More than a sassy slogan...

Are you one of the symbolic creatures out there who finds meaning in ingraining visuals all over your body in the form of tattoos?  I've seen some incredible tattoos out there.  There have been times when I thought that I would get one.  The trouble is... I always come to the conclusion that I would get tired of that particular image I'd chosen...  and it would still be there.  Instead, I went through a bumper sticker stage.  I was even brave enough to put a few brazen sayings on the back of my car.  The trouble there was... they carried a personal meaning for me which was not conveyed to people as they found their car behind me in traffic.  I was driving and didn't have the attention span to divide myself between getting somewhere and offering an explanation.  Or better yet, I'd abandoned my adopted words and wasn't there to defend them.  I ended up taking a razor blade and erasing them from my brief attempt at vehicular exhibitionism. 

I don't know if Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has any tattoos on her Harvard professorial body, but I'm going to make a healthy assumption and say... I bet she doesn't.  After reading the preface of her book I also realized, that while the phrase of her book title was crafted in a clever way, it also carried a deep meaning and correlation to her life's studies.  The name of this book by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.
My hands are waving up and down together in unison forming the worship gesture both at the author, and all that she has accomplished in this book.  Before you even get to page one, there is a thirty-four page preface which gives a scholarly rebuttal.  This rebuttal is one not only to the history of her slogan in use over the last several decades, but also one in asserting the accurate history of what that slogan has meant to encapsulate in the scholarly work of her and her counterparts.  Not only is her rebuttal scholarly, it is witty, clever, and overall cheeky in introduction.  It begs women to ask the question before donning the t-shirt, what is the slogan all about?

I'd love to give an answer.  I'd love to spin it all out as astutely as Ulrich does.  That just would not be fair (and I'm not as equipped in the task as she is).  It would take all the spectacular "aha" and "wow" moments out of the reading experience.  While I would dream of doing what Ulrich has done in the career of being a female historian, to outline what her book here is as an overall exhibition of her life's work (a masterpiece really) seems like sacrilege to me.  I want to invoke the sense of mystery so powerfully to any person who chances upon these words that they set out to get their hands on it immediately. 

Every woman should read this book. 

The one discourse I can't help but make as to the contents are those that Ulrich presents in her research findings and discussion on Virginia Woolf.  While I knew that Woolf had a traumatic past, was a writer impelled to devote her lifeblood to her art, and a woman who battled depression to a bitter end... what I did not know was that the impetus for many of her works was grounded in an unsuccessful library search.  Ulrich says, "Virginia Woolf went to the British Museum to find out why women were poor." (Ulrich, 74)  Swimming in data and finding little to sate her curiosity, she stumbled upon one historian (Professor George Trevelyan), and only finding a very short passage exclusively dealing with the subject of women at all, gave up her search in despondency. (IBID)  Ultimately, this failure to find what was being sought after fueled the result of Virginia Woolf's fiction career. (IBID)  What she could not find in her particular search of history, Woolf created in her own worlds. (IBID)  I bring this up because later in the book Ulrich posits a priceless question, why was Virginia Woolf not able to find what she was looking for? (Ulrich, 104)

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and a handful of other female historians have found an abundance of what Virginia Woolf was looking for in the library that day.  These "re-discoveries" of women in history haven't yet dried on paper in the ink that they have been written with.  It is a glorious feast, the tastiest hybrid of apples in the grandest multi-colored variety you could dare to imagine.  Folks, the best part is that it's all true, and ripe for the picking.  Come, all daughters of Eve, and picnic at this tree until you are quite full with its fruit.

I mourned this latest discovery of Virginia Woolf's lamentation over not finding women in history.  I had the feeling of wanting to get into a time machine and take back all of Ulrich's work for Woolf to delight upon.  Alas, I let the vision of the time machine fade from my imagination.  In its place the realization stood firm, that without Woolf's suffering in this regard, her works of art would evaporate from existence.

I love quotes and phrases like a junkie loves heroin.  I'm going to covetously guard just how deeply clever quotes and phrases play a role in my life, and just leave it at this: if I ran across the Well- Behaved Women Seldom Make History bumper sticker, my hands would reach out for it.  A mental motion picture of me peeling away the paper would be set in motion.  My fingers would tingle for want of smoothing over wrinkles as I adhered the sticker to the back of my car.  Mostly though, there would be the remembrance (of so much history left untold when I was officially learning it in class) I'd acquainted myself with in the reading of this book, and a humble understanding of what the author meant in voicing the slogan.  I wouldn't ever want to forget it.

Gives You Something To Think About...

Admittedly, the reading for this week's discussion was done for my master's studies.  I've read him before and was glad to be reminded about how treasured we are to be in a place where learning and our freedom of intellectual pursuit is a right.  Perhaps there's a group of intellectuals out there that harbor the opinion that this right is not exercised enough by the raving, audience, mainstream crowd of people...but that's besides the point, and another discussion altogether.

The topic under discussion is John Dewey's Education & Experience, which was written in 1938, and whose theoretical vision has had such an impact on the education system in the 20th century. 

It's truly amazing to behold a vision of learning, laid out for all eyes to see, which includes: a process of integrating a body of knowledge, emphasis on individual intellectual bent and motivation, mentorship, application of that body of knowledge to an experience which correlates to it, how the social community awareness will provide constraints/motivation for performance, and how the utilization of the scientific method promotes an ethical and sound processing of questions towards outcomes.

In today's high-tech and instant gratification society (of which I'm an active member) its refreshing to look back at the great thinkers that were a part of bringing us to where we are today.  This visionary helped make stands in education towards progression, a term that is still debated, but to universal benefit.  In an arena where there's always a new educational product, book, writing series, and/or technological gadget, it's nice to take any educator or "educatee" back to the basics... so to speak. 

