Moratorium

I have decided temporarily to stop publishing my posts on prison teaching, since the course with my college students raises some new issues about confidentiality and privacy that make it difficult to report honestly, in public, on what takes place in the classes. I am still writing reports but saving them as drafts. I’ll publish them later, if and when it seems appropriate.

Fixing the problems

When I got home from the introductory class, utterly worn out from the craziness, I fired off a round of emails to all administrators who might help sort through the mess. The end result was that I was back at the prison for most of this afternoon for a make-up class of sorts and to arrange the class list with the staff member who was helping me most directly. Then we met again with the students, including a fair number who hadn’t appeared at all for the introductory class – even though many came who weren’t supposed to be there! So more copies of the syllabus were made, and we went through it again, more briefly this time. Finally, too, they received their textbooks. And here’s a great illustration of the difference between the college and the inmate students – the expressions of delight when some of them saw that the book was thick (ca. 400 pages) and filled with almost nothing but text in small print. One of the students who’d been at the introductory class mentioned he’d already done all the photocopied readings for Tuesday. Another asked if it was OK to read ahead in the book – more than what I assigned for a week’s reading. Several asked for paper so they could write their first essays, even though they don’t have to hand in any before the end of September. And the administrator with me said that since space had unexpectedly opened up in the class list (one inmate who was on the original list was in lock-up, another had gone to another wing in preparation for parole), two inmates who were “dying” to get into the course would be added from a long waiting list. They would be very happy, she said.

This is a course for which the inmates do not get credit; they can only audit. But they are totally excited. You could feel the electricity in the room. Earlier, before we met with them, the administrator showed me an essay one had written to apply for admission to the course. She had been uncertain he should be in it, for various reasons, so to convince her he deserved the chance she told him he had to write at least a page. He filled a page and a half, single-spaced, in small, neat print. Although the spelling was rough, the passion poured out of every line. He said it was a chance he’d never had – he’d lost his parents when he was 16 and had never believed he could go to college; he was so eager to experience what a ‘real’ college class was like. The administrator said to me that she thought he didn’t have sufficient writing skills, but I was overwhelmed simply by the intensity of the desire. I said I thought the experience would help him to learn to write better and asked that he be included. We’ll see if the level of interest lasts, but these guys are certainly out of the starting gate way ahead of the college students.

A note of sadness: the student who’d been sent to the other wing had wanted badly to be in the course but failed to tell the administrator that the transfer was imminent. (It was in preparation for parole.) If she had known, she told me, she could have made arrangements for him to stay for the course. He’d told me how much the summer course meant to him. One week he was there, the next he was gone – and that’s it, there’s no way of staying in touch. That’s another difference from teaching college. It’s nice when students, especially those you like, write from time to time to tell you how they’re doing after they leave. But with prison, even for teachers on the inside, the doors remain firmly closed and once they’re out, most likely you’ll never hear from them again.

New course

The first class of the new course was a near disaster. The prison bureaucracy is byzantine; departments seem to work often in complete isolation, oblivious to the needs of other departments or offices – or with staff who are mainly interested in blocking worthwhile programs for the inmates. There are some great people there, especially those who help me directly with my courses; but sometimes their efforts are totally stymied by others hidden in the machinery. It’s reminiscent of Kafka’s Castle – I need to remember this when we discuss that work later in the semester.

Things started to go wrong from the start. The course will include both college and inmate students during most weeks (a new venture!), but luckily I’d decided to teach the first week with the two groups separated to work out any logistical problems beforehand. When I arrived for the introductory class, the officer at the grill gate told me the box of photocopies I was going to distribute to the students – readings, syllabi, grading criteria, etc. – was locked in an inner office and she didn’t have the key. Period. Sure enough, the door to that room was shut tight. Another staff member in the wing had a key, though; she mentioned to me that she’d had no idea I was going to teach that evening (uh oh), but she came and opened up the office and we got the box to the classroom. Next step: get the students. Problem number 2: no class list. We asked the officer again at the grill, who’d mellowed just a bit and agreed to look through her files. She found a list of students, twice as many as I’d been told to expect, but with apparently several class lists interwoven and quite a few repeated names. A decision was made simply to issue a call for students using my name to announce the beginning of class. That was probably again a mistake, since within 15 minutes a swarm had appeared including students who I KNEW were not supposed to be in this course, but who had been in courses I’d previously taught. I was besieged with a far greater number than could be accommodated in the course – given that there had to be space for the college students AND I didn’t have enough photocopies.

