living together as “nearly adults” required navigating different rules and exploring different roles and relationships amongst ourselves. 

 

For a first year student, learning how to structure one’s time is one of the most challenging aspects of being away at school.  Is it going to be good for some students to learn this in the context of a home where parents are available as consultants?  Might their sleep cycles be improved by having parents who are going to bed at a reasonable hour?  Am I beginning to sound like an old fuddy duddy?

 

One of the books I am currently reading is Sapiens – a Brief History of Humanity.  I have found it readable and useful and likely will post on it soon.  But the part I found particularly salient today is notion of chaos theory.  Simple chaos systems, like the weather, are hard to predict, but double chaos systems, like the human reaction to the COVID virus are even more difficult to predict.  Because we can read the charts from Johns Hopkins University we can see the effects of not wearing masks and not social distancing and this can change our attitudes and therefore our behaviors.  I am hopeful that our administrators are baseball fans and will learn from what is happening in this already bizarrely shortened season.  The charts are, I think misleading.  Today they are headed down in the South and West.  That is not because we have beaten this thing, but because the people in the South and West are reading those charts and have hunkered down (I'm willing to bet).  

 

Bringing a few thousand people together from all over the country to live, eat, sleep, and learn together is riskier than just playing a ballgame a day together, out of doors, with the sun shining.  I hope that other Universities, mine included, join George Washington in coming to its senses.  One of the results may be helping our students put academic learning back at or near the center of the “college experience”.  It may help the faculty take their responsibilities as teachers more seriously as it becomes apparent that academics really are at the heart of the academy.  These are the things that I think it makes sense to hope for in a time of chaos.  We should also attend to keeping the campus culture – whatever that may be for our different campuses – alive – so that we can be in touch with each other during these times of social distancing and the consequent possibility of isolation.


PS Just found out that one of our local competitor schools is not going to open.  Will that bode well for us?  How many dominoes need to fall?   Our President has refused to have faculty at the decision making table...

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.


For other posts on COVID:
I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.
II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).
III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.
VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.
VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument
XIII: Ennui
XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.
XVIII.    I miss my mask?
IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.


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Thursday, July 23, 2020

The COVID Chronicles: Catholic Social Teaching used to support returning to the classroom...


 

So this blog as a whole is not really about COVID, but lately I keep falling into that rabbit hole, so I have decided to more fully inhabit it.  COVID has taken up more and more of my conscious (and unconscious) life, especially as the opening of school has approached.  Mindful of the observation of an historian about the 1918 flu pandemic that very little writing about that period was done – the surmise was that people were ashamed of their actions so didn’t record them – with some trepidation I will go on marking what I say while recognizing that even now I feel that I may, someday, want to delete these thoughts from the ether.

 

In my last posting on this subject, I was trying to make an argument – it was a weak argument – that fiscally the University should close because we might take on long term expenses if COVID turns out to be a chronic illness and we have to not just manage the short term illnesses of faculty and staff, but their long term difficulties. 

 

Despite the fact that I knew it was a weak and even a bit of a whiny and last minute argument, I made it in a faculty meeting with our representatives to the administration.  A number of other faculty resonated with my article, which was nice, it meant I wasn’t alone, but the leader of our faculty group was unclear what to do with my argument.  Who should I take it to?  Whose province is this?  I asked that he be in contact with administrators and ask questions such as: What are the conditions under which we would not start school?  What are the conditions under which we will pivot to on-line learning?  He agreed to do this.

 

Yesterday he sent out a communique from the COVID task force that stated they were addressing such things as what the criteria would be for students to return home (the Reluctant Son’s position is that this will happen when the first kid dies at Arizona State, then all the schools will hear from parents and send their kids home.  I think this is a reasonable scenario).  Included in the email was a link to a panel discussion of Catholic Social Teaching and COVID.  I was curious, so I watched it.

