tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11966516748328368652024-02-18T22:02:26.098-06:00The Logic of Long Distanceconnecting running and philosophyJeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.comBlogger230125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-76763316492202824292017-10-17T16:37:00.000-05:002017-10-17T16:42:42.365-05:00Thoughts on Training for the Experienced RunnerBeing out of the sport for 3 years has had its downsides (<a href="http://www.logicoflongdistance.com/2016/01/a-runners-view-of-elliptical.html" target="_blank">namely the elliptical</a>). On the other hand, it's also been a chance to learn a bit about what my body has held onto over a period of 3 years of not running, and what it lost.<br />
<br />
1. <u>Aerobic strength has been least affected</u>. A month or so into my return, I was able to run 10 miles at a strong pace, close to the paces I ran at my top fitness. Of course I couldn't do it day after day, but it was surprising to me how easy it's been to get back to running 70+ minutes.<br />
<br />
2. <u>Muscle strength/resiliency has been most effected</u>. While the aerobic engine is still strong, my tendons and muscles -- the chassis to the aerobic engine -- have been slower to adapt to the demands of training.<br />
<br />
3. <u>Sustained "hard effort" running is coming back steadily, but slowly</u>. My ability to run faster paces and intervals, from marathon pace to 5k pace is increasing week to week. It's fun to feel like I'm on the improvement curve there, but as always it sort of works from plateau to plateau, with occasional days where I feel off.<br />
<br />
I think there are lessons here for the older, experienced runner.<br />
<br />
<b>Base-building:</b> So much of what we hear about training is about <a href="http://www.logicoflongdistance.com/2009/02/keep-it-simple-yo-distance-training.html" target="_blank">running easy mileage and building an aerobic base</a>. This is truly essential for younger or less experienced runners whose bodies are still developing and are more reactive to training. It lays the foundation of strength that will carry you through the sport. 20+ years into the sport, the engine is not going to change much, even if you throw a lot of miles at it. <u>Older, experienced runners are probably better off running moderate mileage at easy paces to maintain the engine and putting their efforts at getting faster in other areas</u>. Also, swimming or biking can do this stuff while putting less strain on the body.<br />
<br />
<b>Care of the chassis:</b> neuromuscular stuff. If my experience is indicative, this is the capacity that is first to go and that requires the most care as we get older. We need to retain resiliency in our muscles and our overall strength. It's easier to get injured, and harder to recover. <u>Restraint in building mileage, taking preventative days off, making our hard running count, doing strides and other athletic activities besides running.</u><br />
<br />
<b>Hard training:</b> This is where more experienced runners have an edge over our younger more impulsive former selves. We need hard training, but we have to have patience and maturity to see the effects. <u>If our goal is running fast times, we have to get after it on the track or on the roads.</u> There's still only one way. However, we have to take the long view and not get out over our skis in training. One workout supports the next. We run hard and take the time to recover. There's less margin for error with the hard stuff, but we can compensate for that with wisdom. As William James said: "The strenuous life tastes better." When it comes to suffering, we are connoisseurs.<br />
<br />
Finally, the best thing about being in the sport a long time is that there's a lot of young bucks out there who could use a steady hand. Seek out the young guns, run your hard efforts with them, go out for beers afterwords. Talk about patience, the long haul, the delicate and nuanced and ever-interesting logic of long distance. Tell them the words we live by: "Live to fight another day -- but never forget to fight!"<br />
<br />
It's good to be back in the game.<br />
<br />
<br />Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-62951672156835246542017-07-29T22:16:00.000-05:002017-07-29T22:18:17.101-05:00Old MemoriesA running life is a collection of memories.<br />
<br />
13 years old, Fall, 1990, Junior high XC<br />
2 miles XC<br />
It is hot out. He always wins, the guy from Bradley County. I am always second. Today I have decided I will follow him out as far and as hard as it takes. I want to beat him. We go out, and it's hard as I expected, just the two of us. He must know I am there, and he is going to break me. We round the curve by the baseball field, only 600 meters or so into a 2 mile race, and I feel the lactic acid coming up into my arms. This is not good. He is still running strong. I can't do it.<br />
<br />
17 years old, Spring, 1994, dual meet vs. Brainerd High under the lights<br />
4 x 400<br />
I felt the prickly feelings in the back of my neck as our #3 leg came straining down the track, a couple strides behind. My whole body lit up the way only a teenaged body can. The other guy grabs the baton, then the quick fear of the exchange, reaching out for a slim piece of metal among all the flesh and the heat. My ears whine from the adrenaline. I'm out, tracking, a couple strides behind, as fast as I can, as relaxed as I can. On the backstretch I close the gap. We are even, 150 meters to go. I know I am going to beat him, and in that same moment I go inward. Blackness, breathing; it's only the feeling of my body, keeping the legs going. I am all the way inside. 80 meters to go, the finish line dances, Coach Clark waving me in.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidmHc2NaNWUK6Py3UpPg8TOxYiJ4SipwBDcwORuU5mNDJoLDX5_yI3TIy-6OZ1BOe2f-RkALvDMVGNIaI6AWHoWjVs4hw5ESWSE9Ykb-xbIzjJtlh1Cmzi-nllAJZZkD4PYZUyfIcJVnI/s1600/State+Champs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="417" data-original-width="604" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidmHc2NaNWUK6Py3UpPg8TOxYiJ4SipwBDcwORuU5mNDJoLDX5_yI3TIy-6OZ1BOe2f-RkALvDMVGNIaI6AWHoWjVs4hw5ESWSE9Ykb-xbIzjJtlh1Cmzi-nllAJZZkD4PYZUyfIcJVnI/s320/State+Champs.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The author a long time ago.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span id="goog_789485619"></span>
19 years old, Winter, 1996, Southwest Conference Championships<br />
Indoor, 5000m<br />
On the line, my first college track championships. I am strong and lean, faster than ever. I've been running twice a day, lifting weights, waking early and running long hard workouts in the Houston humidity. I'm one of 15 or so. The top 6 score points. My plan was simple and dumb: don't think about pace, stay in the top 6. The first 200 my legs felt light and quick. I am in the middle of the lead pack, getting carried along. I am relaxed and strong. 400m, all good. 800m, we are fine. My confidence builds; I am floating -- through the mile and I hear the split: 4:24, faster than I'd run in high school. It takes one more lap before reality sets in and instead of being carried along by the other runners, I realized they and I are not connected. I start to labor, the feeling goes... I'm out the back, mortal again.<br />
<br />
21 years old, Spring, 1998, quad meet at Williams<br />
1500m<br />
Before the race, someone pointed out this guy from MIT: Leif. He was the fastest. We were on our home track. I'd been running close to sub-4:00 in the last couple of meets, and I thought this was my day. 64s was my plan. I had them dialed in. Instead of the usual pre-race nerves and slight sickness in anticipation of the pain, I felt only confidence. Out of the waterfall and around the first curve, I found myself in first place, running my pace, eight or so guys falling in line behind me. 200m, around the second curve, holding back ever so slightly. "64!" Good.<br />
I knew that the second lap would require a small increase in effort for the same pace. I feathered my effort on the backstretch, beginning to feel the first waves of fatigue but also the deep strength in my legs. Around the curve, still in the lead, knowing the guys were back there, itching, hunting. "2:08!" Good.<br />
The third lap. I could feel them jostling back there, as some fell back, others looked to find position. It was starting to hurt, but above the hurt was the rhythm, 16 second 100s, 32 second 200s, I could run that. 600 to go, 500 to go. Leif came around me on the outside, and I felt the rhythm catch. Shit, but "3:12!"<br />
A 63 was all I needed. Leif was pulling away, and with 300 to go I was hurt but beginning to kick. 200 to go, I am tightened up and there is no rhythm but I am running as hard as I can, and it feels fast. No one else has come by and I can feel I am running alone in second around the last curve, like I'd done through endless workouts, looking left over my shoulder, eyes up, hunting the line. 3:59.8.<br />
<br />
21 years old, Summer, 1998, training run<br />
10 miles<br />
Out after dark over my familiar route back home, an out and back along the road that runs on the brow of the mountain. The air was clear and seemed to fill my lungs. The woods around me was black and hummed in almost deafening waves with the song of cicadas. There were no cars. The city lights of Chattanooga swung down beneath me as I flew along the road, almost naked, my feet touching the ground only so lightly.<br />
<br />
<br />Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-7005409415826728312017-07-21T13:10:00.002-05:002017-07-21T13:22:12.246-05:00From Entitlement to Empowerment: thoughts on our anxious millenials<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Feverish love of anything as long as it is a change which is distracting, impatience, unsettlement, nervous discontentment, and desire for excitement, are not native to the human nature. They are so abnormal as to demand explanation from a deep seated cause." --John Dewey, "The Lost Individual"</blockquote>
<br />
Dewey wrote these words in 1929 -- nearly 90 years ago -- in a past which we probably think of as more stable and calm than our present. Yet if we read this text <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Individualism-Old-Great-Books-Philosophy/dp/1573926930" target="_blank">[Chapter 4 of this book]</a>, Dewey's thoughts feel more pressing than ever. The soul of America is yet to be healed. If anything, despite the tremendous advances that the 20th century brought, this malady of anxiety, nervousness, and distractibility has grown deeper.<br />
<br />
The source of this abnormal angst, Dewey speculates, is in our inability to find stable projects which rest on stable values. We skid about on a surface of life which lacks friction, always sliding forward, feeling out of control. Today we do most of our sledding on the internet, which has the extra virtue of being freed from the physical world and thus totally absent of friction. The Newtonian thought that an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force was genius in the 1600s. It required a tremendous degree of abstraction then -- all objects came to rest in his world. What required genius then is most obvious thing to my Physics I students now: we are never at rest.<br />
<br />
One response to this social malady is to turn to activities of mindfulness, mediation, running for the runners. The stoics are back in vogue, and Seneca feels like a peer. We retreat from the culture at large in various ways and try to cultivate an inner life that is calmer and more stable than external conditions.<br />
<br />
Dewey is rightfully critical of this response, as rational as it is. As we are creatures of the world, our inner life must be affected by external conditions. The retreat from those conditions and the rest and re-centering it gives us will only be temporary. We treat the symptoms -- and we become even more divided between our calm and withdrawn self and our anxious busy selves. What we want and need is a harmony between our inner life and the world around us -- not just in moments of retreat or through individual will, but through the harder [and more meaningful] work of reshaping our social world.<br />
<br />
In other words, a full individuality means having an inner life that is in relation to the world. If we can only find that inner life in retreat from the world, when we take a break, or go for a run, then that is a sign that the conditions of life essentially hostile to our individuality. I fear that this is more and more the case.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguoukjYki3CD_CbT8Zx9kGQMSS1PjuQKFcfku0NFwqqw07F_uROaLLnud1klmSfW7TerWq9eHmy5dnmUw3yywL32ibhQHfbaxoRhZGZaFXMQKpS1GJBfzZpNN6q8PtFJnGwMuvAQZ4BmE/s1600/2010+MCDC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="720" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguoukjYki3CD_CbT8Zx9kGQMSS1PjuQKFcfku0NFwqqw07F_uROaLLnud1klmSfW7TerWq9eHmy5dnmUw3yywL32ibhQHfbaxoRhZGZaFXMQKpS1GJBfzZpNN6q8PtFJnGwMuvAQZ4BmE/s320/2010+MCDC.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In racing, we find a deep connection between our inner selves and our environment.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
