Philosophy is the Most Important Thing

"A man's maturity: that is to have rediscovered the seriousness he possessed as a child at play." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

It was a nice, cold, sunny morning in December when I left my practicum placement at Urbana High School and walked towards the bus stop, where I would catch a bus headed back to the U of I campus. There was another student waiting there, an undergraduate, and she started asking me questions about the Education Department at U of I. She had just come from an observation at Urbana Middle School, and has been considering majoring in education, although not special education in particular, like me, and so she had a lot of questions to ask.

Unfortunately, I'm not the best person to ask these sorts of questions, not because I'm uninformed - although I guess I could educate myself a little better - but because I am a very atypical SPED student. I am a 27-year old graduate student in classes of mostly undergrads. I am a male in a class that is overwhelmingly (more than 90 percent) female. I am the only student in the class with a visible disability. Finally - and I guess this is kind of related to that first difference - I did not major in education as an undergrad. No, as I eventually came around to telling this sophomore as we waited for the No. 5 Green W Bus*, I majored in philosophy.

Upon learning this, my undergraduate bus-waiting compatriot remarked that, oh, he had taken an Intro to Phil. class last year and, um... well, what she remembered most about it is that the professor spent four weeks discussing whether or not anyone could know whether or not the sun would rise tomorrow, and that it was about that point when she decided that she had better things to spend her time doing and worrying about.

It was here where I wished that I could have called a "time out." Because, look, whether or not inductive inferences do or do not count as knowledge is actually really important, and is highly relevant to how the scientific method functions. And I would've loved to have talked to her about it, and about how tragic is was that the lesson that she got out of it was that philosophy was that spending time doing philosophy is a big, fat waste of time.

But I was tired, and anxious about my upcoming meeting with my adviser, and didn't really feel like this was the appropriate venue to get into an epistemological discussion**, so instead, I muttered something like, "Oh, yeah, you gotta know if the sun is gonna rise.." and proceeded to quiz her about what other "Most Boring" "Greatest Hits of Philosophy" that they covered in her Phil 101 class:

"Evil demon?"

- Yup

"Brains in vats?"

- Yes.

"The Matrix?"

- Um, we watched a few scenes. Mostly we talked about robots.

What she got out of the class, of course, was that philosophy was wasting her time and her energies; that she could and should be doing more productive things with her life, like volunteering at the local middle school and pursuing her degree as a math teacher. And it's not like I could blame her. The tragedy, however, is that these are the concepts that everybody ought to know. Understanding them ought to enrich everyone's lives, regardless of profession, and yet they are taught within the "academy" as obscure and esoteric things, and the professors and the T.A.'s - really, in a large university setting, the responsibility here falls on the T.A.'s shoulders - reinforce this attitude that philosophy is not worth the time or the effort of people who are not "serious" about philosophy. So someone like my bus-riding friend gets the message loud and clear that those who aren't prepared to sacrifice the rest of their lives for the sake of brains in vats and evil demons shouldn't even bother.

I caught the Green, with these thoughts in my mind, and went to my weekly meeting with one of my advisers on campus. I walked into her office, and we chatted about my morning, and about how my instructional program with one of my students, Ajax, was going. And then, when we were finished with our order of business, she asked me how I was doing. And I told her about my conversation that morning, and about how it got me thinking about how frustrating it is for me to feel like philosophy is the most relevant thing in the world, that it is relevant to everything, and is useful for everyone in every situation, and yet the way that it is handled, specifically the way that it is taught to young people, ensures that the field and the study of philosophy remains enshrined within a few very specific contexts.

I went on to talk about how happy I would be if I could spend my mornings in a special education class, helping and encouraging students who have been chronically disadvantaged, and then spend my evenings in a college philosophy course, reminding students that they are incredibly privileged in our country.

"Yeah, Joel," said my adviser. "You should make that job." (She's good at being supportive. She used to be a special ed teacher.)