 

I learned a lot.  Among other things, these folks were taking the position that keeping schools open was good for our brown and black employees – those who are least empowered – because they are the ones most likely to be furloughed if the school is to close.  It is also good for our brown and black students who are more likely to come from disadvantaged backgrounds and therefore to have more difficulty accessing technology and quiet study space at home than on campus – and that campus jobs are an important source of income while they are in school.  So staying open is a good thing, especially as we think about structural inequalities and systemic racism. 

 

Similarly, in terms of Social Justice, this is a time for us to be refurbishing our curricula to address in the classroom the racial inequalities that have been exposed by COVID.  The greater proportion of black and brown people who have been infected with COVID, and the higher percentage of those who have been infected who have died.  So we should be exposing the ways in which the social and economic structures privilege those of us who are white and chronically – not just at times of COVID – disadvantage those who are brown and black.  I especially agree with this point.  This is, indeed, a moral imperative.

 

But I was struck that all four panelists were speaking from the position that it was an economic reality that schools must start in the fall, and therefore that they will.  They were asking us to empathize with the decision makers who will likely face what they called moral injury – a psychological term they acknowledged they borrowed from the VA which emerged as the part of PTSD that is based on having hurt others in ways that are inconsistent with one’s conscience – we should empathize with the moral injury that will result for administrators when staff and faculty members die as a result of their decisions.  They went on to suggest that we prepare for a period of lamentation – of remembering and atoning for our sins after this crisis has passed – when we acknowledge what we have done.

 

They did this while blaming the administration of the country for their poor handling of the outbreak.  We have become an international pariah, they noted, because we have not taken the steps that are needed to contain the outbreak.  But then they implied that we were disempowered from doing anything but moving ahead in the direction we are going.  We can’t not open, was essentially the position they were taking.  Our leaders, when they mirror national leadership, should receive our pity for what they are being forced to do.

 

There is an article in the Atlantic that accuses schools of preparing to blame the students for negative consequences.  The Catholic Social Teaching group also seemed to be casting blame outside – “We have to do this.”  But they were not saying, “Should we do this?”  “How much (more) of a pay reduction would we have to take to teach online and to weather this storm – to keep our employees on board – including those we would otherwise furlough like the cafeteria workers and the dormitory staff?”  “Is that something we are able to do?”  These questions were not asked.

 

I feel like we are sailing blindly forward into a predictable future (and God, I hope I am wrong), creating moral havens for ourselves as we engage in behavior that is likely harmful to our students, their parents, our staff and faculty, and to society at large.  It seems that we have lost all moral relationship to our role as potential superspreader sites.  As if, in addition to American exceptionalism, we have the exceptionalism of the Ivory tower on our side.

 

As a psychoanalyst – to return to the point of these posts for a moment – I get it that this appears to be a very large exercise in managing the unconscious guilt that is part and parcel of much of our human functioning.  I also get it that there is group think going on (a psychological, not a psychoanalytic term).  But I guess I felt that our exceptionalism – as institutions of higher learning that value scientific knowledge and especially as homes of the Humanities that value self-knowledge – that our exceptionalism would lie in being willing to be what one of my colleagues calls the moral rebel:  The person (or, in this case, people) who are able to say – NO, THIS DOESN’T MAKE SENSE.

 

Sadly, my hopes are not being realized.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 


To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.


For other posts on COVID:
I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.
II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).
III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.
VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.
VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument
XIII: Ennui
XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.
XVIII.    I miss my mask?
IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.



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Tuesday, July 21, 2020

More Covid Paranoia – Why Shutting Higher Education Makes Good Fiscal Sense


 

What we don’t know about COVID-19 is staggering.  But the models that we have from former viral infection agents is worrisome, to say the least.  If this is like HIV or Herpes, this could become a lifetime illness that will reoccur at, for instance, times of stress.  If like Herpes, it will become transmittable when it is reactivated, we will need to be guarding against this for a long time – or until we have a reliable vaccine.  If you don’t like wearing a mask now, imagine how you will feel wearing one forever – or intermittently whenever you begin to appear symptomatic. 