As teachers and parents, we have to give young people skills to cope with the world when it is hostile to their lives. We all have to learn to recharge ourselves, to find the appropriate rhythm between retreat and engagement so that we can sustain our interaction with the world and our own integrity.<br />
<br />
I wonder, though, whether we tend too much to the inner lives of our students and not enough to the external conditions that are causing them pain. We teach resilience, coping, grit. But how often do we clearly and critically share with them the injustices of the world, the emptiness of the American money culture, the indignities of racism and sexism and just plain meanness? They see these things. This is what causes their consternation and anxiety. But do they know we see them too?<br />
<br />
Perhaps teens would be made less anxious, more empowered, if we were frank and honest with them about the challenges they see. We can work to demystify the future -- to transform it from a black cloud of uncertainty to a set of problems that are, perhaps, inspiring. There, we may be able to teach a sort of art of the possible, which to me is the only lasting cure for anxiety and depression, the clinical terms for our cultural malaise.<br />
<br />
Indeed, if you ask them, adolescents do not want adults poking and prodding at their inner lives. (Neither do adults.) Perhaps that dislike reflects a sort of inarticulate wisdom. The cure to their malaise is not inside of our young people, but outside of them. If we own that, then perhaps millenials will feel less entitled and more empowered; they'll be less likely to look within themselves and more likely to engage with the world. They'll be happier for it, and we will have young partners in the never ceasing, difficult, but also meaningful and joyful project of making, ever slightly, a better world.Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-65358721946143138162017-06-01T13:27:00.004-05:002017-06-01T14:35:41.492-05:00On the Runner's HighImagine that the mind is an ocean. Thoughts come to us like waves crashing on a beach, one after the other, a relentless pounding of the sand. At times more tranquil, at other times riled and roused by storms of intensity, each thought is influenced however slightly and indirectly by the wave-form before it; no wave is ever precisely the same, and once it has crashed its specificity is broken and lost, subsumed into the next wave, and so it goes.<br />
<br />
When we think of the mind and its experiences through metaphors of natural phenomenon, like an ocean or spring or fountain, its personal qualities fall away, and we are more attentive to its rhythms and flows, its liquid structure, rather than its specific content. A primary way in which the body interacts with the mind is through changing the mind's structure. Running is a specific example of this; one reason that runners run is that the structure of their minds becomes altered when they do it.<br />
<br />
This phenomenon has been called somewhat crassly the "runner's high." Runners dispute the runner's high. Many are quick to disavow the experience or write it off as marginal to the more serious and hard-nosed endeavor of self-improvement. I think, though, that the term is ill-defined. I am not so sure we even really know what getting high means in a drug context, much less in a context where the body gets itself high off of its own natural processes. If being high is a state of mind, what are the characteristics of that state?<br />
<br />
A primary characteristic of the mind in a running-altered state is that it is more generative and more connected. This state I am sure has its physiological origins in specific hormones or blood flow patterns. But we talk less about its experiential origins -- the bodily rhythms and sensations that the run produces. The steady and audible breath. The regular beat of foot against pavement. The burnings and loosenings and tightenings of muscles as we warm up, or as fatigue and effort make their marks.<br />
<br />
These bodily sensations form a sort of riverbed for the stream of thought. Thought that had perhaps pooled up over a sedentary day, or which was dammed up by our various and complex neuroses, is released as if from a sluice. Given banks and obstacles of feeling in the body, the water of thought swirls and roils and progresses. To call this feeling getting "high" is maybe to allude to a feeling of being borne along, like a leaf upon a fast-flowing stream.<br />
<br />
Does the runner's high, such as it is, have a narcotic origin in chemicals somehow released in response to physical exertion? Or is it an organic effect of the body being awakened to feeling? I prefer the latter explanation because it makes the runner's high continuous with sobriety -- and perhaps an even more sober form of sobriety; a mode of experience that is not farther from reality, but closer to it.<br />
<br />
Drugs artificially enhance experience, altering reality. Perhaps runners are resistant to the notion of the runner's high because the experience of running feels more real, not less. It reminds us that thought is most itself, most natural, when it is on the move, when flowing and dropping and roiling. We remember that we are at our best when engaged and flowing. The runner's high is no substitute for experience. It is experience, brought back to itself.Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-7421578928520848572016-12-15T09:36:00.000-06:002016-12-15T09:36:48.082-06:00Truth, Enlightenment, and ... animality <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivp62Z0yLd4hBZdTlzsMj5fUNpG58gyOedI7kxJ3l9W5eIviKa9YJiiU_dY-nmO_1z-Izrtus9iHUBLIHBoVw0Ur7t376Dp23Rf7vcdcNSjoHIeY7BDUUOCaoTptjDqvvJq8nyufHkT88/s1600/Trump-with-lion-and-flag-296x300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivp62Z0yLd4hBZdTlzsMj5fUNpG58gyOedI7kxJ3l9W5eIviKa9YJiiU_dY-nmO_1z-Izrtus9iHUBLIHBoVw0Ur7t376Dp23Rf7vcdcNSjoHIeY7BDUUOCaoTptjDqvvJq8nyufHkT88/s1600/Trump-with-lion-and-flag-296x300.jpg" /></a></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
It's fashionable to say we are post-truth, but falsity and unreason have always lived alongside fact and inquiry -- and not just as their opposites. </div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
As folks like Nietzsche and Freud have shown, the capacity for truth and reason is often built out of processes of violence, rejection, and resentment. Anyone who has been to school understands this tension. So must anyone who has reckoned with the history of America, beacon both of slavery and of freedom, of both equality and of racism, that most arbitrary and ugly form of inequality.</div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
We are, after all, not minds, but animals. Human animals operate largely outside of processes reason or even self-interest. These are late-arriving achievements, hard won and fragile. </div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
Yes, we can maintain ourselves in a space of reason; we are capable of operating purely economically, but anyone who has interacted with another human animal intimately knows that all of us also need spaces of irreason and even violence, where we can express our fear, our feelings, our physiological animality. These spaces give us the strength to recover so that we can continue to do the work of enlightened living together.</div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
The fragile institutions of democratic life are built to accentuate our capacity for reason, but as the events of this new century unfold, from 9/11 to Sandy Hook, from Trump to Allepo, it's clear that they are not always strong enough. Irreason and violence can be more powerful; they are likely more native to our natures.</div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
This raises a question: What should our expectations for democracy be? How civilized can we expect to be? In the push for a more perfect union, have we set up unreasonable expectations for our animal selves? </div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
There is no greater recipe for discord in relationship than to expect your partner in that relationship to be more reasonable than they are -- whether this is your spouse or your 4 year old. How often have we imposed a tyranny of the rational only because we were incapable of empathy, of listening, or of just being with each other without judgment.</div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
One way to understand 2016 is that this is the year that the tyrant within the liberal/moral/democratic/<wbr></wbr>pragmatic social order [the superego] has been knocked off his throne. </div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
How should we who -- despite and because of our privilege and blindness -- sustain the power of enlightenment culture respond? What do we owe to our animality? What can we expect from it? Can we tolerate its re-emergence? </div>
Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-57326852606241419772016-11-11T12:55:00.001-06:002016-11-11T13:01:28.008-06:00A Letter to a Parent After the Election<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
I'm publishing this with permission from the parent I sent it to, in the hope it might be helpful to parents and educators in divisive political times.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<br />
Dear XXX,</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
First off, it's so good to hear from you! I had my eye out for you on Parents' Night as well, and I was sorry I didn't get a chance to at least say hello. I also just want to say that R appears to me to be thriving in all the right ways. We don't connect as often as we did last year, but she's a special one who I keep my eye out for. </div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
It's exactly students like R who I worry most about -- what will happen to their lovely innocence and naive goodness? An Egyptian friend of mine sent me a note after I sent him a picture of my little one in my arms last night. He said: "It starts from here, and we build outward."</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
To your email: I think that your instincts are right -- this is a human issue, not a political issue (though of course the two are always deeply connected.) It hits independent schools hard because we work at the human level. Our task is deeply value-laden. We have to have a vision of the good life and be brave and noble in its defense. The alternative is nihilism.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
Our responses, therefore, must be human as well and not crassly political. We do what we have always done -- meet our young ones, our parent community, and each other where we are. We speak frankly about our concerns, and we listen earnestly. We model expertise in inquiry and the value of learning patiently. </div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
We model this "politics of the small" for our students, not just as a way of coping with this unexpected moment, but as the ethos of democracy as a way of life. We have ears and eyes and brains and hearts, and we have each other. These are the raw materials of every community; most of the time they are enough.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
For all these reasons, I found myself grateful to be going to a school on Wednesday morning. <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">I was reminded in so many ways to take the long view, and I could see in so many ways the working reality of good people making small change through hard and daily effort.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Thanks so much for reaching out,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Jeff</span></div>
Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-40591970942743971032016-07-08T10:24:00.000-05:002016-07-08T12:01:01.314-05:00Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and the HeatIt's muggy here in Tennessee. You walk across the asphalt, and it shimmers, and you think you need a snorkel to breathe. It was hot in Dallas yesterday, too -- 97 degrees, and it had been that way all week.<br />
<br />
Now there are these murders, which we've seen with our own eyes. And now there are these reactions to these murders. It makes me think of cloth, fabric, shrouds.<br />
<br />
America right now is a dark, heavy blanket, and we are all crowded underneath, looking anxiously at each other, sweating, just trying to breathe. All this air we are breathing is filled with the breath of other people. It's like we're pulling for oxygen.<br />
<br />
We are re-discovering a truth that is never lost completely, but is occasionally widely forgotten. The social cloth, like Penelope's burial shroud, is constantly woven and unwoven. At some moments we find ourselves wrapped too tightly together, and at other moments we grasp and clutch towards each other, coming away only with fists of threads and torn fabric. Feels today like we're all wrapped up too tight in a tangle. I've got other people's torn and bleeding bodies all up in my business.<br />
<br />