And so on: other problems such as missing textbooks, missing supplies, and others kept showing up during the evening. On top of all that, the confusion meant a near-complete breakdown in classroom discipline – to the little extent it’s ever present in these classes. I finally managed to make more copies, hand out the syllabi, and explain what it meant to take a ‘real’ college course – I offered the inmate students the chance to be graded just like the college students – but I’m not sure how much sank in. Everyone seemed to be talking at once in their excitement; those in the class – or who think they are – are truly happy about it, though one said that if being in the course required strip searches before every class – some rumor they’d heard – he wouldn’t come. Periodically in all the talking someone would ask a question – in a way that I could actually understand (not drowned out by everyone else) – which made clear they hadn’t listened to anything I’d said. Oh boy. I wonder how the college students will react. I cannot imagine two more different groups.

Transitions

On Wednesday I start teaching an altogether new kind of class, one combining a group of my regular college students with an equal number of inmate students.  The subject is “The History and Culture of Prisons”;  the course will include some lectures but as much discussion and as many team projects as I can comfortably ask the students to do together. It makes me nervous to think about organizing it – how am I going to create a unified class from two such different groups? I’ll meet them separately this week, but next week the college students will start coming with me to the prison for class meetings – since obviously they need to come there; the inmates cannot come to us!

Here’s an essay by one of my students:

On Michael Jackson: Michael Jackson touched some of all of us with his music. He was an extremely wierd [sic] and talented human being. Although I don’t think that he was the best of persons, I can’t deny that his music was somewhere around great. He had people of all races coming together as one and dancing and singing together as if nothing in the world mattered to them. I remember trying to do the moon walk for weeks. I even wanted the leather jacket and glove with the glitter. What he did outside of music was very disturbing and crazy. I think that anyone who touch on [sic] any kids should be locked away and not able to be around any body children. F… him as a person, but salute his music.

Government lies

For last Wednesday’s class, I’d given the students an article to read on a section in Plato’s Republic, Book 3 (414b-c); the article is Malcolm Schofield’s “The Noble Lie.” In Schofield’s translation, Socrates introduces the passage in the Republic by saying, “We want one single, grand lie which will be believed by everybody – including the rulers, ideally, but failing that the rest of the city.” I asked the students to compare Plato’s ideal government again with democracy vs. totalitarianism (I also gave them a brief explanation of the latter), and to think whether “lying” in any form was necessary for governments to maintain social order. Some of the students were upset when I suggested that Socrates and Plato promoted a form of government closer to totalitarianism than democracy. Judging by their comments in class and occasional references in essays, in the last few weeks Socrates has become something of a hero for them. Here (to describe how the students see him) was a man who’d unjustly experienced imprisonment for exercising his right of free speech and who courageously chose to die rather than compromise on his principles. It’s interesting how much more reverence they seem to have for Socrates than for Omar Portee aka O.G. Mack, the founder of the east coast Bloods. I note this since they also read an essay by Chris Hedges on Portee. The difference in attitude came out in one student’s essay; he thinks the world of Socrates, but while he implied that Omar Portee was a great gang leader, the essay was blunt in its criticism of his actions and claims to be a changed man. So there was some distress when I suggested they think about the similarities between the government described in the Republic and totalitarian ideology, and also about the similarities to our own government officials’ habits of not telling the truth. I wanted them to think about what it means for governments “to lie” – for instance, are national origin myths (this is what Plato had in mind) like stories of George Washington and the cherry tree lies or something different? Are there times when governments do need to lie for the good of society, as Socrates/Plato argued?

American Iliad

From a student’s essay comparing American fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Iliad:

“I believe that just as in the Iliad, we say we are fighting for [many] reasons, but the reasons are really excuses for us to flaunt our manhood and pride…. Yes, we are fighting to defend our country against terrorist threats, but really our pride was hurt because someone had the audacity to attack the country with the greatest military. Pride! Yes, we may be trying to help these countries get themselves together, but really we want the spoils. Pride! Instead of minding our own business, we bully and forcefully police other nations by parading our pride (military) all through their provinces. Pride!

What logical reason did we really have to go into Iraq? Unfinished business! Like father, like son. Bush wanted to go in and finish the work that his father started, all for more money in the family pocket. Pride! And he used human lives to propagate that pride. Shame on us! Obama was absolutely correct to confess the pride of America. That’s the reason we had difficulty working with other countries lately; we reek of arrogance, and everyone can smell it.”