 

But that is just the surface problem.  The long term problem could be that we would have dangerous – perhaps even life threatening re-occurrences as we age.  These would need to be treated medically.  And, not only would that be personally dangerous and interfere with our ability to do our jobs intermittently, the medical care will be expensive. 

 

The Universities, it is becoming clear, are reopening this fall because of economic concerns.  Elsewhere I have shown how, for my University, these concerns are related to the importance and value of teaching in person – something that we have been devaluing in trying to compete with other universities to offer lower tuitions.  So we have been backed ourselves into an economic corner where we need to have kids in the classroom in order to break even financially.

 

My concern is that this may be penny wise and pound foolish.  By keeping ourselves afloat, we will create a petri dish for COVID to infect more students, who have gathered from all over country in dorms that are every bit as confined as cruise ships, and the students, as they share the virus amongst themselves, may infect faculty and staff.  Many of our faculty are tenured and most of them eventually will be.  This means they have lifetime contracts with the University.  Our University’s health plan is a self-insurance plan.  That means we pay for the treatments that those we cover need.

 

If COVID becomes a recurring, lifetime illness, we will be paying for treatments for a very long time.  How long can we afford to do that?  How much will we have to raise tuition to do that?  How long will people be able to afford that tuition?  Is this a recipe for long term economic collapse of the University?

 

So, you may say, who cares?  Don’t we have enough Universities?  I think the bigger issue is that opening up our economy before we have a solution to a health threat that we don’t understand means that we are playing Russian roulette not just at the level of the University, but at the level of state and National economies.  Someone is going to have to pay the bills for the long term health care (if COVID recurs) and that someone is going to be all of us.

 

If we are saddling ourselves with a long-term health crisis that will sap our economic strength for a generation in order to prevent short term difficulties, what will that look like in five or ten years?  Wouldn’t it be prudent to slow things down, err on the side of safety, protect our health, and protect our long term economic interests by figuring out how to survive short-term economic difficulties?  In the meantime, we should be social distancing, washing our hands and wearing masks – to protect each other’s health and our long term economic well-being.

 

Ultimately we are not the lone individual in the wilderness fighting to create our own, personal destiny and outcome.  We are a community of people that depend on each other.  We need to act like that.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.


For other posts on COVID:
I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.
II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).
III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.
VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.
VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument
XIII: Ennui
XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.
XVIII.    I miss my mask?
IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.


at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Black Swan: Artistic Madness


 

Black Swan is one of those films that a psychoanalyst, reluctant or not, should have seen a long time ago.  I have been trying to convince the reluctant wife to watch it for a couple of months.  She agrees that we should see it, but she does not like violence – and this film, we both knew, would be filled with intimate violence.  And it necessarily is.

 

This post, btw, follows the plot more closely than most of my posts do.  I think it needs to because of the nature of the plot and my interpretation of it.  That said, when you watch this, it will, inevitably not follow my account – just as those who have seen the film will remember it differently than I do.

 

Black Swan is a film about the artistic process and what it takes to become someone that we both are and are not.  In that sense, it is a coming of age film – but it is a coming of age film that portrays the brutality of coming of age that occurs in public, onstage, in order to achieve something that is unique and also quite extraordinary – an accurate depiction of the contradictory aspects of the human soul.  To do this, the film and the character had to become quite mad.  But not, as some critics and mental health folks would have it, mentally ill.  The madness takes the forms of mental illness because those are the forms available to represent madness – but this is not a film about what is concretely displayed on the screen.  In fact, there are many scenes that clearly bear no relationship to reality not because the character is psychotic, but because it is impossible to represent her state of mind onscreen without her appearing to be psychotic.  And this becomes the entry point for talking about this as a film about psychosis.  But I believe it is not about that at all, but about the intrapsychic madness – the madness of the mind – that goes into becoming someone that the hero is not – and deeply and darkly also is.

