LY #101 The Lost Last Time for Telephone

I didn't plan to write about Community on Tuesday.  I'd planned to write about the last time I was able to experience one of my favorite in-class activities -- Public Telephone.  But, sadly, classes were cancelled out of concern for student safety.  I will never lead this activity again.  And the countdown continues.

Richard Estes, Telephone Booths (1977) at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Now, I was somewhat annoyed by this because the danger to students was weather related and was over long before my class started in early evening.  The decision was made around 6 a.m. to cancel classes for the entire day, with the emergency call going out at 6:15.  There was black ice covering the ground throughout the region.  Most of it was gone by noon.  When it was still gone through the entire afternoon, evening, and night, I felt annoyed that I'd lost a whole week of class and especially because I'd lost my last chance to enjoy this activity.

Because of my annoyance I tried to track down the reason the school was closed the entire day rather than just during the morning.  After a few dead ends I received help from Cady-Mae, a lovely and intelligent young woman who works in the public safety office.  With her help I found out that a committee of ten makes the school closure decision after looking at a handful of extremely legitimate sources, including local weather sources, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Weather Channel, and a few other sites.  And, as we all know, the best meteorologists in the world can be wrong about the weather.  I certainly felt better about losing the day once Cady-Mae and a colleague of hers were willing to tell me what upper-level administrators were not -- just where their weather information came from.

So, back to this favorite activity.  It's really pretty simple but it has a powerful impact.  It's all about listening. 

1. I ask for six volunteers.  I take these folks outside of class and tell them to chat with each other and figure out who is the best listener.
2. I go back into the classroom and explain the activity to the other students.  They are to observe and take notes.  I hand out "the story" to the students in the classroom.  (The story I've used most recently is listed below.)
3. After setting up two chairs or desks face to face either in the front of the classroom or in the center (I prefer in the center of a circle of desks), I invite in the volunteer identified "best listener."  The other volunteers wait outside.
4. I read the story aloud to the first volunteer, emphasizing that he or she will need to tell the story to the next person.
5. Then, once I am done, that volunteer calls in the next one, who calls in the next, who calls in the next.

You see why I call it "Public Telephone."  Like the game "Telephone," the story changes from person to person.  Usually it shrinks.  And it's public because there's an audience for the shrinkage.  The changes in the story usually result in laughter from the audience which, of course, increases the volunteers problems with remembering and repeating the story.

Sometimes students have used "good" listening skills during the game.  I have not prohibited them from taking notes or asking questions, though very rarely do they ask if they can use those effective listening skills.  And just as rarely, even though they've allegedly read the chapter on listening, have they used paraphrasing. 

While effective listening is made visible by its usual absence, ineffective listening habits and environmental factors that make listening difficult are also easy to observe.  The audience is a huge distraction to the volunteers, as are their own inner monologues about performance and expectations of perfection.  The message I've crafted is purposefully scattered and hysterical, making it difficult to remember.  I always make sure to encourage the performers to talk about their experience and let them know that the ineffective listening was not just "their fault" but built into the situation.

When I first adapted this activity from a teacher's handbook back in the early 90s, I used the story in the handbook about a taxi driver.  But it just never fit my students.  After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I started using a "crisis" story; one that reflected the disastrous communication errors made by some of the helping organizations during that terrible event.  This story also allowed me to talk not only about listening skills but also about how important it is to create clear messages in an emergency situation. 

If you know anyone teaching interpersonal communication you are welcome to share this with them.  I take no ownership.

THE PUBLIC TELEPHONE CRISIS STORY

Imagine you are working in a crisis situation.  Use all the listening skills you can think of because you’re going to have to pass along this story to the next person.

Here’s what you need to tell the next person.  We need to get to work.  There’s a big fire rolling over Awbrey Butte.  Some jerk tossed a cigarette or something.  Who knows.  Anyway,  Bob Henderson is supposed to lead four vans to the dorm at the top of the hill.  The other three drivers are Kowalski, Smith and Wesson.  The wind has kicked the fire over a couple of roads so we want the students evacuated to the north if there’s still time.  We’re having problems with communications now.  Cell phones aren’t working and we don’t know which roads are open.  What you’re supposed to do is hurry people into the vans and keep them from carrying too much of their junk out of the dorm.  Some of them will want to take a lot of stuff.  The rule is, one backpack or one laptop bag.  That’s all they can carry.  Just one bag.  And no weapons.  So help the four drivers get students into the vans and then run through the dorms and look into every room, make sure no one’s passed out or sleeping, ok?  You got it?  If so, you can pass on this story to the next person.

