A different kind of post

I have just completed my application to the Cambridge PKP supervision course. In the course, a students works directly with a Cambridge professor on a topic of their choice; as a result, students must first submit an application enabling Cambridge to match students with appropriate tutors.

Since I suspect that someone I will soon go on a date with may read this blog post, I sought something that would introduce me to them in a positive way. I believe that this application describes me intimately: for their sake, and for yours, I post it here.

Briefly describe your proposal. 250 words.

Through interaction with a Cambridge tutor, a personal ontological perspective will be developed, codified and refined during the first two weeks of instruction. Ideally, discussion will focus on the works of Georg Simmel, Emmanuel Levinas, and Soren Kierkegaard; however, it is expected that the tutor will include their own ontological perspectives as elements of the discussion.

During the following three weeks of instruction, the student’s ontological perspective will be developed into an educational model and described in written form. In this process, a range of pedagogical practices and theories will be evaluated and selectively incorporated into the educational model, based on the degree of fit between the pedagogical practices and the ontological perspective. Where available, empirical data on pedagogical
practices will be reviewed and incorporated into the pedagogical-method evaluation process

In the final three weeks of instruction, a general model for translating ontological and phenomenological perspectives into educational systems will be developed. Specifically, a series of questions will be formulated; the pattern of questions, and their corresponding answers, will serve as a guide for developing multiple systems of education based on varied ontological foundations.

The written products of all three stages of instruction will be gathered into a paper describing a model for the development of ontologically appropriate systems of education. To guide the supervision, a tutor with expertise in educational philosophy and/or sociological theory would be preferred; however, any tutor or number of tutors comfortable with the process described would be able to provide the desired assistance.

Why do you want to pursue this independent study option and what benefit do you hope to gain from it? 250 words.

I will eventually pursue a career in education reform; specifically, I believe that the philosophical foundations of the American system of public education do violence to the moral and active nature of individuals. As a result, I wish to explore and develop educational philosophies upon which to base more acceptable systems of instruction. To develop my own educational philosophy, I intend to first explore and develop my own ontological perspective.

The independent study option attracted my attention because it provides focused opportunities to develop my ontological perspective and educational philosophy. I hope that the supervision will provide an environment which will intensely refine my ideas by testing them against the expertise and knowledge of the tutor and selected texts. This process will thereby improve the efficacy and internal consistency of the school system I eventually develop. I recognize that many other individuals do not share my ontological perspective. Thus, I hope to also develop a generally applicable model or starting point for individuals wishing to establish philosophically and culturally appropriate systems of education. After identifying my own ideas and realizing them in a school system, I wish to provide others with the same opportunity. I anticipate that assisting religious, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic groups in forming appropriate systems of education will form a significant portion of my future career.

Thus, I am attracted to the supervision option in order to directly pursue the intellectual and practical preparation I desire for my future work in educational reform.

Briefly describe any relevant work you have already done in the area.

In the past year, I have taken two courses on classical and contemporary sociological theory. Each course was designed to familiarize students with the general ontological perspectives of well- known theorists; the theoretical survey began with Plato and Socrates and concluded with the works of Michel Foucalt, Judith Butler, and Jurgen Habermas. Another course taken simultaneously examined the life and philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard. Previously, I completed a philosophically-grounded tutorial on the sociology of international development which provided additional insight into various systems of thought. I am currently taking a course in organizational theory; my research in the course applies organizational theory to educational institutions.

During the sociology of international development course, I discovered that my ontological perspective was insufficient to account for my analysis of the theories I was studying. As a result, I began to explicitly formulate my own ontological perspective through writing. As I have explored additional philosophical and theoretical positions, I have continued to refine my ontological position.

In education, I have studied the sociology of education in four courses, including a course providing an overview of the subject, a course on the production and reproduction of social inequality through education, a tutorial on the limitations of schools as agents of social change, and a research course examining the impact of religious institutions on educational outcomes. Following the research course, I conducted a qualitative field study in South Africa on the educational consequences for students of varying degrees of religious involvement. After returning to the United States, I conducted a similar study using quantitative data and presented the findings at the 2011 Pacific Sociological Association Conference. I am currently preparing a paper detailing the findings for publication.

I am currently co-authoring a study describing the distribution and evaluating the effects of various expressions of educational philosophy in e-learning systems in Utah; the study is slated to conclude in December of this year.

Please list below any books or other sources which may be relevant to the topic.

Totality and Being – Emmanuel Levinas
Otherwise than Being – Emannuel Levinas
Twilight of the Idols – Friedrich Nietzche
Archaeology of Knowledge – Michel Foucalt
Being and Nothingness – Jean Paul Sartre
Truth and Existence – Jean Paul Sartre
Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Paulo Freire
How We Think - John Dewey
De Magistro – Saint Augustine
The Philosophy of Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas – Mary Helen Mayer
From Childhood to Adolescence – Maria Montessori
Various books of Christian scripture
Various commentaries and explanations on non-Christian scripture

As an added bonus for those of you who scrolled down:

A brief post

I apologize for the lack of posts recently; perhaps I will have more time in the near future. Indeed, I know I will: this is going to again become my travel blog in a series of weeks.