 

Natalie Portman plays Nina, the perfectionistic, talented, but mousy corps ballerina in the New York ballet.  She is the daughter of a woman who also danced in the New York ballet – never advancing beyond the corps – Erica Sayers (Barbara Hershey).  Nina still lives with her mother – and her mother is a piece of work.  When Nina, who is battling - likely through anorexia and bulimia – to maintain her emaciation level weight, is offered an ornate cake by her mother to celebrate her getting a role and Nina demurs, her mother threatens to throw the cake away and it is only through what is a well-practiced routine that Nina brings her mother back from the brink.

 

I hope to demonstrate that, diagnostically, there is a lot of stuff here.  Erica – the mother – right off the bat – is precariously balanced.  We would call that a borderline level of ego functioning – meaning that she is neither neurotic nor psychotic, but somewhere in between, with characteristics of both.  She is a successful Mom who has raised, apparently on her own, a talented and competent child, but she is not mature – she needs things from her daughter that a mother shouldn’t.  The daughter could be diagnosed with an eating disorder, but she seems able to manage her mother’s muddles and is functioning quite well professionally – as we will see.  On first blush, she appears to be functioning in the high borderline to low neurotic range – probably with a more solidly developed personality structure than her mother’s.

 

This interaction between mother and daughter captures Nina’s ability to suppress her own desires – to eat – and also to alienate her smothering mother – so that she can be the highly regimented perfectionistic dancer who devotes herself to her craft and, in the process, has come to embody half of the prima ballerina role for which she has been cast – the White Swan in Swan Lake.  The White Swan is actually a human – Odette - who has been imprisoned as a swan by the evil owl-like sorcerer Rothbart.  She spends her days as a swan and becomes human, along with her similarly cursed maids in waiting, only at night at the lake that was created by her mother’s tears when the spell was cast.

 

Perhaps Swan Lake is where the term wounded bird comes from – but whether or not it does, Nina embodies the wounded bird – her emaciated and therefore androgynous body evokes a kind of careful pity from us as viewers and, in the ballet, it precipitates the romantic love of the Prince, who pledges his undying love – even though his evil mother, the Queen, has determined that he must choose a wife at a dinner tomorrow night.  So Nina dances the part of the White Swan well, but the artistic director, Thomas LeRoy (Vincent Cassel) is concerned that she can’t dance the role of the Black Swan - the seductress who uses her strength rather than her weakness to rope men in.  When Nina goes to his office to plead her case, LeRoy grabs her and kisses her, and she bites him in return. 

 

This movie is a pre-#METOO movement movie, and this scene and the others I will be talking about could be seen as reeking of casting couch sexual predation.  Certainly LeRoy is portrayed as a sexual predator by Nina’s Mom and he had a pretty openly sexual relationship with the previous prima ballerina Beth (played by Winona Ryder).  But the sexual interactions between LeRoy and Nina, starting with this one, seem less about his predation and more about his testing and then demanding the transformation from the White Swan role to being able to fully inhabit the Black Swan’s persona.  And LeRoy's interactions, then, are portrayed as being provocative of an artistic growth – and its accompanying and necessary sexual growth – rather than being intended as sexually self-satisfying.  Of course, this may be the self-deluded writing and/or directing of a predator – but as portrayed, the position is that, though madness inducing – the LeRoy's sexual aggression has artistic intent and integrity.

 

We don’t quite know why – though the bite seems to have sealed the deal – Nina, to her surprise, is cast in the role instead of Lily (Mila Kunis).  Lily, whose carefree style allows her to play, to flirt, as Odile – the Black Swan – and to convincingly win the Prince (LeRoy) away from Odette (Nina) when she is dancing the role.  So Nina continues to worry, after having been given the part by LeRoy, that Lilly will steal it from her.  That said, and though LeRoy encourages Nina to model herself on Lily – frankly neither Lily nor Nina have the gravitas that is needed from a Prima Ballerina and neither of them appears ready to be the Black Swan.  Still Nina fears that Lilly is trying to take the part from her.  But she also – and I think rightly – sees Lilly as her double – as her doppelgänger.  They are twins, standing on the edge of being principal ballerinas but neither of them able to quite manage the role yet.  They are too flimsy.  