LY #100 Blogging vs Newsing

Today I had an experience that taught me one of the big differences between writing this "change of life" blog and writing news.  In trying to track down the reason for a school decision that annoyed me I found that I was talking with friends, people I like and respect, and getting answers that weren't answers that I'd accept from students.  When I question students, I want them to refer to facts and to be able to tell me their sources.  When I got information from friends I got rather amorphous "best possible sources" without any data.  And because they were friends, I didn't push it.

If I were a journalist, I'd be required and expected to push.  Same with sales.  Salespeople have to be able to push.  Now, I have a good friend who is an excellent salesperson who has a deep belief in the humanitarian activity being sold.  My friend tells me that sales is all about establishing relationship. 

Yet relationship is the very reason I'm not a salesperson or a newsman, as my father wanted me to be.  Well, until he found out I was going to be a "college" professor.  (Somehow he never was able to say "community college professor.)  Being a professor had more status, in his mind, than being a newsman.  Anyway, my big problem with any activity requiring pushiness and hustle is that I can take no for an answer.  Especially from my friends.  My foot doesn't get stuck in doors.  I'm not the squeaky wheel.   When it comes to addressing conflict, I must quote Charlie Brown:  “No problem is so big or so complicated that it can't be run away from!” 

Since this is my hundredth retirement blog post, I should have a little celebration.

Boston July 4 fireworks on a TV in a Boston flat

LY #99 Community

So two of my younger students approached me after the Visual Rhetoric class to ask if I'd been watching this season of Community.  I hadn't.  So I've been catching up.

I must recommend Episode 502 "Intro to Teaching".  Jeff Winger becomes a law professor!  He takes a job at Greendale Community College so he won't starve.  His first day of class is the worst. first. day. ever.   He jumps into the classroom with no preparation at all.  He asks if there are any questions.  One student says, "Will there be a syllabus?"  Jeff doesn't know what a syllabus is!!


There's also a cranky old time teacher who" laughs when Jeff says teaching is a short-term gig. He thought the same thing... 15 years ago."

There's a happy ending -- Jeff does learn how to teach and Abed does survive his possession by the spirit of Nicholas Cage after taking a class called, "Nicholas Cage:  Good or Bad!"

The kids who protest for "Slightly higher grades!"

The Dean saying to Jeff, "If I fire you you're likely to starve and die.  Do you want me to cut your meatball?"

I disagree with some of the jokes, but still enjoyed the satire.

LY #98 Alexander Payne's Comedy of Fanaticism

Laura Dern (foreground) in Citizen Ruth

As a rhetorician I tend to see all texts, no matter how artistic or entertaining, as persuasive.  But some texts are made to be rhetorical.  This weekend we watched Citizen Ruth (1997), a dark and funny satire on the abortion debate.  I didn't think I'd like it because I find the national debate so debilitating and off-putting.  Nevertheless, I was caught from moment we see our "heroine" being dragged off to jail for huffing patio sealant by cops who know her name. 

I wouldn't have ordered this from Netflix but my spouse wants to see all the movies directed by fellow Nebraskan Alexander Payne, whose Nebraska is currently nominated for six Oscars.  When I read the description I was still hesitant.  But the movie was quite powerful as it presented its sharp and yet still strangely respectful portraits of the fanatics on both sides of the national debate.  Even though the quirky wrong-headedness of most of the characters is fully revealed, none of them are presented as hateful.  Each character has his or her reasons for their way of being in the world.  There isn't the sense here, as there is in some of the Coen Bros movies, that middle-Americans are lesser beings than filmmakers.

A spacey Laura Dern is the huffing addict Ruth.  She has already had four kids that have been taken from her and she has been declared an unfit parent.  At the movie's start, she is facing a felony charge for getting pregnant again.  The judge encourages her to "have it taken care of."  As she lies in a fetal position in the jail cell she prays to God to help her.  At that moment a group of singing Pro-Life demonstrators is brought in for violating distance rules at the local clinic.  Ruth is taken up by this group, called Baby Savers.   A married couple, Norm and Gail Stoney (Kurtwood Smith and Mary Kay Place), members of the group, bring her into their house and say they will take care of her until she has the baby.  While this couple is a stereotype of what the left thinks of Good Christian People, they are also struggling folks with whom we can identify.  Gail struggles with a loudmouthed teenage daughter who sneaks out of the house and Norm is a put-upon employee of a Wal-Mart type store.  When the sound tracks picks up the tunes of hymns sung by the Christians, it doesn't do so in a condescending manner.

