Homeostasis,
the tendency of a system or a person to maintain internal stability and resist
change, can get easily upset, especially in the change from high school to
college. I definitely felt my homeostasis slip away on September 3, 2015 , as I
entered my first semester's composition class. The wildly gray-haired instructor with
the observant blue eyes asked us to think of him as a coach or midwife and to
call him KP, just like his writing clients do in the real world. He said looking
at the backs of one another’s heads put us at a disadvantage, another example
of how the education industry was “running game” on us, and invited us to arrange
our desks into a circle so that we could see one another better. We wrote our
names on tags we hung from our seats, looked around and introduced ourselves. After
we read the syllabus aloud, he asked us to take ownership of the course, journal
on our experience (75 pages!), get to know each other, author our own author-ity,
discover our identities as writers and not mind a little homeostatic upset.
He may
not have realized that his interrogation of everything had already threatened
our homeostasis. As class ended, some shook their heads, rolled their eyes or
huffed their discontent. Was he too unpredictable for the grade-centric, too participatory
for the shy, too poetic for the more rectilinear among us? Although some called
him a hopeless nut case, insane weirdo or serious whack job, I felt intrigued
by his strange antics, irreverent disposition and passionate bursts of ideas. He
wasn’t merely critiquing our conventional expectations; he was celebrating an
alternative that would prove life-changing for me. So, over the next few weeks,
I gathered the evidence, but his medicine proved useful only after I took to
heart his diagnosis of our millennial generation’s illness—we’re in peer competition;
we fear being judged; we have weak attention spans co-opted by smart phones (“magic
power devices” in KP-speak), computer screens, texts, TV—so we are reactive,
not proactive (Gordon, interview).
Regarding
our inability to listen for long, he called the prompts we’d been given for
writing assignments in high school can’t-fail, paint-by-number exercises that eliminated
thoughtful responses in favor of predictable mediocrity. He delivered to us
what service providers at Hofstra had delivered to him: We, having had no
experience out of our homeostasis, could not make use of the university’s
resources that we had already paid for (Gordon, class discussion). Hence, our
first prompts, though activity-driven—a) convince the class that one’s peer
interviewee is an asset to us; b) experience a service at Hofstra, interview
the service provider and convince us to participate in the service—came with
no written instructions. As one of our best writers put it, “At first I was frustrated
with a lack of direction because growing up all we had was a sheet of paper
with an assignment and we stuck to that, but with KP I discovered that there is
more room to express ourselves freely without fear of being greatly penalized
in our work. Not only does it allow for creative freedom, but it removes the
stress from writing essays” (Solis). Ironically, his encouragement of our
transcending convention rather than enforcing it granted greater capacity to
express, as well as to entertain, new ideas.
He talked
ideas often and he increased my attention span with his animated commentaries: a
combination of playful asides and cliff-hanging transitions, puns and double entendres, song lyrics
and poem quotes, jazz and jailhouse slang, exclamations in other tongues. His
rapid-fire delivery burst our little high school bubbles, but I sensed another
motive more sinister than shock and awe. His trust-your-gut-&-let-go-into-the-flow
convo style invited us to treat language as a tool for discovery rather than a
restricting set of rules that kept us in our places. He also caused me to reconsider strategies for
conveying a thesis as well as new ways to interpret data. As Sydney put it,
“When he first starts talking, there is that doomed moment of total uncertainty
about where he is going, but after slowly internalizing his diverse ramblings into
a coherent whole, it turns out that his ideas can be applied with great benefit
to most aspects of our college intellectual life” (Chesworth).
Like he
predicted, we did need one another—as study buddies, as readers of our
journals, as peer reviewers and as writers capable of taking feedback—to
repudiate the banking concept of education (Freire, 1) with a problem-posing
method that engages us as peers. My heart opened while reading a blog post from
his former student fresh from the Ivy League and a life-threatening coma who
described KP “as being the weirdest person in the room in order to ensure that
no one feels alienated by their fellow classmates” (Weiss, par. 3). His asking
us to take him as he is meant that he wanted us to be ourselves and “quit
frontin’.” Because of (or in spite of) his behavior, we learned to speak our
minds and share notions that we may have otherwise rejected as below standard
or out of orbit.