Watching “Troy”

I didn’t write about the last class in July partly because other work got in the way, and partly because it took so much time to process my thoughts. Attendance has been very good, and the students make it clear that the promise of food packages for coming regularly to class is a strong incentive. But only about a third of the students hand in essays; some are very short and suggest a real struggle to get thoughts into written form, while others are remarkable in the depth of thought behind them and, at times, in their eloquence. I’ll post some more sections from the better essays soon.
Even though the students say their goal is to get the food packages, several have indicated that they enjoy the class and especially the discussions. So I was taken aback when the majority told me in the last class that they weren’t reading the photocopies I was giving them from Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad. Since the class isn’t for credit, I told them they should only read the texts that interested them – if the Iliad wasn’t one, this was fine, but I was curious to hear why – I thought a poem about violence and war was the sort of thing to appeal to young men. I didn’t say it aloud, but what I was also thinking was the appeal to gang members who’d themselves engaged in quite a bit of violence. If anything at all in ancient Greek literature was going to interest this crowd, surely it was Homer’s account of Achilles’ rage, men lusting after women like Helen, battles between Greeks and Trojans, and so on – and especially in Lombardo’s energetic, accessible translation. It really threw me when one student said the reason he didn’t like the poem was that it had too much violence; he didn’t like reading about violence and war! Several other students seemed to agree.
What were they trying to tell me? Were they simply covering up for not doing the reading? Even Lombardo’s language is sometimes hard, especially all the Greek names, and maybe most of them really were coming to class only to get the food packages. But as the conversation continued, I started to think some honestly disliked all the maiming and brutal killing Homer describes in part because they’ve seen so much of it themselves. One student said he’d rather read Plato, and could we please have more Plato to read? Plato/Socrates, he said, discussed things that he could “connect” with, that seemed linked to their own lives, their interests and concerns, and this did not seem true of the Iliad. I explained how I thought that the Iliad raised interesting questions about the reasons for war and why we engage in violent acts, and about ideas of “just war” that are in fact relevant to the present – to thinking, e.g., about American foreign policy and American militarism. The students seemed to understand this, but they still insisted that Socrates and Plato seemed more relevant. So we’ll go back to discussing the Republic next week.
I started thinking about their reactions to Homer’s poem again as we were watching the movie, “Troy,” in on August 5; we’ll finish it August 18. When I brought the film – several had been requesting it for a few weeks now – I planned only to show about a ½ hour, focusing on battle scenes, but I was overruled; the students unanimously voted to start at the beginning and devote the entire class to this. The film is mediocre, but it’s not totally bad, so I decided it wasn’t such a bad idea; for students who’ve had no exposure whatsoever to ancient Greek culture, it at least gives some idea of the characters and settings of Homer’s narrative, and some scenes are gripping.
At first, though, I thought that their interest in the movie proved their disinterest in Homer couldn’t really have anything to do with the poem’s violence; after all, the movie shows lots of mahem! But now, as I think about this more, I realize that the movie is not nearly as graphic as the poetry, and my sense is that the students who’d tried to read the poetry picked up on this, as well. Homer’s descriptions are incredibly powerful; they put the reader in the thick of the action, as if you’re standing beside each warrior as swords get thrust into innards, limbs are lopped off, falling men spill their guts onto the soil and gasp out their dying breaths. And this goes on for line after line after line, for pages. Despite all the money poured into the big battle scenes in the film, it falls far short in its impact; it cannot match the emotional power of the poetry, the way it forces you to confront the cruelity, the crudeness, the slog of the combat. While we were watching the movie, one student commented that he found Homer’s accounts of battle too long – they were tiring to read. (He was one of those who’d actually been reading.) Shortly before this he laughed at me when I looked away from a violent scene in the film. “It’s just a movie,” he said – it’s not “real.”
The attraction of the movie was not only the violence, of course, but also the sex –there the visuals are much more expressive/graphic than Homer’s poetry. I suggested they should all cover their eyes in the x-rated scenes; one student retorted that he was going to watch every second of them. The officer happened to come into the room during one sex scene to ask one of the students a question; when he left a few students laughed that maybe I’d get in trouble for showing porn, but I don’t think the officer noticed what was on the screen. (And I don’t think he would have cared; the scene only lasts about 10 seconds.) But even though the sex in the film has more immediacy than in the poem, what I find striking – putting all this together – is how, for the students who did some of the reading, when it comes to violence and war the film apparently had less emotional force than Homer’s text. The students seem to be bored and even somewhat sickened by the drudgery of Homer’s descriptions of war (I think a sense of drudgery is one effect the poem seeks to create); in contrast, they have little trouble distancing themselves psychologically from the film’s scenes of war and killing. The battle scenes in the film have less psychological impact – they’re exciting but not “really” about real people suffering and dying. Homer is far more effective in getting us to confront the hideousness of violence, and some students seem to have found that upsetting. At least, this is how I think their reactions can be interpreted; a lot of this is guesswork based on their scattered comments. But perhaps – to speculate some more – Homer was too good at conjuring up a reality close to their own experiences – a reality that they knew all too well had none of the excitement or adventure of a Hollywood movie.
So next class, it’s back to Plato.