The thing about weather is that you gotta live with it. We gotta live with these murders, we gotta live with the heat. We're gonna have to sweat. I keep thinking of Radio Raheem and Sal's Pizzeria in <i>Do the Right Thing</i>, and how on that hot day they didn't make it to sundown. Something had to be set on fire, as if we could out-hot the heat.<br />
<br />
The best I can think right now is that we're just gonna have to sweat. This heavy summer heat's gonna pass. July's going to find its way to August. Right now, there's some cool air that's gathered in some place up in the Yukon that is untouched by all of this. I'm just holding in my mind's eye to a mountaintop far away from all this stuff, in some place where murder hasn't even happened, and where justice is just a word spoken to rocks who aren't interested in understanding.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/U35MvblI4og/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U35MvblI4og?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<br />
I wonder what Tina thinks of the Yukon.<br />
<br />Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-18803997810962213692016-06-16T15:29:00.001-05:002016-06-16T15:33:28.717-05:00Politics and Schools: on educating in a toxic atmosphereWe talk about the political climate as if it were not the very air of community. As social beings, we have no choice whether or not to participate in politics. In this deep sense, politics is not about voting; it's about the way in which our very presence trails along all sorts of political issues: our whiteness, our gender, our Americanness, our class, etc. Though we are individuals, we also always already (and sometimes unwittingly) represent groups. It is in this sense that politics is necessary. It names the fact that communities of people are forced to interact. This interaction of peoples is the air of community life, and we must breathe it, polluted or not.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The mark of politics today is that it is strangely both all-encompassing and difficult to internalize. Let me see if I can explain. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
First, politics is everywhere. It's not just that it shows up on our twitter feeds or is constantly blaring on some screen at the peripheries of our vision. It's also that its mines and possible mis-steps threaten so many of our interactions. The fatigue surrounding the notion of political correctness is a mark of this ever-presence of politics. Communicating today bears not just the burden of individual representation, but we are all always already speaking on behalf of liberals or conservatives or white people or our gender or religion. Politics mediates all of our relationships, and all of our relationships are threatened by politics. It is all-encompassing.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Second, politics is difficult to internalize. This is in the nature of politics; it is fundamentally alienating. To speak politically is always to forgo our individual sense of self. When we speak politically, we do not just say what we think, but we speak "as" a group or "for" a group; we measure the possible effects of our speech. We negotiate and compromise. We are forced to encounter people who at least think we are wrong and may even think that we are dangerous. To speak politically is to move out of a space of individual integrity or wholeness and move into a negotiated, fragmented, hostile space that is always open and being refigured -- subject to events and outcomes and forces far beyond our individual control. It's unsettling. It can also be thrilling -- as war by other means.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Neither of these characteristics are bad in themselves. They are consequences of the fact that we are social animals. However, it is important to note that if we live purely politically, if we breathe only this air, we will find ourselves constantly unsettled. So, we need sometimes to escape from politics. We need private spaces in which we can be less measured, where we can speak without fear of reprisal, where we can recover from the stinging hail of the public sphere, where we can experience the calm of home, or the intimacy of being understood.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We know that a primary function of schools is to prepare students for citizenship -- so that they can weather the storms of public opinion at best or even steer communities towards the public good. However, schools also work as a shelter from politics. Young people need quieter spaces where they can hone their participation in the public life. A school is a place that is not fully public, but not fully private either. In an ideal school politics exists, but it exists as ideal politics: as simple the interaction of different community interests.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Schools must work harder today to create this original sense of political participation. This is of course something that schools have always done imperfectly -- they are too weak and too imperfectly realized not to be buffeted about by the political winds that affect wider society. Racism, money, hatred, and fear remain fundamental obstacles to democratic education today. But there are two ways that this can at least be addressed by students and teachers:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
1. Give students a sense of ownership of in the school community. It's only through a sense that schools are vital centers of community life that students have access to politics in its best form. If we cannot give students a sense of autonomy as they grow, how then are they to express it fully as adults?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
2. Directly address the political atmosphere of the times. Students must be sheltered from the worst forms of politics, but that sheltering must be explicit. We have to point out the forms of intolerance, unhealthy anger, and indeed death and war to students; we have to let them know that we see them, and that we are protecting them from these things so that they can eventually have the strength to change them. By not being explicit about the need to protect students from politics, we teach them either to be blind to politics or to be unwitting victims of it.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In other words, we need to both protect students from the bad air of contemporary politics and give them good air to breathe. It's only by performing these two functions that the school can keep alive the ideal of politics and shelter our most vulnerable people from the toxicity of the contemporary atmosphere.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-73871867394208383462016-02-26T10:54:00.002-06:002016-02-26T11:00:27.096-06:00More Thoughts on Anxious High School Students<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white;">
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">School leaders and teachers across the country are seeing rates of teenage anxiety and depression skyrocket. The school where I work is not immune from these trends, and it's something that faculty and administrators alike are wrestling with -- and honestly without great answers. When we approach these problems, sometimes we forget to ask the question from the other side -- why is it that the very same experiences that used to prepare students for life now seem not to be effective anymore? Maybe it's not that we are creating more miseducational experience for students, but that something has happened that has made great education less effective.</span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">In "Flow" by Csikszentmihalyi, he talks about a strange paradox in which people actually report undergoing more optimal experience at work than in leisure, but still do not like or identify with their work. </span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">He thinks that this is because of pernicious myths about the relationship between the modern worker and his job that undermine and distract people from the actual positive experiences they are having. These myths tell us that work is something that we are forced to do, rather than a positive force in our lives... and actually distract us from the positive experiences that we are having, causing unnecessary resentment and angst. </span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">I believe that our students are also subject to a lot of mythology that is causing them to see their education as something that "happens to them" or that they "must do" against their will, thus sapping their energies. </span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Csikszentmihalyi explains:</span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">"When we feel that we are investing attention in a task against our will, it is as if our psychic energy is being wasted. Instead of reaching our own goals, it is called upon to make someone else's come true. The time channeled into such a task is perceived as time subtracted from the total available for our life. Many people consider their jobs as something they have to do, a burden imposed from the outside, and effort that takes life away from the ledger of their existence."</span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Administrators, parents, and teachers are always concerned we are not doing enough to teach independence. We tend to be self-critical in this; blaming our intents to help students learn as creating dependency. However, teachers and administrators helping students as individuals is something every great school has done for years and years, long before this current wave of student stress and anxiety. That support attempts to match challenges with actual student skills so that students can experience the positive experience of control and independence. We don't always get it right, but I do think that's the goal of good administrators and teachers, whether we articulate it or do it intuitively. </span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Maybe the problem is not the teachers and administrators who work hard alongside students to empower them to do their best, but the persistent and pernicious mythology that school exists for purposes that are not the students' own: their future selves, social prestige, their parents' dreams, or even the school's own sense of prestige. </span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">In the classroom every day and also after school every day I see students who are engaged, challenged, and interactive with peers and teachers. In the moment, things look good. But I worry that despite all of this positive evidence, students still don't perceive that their education is going well. They are mis-judging their own experience, and don't apprehend the positive moments as crucial to their journey. They understand them as pleasant distraction from the larger task, rather than fundamental to the task. Instead of judging the quality of their education by the quality of the experiences they are undergoing, they are judging it according to a future that they cannot imagine, according to criteria that are not their own.</span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">This false mode of judgment doesn't allow the students themselves to recognize the beauty of what we see every day in schools that work -- students engaged and vivacious, learning at tremendous rates, and being great friends to each other. Although they are succeeding, they feel they are failing because the wider culture (and we ourselves) have failed to direct their judgment of what counts for success in the educational experience to the right place. We depend on 'external markers' such as college admissions, test scores, etc., instead of pointing out the excellence, rich experience, powerful mentorship, and positive friendship that we wiser people see all around us, and which draws us every day back to work.</span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Is it possible that the answer to student stress is right in front of our faces, if we had the eyes to see it and the values by which to appreciate it? Maybe we need to remind the students in large and small ways that schools exists <i>for them</i>, and that the positive moments when they happen, when challenge and skill align and students solve their own problems, are not distractions from larger goals or means to larger ends, but the very meaning and function itself of an educational community.</span></span></div>
</div>
Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-19946227406997587162016-01-21T22:25:00.000-06:002016-01-21T22:31:41.208-06:00A Runner's View of the EllipticalI haven't really told the story of my running over the last couple of years, and that's because there's no running story to tell. The story is of an achilles tendon on my right heel that over the course of 6 years and 15,000 or so miles of running and racing [and generally feeling FREE] through achilles tendonitis/tendinosis/bursitis/haglunds deformity (it felt alright after it warmed up, for the most part!), the achilles decided really that enough was enough. I couldn't run without limping, and when I ran, I got these sharp pains that felt like the tendon was tearing, one strand at a time. Which, turns out, it was.<br />
<br />
I got an MRI. The Dx was rupture/necrosis/general death of achilles tendon over about 1.5 inches or so. Kind of like the achilles tendon equivalent of a frayed rope.<br />