 

Nina hallucinates Lilly as having her own face at various points and is confused by this – including in a scene that takes place in her bedroom when Lilly is making love to her – while her mother is locked out of the room and objecting that Nina should be asleep and preparing for her work on the stage in the morning.  This is one of those places that critics and psychologists see evidence that Nina is psychotic.  But I don’t think that is what is happening here at all. 

 

This scene begins with Lilly coming to Nina’s apartment to apologize for having made a snarky comment and intending to ask Nina out to do something fun – not knowing that Nina never does anything fun.  Nina’s days are spent in rehearsals and then with her mother, period.  Nina’s mother answers the door, but does not let Lilly in.  Nina, in an uncharacteristic fit, defies her mother, opens the door, invites Lilly in, and then decides to go out on the town with Lilly despite her mother’s objections.  They go to a bar, pick up a couple of guys – Lilly offers Nina ecstasy, which she refuses, but then Nina sees Lilly spiking her drink with it and acquiesces to trying it after being reassured the effects will last for only a couple of hours.  All kinds of chaos ensues and apparently Nina and Lilly end up in bed in Nina’s apartment with Nina’s mother listening at the door to their goings on. 

 

The hitch is that when Nina wakes up late the next morning, Lilly is no longer there, but the door is still barred from the inside.  She shows up late at the stage, where Lilly is dancing the part of the Black Swan in Nina’s absence.  When she confronts Lilly about the night before, Lilly accuses her of having had a Lezzie wet dream about her, and that seems to be the case.  Nina is obsessed with Lilly and her freedom and has fantasized about having her be in her room – though she was also fantasizing about a version of herself making love to her.  Nina was, in this fantasy, her own double – both the innocent being seduced by the Black Swan – she is beginning to become the Black Swan herself – but at this point only the pale version of the Black Swan that Lilly can fulfill – the version of the swan that LeRoy passed on in favor of Nina.

 

But there is still a problem – as talented as Nina is, she is still the White Swan.  She just doesn’t have what it takes to be the Black Swan.  Her mother senses this and calls in sick for her on the day of the performance.  Nina defies her again – this time with finality – and heads, late, to the stage – where LeRoy is preparing Lilly to dance the part based on Nina’s expected no – show.  Nina has a lackluster dance as the White Swan – she falls out of the arms of the person carrying her – and blames her partner for the drop, though we know that she has been reeling and is barely hanging onto herself.  We are worried about her ability to perform the second act, and we don’t doubt that LeRoy is, too.  So it is no surprise to us when Lilly is in the other stall in Nina’s dressing room, preparing to dance the part of the Black Swan.  What is a surprise is that Nina throws Lilly against the mirror, causing the mirror to shatter – and then uses the shards of the mirror to murder Lilly.  She then stuffs Lilly into a closet and prepares to dance the Black Swan…  Ouch.

 

Nina, having murdered someone that she admires – and someone who is also her nemesis – is prepared to be the Black Swan.  Her transformation, from webbed feet, to her skin sprouting feathers, is the powerful climax.  The audience appreciates the dance that she does – we – who are with her and seeing the world from her perspective – experience the transformation in a visually transfixing manner – one that relies heavily on make-up, special effects, and the ability of Nina/Natalie Portman to become the Black Swan.  Having seduced the Prince and the audience, she waltzes off stage to seduce LeRoy – something he has dared her to do – edging her closer and closer to exploring her sexual power, but he is overwhelmed when she achieves it, and we are too.  Nina has become, not Lilly, but the woman who can bite – not just to end an encounter – but to bite off what she may or may not choose to chew on and suddenly it is LeRoy who is in awe of her and not the other way around.  We didn’t know she had it in her.