Nor is it condescending when the other side sings songs to the moon.  Oh, yes, there are Pro-Choice people who are presented just as satirically as the other side.  One of the Baby Savers turns out to be a Pro-Choice spy (Swoozie Kurtz) who whisks Ruth away from the Stoneys to the wilderness retreat she shares with her lesbian lover (Kelly Preston).  Like the true believers on the other side, who sing to Jesus, these women sing to nature.  And also, like the Baby Savers, they want to use Ruth to send a message.

Ruth isn't interested in either side using her as a rhetorical trope.  She bolts from each side when they try and constrain her, but then is brought back  by money.  A bidding war for her "choice" begins. At the top of the Pro-Choice side is the carefully coiffed Jessica Weiss, played by Tippi Hedren looking as cool and collected as she did in Hitchcock's Marnie.   In other words, she looks like she could be covering up a whole lot of crazy.  At the top of the Pro-Life heap is Blaine Gibbons, played by Burt Reynolds an unctuous and scarey Elmer Gantry type with a boy-toy on the side and a horrible hairpiece on top.  Payne presents both the Pro-Choice and the Pro-Life extremists as believing more in their cause than in the living person(s) they're dealing with. 

Payne, in his role as Author and Deus-Ex-Machina, gives Ruth an out by supplying a miscarriage that she doesn't tell anyone about.  I think that this plot device also keeps us focused more on the "dialogue" between the sides than on the actual choice that Ruth will need to make.  I don't think Payne and his co-author Jim Taylor wanted our focus to be on the actual life of the foetus or child.  They wanted us to think about the ethics of using other human beings as symbols for a cause.

LY #97 Sherlockian Fannishness

I was first introduced to Mr. Sherlock Holmes in 1966 when I was in 6th Grade.  He was on the case of the Baskerville Hound.  I was  immediately taken by him, as has been much of the civilized planet. According to Don Hobbs, a collector of Holmes books interviewed by CBS for their promotional story last Sunday, the stories have been translated into 98 languages.  (Much of this video, by the way, with Mo Rocca doing interviews at 221 B Con, must have been shot last April.)

The year after I met Sherlock Holmes, I purchased my very first "expensive" book:  a copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes.  (Around $6.00)  Later, in high school, I would buy another expensive Holmes book:  The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by W.S. Baring-Gould (around $24).  I forget for which one I had to sell my bicycle to afford.  For a short time I became an expert in "the canon."  Actually, it was through the Annotated that I learned the meaning of the word "canon" as it related to something that didn't shoot.

But life happened to me at the end of my junior year in high school.  I became more emotionally invested in people than in fictional characters.  My fannish psychology moved into something that contained elements of its obsessiveness without the safety of its target.  But that's for another post.

Recently, I've come to love the detective again, this time in the shape of Benedict Cumberbatch.   The January 27th New Yorker has a lovely article by Emily Nussbaum that reviews the historical association between Holmes and his fans before discussing the BBC series take on the sociopathic genius and his "love affair" with his number one fan, John Watson.  Like NCIS, the police procedural that's the most popular broadcast TV show in the United States, this reboot of the contemporary Holmes franchise is focused on character relationships more than solving crimes.

I loved the first episode of the 3rd season of Sherlock because it showed, for the first time in any media I can remember, what Watson felt on the return of his friend from death.  I can remember that when I read The Adventure of the Empty House way back in 1966 I was surprised that Watson didn't have much emotional response to the resurrection of his close friend and companion, a death he'd detailed in The Final Problem, his magazine story about Holmes plummeting to glory at the Reichenbach Falls.  (You see, just like other fanatics, I'm now referring to Watson, not Doyle, as the creator of the stories.)   Sherlock's presentation of John's rage at his friend's lack of compassion showed the writers' understanding of human psychology, as did the length of time it took for the two to get back together again. 

And speaking of things that take time, here's a little video collage Tribute to The Hound of the Baskervilles.  I started and abandoned it last spring and finished it this week.

More appropriate to The Empty Hearse is this poem imagining Conan Doyle's visit to the small town near those famous falls of Reichenbach.  I wrote it several years ago and in it hoped to express Doyle's hatred of his more famous creation.

Poem (c) Kake Huck 2008

CONAN DOYLE AT MEIRINGEN, SWITZERLAND, 1891

A man is no Napoleon, no sweet

Served after dinner: though introspective
His work and worth should satisfy like meat

Not mille feuille flat and folded, puffy pleats
Of sugared dough and custard.  The objective
Of creation is social change. So sweet

May be successful, but fame is fleet
As after-dinner comfort.  Collective
Tastes are fickle.  What satisfies like meat

Today is tasteless tomorrow.  They eat
and leave.  No publisher’s directive
turns a writer to Napoleon. Sweet

freedom demands action! Time to meet
my destiny without his protective
fame.  Life without him will be my meat.

