Splurging and Touring Occidental College (for my middle daughter)

Huntington Gardens, Nov 8, 2008

Yesterday I really physically overdid it and went both to Occidental College for a tour to see the college with my middle daughter (who loved the messages of multi-culturalism as well as the curriculum,it being teaching based and "meaning of life" based) and then went to Huntington Garden's and to downtown Pasadena. More on this school tour later I'm making a walking Mom's perspective piece. Obama attended this school, Occidental, and they were obviously delighted he was elected. After two years, from the school, he transfered to Colombia. It appears early on he was quite good at moving on and upward toward his goals.
Far more self-possessed than I felt at the time.

I went shopping in their University bookstore with a school supplied 20 % off coupon saving a bundle on books I'm going to read this next few weeks and share right now. Ahead of being fully read, I'm just calling this an "I'm excited to read" this new book group. If I ever have $500 I'm going there to get myself about twenty I had to leave behind. After going ahead and splurging then sat for a part of the tour to read as both my husband and daughter had "the energy to go to the next session." I'm really suffering the blocked intestine blues.

After this lovely lunch there, they put on a really amazing day for families, we went to tour the Huntington Galleries and Gardens (again I fished out) and had dinner at Buca di Beppo's in Pasadena . I'm so struggling today. But it was so good to see my babe, Sylvia. Happy. CalTech is so good for her. She explained E to me, the square root of -1 and some long differential equation work as well as a relationship that oscillated in a mathematical progression she has been working on. It was good to listen to actually. I do like theoretical math but I need the lessons really, really simplified and slow. Although I annoyed her, the work she does in physics is great.

So I got to go in a bookstore, as I said, and spend $150, incidentally Occidental has a terrific bookstore ...again...
and that is so rare as to be like the sighting of a bluebird, treasured.

My gosh sitting with my bag of books brought me back to my college days when I never, ever could AFFORD the books that I needed to read. One thing I did realize was somehow we advanced opportunity for these kids of mine in a lot of ways, freed them to get to places like this, gave them a softness and freedom from so much I knew at this time when I took on responsibilities that were overwhelmingly impossible. Imagine how my parents might look on that, or their's.

You know on the surface Occidental was so mixed in it's applicants. Just wonderful to see touring, so actually refreshingly diverse, I could see kids just like I teach there. I sat reading these books in that mix watching kids, thinking that I have worked really to give my own children the access that we all should really look much harder at providing broadly to all children that work for it. A richness of personal meaning was found yesterday for me despite the failing body.....So the books...



This was the one I started sitting under a tree reading. Drinking my bottled water.
It is called Education's End, Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up the Meaning of Life

Written by Anthony T. Kronman, this book is posing a question that I see filtered into the public elementary school and that is why I bought it. Also it began heavily embedded in the concept of CARE. This seems to me to be the center or heart of why we even do this, educating, and it seems to be almost so invisible and unspoken. It's not tested and therefore not really very important at all to the "powers that be." Care based education is suffering deletion, denigration, shrinking and marginalizing.

In my reading and then application into my contexts the book of this former Yale Law Dean's looks at why we have moved from talking/teaching "meaning of life" in colleges ; we are eschewing seeing this higher level training of our students as pathways to live happier and healthier lives over highly skilled ones. I saw this into my own dissonance with turning school into a rote skills center ( as my daughter's and son endure). I do see parallels in the loss of instruction in the legitimate pursuit of care and happiness in "institutions." The high price of that appears to have some serious issues in responding to the challenges of the new age, an age requiring we address our brother now.

I cannot yet present the book but I do think after I complete it I may have a tiny slice of understanding how this prof. saw this change go down in his perspective, that at least on the surface, has come at such a high price. saw his determination to "do something."
It's a very enjoyable, personal and meaningful read. It begins with this quote. I'd like to share it:

The pleasures of the intellect are notoriously less vivid than either the pleasures of sense or the pleasures of the affections;and therefore, especially in the season of youth, the pursuit of knowledge is likely enough to be neglected and lightly esteemed in comparison with other pursuits offering much stronger immediate attractions. But the pleasure of learning and knowing, though not the keenest, is yet the least perishable of pleasures;the least subject to external things, and the play of chance, and the waet of time. And as a prudent man puts money by to serve as a provision for the material wants of his old age, so too he needs to lay up against the end of his days provision for the intellect. As the years go by, comparative values are found to alter: Time, says Sophocles, takes many things which once were pleasures and brings them nearer to pain. In the day when the strong men shall bow themselves, and desire shall fail, it will be a matter of yet more concern than now, whether one can say "my mind to me a kingdom is"; and whether the windows of the soul look out upon a broad and delightful landscape, or face nothing but a brick wall.
-A. E. Houseman, 1892

You know I was in a certain frame of mind yesterday. Wishing for my daughter an education in skills but also in something "else" to make "a life" over a specific narrowed discipline alone. I suppose because I know what helped me and what life has called upon me to face. There seems to me something of the foundation for "who am I?' necessary. I see that we work in a rapidly changing world and value knowing both who you are and what you are about, but also what is/can be my meaning and how to work toward that. But just in a model about gaining skills to work in complex and evolving dynamics as a cog, without personal ethic and ability to act on your values in contexts in what we do, I'm not sure...really a book to help this thought comes at a good time. I'm very disappointed in a money driven end. My children don't want that. They want to know themselves. I see that universities have made extraordinary compromises as they have been wedded to getting the corporate and donor buck. I see that they have almost completely lost the idealism of my youth, along with the struggle, the sense of edginess, the ability to think critically. But also I see good there. Amazing research gains. I do.