<br />
I had surgery. They cut out the necrotic inch-and-a-half and then took my flexor hallus longus (which apparently is not all that useful, or at least much less useful than an achilles tendon, though now I can't flex my big toe) and somehow used it to rebuild an achilles tendon on my right side. This was last June.<br />
<br />
The first three months, I was in a cast, then a boot and spent a lot of time on the couch. I watched the Sopranos from Episode 1 all the way through. Spoiler: therapy doesn't do the trick with mobsters, or maybe with anyone.<br />
<br />
After three months or so, my wound finally healed up enough and everything was strong enough to start limping around in shoes. Now, finally, after another 3 months and a startling amount of rehab, I can hammer out an hour on the elliptical, which I do more or less daily. This brings me to my point: the elliptical.<br />
<br />
It turns out that there are a number of people who are elliptical users. Instead of running or cycling or hiking, their exercise of choice is the elliptical. I must have known this subconsciously because otherwise why would there be so many elliptical machines in the gym? But now that I am one of the daily elliptical users, this fact has slowly worked itself into my mind through experience. As you are a runner, you also may not know this fact, or like me, find it difficult to accept.<br />
<br />
I ruminate on this fact while I am on the elliptical. Why are these people here with me? There are definitely benefits to the elliptical, and all of the benefits of the elliptical boil down to one thing. The elliptical is predictable. It does the same thing, every day. You show up, the elliptical is there, you get on it, set it up, plug in the earphones, turn the channel to what you want to see, grasp the handles, place feet on the foot-thingies and it's like you enter a soft tunnel of exercise that is there waiting for you every day. Nothing is too jarring. Nothing really hurts. The heartrate rises, but not too high. The muscles work, but they don't get sore. The joints bend and flex, but they don't pound. It's sustainable, predictable, always there -- really like nothing else in the world.<br />
<br />
It's got to be really freaking healthy. No one ever necrotized their achilles on an elliptical, that's for sure. That's because the elliptical was designed for the body, which is very strange and soul-sucking if you think about it (and especially if you think about it on the elliptical.) It's actually the inverse of activity -- to be active is to move your body over and through terrain. We use our body to play in, with, through, and against our environment. The body is a partner with the environment, and really it only comes into its own through a type of oppositional relationship with the environment. This is why, for example, runners love hills.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu_i6GYBb0Rj3u1aQDh3HSNekQHwWgNaVAJ5yCUO8BYy7Sfz4HOsmDE42pGGaFQ4v2j9JwXq6cXEe54-qXk30gLCTAi3tm4Ag74XNbNQkKWUY0pHZQ40EZLgOOgKwtnxW3G7H9Uon2B4o/s1600/meb+elliptigo460.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu_i6GYBb0Rj3u1aQDh3HSNekQHwWgNaVAJ5yCUO8BYy7Sfz4HOsmDE42pGGaFQ4v2j9JwXq6cXEe54-qXk30gLCTAi3tm4Ag74XNbNQkKWUY0pHZQ40EZLgOOgKwtnxW3G7H9Uon2B4o/s320/meb+elliptigo460.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Meb, undermining my thesis on the ElliptiGO.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The elliptical is very strange because being built for the body, it undoes the whole notion of the body actually doing something. It takes an object, namely flesh and arms and legs and pulsing heart, and straps it to a machine that imitates movement. Yes, the blood still flows. Yes, the muscles contract and expand. Yes, the heart rate can be monitored and seen to rise to 120, 130, 140, etc., but despite all of that, what happens? Nothing.<br />
<br />
The elliptical is exercise purified, or health purified. It's exercise for its own sake. Seems to me, though, that unlike something like Beauty or The Grand Canyon or an April Butterfly, exercise doesn't really justify itself. The elliptical is like the bodily form of narcissism -- it's like a weird body-mirror through which the body relates only to itself, and gets caught up in its own gaze.<br />
<br />
I mean, certainly it is better than sitting on the couch. I am so happy that I can do it, and every now and then, I can even conjure up a faded image of how it felt to be running when I was fit. There is part of it though that feels too much like the rest of this strange modern life, where humans have finally figured out how to turn the environment into a thing that exists for them, rather than something they live in and through. Running was one way I escaped that.<br />
<br />
All of this is to say that the elliptical people will remain strangers to me. I am all for predictability, but give me the predictable routine of the runner -- the routine that gets me out the door, in the wind, to feel habitually the sting of rain, the jarring of asphalt, the wild whirl of the sky, the horizon that draws the eye outward, so that we feel small and simultaneously real and in the world, and the world also feels a bit like it is inside of us.<br />
<br />
Maybe this spring, pending the slow return of life to my heel. In the meantime, the rest of you have to carry the torch of the body's utility, perhaps this weekend on a quiet run as snow falls, and you leave traces that fill in behind you while everyone else stays inside, their warmth not quite of their own making.Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-27084828109763491412016-01-02T19:58:00.000-06:002016-01-02T20:11:30.861-06:00On Trying to Be a Person: some thoughts after reading Knausgaard<div class="p1">
A few quick notes after reading the first two volumes of <i>My Struggle </i>by Karl Ove Knausgaard. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Why it works: even though <i>My Struggle</i> is personal and autobiographical, it is not confessional. It's personal narrative without guilt or its close brother: aspiration. The other reason it works is that the writing is full of detail, description, not just of inner life, but also of objects and ideas and landscapes. Knausgaard gives us a full picture of experience. His writing is neither subjective nor objective; or maybe better put, Knausgaard's writing makes that distinction irrelevant. While the content of the book is personal: family life, adolescence, work, play, etc., these things are also universal to human experience. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
More than that, Knausgaard's resurrection of the <i>person</i> is also a crushing criticism of the way in which 21st century life has destroyed the personal as a source of meaning. It's done this in two ways: 1) through the culture of sameness, in which we learn to obsessively narrate our lives through cultural memes and tropes, e.g. Facebook. It's not that our lives are really the same, it's that we are limited in our expression of life, even (especially?) as we express it to ourselves. 2) Through liberalism and socialist thinking, which encourages us all to understand ourselves and what it means to be alive in terms of an affectively impoverished and overly analytical set of concepts like class, race, etc. None of these concepts give us a handle on feeling or family or death or work--the personal universals that make up life in its immediate forms. So we end up lacking much sense of immediacy,* empty and out of touch with ourselves, uselessly trying to fill the void with filtered selfies (hollow subjectivity) an equally hollow politics (hollow objectivity).</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
*followers of the blog will recognize that the main argument linking all of these posts together is that running is valuable and we are drawn to it because it tunes us in to the immediacies of experience [while running, too, is also subject to all the various mediations that alienate us from immediacy (joy, pain, meaning, love) -- social media, $$, shallow, status driven goals and practices, etc.]*</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Reading 1000 pages of Knausgaard has led me to this thought: contemporary life only gives us two primary ways of relating to ourselves: through guilt or through self improvement. Neither of these are actual self relation; they both reject the self. Guilt makes this rejection negatively through resentment and self loathing, self improvement positively, through the actions of self-sacrifice. They both substitute relation with an ideal for relation with the actuality of the self -- hence mediation and the lack of immediacy. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Knausgaard's prose reminds us that we can be with ourselves--our memories, our present--without the impulse to hate ourselves or improve ourselves. In this way, he is a Nietzschean or a stoic. The authorial voice in <i>My Struggle</i> does not struggle to improve or to analyze or to understand the self, but to be a person, to practice selfhood. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
We sort of follow Knausgaard through his life as he learns and re-learns how to be a person. While you'd think that 6 volumes of words about one's life would be narcissistic, it turns out to be quite the opposite. The text bites the bullet we must all bite; which is that we all have a duty to practice self-hood, to become a person. Knausgaard sort of sets himself out into the world, attempting and failing at this task again and again, and thereby succeeding I think, more than most.<br />
<br />
By inviting us into the struggle, Knausgaard does the opposite of what social media does: he figures his personhood intimately and honestly and factually. His self is not written as a cultivated object, but almost painted, as an artist would render an object in a natural and social world. Knausgaard teaches us something that we already know, but too often forget: practicing selfhood and self care is the only genuine way to be with the world and with others. </div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
Nietzsche's concept for this was <i>amor fati</i>, love of who one is, his highest ethical principle. Narcissus neither knew himself, much less practiced himself; his self relation was empty, a mere image--what these days we call a status, a meme, a selfie. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Who would have thought that what 21st century life needed was more self-examination, not less!</div>
Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-60406200035670845912015-11-03T09:58:00.004-06:002015-11-03T10:06:38.769-06:00Shallow Optimism, Deep Hope: a quick formula for resilience in education"I am not an optimist, but I am a prisoner of hope." --Cornel West<br />
<br />
Three quick points:<br />
<br />
1. Apparently only 31% of students nationwide agree that "I can find many lots of ways around any problem."<br />
<br />
2. We always ask: why aren't students more invested in their own education? The answer is because they don't own the goals that are set for the educational system. As Jessica Lahey put it in a recent tweet: "we don't wash our rental cars."<br />
<br />
3. Hope is another word for resilience. Hope comes to us, and it sends us over and over again into situations where failure is possible. It is grounded in a durable concepts like justice, goodness, truth, and love.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://mastermanifesting.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/superficial-cornel-west-quote.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://mastermanifesting.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/superficial-cornel-west-quote.jpeg" height="320" width="263" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Students are <i>optimistic </i>that they will do well on the next test because they studied over the last few days. [low resilience]<br />
<br />
Students <i>hope </i>that their education makes them genuine human beings, capable of carrying out full, just, and independent lives. [high resilience]<br />
<br />
Our school system is designed for <i>optimism</i>, which is fleeting, external, and dependent on that minimal thing called the human will.<br />
<br />
We need schools and communities that are focused around <i>hope</i>, which draws on deeper, more spiritual resources in the human -- and hopefully exposes students to these resources, teaching them that human strength is founded in our internal capacities. These are designated by concepts like joy, friendship, truth, justice, and freedom.<br />
<br />
Looking for resilience in kids? Simple way to find it: ask whether your interactions with them are based around resilient concepts.<br />
<br />
Is our pedagogy founded in a shallow optimism which says that "for this kid, in this situation, given these skills, she might find her way in society that is fundamentally hostile to her growth?"<br />
<br />
Or are our educational practices and relationships with students founded in a deep hope that says, "together through the work of community, we can make a future that is more just, more free, more true, and more connected?"<br />