I prepared a photoessay today; I believe I may post highlights of it here. Also, my first short story is nearing completion, and will be submitted for (hopefully!) publication in the next few weeks. I will update concerning the project as time goes on.

Until then, adieu; good luck and long life to my Swedish friends, and to all of you as well.

A quick dip

As all of you who follow this blog have noticed, the vast majority of my posts tend to be long. While in Africa, the posts averaged about three pages (if I remember correctly) - other posts before and since have been even longer.

I am about to start a project combining three essays I've written over the course of the semester using the fourth one as a frame. The end result should be thirty pages or more. I admit I am a little apprehensive about this undertaking; this will be, by far, the longest piece I've ever had to write. Ten pages, on a relatively dry academic or philosophical subject, don't frighten me; thirty pages explaining my worldview to an audience is a little more intimidating.

Exciting, too, though: this is what I want to do. It's part of the journey I want to take. It's practice for the kind of creative non-fiction and creative fiction I eventually hope to produce. Maybe I'll post it in installments here.

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Go eat corned beef and wear Orange!

Or green. I simply forgot green last year, but was wearing orange, and so decided to support the Protestants in Northern Ireland. Either way, both parts of the island are supposed to be wonderful.
BTW: I'll be visiting there for the first time soon, and I have no idea what I should do. I may just go and explore. If any of you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

From my personal essay writing class, I was informed that one purpose of writing is for meditation: write to work through what you are otherwise unable to work through. Inexpensive self-therapy. Following that noble tradition, I begin to blog today. Why share such a meditation with the world at large? I'm not JUST meditating; I'm also trying to improve my descriptive and narrative ability. Since I am going to be writing a lot in a very short period of time in the very near future, practice now will help me to develop the ability to write quickly and well. I hope. Please post comments and critiques.

Alice in Wonderland meets the Cheshire Cat: in an oft-quoted-in-Mormon-circles exchange, Alice asks which way to go. Rather than butchering the quote, I will simply transcribe it here:

The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect. “Cheshire-Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—,” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. “
What sort of people live about here?” “In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Sadly, the end of the quote is often left off. Please excuse the second portion: not that I consider myself insane, but it is a bit nice to remember that we're all in this together.

Anyway, I feel this is often the way God works with us. Again, not that God is insane, but that He answers the questions we put to Him in order to help us grow. He is a little more loving than the cat (i.e. infinitely) but His responses are very often conditioned on our questions. Take now, for example: if you don't know which way you want to go, it is harder for you to get there, and you have to keep moving to get anywhere, so as long as you keep walking, you go somewhere, and God changes the path around your feet. Imagine Alice in Wonderland as a gameboy game, where the character always stays in the center of the screen, and everything else changes around him. THERE's a lesson ins subjectivity.

Anyway, I'm off to a scholarship meeting. I feel meditated. So much for practicing narrative and descriptive ability. Hope you enjoyed it too.

Lightning

Lightning

I found no solace in Capitol Reef. It was a beautiful place, with stunning moonlit vistas of the maze of canyons and mesas. Striking red dust and red rock were everywhere thrown into sharp contrast by unyielding light. But it was not a place of peace for me; I found no movement in my soul, no stirring inspiration, no deep insight.

Perhaps I lacked because the place was peaceful. Nature in my home is a nature of conflict. Though it was cold, the sky was still in Capitol Reef. My memories of nature are of the sky riven with flashing light; midnight blue, celestial horizons afire with electric brilliance all across my field of vision, rippling over the plains. The scene from a distance is beautiful and majestic; the scene from within the storm is stirring, gripping, and invigorating. When the rain pours down in waves that roll across the ground; when you can see the thickness of the rain break towards you; when your bones and blood shake with the cacophony of thunder; when, because of the rain you can only see blinding flashes all around you: then nature speaks, then, I feel something in my soul.

Friends from more peaceful parts of the country mistakenly think I feel fear. Not at all. After my first tornado in a tent, I could not feel fear of storms anymore; if I die, I’ll die, and that’s the end of it. No. The storms of my home are a witness of God moving in His majesty and power. A silent being? See the Missouri in flood; watch a flash of light crack the sky down to the earth; hear His voice in booming tones roll across the plains. Even I cannot mistake that.

But in Capitol Reef, He was silent. Thankfully, the God of nature speaks more than in thunderstorms; the tempests of the heart and mind seldom yield such satisfying or cathartic external displays. But there was no communication during that trip.

I knew why He was silent – I had gone into the desert. For reasons I do not know, my pursuits of the opposite sex are not currently approved by Heaven. There I was, in blatant disregard of such a mandate, pursuing a classmate in ways that, in other climes, would be perfectly acceptable. Even the desert dwellers of my company could detect no improper behavior; by every external standard, especially the standards of the Church, I should have been in the right. There was water in Capitol Reef; but I could not drink. I had gone into the desert, and until it rained, I could not slake my thirst.

When I got back home, back into a snowstorm, I called the girl I had been pursuing. We decided to just be friends, and I had glass of water. The following Sunday, as I partook of the Sacrament – water, in our church – God spoke; great, drifting flakes outside the window, springs of joy in my soul.