So this book was having a conversation with a parent looking at our young people and the "trading" they are going to engage. It reminds me of the song...teach your children well. We are not them though. If we ever ask them why, you know that we would cry.

So I think this is a lovely book to say "You know, We love you."

I like this from page 45...

"...Even a half century ago, the question of life's meaning had a more entral and respected place in higher education than it does today. It was not always given this name. But the estion of how to spend one's life, of what to care about and why, the question of which commitments, relations, projects, and pleasures are capable of giving a life a purpose and value: regardless of the name it was given, and even if , as was often the case, it was given no name at all, this question was taken more seriously by more of our colleges and universities in the middle years of the twentieth century than it is today. It was a question that instutions of higher learning felt they had the right and duty to address in an explicit and disciplined way. The responsibility for doing this fell in particular to the humanities. A half-century ago, many teachers in these fields still believed in the possibility and value of an organized study of the mysteries of life. But under pressure, first , from the modern research ideal whose authority today dominates the humanities as it does all branches of learning, and , second, from the culture of political correctness that has been so particularly influential in those disciplines for the past forty years, the question of the value and purpose of living, of the sources of fulfillment available to us as mortal creatures with ambitions of the most varied kinds, has been pushed to the margins of respectability even in the humanities. It has been stripped of its legitimacy as a question that teachers of the humanities feel they may properly and competently address with their students in a formal program of instruction. It has been exiled from the classroom and kicked out of school, so that today it survives only in private, in pianissimo, in the extracurricular lives of teachers and students, even in those libelal arts programs whose distinctive purpose presupposes the vital importance of this question itself: the depressing conclusion of an historical development that has privatized a subject the humanities oce undertook to investigate in a public and organized way, before the modern reseaech ideal and cultue of political correctness made it an embarrassment to do so."
-Antoiny T. Kronman

Something I want to understand better.



Of course the rest of these are books I either wanted to read or that caught my eye. Many books did that yesterday. I get out soooo rarely it becomes quite a treat. But I'm paying today of course. when you lose your health you know this. Storming the Gates of Paradise, Landscapes For Politics by Rebecca Solnit

It had some good reviews. What is this about? I do not yet know. Essays. Beautiful pags I open full of references I know. Listen to this intro to one

"The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say , stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell."

This goes on into an essay on metaphors. It is so good I am keeping it here under my arm to go curl and read to distract me from feeling so ill.

I cannot wait to read.






This book Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds, Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America by Gregory Rodriguez I debated.
I thought, well I teach that so I really could wait and read in the library. But picking it up I thought about something Syl said about CalTech and home . She said she misses hispanic kids. She feels a bit disoriented. I have been hearing that for several weeks. How can we know the lives and stories of those we do not know? If i did not teach where I do would I know this?

No, I wouldn't.

So what it appears to do is tell the story of becoming Mexican Americans, the immigration, difficulties, perceptions.




I intended to read this so many times. This book explains the philosophy of care as the cornerstone of educating, basing our work in what we know from a construct of "home." This Stanford educator plows through these times when Standards/tests define, into the foundation of what we do and why. A read that will be affirming and challenging.




I suppose it would be silly to tell you that the paper this is printed on is awfully nice. It kind of sucked me in. Should recall this, but it fades. so I'm going to read it again. Or for the first time.
To quote a movie I really like.




NPR, I thought had an extended interview with the author and it was terrific. Really. But I cannot find it , I did find this, equally good. It definitely made me want to read this bok. Besides loving biographies, and especially auto-biographies.

That interview told me a great deal I never knew. She spoke to having this relationship. It was something to me worth hearing. I've read several pans of the book, but the interview was compelling and I'd like to read it.




This book is called "Happy Families" by Carlos Fuentes
I think it will affirm for me the goodness I find in the families I teach. The jacket alludes to the richness that comes from the variety of lives and settings, this set up of stories appealed to my love of story.




In a section labelled Occidental writers I found this one.
If I get an operation this is first on the recovery reading list.
I've read everything I could find on Hellman and all her associations. liking her cookbook the best :) This biography will be terrific to refresh reading that is a bit past for me now.
There is a line I found there today about her mind, one former lover saying "was the sexiest mind alive." I would think that quite the compliment. Many men were devoted to her.
She to them. Interesting to read.




This I just do not know. But it tells in a way the author's story and I would like to know more.
Anthropology remains one of my "wish i could have done that" loves. I read there whenever possible.
So it took a day of dealing with tummy nightmares to get this here. Disappointingly slow going and I'm missing seeing a friend out here because I'm just too sick for guests.
It seems yet another causality of health.

But getting to the bookstore was an amazing treat.