<br />
Students intuit very quickly the sort of future that our relationships with them predict -- our ways of relating to them can undermine or generate hope in them and through this process either sap them of resilience or open them to the deep stores of strength and possibility that liberal education at its best sustains generation after generation.<br />
<br />
What is liberal arts education? Put simply: it is a community practice of deep hope.Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-21695097795024556882015-10-26T21:30:00.002-05:002015-10-26T21:43:33.221-05:00How things generally goMornings feel best to me. The vagueness of consciousness mirrors the early dawn and portends lucidity. There is a wariness to morning, the small fear that we all feel when at the beginning of something. I like most the mornings that stretch out not quite timelessly before days that have not yet been planned. No one else is up; no one else would be moving; the relaxation that is possible in the morning is the unearned kind and thus most itself, most fully present.<br />
<br />
The coffee is finished, the scraps of reading are read, and into our day clothes we step, one leg at a time, like putting on armor. On opening the door, the day makes itself known -- the first breath, autumn smells, leaves scattered and thrown across the driveway.<br />
<br />
Day is so much interaction and movement. The people come at you with their faces and their lively eyes. Small requests uttered, and the larger tasks always left unsaid. We walk by each other, holding ourselves somewhat tightly to our chests, not letting too much of ourselves leak out, and then finally losing ourselves to chore, to tedium, to fatigue, and if we are lucky to occasional joy or romance or more. All the beginnings not yet begun become real and resist; this is day.<br />
<br />
Afternoon comes, as always, and energies wane. <i>Hacía el sur son inteligentes y duermen la siesta</i>. Even if we work and do not rest, we work slowly and aim primarily to finish up. The daytime has drained the life out, like clear water poured over the ground and soaked up into roots and earthworms and then to the rocks underneath. If you take a moment in the late afternoon, you will notice that after the energy is stripped all away, you can find a sort of bedrock of the soul, the limestone underneath. That can be satisfying.<br />
<br />
Evenings, things depend. Some people get the morning feelings again, in anticipation of the night being another beginning. Others -- like me -- see the night time as a chance to throw one's self absolutely into ending. As the light drains out of the world, so do all the daytime things slowly lose their reality.<br />
<br />
Night comes, and we lay in our beds. The mind draws loops around itself, constructing imaginary scenes until the loop skips and eventually becomes a dream and then dark.Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-57976333985961866712015-10-21T21:48:00.001-05:002015-10-26T21:33:04.116-05:00On Teacher Autonomy<div>
"It is ... advisable that the teacher should understand, and even be able to criticize, the general principles upon which the whole educational system is formed and administered. He is not like a private soldier in an army, expected merely to obey, or like a cog in a wheel, expected merely to respond and transmit external energy; he must be an intelligent medium of action." -- John Dewey</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Teacher autonomy is critical to good education. This (like everything in education) is of course most obvious to teachers, as they are the ones most intimately involved in the educational process. Students (especially adolescents) are suspicious of contrived situations and most open to connection when they sense there is an authentic person on the other end of the line. Autonomy is the path to authenticity, as only the teacher who is free to explore and experiment can find the pedagogy that allows full expression of the self in practice.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
However, autonomy is poorly understood by many teachers who advocate for it and also by the administrators who are suspicious of it. The reason for this is that autonomy is really different from being left alone. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Sure, the first step to developing autonomy is freedom <i>from</i>. Freedom from arbitrary constrictions. Freedom from micromanaging. Freedom from forces and interests that are obviously mis-educational. Administrators have a basic duty to protect teachers from these things so that they can explore and create.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Unfortunately, most conceptions of teaching autonomy stop there, but of course that sort of autonomy for teachers is not enough. Autonomy is more than freedom from constraint. Autonomy is positive freedom -- it is the freedom to act <i>with purpose</i>. Teacher autonomy (like individual autonomy) only finds its full expression within a purposeful community, and it is fuller yet when teachers are able out of their own practice (alongside students) create that purpose and feel responsible for the school community.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
What then, is the role of the school administrator? As clear as I can figure it is to identify the ways in which the community is not yet autonomous or lacking purpose -- and also the teachers as individuals who have not yet found the full expression of their autonomous practice (or who have lost it somewhere along the way.) The administrator cannot <i>ex nihilo </i>create this purpose or autonomy, but must instead, through modeling, encouragement, listening, and communicating help teachers into autonomous community, actively and boldly clearing the path for it, and sometimes perhaps tracing the first steps.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If students are to learn to be free, active, bold, joyful, and creative, they must have in front of them on a regular basis adults who possess these qualities. Schooling is difficult work, and many adults lack the stamina or resilience to do this work and manifest these qualities. The best schools quickly identify the impediments to teachers being their full, best selves for their students, and eliminate them without pity.</div>
Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-87160246658247983832015-10-16T12:41:00.001-05:002015-10-16T12:42:17.679-05:00On Vitality, Schooling, and TrainingAn acquaintance told me a week ago that there is a deep connection between training for a marathon and good schooling and encouraged me to draw this connection.<br />
<br />
The connections at first seem obvious. Perhaps school is like training. You put the work in and then get results out. Effort over the long haul leads to incremental changes in the body, mind, and spirit that allow the runner/student to do something which perhaps seemed impossible. I suppose this is the association my friend had in mind, and it works at a certain level.<br />
<br />
Runners recognize, however, that equating training with effort and work takes an external view of the whole thing. From the inside training never feels primarily like a goal-oriented activity. In order for it to work and work well, it must mostly be immediately satisfying.<br />
<br />
Sure, there were moments when there was a lack of satisfaction and I could invoke an external goal (running under 2:30 in the marathon was mine) to get myself out the door. But my training at its best was an almost wholly present-oriented activity. The training works when it is integrated and flows and feeds the rest of your life, through friendships, being outside in nature, and the pleasurable feelings of bodily movement. If we have to be inspired to get out the door on a frequent basis, and if it's not the doing itself that is inspiring, then the effort that marathon training requires can't be sustainable. The running must be based in a sort of joy in movement, one that is pleasant in itself and flows out of experience with the vitality and force of Nature.<br />
<br />
Learning is the same in this sense. As living beings, it is as natural for us to learn and grow as it is to breathe and eat. Schooling, like training, has to feed that natural impulse and work in it and through it. The purpose of schooling is to make the human animal most fully what it can become. Too often we think of the work of education as the construction of an artificial self, manufactured through external effort and work. So long as the work of education fails to engage with the natural impulse to grow and learn, it will be absent vital force. If running and training must be based in the joy of movement in order to be fully effective, so education must be based in the natural joy of growth.<br />
<br />
One of the great dangers of marathon training (perhaps the single greatest danger for the highly competitive runner) is overtraining. Overtraining happens when instead of working in concert with vitality, training begins sapping it. The consequences to the runner are loss of joy, constant fatigue, depletion, etc. Yet, often the runner ignores these signs, attempting through sheer effort to will the body to follow the despotic trainer. The error of overtraining is a consequence of too much artificial effort and too little listening to the body.<br />
<br />
When our schools fail today, they fail in two ways.<br />
<br />
1) Focused too entirely on what society needs from its young people, it forgets entirely that the process of education is founded in student growth. The "training plan" -- having been crafted by political interests -- is implemented and executed with complete disregard for the individual undertaking it.<br />
<br />
2) Schools, teachers, and parents intentionally trying to maximize student growth, very much like the marathoner in training pushing herself to her absolute limit, disregard the natural ability of the child to grow and the natural source of growth, which is joyful play. They push the child too hard, effectively overtraining them so that they lose touch with their natural capacity for growth. Here schooling becomes based in effort, work, and achievement rather than the internal qualities of curiosity, will, determination, and freedom.<br />
<br />
Schools work only when they are founded in and working through the natural impulse to growth and association that are a byproduct of being living beings. Any other approach to education is necessarily artificial and external -- usually founded in ideas or demands that are only weakly attached to the relationships of community out of which the school draws all of its life.Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-30810649293120923852015-10-01T07:52:00.002-05:002015-10-01T08:00:51.284-05:00Twin Cities Marathon and the Black Lives Matter ProtestBlack Lives Matter in St. Paul has <a href="http://www.runnersworld.com/races/black-lives-matter-says-it-plans-to-disrupt-twin-cities-marathon" target="_blank">planned a protest</a> to block the finish this weekend at the Twin Cities marathon. Here are my thoughts and hopes for how this goes.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<br />
We all know that running is an expression of great individual freedom, which is why we value it so much.<br />
<br />
A marathon race boils down so many of our values and creates a pure space for their expression -- hard work, execution, effort, risk. Because all distractions have been cleared away, and the course has been marked off from the chaos of life and the politics and all of that, the individual runner is freed to maximize his or her potential.<br />
<br />
It's interesting to reflect on how artificial the conditions of a big city marathon are: how many roads have to be blocked, how many policemen enlisted in the effort, how much work and resources goes into creating this clean slate for achievement, especially when it is mapped out over a normally chaotic public space, as in the case of the big city marathon.<br />
<br />
Reflection brings the realization that the expression of great freedom, the maximization of individual effort, depends on a prior effort that requires social coordination and agreement, and it takes very little to disrupt that organization. Marathon races show what becomes possible for individuals when like minded people work together.<br />
<br />
It's for all of these reasons that a blocked or disruptive marathon works well as a metaphor for blocked social justice and disrupted democracy. But of course it is just a metaphor; life itself is not at stake in a marathon, only the expression of life. A marathon is a medium through which we work out our relationship to life. It's not "real" in the way that life is. It is constructed.<br />
<br />
The constructed and metaphorical nature of marathoning, however, is what gives it great power for life. We need artificial forms and media through which we can work out our relationship to life. This is why art -- and marathoning is art -- is so precious. When life itself gets into these artificial forms of understanding life and messes them up, we feel a loss of control and understanding.<br />
<br />