Neither these Falls nor my Doctor was effective
In murdering the world’s greatest detective.
I was that crime’s Napoleon, and sweet
the work and words that turn him into meat.

LY #96 CSI's Boomer Rhetoric

This post contains spoilers for the January 22nd episode of CSI:  Crime Scene Investigation.  Season 14 episode 13.

Boston Brakes CSI 1413

Last night's episode abandoned this season's Perry Masonesque practice of locating guilt in the LSP (Least Suspected Person).*  Instead, it offered a story that was less a "who done it" than an argument about the power and decency of government agencies. On one side of the argument is our belief in reporters who share information on government over-reaching.  On the other side our belief that government agencies are actually on our side.

The story turned a reporter, John Merchiston, portrayed in earlier episodes as a celebrity journalist, into an Glenn Greenwald type, hot on the trail of a story about government surveillance and accepting leaks from an Edward Snowden type code-named "Suvari".   Early on we see the CSIs watching a video of an interviewer telling Merchiston that he's gone from being a "Rock journalist to quixotic muckraker."  And Murchiston says,  "I'm just a seeker of the truth. . . In our obsession with security we may be relinquishing our freedom, surrendering to the real enemy - fear."

The plot of the show weaves around a series of killings:  of Merchiston's assistant who dies in an exploding car (causing everyone to think that it's the reporter who is dead) and the buxom young woman who contacted him to pass on a thumb-drive from Suvari.  There's even an earlier murder of a government worker who may have had an affair with an air force general.

At first, the argument for Merchiston is pretty weak.  CSI Finlay (who has probably had a romantic involvement with him) calls him paranoid.  His lawyer says that "His story was going nowhere . . . John's own worst enemy was always himself."    At one point, as evidence is found linking Merchiston to the killing of the young woman, CSI Nick Stokes says, "He's a stone-cold killer."  And when we see Merchiston in the flesh after the car crash, he is red-eyed and crazy acting.

But we also see that CSI D.B. Cooper, head of the night time shift at the crime lab, believes him and seems to be on his side, risking arrest by taking the reporter to Finlay's house so that he's safe.  Over the program we slowly find out that Finlay wasn't paranoid, that someone had indeed been tampering with the evidence, hacking crime lab computers, and putting "back seat driving" capabilities into contemporary cars. 

As the case against the reporter gradually erodes, so does the "case" against the FBI.  At first we see them as dark suited and unfriendly automatons.  They enter the crime lab like a regimented pack, carrying out evidence in the case.  Later there's a scene in which an offensive FBI agent is interrogating Finlay with Brass standing in the room observing.  After the agent makes particularly rude sexual comment to her about her relationship with Merchiston, Brass steps in and says, "Screw you!" and then turns to Julie saying, "Isn't that what you wanted to say?"  He then tells the agent, "My house, my rules" and that he needs to be nicer.  The action taken by one of our beloved regular characters against an FBI agent shows the Bureau in a bad light.

But this light fades as the FBI joins forces the Las Vegas police later in the program.   After a car Nick Stokes and the lawyer are "driving" has been hacked and almost kills them, CSI Greg Sanders says to another FBI agent, "Like I told you the truth would set us free."  The agent tells Greg, "Like I told you, we're on the same side." 

It turns out that while inappropriate snooping was going on, it wasn't being done by the agency itself but by an Air Force General Robert Lonsdale.  The show ends with a sharp confrontation between Lonsdale and DB, the former on the side of "Everything for national security" and the latter representing both the law and freedom.

DB:  "I know what you've done.  You've used the entire national security apparatus, all of their technology, to cover up an affair."
Lonsdale:  "You don't know what I've done.  And even if you did you couldn't understand it.  You're not a soldier, a patriot.  You are just another child of the Sixties who cloaks himself in principle while our enemies plot to bring chaos to our streets.  I am not going to let that happen and I will stop anybody who gets in my way."

DB then says that his "hippie parents" taught him patience and that Lonsdale has involved way too many people for his crimes to remain hidden.  "Someday there's going to be another . . . person of conscience and when they step up I'm going to be right there waiting patiently for you.  You're dismissed, General."

So the bad guy is neither the reporter (the media) nor the government itself, but a single individual who is high enough placed that he can misuse the secret tools designed to protect the people.  And the good guy is the baby boomer team leader who has the moral authority to challenge the bad guy who seems to be protected by a governmental cloak of invisibility.




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* This concept is an old one but I got the acronym from listening a Great Detectives of Old Time Radio podcast of a 1946 episode of the radio mystery, Casebook of Gregory Hood.  The episode was entitled, "The Three Silver Pesos."