Nature cannot provide what God withholds. I could only be thirsty in Capitol Reef.

Mormon culture preaches a domestic ideal – celestial marriage - that promises personal happiness. As I stated earlier, by divine decree I am closed out of such an ideal at the moment. Not by lack of effort- mind you. I have on countless occasions thrown myself down from grace, and found a willing partner on the ground who came up to meet me in the air … until we struck each other, and nearly broke from the impact; both of us returning, charred, to our respective elements – she to the friendly earth, and I to thunderheads in the sky.

Not all of those meetings have been wicked; Heaven opened pathways for me to travel through, else I could not have gone so far as I did. I have loved, and have been loved, with an electric intensity and a pure light that I thought were the ultimate expressions of my soul. But I was wrong. Heaven never finished my course; there was no final connection; Heaven did not give the third flash linking sky and ground.

But lightning is far more than romance, and God does not speak to me in stillness, but in conflict. Though I struggle even now to admit it, I have not been called to lakes in the desert, or to smooth, flowing rivers that gently and sleepily roll into the sea. I was born, and I live, and I will die, in storms.

Sparks are upper-atmospheric bolts of energy that travel great distances across the magnetosphere before discharging in the sky below. Before I admitted my call, I wondered if I could stay low to the ground, stay close to my lightning rods, and have Heaven accommodate me. But the motion of charged particles is not determined by the particles themselves, or by the energy transferring between them. Chaos theory teaches that random chance picks the path of a lightning bolt; that random chance determines the journey of a spark. Sailors witnessing Saint Elmo’s Fire attribute it to God.

St. Elmo’s is the name of an electric fire that dances blue and green over masts but does not consume them. Like a bow in the heavens, or the shimmering greens and blues of skies over northern seas, this beacon in the rage of storm is a witness that God is on the ship; that God is nearby, that God is watching and with sailors in their moment of need. If God is on the ship – showing forth His power in the storm before He commands it to be still – then He is also in the sky. And if He is, then my paths across the upper atmosphere to lands and climes I do not yet know are Heaven opening a way.

I had hoped to touch down here; to be carried into a home, to charge lightbulbs and ovens and baby monitors. But that is, apparently, not my way. God doesn’t call me to the stillness; he calls me to where air is rent by rain.

Lightning is a call from Heaven. The terror is in striking, not in being struck. The beauty is Heaven flashing through you, not something that others observe. The effect – the thunder that ripples outward for miles, the light that blinds and illuminates – is God moving in His majesty and power, not chance. And I feel the pull of charged particles upward, away from here.

Writing.

I recently attended a lecture reading by Ander Monson. His essay, "Long Live the Jart" was interesting and useful, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, the introduction given him as an artist leaves me wondering: is there really meaning in everything? Should we find meaning in everything?

My initial reaction was that we should not - some things are more important than others, and though there is some value to the unheroic, claiming that all things have meaning is very near to rendering all things meaningless. Granted, that is a relational view of meaning; meaning is meaning only if it is more important than something else. And that's not quite fair - there is some type of intrinsic value, even from a subjective perspective; all things can have meaning to me, even if they are not all heroic.

That perhaps is the key - all things can have meaning, but meaning is not a guarantee of quality. Whether I like it or not, every moment of my life has meaning for me - has an impact. I've heard it said that it is imprinted on our bodies- the Bible talks about the word of God being written into the fleshy tablets of our hearts; or about the show of our countenance. At a conference I attended recently, someone speaking of those in combat gave the idea that what one thinks about all the time is what one becomes. And, apparently, it shows.

Perhaps that's why I have an interest in dreams- Jung is fascinating for me, though I don't hold too much truck with the 'collective subconscious.' I don't think we are connected in quite that way; if we are, it's a reflection of a shared past, seen through a glass darkly, and not face to face.

I've woken from sleep and felt renewed, recharged, coming out of dreams remembered only as passing. Other times, I've awoken furious based on dreams simmering below the surface of my memory. My own religion - vindicated dozens of times by my experience! - teaches that dreams are one route of communication between God and man.

So my thoughts, even my sleeping thoughts, show whom I am, whom and what I am becoming - that I am known by God as one day I hope to know. - Face to face, no longer in part, knowing both Him and Me as I am known.

Life, then, is impact control. If I want to live in a way that is common and low, those moments have meaning: they make me common and low. And should I become a writer and could draw the meaning out of a single raindrop, paint a landscape in a garbage can, see the universe in my empty bag of potato chips: even so, my life would consist of garbage cans, single raindrops, and empty mylar bags. Meaningless meaning; impact, but no ennoblement; change, but not improvement.

Again, I mistake - the writers journey is like repentance; it's not satisfying unless one comes away with some victory, growth, or improvement at the end. But I don't want to live for and in single raindrops and empty bags. I want a life of thunderstorms and feasting and fasting, not one of fast food.

In a rat race, even if one wins, one is still a rat. Describing my prison cell - seeing the beauty and joy and terror in it- is a good reaction to being in prison, but how much better to burst the bonds?