The protest is positive in the sense that the BLM is inviting runners into reflection on these things, and helping us draw connections between ourselves and the communities that we only run through, and often times do not even run through.<br />
<br />
However, I hope in the end they let the runners run, not because marathoning is more important than black lives, but out of a sense of empathy for and kinship with the marathoner and the community that makes marathoning possible.<br />
<br />
Black Lives Matter has a chance to say something like the following -- "though black lives are often disrupted, and though we have the power to disrupt as well, we will choose not to disrupt the lives of individuals or the organization that gives them meaning." This choice would be highly meaningful and richly demonstrative as well. It would not only raise awareness, but do so in a way that builds the empathy and understanding that is the necessary precondition for the forms of community upon which deep social justice depends.Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-4916576069005365982015-09-23T21:56:00.003-05:002016-10-24T18:53:08.852-05:00On the necessity of anxiety for education: the wild and unholy learning of adolescence<i>I've just finished Jessica Lahey's <u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Failure-Parents-Children-Succeed/dp/0062299239/" target="_blank">The Gift of Failure</a></u>, and it inspired this post in a sideways sort of way. It's a great read for parents and educators, highly readable and very wise -- but what if the failure she writes about is really just a means to an end that looks more like play...</i><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<br />
Anxiety is a condition of learning. It's a feature of adolescence, not a bug.<br />
<br />
Schools these days are worried about anxiety, and with good reason. Young people are very anxious, and it's impeding their learning. We've been asking how to reduce that anxiety, using techniques like mindfulness with some effectiveness, and rethinking emotional support in schools so that we can keep anxious young people tracking down the path we've set for them.<br />
<br />
While anxiety is a real problem that must be addressed by schools, it's also clear that we haven't gotten a grip on the problem. Perhaps this is because the whole idea of <i>reducing</i> anxiety is problematic. Maybe the problem is not anxiety at all, but the forms in which anxiety is allowed to exist that are the problem.<br />
<br />
Anxiety is fundamental to adolescence. It's the sense that things must change, and urgently. Or, as Camus wrote, it's the "tremendous energy spent in just being normal." Anxiety is the great driving energy that funds this incredible period of reaction, freedom, intense experience and growth. Without anxiety, there would be no first kisses, no deep insight, no wonder. Anxiety is the intensity, the shimmering, that gives adolescence its life.<br />
<br />
In my work, the problem I see is not that students are anxious. Indeed it would be strange if they weren't. Teenagers <b>should </b>be anxious because they are experiencing freedom and growth. The problem is that they are anxious about the wrong things -- they have had their anxiety stolen from them. We ask that their anxiety be quelled and that they submit to a known and tamed future. The goals we set for them are of an adulthood that is already understood. The world we present for them is one in which the path to happiness is much too clearly defined. Anxiety does not want clear goals or need calming. What it wants, what it needs is wildness and openness. Anxiety is a panther pacing the cage. It can only be its full self in the wild.<br />
<br />
We think that students are anxious because they are worried about an uncertain future or afraid that schooling is not going well. But this is an adult projection. Adults worry (and rightfully so) about the future for young people. But the natural attitude for adolescents towards the future is disinterest and unconcern. The intensity of youth is founded in the way in which it is totally present in its becoming.<br />
<br />
The problem that students experience today is not that they experience anxiety, but that they are <b>not</b> allowed to experience it. Parents, schools, culture, college pressure -- these things bottle up student anxiety and attempt to direct and channel into mechanical, law-abiding, and future-obeying forms something that is fundamentally wild and living and anarchic.<br />
<br />
So, maybe the answer to the problem of anxiety is not really deep breathing or relaxation or mindfulness, but instead something that looks more like play, joy, or wildness. So long as we are intent on teaching students to "manage" anxiety, we are misunderstanding the proper function of anxiety. Adolescent anxiety can't be managed -- that's the whole point. It operates outside of the whole concept of management. What we need are school and family spaces that allow for wildness and play. We need to release anxiety into its full power.<br />
<br />
Until that moment, until we adults realize that the structures we have built are fundamentally hostile to the practice of adolescence in all of its wild and unholy learning, anxiety will be an impediment to learning and the mental health of our young people. Let's not be content to manage anxiety in the off-base hope that eventually adolescence will just go away.<br />
<br />
Here's the heretical claim: maybe it's only by rethinking anxiety as a feature of adolescence, not a bug, that we can begin to glimpse a different sort of schooling, wilder, freer, less adult -- a school that doesn't just tolerate anxiety, but puts its tremendous power to use on behalf of learning. It's strange but we always talk about anxiety as if it were a quantity rather than an existential reality. We say: she experiences <i>a lot of anxiety</i>. But the problem of anxiety is not how much there is -- but the ends to which it is (or worse, is not) put.Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-69045786079746915622015-09-10T22:02:00.001-05:002015-10-26T21:33:40.399-05:00On Education as a Human Act: a report from the trenchesThe process of learning is call and response. It's back and forth. It is flow and rhythm. It's a method of measuring -- how much can I take in without being overwhelmed. You can't gulp the glass; you have to drink deeply but breathe while you are doing it. You have to digest.<br />
<br />
In short the process of learning is a process of relating. In learning we establish relationships with each other and with the object of study.<br />
<br />
Much of the contemporary discourse around education forgets this basic fact. When we think of students, we think of individuals with clear boundaries, as disconnected wholes, and our educational system tends to consider itself as the accretion of many isolated data points. Each individual accrues a transcript, which marks the ascension of a single atom through a clearly defined path. When we speak of whether our educational system is working or what it is doing, we understand the whole "system" (we are in a mechanistic metaphysics) as an accretion of thousands of isolated data points. We take the data as primary and try to derive relationships from the data.<br />
<br />
This way of thinking is literally backwards. Every educator knows that individuality is constructed out of relationality -- not the other way around. An atomistic way of thinking about students forgets what teachers know: learning is about making boundaries of the self open and permeable and could never be measured by any test whose function is to close off a self so that it can be determined. Tests make static a process that is dynamic. They attempt to define a river by casting a line into it. Learning is fluid -- it demands breaking open the self and interacting with the world and with other people. The isolated atom cannot learn. It can only be sent mechanically from one point to another along a line that is already clearly laid out and determined.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8u1YH5s2dHWA2GYzSqk8Mmqpr5zAcpGUg8GWLbnwDXkbiVJqci2LLYkx8jmQbCu8VaWJvxCZr3E8Y6or7c_MuNCPO9zyCnUVt9sPa4fpBklp40EegO4uiLvHiUuUHNiaDw3Iv0sJaZ9E/s1600/numberlines-thumbnail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="137" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8u1YH5s2dHWA2GYzSqk8Mmqpr5zAcpGUg8GWLbnwDXkbiVJqci2LLYkx8jmQbCu8VaWJvxCZr3E8Y6or7c_MuNCPO9zyCnUVt9sPa4fpBklp40EegO4uiLvHiUuUHNiaDw3Iv0sJaZ9E/s320/numberlines-thumbnail.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
These are things I have learned in my educational work: good teaching begins and ends with good relationships. Those relationships are founded in trust, and trust is a binding agent that functions between individuals. A school is not a system of transcript assembly. A school is a place, which exists in a world, and it is made out of people.<br />
<br />
The social function of a school is to be a place where human relationship can be maintained and protected, where habits of human relationship can be built while they are still open and in-process. A school protects young people from the repetition and deadening that undermines relationality and de-sensitizes the human animal. These relationships -- of friendship, of respect, of joy, of concern, of self, of inquiry -- are the material of education.<br />
<br />
A school is, therefore, a type of utopian space, where people come together to attempt to preserve the best in each other against the social forces that would undo and mechanize the human element. Schools succeed when they protect our ability to be vulnerable, to be exposed to each other, to encounter the world, to think and to feel. Openness, exposure, and vulnerability are the conditions of possibility of relationships and indeed of sensitive inquiry itself. Without these qualities there is no inquiry, there is only violence.<br />
<br />
All educators must resist the factory model of education. The factory model, with its atomistic and divided conception of the child and the educator, its linear conception of curriculum, and its hierarchical characterization of social structures strips the school of its essential function, which is to maintain our humanity and to construct a vision of the human that is worth pursuing. It makes the school a machine instead of a place; it gives it functionality but not relationality. It deadens and makes mechanical a process that is organic and living and can only function in organic conditions.<br />
<br />
For these reasons, the basic function of a teacher is to simply be humane -- all educational practice stems from the humanity of the teacher. The teacher's ability to relate to the world, to the material, to herself, to her colleagues, and to her students is the <i>sine qua non</i> of educational practice. All pedagogy is variation on this theme, and no pedagogy can substitute for it.<br />
<br />
So, yes, let us measure our educational practice. Let us test and revise and innovate. But when we do, let us be sure we are testing the actual material of education. Such tests are not impossible to construct or carry out -- but their implementation demands qualities that cannot be factory-produced: empathy, respect, care, concern, attention. The testing and the analysis of education can only happen at the level of life itself, and those who know how to inquire at that level remain in short supply and appear not to have their hands on the levers of the educational system.<br />
<br />
Until we have a society capable of taking the measure of a life in a full way, we will never have an educational testing system that leads us out of the factory model of education. We will have to rely on the human element in the factory and their counter-practices within and against the machine to keep the human spark alive. Green grass breaks through the cracks in the hardest concrete, and so still in the margins and through great effort does learning and genuine education happen.<br />
<br />Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-81579887029695142302015-09-06T21:53:00.003-05:002015-09-06T21:53:45.285-05:00Pretending to be NenowThe runner I thought about most when I was training hard was <a href="http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=411546&page=0" target="_blank">Mark Nenow</a>. He's not known by many runners today, but he ran under 28 minutes for 10k something like seven years in a row back in the '80s. He held the American Record in the 10000m for 15 years, from 1986 to 2001, when Meb ran seven ticks faster. Ritz never beat Nenow's best time. He still holds the mark for 10k on the roads at 27:22.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiae4fiT2gZNxc1I2GnY46UR0eaadvvHzOh2n1w1AxpzJcjZqbNhFlx9NEWI8mxhwnOoPIYbvUThEq-WUHGr5RkK5z06xKqoLeEHnAc3fctb25tWVkROTafBkX1cfYLKaOdt3foRrOu_yw/s1600/Nenow.GIF" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiae4fiT2gZNxc1I2GnY46UR0eaadvvHzOh2n1w1AxpzJcjZqbNhFlx9NEWI8mxhwnOoPIYbvUThEq-WUHGr5RkK5z06xKqoLeEHnAc3fctb25tWVkROTafBkX1cfYLKaOdt3foRrOu_yw/s320/Nenow.GIF" width="197" /></a>Nenow was a total running bum. He was known as the "White Kenyan" as he was slight and had legs up to his elbows. He lived and trained during his fastest years in Lexington, KY. His training schedule was simple: 140 mpw in 13 runs: 10am / 10pm Monday through Saturday, with a 20 miler on Sunday. Apparently he would head out for his evening run at 10pm. Most of this running was at "moderate" paces, which for Nenow was probably sub 6 minute miling. He did little to no interval work, sometimes running for a year without getting on the track -- but his best times came of course with a little rest and sharpening. Nothing fancy: workouts like 4 x 1600 at 4:30 pace.<br />
