Freelearning

What I've Learned about Love

I enjoy reading books that talk about something I am experiencing.  They help me find words to understand my experience and often point me to insights I have not yet gained.  Reading bell hooks' Communion: the female search for love, 2002 has shaped my thinking about my relationship. 

By hook's definition, E and I have a love relationship.  E is one of the new men she describes who is in many ways freed from patriarchy.  He is able to relate to me in mutual sharing ways.  He is pleased, and surprised, when I don't bring power issues into the bedroom.  He listens to my doubts about my commitment to him without getting reactive.  He rejoices in my friendships with others.  He told me early on that he didn't fit the typical male stereotype mold.  I didn't believe him.  I was wrong.

Because E is different, I have to be different from what I learned in patriarchy.  It takes me a long time to trust that I can ask for what I want.  He used to thank me for telling him things I assumed would be hard for him to hear.  That helped to build my confidence.  I discover that when he is not in patriarchal thinking, I have to find new ways to respond.  I've grown from being afraid of being subordinated to him to enjoying him as a separate person.  bell hooks describes these challenges women face when they enter into relationships with new men.

 

E. and I have been together for almost 9 years.   I found him when I was searching for love.  I had analyzed my previous romantic relationships -- what I thought I was getting and what I actually got.  Then it was time to list what I wanted in a man.  I had 17 qualities.  E.  had all but one.

The first time we got together alone, E "didn't touch my hair".  His hand was so close to my head that it felt like the most gentle of touches.  We talked a lot.  He called me after he got home.  "I didn't mean to cut you off when you started to talk about intimacy.  I got scared.  I want to learn how to be intimate, too."

That's when I knew this man  was special.   He initiated talk about how things were going between us.  We were friends for almost six months before we changed our relationship.  Since the beginning we have each grown and changed.  Our connection is so strong that when one of us changes the other one is changing, too.  We aren't necessarily sorting things out on the same issues, but the growth we share enriches our love.

We live in two different towns.  We spend 3-4 days a week together and the other days apart.  E has jobs in both places.  In the past, I felt there was something wrong with us because we couldn't live in the same house.  Now I feel grateful that we are both aware of what we need and confident in our love for each other.  We have created what works very well for us.  We enjoy the coming together and the separation.  This arrangement does not fit into the arms of patriarchy.  bell hooks has helped me see that my negative judgment of what we've created is a remnant of what I learned as a child.  I want to leave that behind.

I try to understand why academe is so slow to adopt new approaches to education.  I recently helped a friend understand how to write a literature review.  He is in a graduate program and this is a completely knew activity for him.  I was able to give feedback that helped him shape his reading into a paper.  However, I found I needed to stop because my role became one of telling him what he couldn't do because it was not the  traditional approach.  He had integrated large amounts of information.  But he had mixed popular writing with academic, expansive thought papers with academic research approaches.  I thoroughly enjoyed talking with him about the subject (a school garden as a way to help inner city children learn more about their local ecology).  He is insightful and his work is exciting.  In trying to help, I became the enforcer of all the craziness of academic institutions.

March 14 bgblogging describes how students can learn breadth and depth from using the internet.  I particularly like her quote, " students come to see that in addition to the delights of grazing the possible, we can use the connective, collaborative practices of the Web to dig far more deeply into subject matter. . . ."    Instead of forcing students into preconceived molds she sees the opportunities in encouraging students to use the web to learn and participate widely.  At the same time she creates spaces and tasks for her students to use to work together, learning from the common focus on a task or an approach to a task while bringing a lot of individuality to it.  In her classes students cannot fail to participate.  The activities are designed to bring students to the heart of who they are and what they want to do. 

Why does academe favor limiting what students can and should read?  Why not evaluate what students produce, how well they are able to integrate and articulate their ideas.  Barbara Ganley has her students work from their experience and from reading other authors to see how those authors work as writers.  She encourages her students to respond to the writing around them.  No wrong answers.  When I took intro. to literature in college, our exams were frequently multiple choice.  That approach is predicated on there being right and wrong answers. 

I think the reaction against wikipedia is similarly based on a focus on right and wrong answers.  What if, instead of mocking students for using it, faculty had students participate in creating it.  Students could check on the accuracy of a topic of interest to them and join in changing it.  Concepts of a huge wiki created by the public, open source software, and creative commons licenses are difficult for many people to understand or accept. 

What about our culture needs to change for higher education to be more open to learning over regulation of knowledge?

Never too Late

My blog has lain dormant for almost four months.  Many of my entries have been about experiments in education.  They provide a context for my writing.  I think I am still looking for the kind of school I wish I had been able to attend.

I have spent the last three months working on a memoir of growing up in Michigan -- urban and rural, isolated and loved, breathing in nature and fearing industries.  I've captured each memory in a short, short story.  I've created 12-15 so far.  This focused, backward looking writing has overtaken my earlier experiment with a blog.

Now I'm ready to start up my blog again.  Barbara Ganley writes about her work with students at http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/ .  She encourages the students she works with to blog their learning.  I aspire to blog my learning across disciplines, genres, interests, and roles I hold.  When I started my blog last summer, I read that it was important to pick a topic and to stick with it.  I tried to do that and found myself limited.  What I want to do is weave my personal/intellectual adventure into a distinctive fabric that reflects who I am.  I guess it is my person that will be the common thread.

I take out books from the library on a range of subjects each time I go.   Politics, religion, The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud (fiction), visions for the economic future of this country, a memoir of Hilary Clinton,  a biography of David Mamet, how to begin to do watercolors,  politics, and religion.  I use Amazon.com to read reviews of books if I want to get the gist quickly; sometimes I read the professional reviews but more often I find the users'  comments more  helpful.

I am throwing off the strictures I put on myself about keeping to one topic and having several hyperlinks in each post and doing everything "right" (when I don't even know how to get the computer to do what I want it to half the time).  I'm going to write for myself, in public, for a while and see what develops.