Why war?

I brought up another but related topic, to try to draw a connection between the theme of women + violence, the Iliad as a poem about war, and current events: The Greeks, I said, at least went to war over something; their war had a purpose – whether winning back Helen, upholding the rights of marriage, or protecting women in general or the honor of Menelaus – whereas some recent articles on the war in Afghanistan have expressed much befuddlement over its rationale. Why are we still fighting our own war? The reasons seem to change every month, and different spokespersons express different opinions. I had handed out two articles for next week about Afghanistan, one Chris Hedges’ essay in Truthdig, “War without Purpose,” and the other a recent blog post by the editors of Foreign Policy, titled “Mission Creep in Afghanistan,” noting the claim of one government official that we were fighting the war in the hope of reforming the prisons there. As the journalist commented, it was odd to be so worried about prisons in Afghanistan given the state of our own incarceral system Needless to say, my students thought this was quite funny.

So what I was hoping to get them to discuss was whether war was morally acceptable if it had a purpose, and what might constitute a morally valid goal? But again, the conversation shifted, and serendipity intervened. One student took this as an opportunity to mention the poppy fields in Afghanistan and discourse knowledgeably (?) on opium; and that comment – I have SUCH a hard time staying on a topic myself – led me to allude to the scene of Dorothy et al. drugged as they walked through a field of poppies (?) toward the Emerald City, in “The Wizard of Oz.” Then the student (south Asian) mentioned that he had himself spent his childhood on a farm in India where poppies were grown. He had relatives who’d tried to market opium and heroin; and there it was customary and perfectly legal to serve guests poppy tea. He described how it was made, with the dried and crushed heads of poppies, and its “kick.” Another student immediately wanted to know exactly where the farm was located; the idea of legally drinking this tea clearly appealed, or maybe it was because of his entrepreneurial instincts – the hope of marketing it.

Conversation then circled around about poppy-based drugs, and when I heard them referring to “dope,” I commented that when I grew up, dope meant marijuana, and I feigned surprise that they used the same term for heroin. Sure enough, just as I hoped, this led to a chorus of students competing to offer me a vocabulary lesson on terms for drugs, with neat divisions into categories and sub-categories – a litany thrown out far too quickly for me to keep track: dope, heroin, coke, crack, white girl, Dr. Pepper, and so on.

The class basically ended there, but as I told them before we left, I learn at least as much as I can teach them, probably a lot more.

Women and violence: the Iliad and the inner city

Although we didn’t have enough time left in class to explore this topic in much depth, it seemed one they felt they knew something about first-hand. I hope I can get them to discuss it further next class. Most agreed with one another that there was no point in waging war against Troy if Helen had run off with Paris voluntarily; no woman was worth the bother who did a thing like that. One of the most talkative students said, though, that he could perfectly relate to Achilles’ rage at losing Briseis, and he compared it to a time he’d been in competition with another guy over a girl. The girl was going out with his competitor, but my student found an opportunity to beat him up and smash his nose, and then – I think he implied – the girl became his girlfriend instead. The other students were delighted to hear about his success. I managed to draw out a few of the quieter students with this line of discussion. One student pointed out that the issue was less holding on to girls or wives than honor vs. shame; it was so important for Menelaus and Achilles to protect their honor. But the analogizing with the Iliad was hard to sustain; the conversation veered off to their contemporary experiences. When I mentioned again the protection of women, one student commented that women in the hood generally did not need protection from men; they were quite capable of taking care of themselves. If, for instance, some woman there saw me – pointing to me – as competition for her boyfriend, she would punch me out on her own, she wouldn’t expect the guy to do this for her. Clearly, some things have changed since Homer wrote the Iliad.