In
essence, his wide-angle, learn-by-doing method suggests that we create room for all the possibilities, including
the non-rational, intuitional and oddball notion. This involves an attitude
adjustment about making mistakes or getting judged and leads to a more dynamic
exchange of ideas. We students are allies to each other rather than aliens and one
another’s greatest resource; the success of our peers is not a threat to
our achievement within the class. Intellectual growth of those around us only
encourages and evokes development within our expanding minds. Learning of the
upmost importance occurs within our one-on-one experience, and it is the
heart-to-heart, eye-to-eye conversations with our equals that provide us with
life lessons that will extend further beyond our schooling years. Developing
close interpersonal relationships facilitates the improvement of our skills as
writers and thinkers. As a service to one another, KP asks us to critique the
work our peers have presented and to offer praise when praise is due as well as
offer solutions to what is problematically expressed. Not only must one be honest
and tactful but also be willing to change one’s mind without fear of failure, which
is particularly relevant because, preceding our university experience, we were
tricked into becoming slightly different versions of the ideal student in order
to get accepted by our dream college. We lost our individuality without any recognition
of it even happening. Now that we have become acutely aware of this loss, we must
regain the original and unafraid voices that we rightfully possess.
Nothing
has stimulated this unlearning/re-learning process for me like discussions
following reading assignments. From the parable of the Chinese farmer to the
Gestalt vase/facial profile image, from Chuang Tzu’s butterfly dream to
Lawrence Kohlberg’s levels of moral development, from Plato’s “Allegory of the
Cave” to Alan
Watts’ The Book: On the Taboo Against
Knowing Who You Are, from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
to John Smitanka’s “A Reflection on the Purpose of
Higher Education,”
from Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” to Susan Faludi’s Backlash, from Malcolm X’s “The Ballot
ot the Bullet” to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and
Thomas Frank’s eye to contemporary university life alongside Roksa and Arum’s “Life after College,” I
better sense
reality’s multi-dimensional threshold. Talks about Taoism, Buddhism and other
meditation-driven philosophies have inspired me to research ideas that had
previously seemed bizarre, but I can now confidently say I identify with.
Having
grown up in a strict, conservative household where I was constantly spoon-fed
beliefs that I had to follow, I
wouldn’t have even thought to reach beyond the Roman Catholic, predetermined,
obedience-driven mold bestowed upon me. When I thought of school or church, it
was the image of a machine filing in students and turning them out as plastic,
uniformly faced learners from the music video by Pink Floyd, accompanied by the
words: “We don’t need no thought control … all and all, you’re just another brick
in the wall” (Pink Floyd). Now, for the first time in my educational career, my
point of view is not limited by my mother’s fear-based, overbearing restrictions.
I have expanded my ways of thinking and have been met with enthusiasm by my
classmates. Having intellectually grown as an individual due to this inimitable
character, I now understand what was meant by the comment: “With KP, you will
do more than just learn” (Anonymous).
Works
Cited
Anonymous.
“Paul K. Gordon at Hofstra University –
RateMyProfessors.com.” N.p., 25 May
2015. Web. 28
Oct. 2015 .
Chesworth,
Sydney. Personal interview. 27
Oct. 2015 .
Freire,
Paulo. “The Banking Concept of Education.” thinkingtogether.org. 4 Feb. 2004. Web. 5 Sep. 2015.
Gordon,
Paul Kirpal. Class discussion. 3 Sep.
2015 .
Gordon,
Paul Kirpal. Personal interview. 6 Oct.
2015 .
Pink
Floyd. “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).” The Wall. 1979. CD.
Solis,
Lola. Personal interview. 27
Oct. 2015 .
Weiss,
Jared, “The Power of Belief,” Taking
Giant Steps Blog, 23
Nov. 2015 .
After reading Kelsey’s article, it made me realize and appreciate how fortunate some people are. Very rarely do we ever just pause, zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Kelsey mentioned how she had grown up in a very strict and conservative household, and that she didn’t have much say in how she felt or what she believed. It seems like such a little thing to me at times, but I can be ignorant to the fact that not everybody has the same freedom and power that others my age have been given. While, of course, I grew up with rules, I have always been nonconventional. I have always done my own thing, regardless of how “cool” I did or didn’t look. I’ve always had my own styles, beliefs, opinions and mindset. And it’s pretty crazy to think that even here, in the most free country in the world, not everybody truly does have the freedom of speech.
ReplyDeleteAt another point in the article, Kelsey mentioned that nowadays people tend to lose themselves while trying to mold to the stereotypical norms that the world has created. I couldn’t agree more with that point, and it has actually been something that I’ve been a firm believer in for a long while. People are too invested and worried with the way they think they may be perceived, that they’ll put on a mask that eventually molds them into a completely different person. It’s become such a pressing matter with current society, that the pressure some people feel to please others has completely overpowered ones desire to please themself. I really love how Kelsey related these topics to the Pink Floyd song, because it goes along perfectly with everything I’ve just expressed. Just because a wall needs to be built, doesn’t mean you have to be one of the bricks in the making. As KP said yesterday, “You are the agent of change.” I feel as though being a part of KP’s class will be a great opportunity for many students to re-open their eyes and see the truths about the world we live in.
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