<br />
Anyways, whenever I'd get that bulletproof feeling, when my mileage built and it felt like I could run forever, I'd imagine that I was Mark Nenow running with stone-hard legs through the Nashville evening. I can't say that I knew what it felt like to be that fast or be able to weather that sort of training, but I loved the kind of running that he ran -- the moderate runs, day after day -- which matched the simplicity of his training, and, in turn, matched the grueling simplicity of racing 10000m.<br />
<br />
These runners in the 80s had no internet, rarely ran with watches, and Nenow himself didn't even have a coach. It's likely that if he had done today's perfect training with today's perfect recovery methods he would have run faster, perhaps much faster. But it's just as likely that part of the reason Nenow ran so well was that he did it his way, on his own, listening to his body, and simply running as much as he could.<br />
<br />
I don't know Mark, but anyone who trained like that must have loved the running as much as the racing. And why not? Think of what it must have been to be Mark Nenow feeling good: rippling along at 5:40 pace, somewhere around the 17th mile of the day, as the dogs barked and the moon shone through the Kentucky midnight -- just Mark, just running.Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-58805659165350356292015-08-30T15:34:00.004-05:002015-08-30T16:35:26.627-05:00Running DreamsMy suspicion is that most runners do not dream -- or at least do not remember their dreams. As a runner, my sleep had the quality of ink; absolutely black and immediate. It could be that runners simply do not need to dream, as in waking-life they are able to inhabit an intermediate phase of consciousness, skimming underneath their minds as they roll down the road. Or perhaps the narcotic fatigue of training drags runners into sleep so deeply that by the time they re-emerge they've left their dreams unconsciously behind.<br />
<br />
Lately, without exercise, I have been dreaming more, and I often dream quite vividly that I am running. Some hours later, I have to point my consciousness to the fact of my injured ankle and construct a counter-factual argument: I cannot run, and so therefore the run that I am remembering must have been a dream and did not happen. That's how vivid they are.<br />
<br />
Upon recall these dreams are are very bodily. The run comes back as vibrations and sounds. The images are peripheral, as when in the flow of running, experience becomes a type of tunnel that opens out from the mind. The eyes are less important than the hips, the shock, the balance.<br />
<br />
The other day in my dream I was running up a mountain, and what I remember most was the downthrust of my elbows, my toes curling to grip the dusty trail, and the arch of my neck as my eyes searched up for the horizon. The sun was nowhere to be seen; the landscape was trimmed down to an intimate horizon in which everything was felt and included, as if the lavender on the side of the trail was not seen but felt. This is perhaps a hallmark of dreaming. The boundaries between mind and world, between sense and reality, are muddied, as the world itself is only thought and through that inversion thought itself is worlded.<br />
<br />
I remember that inversion in the flow of the run. To be reminded that we are each centers of our own universes, each capable of expanding and dissipating, or contracting to a point of intensity. Cosmology states that the universe began in a tightly wound point of tremendous density, and it has been exploding outwards for eons. Our image of the universe is specks of lonely stars in gallons of black paint.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://english.bouletcorp.com/2015/08/26/brassens-in-space/" target="_blank">The inward universe does not mirror nature</a>. We need both expansion and intimacy, distance and depth, beginning and endings, waking and sleep. The multiverse of experience is a billion drifting centers of a billion vague horizons, blinking open and awake and then at the end of the day contracting back and asleep. Later we wake and remember that it was all a dream, and that it all happened inside our minds, but that it was still somehow quite real, as real as it gets.<br />
<br />
The possibility that reality is a dream has always been seen as solipsistic -- as a way of arguing that the only thing that is real is individual consciousness. But dreams and runs do not eliminate the world. They interiorize the external. They collapse the barrier between self and world, not so that the one becomes the other, but so that they both mingle and refresh and inter-connect. We dream and run and remember, not escaping reality, but following paths back into it.<br />
<br />
<br />Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-40657545780107660212015-08-25T22:20:00.001-05:002015-08-25T22:20:20.324-05:00The Depressives<i>Disclaimer: this post is not about running -- it's been over a year since I've run! But it was motivated by a perfect evening for running, as the Tennessee summer somewhat incredibly loosened its grip, letting the crisp of fall in through the cracks in the clear sky.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>* * *</i></div>
<br />
It's come to me slowly and over time that almost all of my literary/philosophical heroes have been depressives. The three philosophers I've spent the most time with -- James, Emerson, and Nietzsche -- all struggled with and at moments succumbed to depression. There's a way in which their depression is a key to their writing, particularly Nietzsche's writing. Much of his work on human motivation -- the will to power -- could be seen as motivated by the depressive's question: how can I will myself to will?<br />
<br />
James' philosophy as well so often rotates around questions of what makes experience flow and run. Depression is like a large and stagnant body of water, and we see James through the sort of effort of his prose make the water run. "The Will to Believe" is the text of a depressive trying to develop habits of mind that keep the water flowing. Belief for James is not about truth, but about continuing to survive and pursue an active life: this is the depressive's challenge.<br />
<br />
We don't often think of Emerson as a depressive; the stock Emerson is the Emerson of "Self-reliance," an essay often (mis-) read as having the view that the individual could through force of will somehow wrest hold of his destiny and live according to it. The deeper argument that Emerson urges throughout his work is that the self must find deeper and more substantive sources of energy: the divine, genius, the universal. The Emersonian self is always losing itself in larger flows. The essay that unlocks this message is "Experience," in which Emerson fails to find the flows of experience, in which he lays out the fundamental nature of reality as melancholic:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"...we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again."</blockquote>
In <i>The Noonday Demon</i> (a book which anyone who is interested in depression should read), Andrew Solomon argues that depression has been with us, manifesting itself in various cultural forms and under various understandings, but persisting as a quality of the human animal. These days, of course, depression is understood medically as a type of disease along the lines of alcoholism or perhaps diabetes. There are people who have a propensity towards depression that can be activated by their environment or their biology (and also deactivated through medical and talking therapies.) Solomon's take is that depression is a type of chronic illness and should be treated as such -- through ongoing and constant treatment. Depression is a flaw in the wheel of character, and it can be lived with, but only through steady work.<br />
<br />
When we read philosophy as young people, we often do so in order to lend authority to our own relatively new impressions of the world. When I read these depressives as a young man -- James, Emerson, Nietzsche -- I recognized their problems and my reaction was to say: aha! -- some truth, and carried them close to my heart as encouragement that the shade in which I saw the world might have some merit.<br />
<br />
As we get older and more settled in our views, we need the affirmation of philosophy less. We see the philosophers that we clung to so urgently in our adolescence as thinkers as deeply flawed and even embarrassing. This happened to me most specifically with Nietzsche, who I find I can hardly read any more, and when I do so now, it's mostly to extract something banal and ordinary like: the guy was a depressive, rather than a nugget of indecipherable prose that reflected back to me something undecipherable as well.<br />
<br />
But just in this way the philosophers return to us, less as sooth-sayers and more as representative types. The depressives, I can say at least, resonated with me in a time in my life when I needed them. They were friends, fellow travelers, strange men from the beginning of the 20th century who seemed to be speaking in an untimely present to me. As a young man, the concept of depression was totally foreign to me, but I understood these problems all too well: The Nietzschean question: "what is the source of human will?" The Jamesian question: "How does intellectual rumination touch reality?" The Emersonian question: "How can the individual tap into the spark of divination?"<br />
<br />
My use for philosophy had little to do with truth and much to do with companionship and friendship around a certain set of questions. Or, perhaps better put, the truth I found in the depressives was in their struggle, which seemed to take place alongside mine. It's impossible to imagine my young adulthood without these ideas and thinkers; that's how deeply they affected me.<br />
<br />
In the larger culture wars, battles rage on about the value of the humanities, the purpose of philosophy, literature, and other less practical pursuits. For my part, it's sad to think that someone like me might not have had the chance to encounter those traveling companions who shepherded me into adulthood. Who else could it have been? The transition certainly would have been made, but less richly, less articulately, and with fewer memories and understanding of myself.<br />
<br />
So, I'm grateful for my youthful courage to study philosophy and for the teachers and professors and friends and family who encouraged me to go digging into books to see what strange riches I might find.Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-34843272146343255082015-08-03T21:24:00.001-05:002015-08-03T21:45:08.802-05:00On the Smallness of Running<span style="font-family: inherit;">"<span style="background-color: #fdfdfd; text-align: justify; text-indent: 2%;">As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on the top." </span><span style="background-color: #fdfdfd; text-align: justify; text-indent: 2%;">--William James, in a letter to a friend</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fdfdfd; text-align: justify; text-indent: 2%;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #fdfdfd; text-align: justify; text-indent: 2%;">The smallness of running:</span></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the strike of the foot</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the curve of the path</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the agonizing second</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the race remembered</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the step out of bed</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the moment of decision</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the blinding whirl</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the forward lean</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the breeze in an ear</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the flight of the mind</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the common pace</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the daily run</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the irritable tendon</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the lace untied</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the rising strength</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">the return to weakness</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">and so on, so long as we run</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The way to write about a practice like running, which has no larger meaning, is to focus in on the smaller meanings. It's easy to think that when we philosophize we ought to say something grand and large, as if the truth of life must somehow be bigger than life. We are always wanting life to live up to its reputation, perhaps not realizing that this desire diminishes life. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Following James, I've found more insight going small -- into the overlaps and the lifted edges of life. It's there that the mind can actually grab hold of reality. We want our minds to be like trawling nets that capture everything at once, but the truth is that minds are more like scalpels and tweezers, better at slicing and mending and grasping the small than capturing the large. We think with a pincer-grip.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It's for these reasons that I drone on about running as an antidote to wisdom ill-conceived. Running brings us back to the small. It locates the mind inside a body, inside a brain, inside a skull. It localizes the attention, steadies the scalpel. When we run, we find ourselves to be contained within ourselves, smaller and therefore more capable, and ultimately more wise for the smallness.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Like any material, the larger the mind is spread, the thinner it becomes. With the internet and current events and politics and all, it feels as if our minds have been stretched to a sort of transparent film, like the surface of a soap bubble, upon which only impressions can be made. Our attention is repeatedly drawn to affairs much larger than we can comprehend, and our reflections threaten to spin off into other reflections, hardly skimming experience.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In contrast, the pleasures and pains of having a body are always local, immediate, pressing. While our minds can drift above and out of them for a while, in the end these smaller immediacies will have their way, like James' patient soft rootlets rending relentlessly the hardest monuments of man's pride. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In this is the small wisdom the body teaches: in the slip, in the passing, in the sensed and forgotten, in the glimpsed and the fleeting. In these are something more stable and enduring than the monuments of pride, the Gods and Nations and Arguments and Identities and Truths. We run, we sweat, we move, composing ourselves again, packing ourselves back into the small beings we are, ready to lift camp and to travel. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Might it be that in the end there is no larger meaning, that in the end life is measured in smaller meanings, themselves eroding away into sensations, overlaps, strains, and intentions? The world, perhaps, does not just orbit a sun but is also made of beetles and coral and blood, itself one of many worlds, teeming off into smaller and smaller multitudes. Can't we cast our lot with smallness? Aren't the multitudes more than enough?</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-60999162516912247052015-07-24T22:13:00.000-05:002015-07-25T18:02:11.037-05:00Death, Singularity, and the Memory of Running<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">"... as my father was receding from human circumstance, so, too were all of these particulars, back to some unknowable froth where they might be reassigned to stars or belt buckles, lunar dust or railroad spikes … I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow.” </span></div>
<div class="p1" style="text-align: right;">
<span class="s1">— Paul Harding, <i>Tinkers</i></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Injury has kept me from running for more than six months, and I finally decided last month to go under the knife, hoping that the surgeon could somehow make elastic again a right achilles tendon that had been chewed by my calcaneus over the course of thousands of miles into a ruptured mass of inchoate flesh. The surgery was a success; he took the flexor hallus longus — a tendon that runs the length of the bottom of the foot to flex the big toe — and somehow used it to reinforce and stabilize the achilles. Just yesterday I began to walk awkwardly without crutches. It will be a few more months until I can run. With luck, I will be able to train a year from now.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">So for the last little while running — that faithful antidote to all the ideas in my head — has now become an idea. My relationship with running is no longer immediate. I am a runner, still, but in memory, in dreams.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Here are the things I remember: the acid first early steps of a run, the complaining legs falling like mules into halter, a steady rhythm, steamy breath, the shoulders loosening and legs warming. The second curve of the track, bending patiently around, the bodily humors surging and flowing, pain and pleasure mixing like ginger beer and whiskey. Mischievous thoughts, playing with the pace, baiting training partners into feeling too good, running too fast, until we are flowing and cranking and leaning into the curves.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">When something in your life is lost: your father, a favorite shirt, an old habit, or a place, what is remembered is arbitrary: a collection of moments adding up to only so many particulars. So it is with running; away from the rhythm of training, away from the constant ache and hunger, the wooden legs and bird-chest, running comes back to me as scattered bits and impressions, never as the whole. The brain weakly assembles what in immediate experience is so much fuller: the symphony of experience played back by a solitary and sweet violin.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">But I believe what Paul Harding is saying in <i>Tinkers</i>, as George ruminates on his father's death, is that in the re-assembling of memory, in the broken particularity, is a kind of connection. As particulars, as belt buckles and lunar dust and railroad spikes, we possess the kind of fractured density that Kant could only call the object =x. Singularity is the word for it in philosophy — as singularities we are not the same, we are absolutely other, as mute to each other as a pillow to a strand of hair, as the diamond to the orange peel, as every object is to every other. We are all made out of this soundlessness.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">The logorrheic beings we are, we constantly bridge this soundless singularity through narrative, piecing together the separate nouns that clutter perception with verbs and syntax, holding the whole grammar together in the stories we tell. Narrative weaves together the disparate, fallen apart, and lost objects into a coherence that — done well — recreates the deep and immediate flow of experience.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">But narrative itself only holds together in the moment of reading or the even more fragile moment of writing. Narrative, itself, is an experience, and does not last. We read and are captured in the grip, and then lost again. </span><br />
<span class="s1"><br /></span>
<span class="s1">With running too: we run, are captured in the grip, and lost again. Like wrens, we flit from branch to branch, the perchings and the flights, lightly touching and grabbing and holding on, then falling into flight. </span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">That's what I miss from running, the catchings, the fallings, the effort to piece it together until it then comes together. The violins drop their piecemeal whining, the soundless objects cease their muteness, and -- the symphony begins, and it strains and flows and lasts the whole while, like life, until it ends.</span></div>
Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-15159016317593355842015-07-20T09:46:00.003-05:002015-07-20T09:47:32.159-05:00"Running as Art: Tolerance, Temperament, and the Ineffable"<a href="https://goo.gl/XNRxJd" target="_blank">Here is an open access link</a> to the post-prints of "Running as Art: Tolerance, Temperament, and the Ineffable." This essay was first written in response to a call for papers on the topic of the ineffable by the <a href="http://philosophy.emory.edu/stuhr/americanphilosophiesforum/" target="_blank">American Philosophies Forum</a>.<br />
<br />
I think that readers of this blog will enjoy it! Any institutional use of this work should credit the <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/journal_of_speculative_philosophy/v029/29.2.edmonds.html" target="_blank">Journal of Speculative Philosophy</a>.<br />
<br />Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1196651674832836865.post-5426519047501452062015-05-30T08:19:00.002-05:002015-06-05T11:19:38.251-05:00My Dad -- how I knew him<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/69292348@N08/17736840744" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Untitled by lld235, on Flickr"><img alt="Untitled" height="400" src="https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/351/17736840744_a3f2f6b90d.jpg" width="273" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dad loved the Tennessee River Gorge</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">When my daughter was born, my Dad would look at her to try to gauge whether she was an Edmonds. He always concluded that she was. Lourdes and I saw it too: from the beginning the first person she looked like was my father. Panambi was a difficult infant. I remember looking down at her when she was just months old, and she stared back up at me with animal wildness in her eyes, twisting and straining in a body that didn't fully respond. That's when she looked like my Dad.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">When we would talk about how difficult Panambi was as an infant with my family, everyone would say that Dad was the most difficult infant they had ever seen. I of course didn't see that up close but I saw it in my own daughter. She came into the world restless and straining at its limits, just like my Dad.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">When I think about who he is, that's the first thing I think of -- a sort of unsettled, straining, and restless energy that was the quality of his soul. My Dad was a little bit crazy and very much alive.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">That restless energy made some people uncomfortable. My Dad was not good in polite company. He headed straight in conversation for the most taboo topics. He could size up a complete stranger in an instant and would center in on what made them uncomfortable and unsettled. This sounds mean and aggressive when I write it, and I think that he came off that way to some people. But what he was doing was inviting people into the way that he lived in the world, which was open and unsettled and vulnerable and chaotic. He wanted to dispense with the guards we put around us and meet on terrain that was more open. He felt most comfortable there.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Although my Dad loved to provoke people he was never calculating -- it was instinctual. He never controlled fully the energy that coursed through him. The closest he came was as a young man, a state champion pole vaulter who also loved to party and dance. He couldn't control the energy but as a young athlete, he could vibrate with its frequencies.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">The purity of my Dad's energy is something that those closer to him knew. Once you got past his provocations, a different man emerged. My father was almost totally selfless. Perhaps because he could never build a self around all of that instinct and spirit, he just never demanded much from anyone. He was also deeply sensitive and capable of deep emotion. Though he never said it much, I knew how much he loved me and my brother, along with his mother and his own father and his brother and sister. His life centered on a small circle of people who he would do anything for, without complaint and without judgment.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">My Dad died suddenly and it appears he left without suffering, at least in that moment. In the later years of his life, my Dad suffered quite a bit. His body rebelled at the energy of his spirit, tightening and tensing up on itself. Sometimes the energy was too much for him to bear, and his way to deal with it wasn’t always healthy. But he took it all on himself and didn't want to bother anyone with it.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">The memory that flashes before me now is of me and him fishing on Santeelah Lake up in the North Carolina mountains. It was sunset, the lake reflecting brown and orange sky. All of a sudden, the smallmouth started biting, and it was total chaos. I was probably 10 years old, and my Dad and I reeled them in, one after another, these tight wriggling fish pulled like electricity out of those clear cold waters. That's when my Dad was at peace, with his son, in nature, with forces as wild and clean and wriggling as that soul-stuff that ran through him.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">That night is 25 years gone and now so is my Dad, gone with it, but he was never here to stay anyways. He was unsettled and vibrant and now he is gone.</span></div>
Jeff Edmondshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11840746835757479590noreply@blogger.com16