In the classroom as students, we're privileged we are not learning solely from our Fun With Dick And Jane readers anymore.  I'm not talking about a book that was remade into a movie with Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni.  Children today have more hands-on experience in one year now than a child probably had in their entire school career one hundred years ago.  There are crystals to grow, the museum to visit, the fascinating computer programs to learn from in an animated game, plastic coins to count with, and field trips to wilderness camps with activities built to encourage character, ad infinitum.  It's all such great fun.  And as a former public school teacher who used to grace the hallways with her lesson-planning skills on the way to her gradebook, I used to revel at all the possibilities of offering learning opportunities.  So much to choose from!

While I loved so much Dewey's points on experience and systematic organization for experiential learning for students that do not ignore a body of knowledge, what keeps coming back to me when I think about this book are his arguments about intellectual freedom.  Maybe this is because Dewey's words speak to me from a past that did not have all the fringe benefits that schools now offer to its students.  I somehow remind myself about the difference of the worlds he speaks from and I live in.  It's easy to get lost at the carnival in all the fun (although I don't know if my children would view their school experience in this way). 

Dewey's main argument about intellectual freedom is that, "the only freedom that is of enduring importance is freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while." (Dewey, 61)  Our freedom to choose today sounds like a walk through the Mall of America.  In this country now we are constantly bombarded with the pressure of making choices, and in an infinite variety of.  We utilize the freedom of observation and judgment every minute.  We have the right to make choices independent of what others are telling us, and hopefully we are exercising it today.  There's not enough time in a day to say yes to all the propositions which are posited in our direction.  Are we skilled enough in aligning our skills of observing and judging with what we've named as our purpose?

It's a hard skill to build.  There's plenty of opportunity to practice.  Don't get me wrong.  I could definitely be described as a "Yes woman."  Most of my biggest life lessons came packaged in the form of saying yes, when an observer might have been passionately shaking their head, no, No, NO!!!!  This visionary writer makes such an important point about our intellectual freedom.  Dewey says, "Natural impulses and desires constitute in any case the starting point.  But there is no intellectual growth without some reconstruction, some remaking, of impulses and desires in the form in which they first show themselves."  (Dewey, 64)  The thought of applying a scientific method to any life experience might sound a bit geeky.  I love it when people don't say yes right away about a possible venture, but say instead, "I don't know, let's research it."  And I'm talking about life experiences you wouldn't access the ERIC database for.  I know.  I know.  What a geek!  I come to this level of maturity after riding roller coaster speed on the high dial of impulsivity most of my life.  I am really an adult now.  And these are the kinds of things adults would say out loud where their younger counterparts Might hear.  Since I'm talking about being an adult, I'll quote Dewey once more, "thinking is thus a postponement of immediate action, while it affects internal control of impulse through a union of observation and memory, this union being the heart of reflection.  What has been said explains the meaning of the well-worn phrase 'self-control.'  The ideal aim of education is creation of power of self-control." (Dewey, 64)

Why am I choosing this book as a topic to discuss here?  Well.....I'm exercising my intellectual freedom.

What it Means to Have it.... BADD

I'm going to get a bit personal about my BADD constitution. It wouldn't be fair to flippantly and nonchalantly bring up a book each week - without letting one know just how deep the letters cut into my psyche.

It runs deep, and flows from long, long ago. For some reason, the gene of my reading disorder was activated at an early age. I would do anything to get a good fix. I once found a twenty dollar bill in a purse my mother no longer carried around (so it wasn't technically stealing). Instead of being an honest child, I took it to the school book fair and spent every penny.

I would read books that I wasn't quite old enough for... and still today, I have not outgrown this neurosis.

I kept books from the library so long that I couldn't find them anymore, just because I couldn't bear taking them back.

I made fun of my mother reading and crying over a book, but eventually couldn't resist taking it, and found myself doing the same thing.

I have been the object of ridicule, of being relentlessly made fun of, for keeping the company of a book... in a bar.

I've admittedly had late fines from one library totaling something around a seventy dollar range, and whole-heartedly support food drives that erase fines for a worthy (my) cause.

Today...I find myself not quite sated with one book from an author and set out to find more from ones I loved just to take care of an itch that had been created by them.

I choose a variety and cannot pledge loyalty or fealty to any one author. They are juxtaposed as lovers from: C.S. Lewis to Nietzsche, Emily Bronte to Henry Fielding, Stephen King to Henryk Sienkiewicz, Diana Gabaldon to Aphra Behn, Kahlil Gibran to Carl Sandburg, Hafiz to Toni Morrison, Louisa May Alcott to Laura Esquivel to Henry Miller to Wayne Dyer and showcased in bondage covetously on my shelves.

I bawl over a delicious book having uttered the words "the end." I can only rejoice or find any sense of happiness upon the discovery that there is more to the story - a series!

I refuse any treatment or diversion or substitute or alternate lifestyle for my affliction of running my eyes over the inked-on pages that I want more and more of.

Threatened by the reality of out-of-state moving more than once, divorce, possible poverty, and small upper body strength, only a very small percentage of the massive collection of personally owned books is ever passed on to new homes.

I am continuously reluctant to admit the books I've been reading under the sheets. Some mean so much to me, their existence is a covert one and I don't want to share them with anyone else. There are books that are easy to talk about because they don't mean that much.... Then there are those that I only share with a select few.

They say that surviving some afflictions and/or tragedies comes more swiftly by voicing the experience. If I were to become a thriver and overcome my BADD constitution by blogging here... Swift destruction of this blog would occur. All followers would probably be included in that destruction.

I thought it only fair to acquaint you with the BADD malady and any possible threats to the proximity of it.