 

She returns to her dressing room and we are concerned again for her – what is she to do with the body? – but then Lilly shows up at her door to congratulate her on her performance.  What has happened?   Oh, she didn’t destroy Lilly – her Doppelganger – she destroyed herself – thrusting the shards of the shattered mirror not into Lilly but into herself.  She dances the final piece wounded – a piece that culminates in her regarding the Prince, who has been seduced by her nemesis on stage – the Black Swan who is evil Rothbart’s daughter, Odile.  The White Swan – Nina – will never be able to live as a human again – the prince cannot undo his attraction to Odile (which, in this rendering is  Odette’s dark side) – so she is trapped in her Swan body.  She takes in the Prince – LeRoy - and the Queen – her mother – and, rather than live a loveless life, she takes her own life – and the audience erupts with cries of Nina, Nina, Nina, while LeRoy rushes to her and discovers that she is near death – and, curtain!

 

Nina has killed herself.  She has destroyed the mousy persona that allowed her to have the technical chops to become the prima ballerina – but that self must be destroyed for her to make the transition to being the star.  She needs to feel, as the previous prima ballerina, Beth, did – that others are out to get her.  She needs to know that others are working just as hard as she is – that they are just as talented – and she needs to know that she is better than they are – that she can become not just the technically proficient dancer – but the star.  And to do this, Nina must die.  Not the flesh and blood Nina that is portrayed in the film, but the persona that has brought her here.  She must shed that persona like a snake skin so that she can grow into who it is that she can truly be – and this is a terrifying step.  She needs to leave her mother – her protected space where she never had to grow up – her sexless and therefore inviolate self – the one who would not – like her mother had – become pregnant and leave the troop – but more than that – the one who would not be penetrated.  But the penetration had to come – not from LeRoy – but from herself.  She had to marshal the self-destructive forces that she had been relying on to get her – the anorexia, the bulimia, the ability to ignore the pain of the damage to her fingers, the self-harm that she inflicted with her fingernails, all of this had to be directed outward.  She had to gain the claws that she had so carefully trimmed and use them to slay the world, and to slay the part of herself that had contained and repressed her so that she could shine.  And this was a violent transformation.

 

There is a critical scene that helps in this transformation.  Early in the movie, after she has displaced Beth as the prima  ballerina and when Beth is headed to a year of dancing out her string – about which Beth is furious – Beth is struck by an auto and hospitalized.  Nina visits Beth in the hospital twice.  Once as the mousy and worried corps ballerina who won’t wake the sleeping Beth but can see the extent of her injuries – Beth will surely never dance again.  And the second time to return the things she has stolen from Beth – the little trinkets that connected her to Beth.  These include the nail file that Nina has been using to file down her claws – to stop herself from scratching herself.  Beth takes this implement of non-destruction and, in a weird set of images, stabs herself with them.  Nina, horrified, retreats, only to discover that she is carrying the bloody nail file.  Did Nina inflict the wounds?  Is she psychotic enough to imagine that Beth did it when she was murdering her?  From the perspective of having seen Nina’s murder of Lilly as an imagined event – we can now appreciate that Nina has imagined this horrific and surreal scene.  It represents an important transition towards becoming the Black Swan: Nina is acknowledging that her advancement – her achievement of her own goals – is coming at the cost of Beth (and her Mother’s) realization of their mortality – of the loss of their own powers.  Nina’s birth robbed her mother just as her appointment robbed Beth – but it is also the case that her mother and Beth were at the end of their string anyway (Beth is, I think, the age that Nina’s mother was when Nina was born – 28).