*C-U has a super complicated bus system.

**That's disingenuous of me. It is always a good time to talk epistemology.

Winter Solstice

I guess we're not going to be seeing the lunar eclipse tonight... it has been snowing all day today, turning to a frozen rain in the afternoon, and then back into snow again after the sun went down, creating a nice cake-like layer on the pavement of snow, ice, snow. Nonetheless, there is something pretty cool about an astronomical event that* occurs only once every five hundred years, and something a bit ominous about a full lunar eclipse on the winter solstice. Perhaps it is one more reason why the Mayans predicted certain cataclysmic changes for about this time.

Friday was my last day of work before the winter break. The kids are always asking me about what I think about 2012, "Isn't it true that the world is going to end?" "Aren't we all going to die?" and so on. They always look so disappointed when I tell them, no, the world will not end in 2012, don't listen to what the television says. I can be so boring sometimes. But I guess that it's just a bit of human nature to secretly hope that you get to live to see the End Times. It might give existence meaning, who knows?

Also, kids fucking love vampires. I found a notebook lying on the muddy ground by the bus stop a few weeks ago. It had two pages of long division followed by several pages of vampires:

This vampire makes me think of Trent Reznor, circa 1989.


This one has a beard. Because it must have been cold that day.

I think that kids - people - are fascinated by 2012 for the same reason that they are fascinated by vampires. Supernatural, thrilling, mysterious. Give you some insight into Death - What Lies Beyond - Etc. Also, both may give you the opportunity to prove how heroic you can be, a la Left Behind or Dead Rising or Dawn of the Dead or Twilight.

*Initially wrote, "astronomical event hat." If anyone has any last minute Christmas shopping to do, I would like one of those.

Often, My Job Is Weird

So I'm sitting in English class, sitting at a desk and helping a student with her work, when D- comes up from behind me, carefully inspects the top of my head, and then gleefully pronounces, "So, Mr. Wright is finally going gray!"

It's not the fact that I'm going gray that concerns me, or that D- noticed, but the odd interjection of "finally" into his pronouncement. Why finally? I know that being 26 is ancient to a 13-year old, but surely he knows at what age most folks go gray? And he's only known me for 2 years - has he been waiting this whole time for me to start show signs of aging? Of weakness? Of the daily grind of working in a middle school?

Or has he been working on a hex to cause me to age prematurely so that he won't have to stay after school with me and serve his detentions?

Two Weeks Later

So it's been two weeks in Urbana, and things have been moving at a fast pace. Like I said, I am working as a teacher's assistant at a local middle school. I'm helping out with the classes for the students with learning disabilities, emotional disabilities, and cognitive impairments. We're spending most of our time working on reading skills, as we are working primarily with 7th and 8th graders who have 2nd or 3rd grade reading levels. There are lots of challenges that spring up here, of course, but one that has surprised me the most is the issue of finding proper reading material for our students. In order to get them to be reading on their own, to themselves, on their own time - which is one of our biggest goals - they need to have texts that they can both comprehend and be interested in. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the literature that they can read doesn't interest them at all; you have no idea how many times last week that I heard someone tell me, "Man, I don't want to read that. That's kid's stuff."

And it's true; no 14-year old wants to read (or, even more so, be seen reading) anything about Amelia Badelia or My Teacher the Tyrannosaurus. Unfortunately, everything that I have found so far that might be interesting to them on a thematic level is above their reading comprehension skills.

So here's your homework - I know that a lot of you have some kind of experience in either early education or special education. So my question is: what resources exist for these students? There should be a program that publishes reading material that deals with issues appropriate for young adults that is on a young child's reading skill level. I have done some research into the area online, but, although I have found some interesting independently published journals aimed at middle school-aged students, I have yet to find anything that could possibly accommodate our students. So, please, if you have any leads on where to find literature designed for young adults with learning disabilities and remedial reading skills, or if you know of someone who might have some productive thoughts on this matter, please let me know.