Socrates and the Iliad

Because there were more students than I’d expected, I was short on readings. I usually bring xeroxed materials since it’s easier than putting books on reserve in the library, esp. with these students who are max. and med. security. Their movements are quite restricted and I think having the photocopies gives more of them greater opportunity to read. They spend quite a bit of every day locked into their cells; it’s good to offer them something to do there besides watch TV. But this time I ran out and needed to make more copies, and that held up getting the class started. The inmates were also clearly using this as an opportunity for a bit of rowdiness. Their behavior sometimes makes for a recess-like atmosphere. I think they like some chaos in the classroom, and it easily happens in any class I teach (college or prison) – I’m not sure why, but I’m not good at compelling students to buckle down, at least for the first 15 minutes or so of a class. I also don’t have much drive to force a more ’serious’ atmosphere all the time; I like a looser style of classroom experience for some of each meeting, to leave openings for serendipity – times when topics of discussion, questions, and arguments can bubble unexpectedly to the surface. Those times make for some of the most interesting classes, by far, especially in the prison where so many things happen that are unexpected – by me at any rate. For the students, class is a time to cut loose from the ultra-regimentation of most of their lives inside: walking through the halls in single file watched by guards, head counts several times a day on their cellblocks, permission slips required for every movement outside their cells, etc.

But when we finally got going, as is also typical, multiple questions started flying at me about the material assigned for this class and some of the texts I’d handed out for next week – especially the sections of the Iliad. One student, the paralegal (the talkative inmate with the very long dreadlocks whom I’ve mentioned in other posts), wanted to know the difference between the translation I was giving them to read, by Stanley Lombardo, and the different translation the student had in his cell. He’d taken it out of the library and was already reading it on his own, and agreed to do a comparison (I asked) for next week to report back to the class. Another student wondered about the tension he saw between Homer’s mythical explanations of the world and human behavior, and the teachings of Socrates, and he wanted to know if one reason Socrates had been put on trial was that his teachings implicitly challenged the Homeric world view. Several students wanted to know if various episodes of the Troy stories known to them from other sources, like the atrocious movie, “Troy,” were told in the Iliad or the Odyssey – in particular the story of the Trojan Horse.

One student turned the discussion – midstream, while others were talking of course – back to Socrates and wanted me to verify that he’d written nothing on his own. If that was the case, how did we know anything we read about Socrates’ thought was actually his? After all, he said, Plato did a lot of teaching after Socrates was dead, indeed that was the period of his Academy. I mentioned Xenophon, thinking the student was asking if there was evidence Socrates had existed at all. That was part of his question – he dismissed my comment with a wave, he already knew about Xenophon – but he was concerned that Plato might have been putting his own ideas into Socrates’ mouth. We talked about this for a bit; I agreed with him about the problem and reminded him, moreover, that Plato did his writing of Socrates’ dialogs after his teacher’s death.

In all these threads of conversation, several simultaneous, one student asked where the Aeneid fit into this history – another reminder that for all the lack of formal education, many of them had managed to pick up and retain some interesting pockets of information. I’d been trying to fill in some of the historical background when I was side-tracked by all the questions. The question about the Aeneid helped me get back to that theme. I asked one student to summarize Books 1-2 of the Iliad, which he did in remarkable detail, though he couldn’t pronounce most of the names. It seemed only a few had actually read the Iliad text given them last week; most knew the basic story from the film, but some of the students have clear problems reading, despite their great questions. Additionally, some had not received the text at all since they had been in lockdown last week because of the beating of the officer – it’s hard to surpass an excuse like that. Then I talked for about 20 minutes on the historical context, ancient warfare and story-telling, the problem of whether Homer really existed, and a few other bits of information I was able to dredge out of my memory that I thought might interest them. They listened, seemingly fascinated. Maybe I was imagining it, but I seem to have a much easier time holding their attention than with the college students, as long as I never talk more than 20 minutes or so; that seems to be their limit.

And then, finally, I started to turn the discussion to one of the topics I’d planned to cover in the first place, before the onslaught of opening questions: I asked them if they sympathized with the rage of Achilles and men going to war over a woman (Helen), and did this seem to them normal behavior that they could relate to from their own experiences with women and violence? After all, they’d all clearly had some experience with women and a LOT with violence, and surely those two issues had occasionally converged in their lives, too.