 

So how are we to understand Nina?  Her character starts out at a Neurotic to high Borderline level, but becomes – necessarily – less well organized – more fluid – she enters into a temporary state of madness - in order to re-own the aspects of her character that have been disowned as she has worked to inhabit the role of the Black Swan and the persona of the prima ballerina.  This trajectory is similar to the trajectory that is taken in the successful transition from adolescence to adulthood – and in a successful long term treatment of an overly constricted individual.  This is a violent process.  Well-earned skills and habits are loosened up – which is terrifying.  If I can’t do what protects me, what will happen to me?  And all kinds of paranoid fears emerge – my peers want what I have – my mother is jealous of me – and, though the thoughts may be paranoid – meaning that they are borne out of a projection of inner fears into the world – they may also reflect what is actually going on out there – both Lilly and Nina’s mother are, I think, jealous of her.  And it takes courage to be the apparent instrument of their demise.  And it takes a strong soul to see that though both they and you believe this to be the case, it is not.  But without that courage and strength, great art, growth, and healing cannot take place.



Birdman is a middle aged male variation on this theme that you may enjoy reading about.

For another way to think about the horror aspects of this film - some of which are described above - see a post on Bride of Frankenstein.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 


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Monday, July 13, 2020

Get Back in that Classroom! A Professor’s Paranoid Covid Ruminations


 

My Grandfather’s motto was:  Health first, then school, then other things.  He was a diehard Republican (of the pre-hijacked party – one that believed that our country should be self-governed, not none -governed).  The president of the college where I teach is a Jesuit priest.  He used to be a stickler about not calling snow days – then one of our students died on her way into class in an auto accident on a day when many other schools were out.  Since then he has more closely followed the local norms for school closings.  The President of our country has lost all pretense of caring for the well-being of the citizens.  He is interested in re-election and believes that a thriving economy is the ticket to get there.  He might change his mind and decide that supporting masks will be the way to get there, but I don’t expect him to start really caring about people.

 

We are one month away from the planned start of school.  The plan at this point is for all of our students to come to campus.  In a typical year we have students from 40 or more states and at least 10 foreign countries.  They descend on campus, live in tight quarters, and pass around bugs – they create a veritable petri dish of infectious diseases. 

 

Our corner of the country is not getting a whole lot of press.  Our curve is rising, but not as fast as the South and Southwest.  Our county is at the next to highest level of concern based on the governor’s newest method of rating risk (our Republican governor is very old school and has done a magnificent job of working with a legislature that would deny the difficulties of this illness and with the citizens and praising them for the restraint they have shown until recently).  We are opening up – but the hospitals in my corner of the state are full.  We are close to a tipping point in terms of being able to handle new cases.

 

Why don’t we go to virtual classrooms?  There are two interwoven reasons.  The first and most important one is that boots on the ground, breath the same air experiences are better than virtual experiences for the cohort that comes to our university.  Distance learning works well for some – for highly motivated learners – which includes non-traditional students who are working to move into careers that will better tap into their talents – and for traditional students who are interested and able to be in virtual classrooms.

 

Ten years ago, I remember being shocked to discover that on many state university campuses, students were spending their entire college careers living in dorms and never setting foot in a classroom – they were only taking virtual classes.  And this weird configuration highlights the other reason to be boots on the ground – that petri dish creates lots of good stuff – presumably the kids living on campus but taking on-line courses were forming lifetime friendships, considering marriages, and learning the social skills that help us transition from adolescent functioning to being ready for what is now called adulting.

 

So the first issue is that in class learning has value – on many different levels.   But we have been consistently ignoring this value – we have actually been actively devaluing a college education.  I know, it is hard to say that given the cost of college.  It is crazy expensive.  But two things have led to that – the first is the ballooning of auxiliary services that are part and parcel of delivering a competitive education.  Things like computer access and screens in every classroom, along with white boards and chalkboards plus various offices on campus to manage a variety of student concerns but also to help students engage more fully in the college experience – salaries of faculty are certainly part of that mix (though I make less than some high school instructors and policemen in this city).  There is also the cost at State Universities of maintaining a large research facility.

 

In our little world, our President (and the one before him) have what I call an Edifice complex.  We have built lots of shiny new buildings – most recently a gym that looks very modern – unlike our old functional but dowdy building that wasn’t part of the tour given to students and their parents when they came to school.  Unlike the old buildings, which were named for Jesuit priests, the new buildings are named for donors – but the donors only provide about a quarter of the cost of the buildings and we have borrowed money for the rest.  So we have a huge amount of debt (I have told a cautionary tale before about building debt and the ability of a psychiatric hospital to survive bad economic times).

 

So, while the costs of providing a quality education have been going up in necessary and optional ways, we have been devaluing the education that should be central to what a University does by offering scholarships – which are internally referred to as discounts – on our tuition.  Our discount rate (I sometimes feel like I work at a Wal-Mart) is currently around 52%.  What we DON’T discount is room and board.  Parents get it that it costs money to house and feed kids.  So room and board has become our cash cow.  We have gone deeply into debt partly in order to have more dormitory rooms.  This means we need to fill those rooms in order to stay financially afloat.  If we go to all on-line learning, we won’t bring in enough money to service the debt we have taken on to subsidize the lower tuition rates that we have (I know – they are still quite high) and we will lose one million dollars for every week that we do not have butts in seats (and in dorms).

 

Earlier today I got a call from a high school classmate.  She is facing the same dilemma I am – only she will be going into a classroom with very young children – children who, when they need a hug, need a hug.  They simply can’t survive without one.  And suddenly that becomes a risky thing to do.  She wants to know if we should just retire.  I am five years away from my planned retirement (and so, more or less, is she - we went to school together).  Should we just stop now?  Financially that would pose the same problems that the school is facing.  I have debts that need to be paid out of my income.

 

Is President Trump Chairman Mao?  Is this the great purge of academics that Mao undertook?  I don’t think Trump has any love for us.  He knows that we are mostly liberals and likely will vote against him in the fall, but I don’t think that he is thinking (when I am rational) that killing us is the way to get back into office.  I also don’t think my own President wants to kill me (most of the time – sometimes he does get pretty angry with me – and with the rest of the faculty).  I would hate for him to realize, after we had become a superspreader site and many of our older faculty and staff are hospitalized that he had made a mistake – the way he did with the snow days.  But we are in a bind.

 

I wish that there were a way to put all debt on hold for a year – perhaps even to simply devalue all property.  And then to reduce the debt to be consistent with the new value of the property.  We need to put things on pause so that we can follow my grandfather’s admonition and take care of our health before we take care of other things.  This will require visionary thinking and remarkable leadership – both of which seem in short supply on both the national and the local level.


I remember a conversation with one of our staff who is in charge of our buildings and grounds.  I was arguing that we didn't need to have all of our buildings be in tip top shape.  In fact, when we were thinking about refurbishing the main liberal arts classroom building on campus, the architects met with faculty to get a sense of what a liberal arts building should look like.  They fondly said that it should be old - and that it should be comfortable.  There should be places to throw yourself onto an old couch so that you could curl up with a book.  But the buildings and grounds guy said that doesn't appeal to today's students - and if we don't keep our buildings up to date, their value plummets.  My counter?  The value of the buildings on our campus is directly related to what happens inside of them, not what they look like.  We need to make the experience of being in the classroom as valuable as we can.


Paradoxically, we live in a time when that value may not be accessible for some time.  That is a problem for the students, faculty and staff who want to be there.  And for the fiscal well-being of the school.  But if we don't keep health first as a motto, we may not have a community of teachers to return to.

 

In a month, I will be requiring all of my students to wear masks.  I will be masked.  I will spend as little time on campus as I can and I will wash my hands as frequently as I am able.  And I will pray that we all come through this OK… And I will try to keep my paranoid and vindictive thoughts at bay (including those about 30 pieces of silver...).

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 


To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.


For other posts on COVID:
I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.
II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).
III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.
VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.
VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument
XIII: Ennui
XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.
XVIII.    I miss my mask?
IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.


 

 

 

 


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