Andrushka

I am so flying by the seat of my pants this week. Monday it was a presentation over a book I didn't actually read. Today I was a bit more prepared, but not nearly as much as my classmates. In my 19th century studies class we began our group project presentations (group, in this case, means two people). Our teachers (there's a group of them) assigned us partners based on some arcane wisdom unknown to me, and the only two people in the class with y chromosomes were put together. David is a lieutenant in the US Army who plans to one day teach English at West Point. I'm a pacifist who rejects the validity of a large standing army as an institution. A match made in heaven. It eased things considerably that he was interested in my topic choice so we didn't have to go through another tired civil war presentation. My idea? The relationship between botany and imperialism, focusing on the invention of the Wardian case. We now call Wardian cases aquariums, terreriums, or vivariums (depending on what you keep in side, and if you keep a hamster in an aquarium, I recommend you get a vivarium before the poor animal drowns). It increased the survival rate of plants being transported aboard ship from 5% to 95%, allowing the British to send double-O-botanists into restricted areas of China and South America to steal plants and transport them back to the Kew Gardens in England. From there they were sent out to British colonies to create a sort of ecological mercantile system. So, Malaysian rubber and Indian tea wouldn't exist without the Wardian case. The spread of useful plants did help many people. Long before the Wardian case, New World species had already improved European diets, allowing for an incredible increase in population without a similar increase in medical technology. With the Wardian case, Cinchona trees could be taken from South America and spread throughout the tropical world so people could produce quinine locally. It's so nice to not have to depend on sickle cell anemia for survival. So, though I'm not a big fan of mercantilism or introduced species, I'm not going to argue against the effects of it. However, a little literary theory (post colonialism and Bourdeau) mixed in and one can argue a lot of things about the symbolism of the case, the ecological violence, the exoticism of house plants plants, the "democratization of colonialism in the motherland" . . . you get the point. Unfortunately, reading a theory-heavy paper doesn't make for the most engaging class time (a fact of which some people need to be reminded). So, after an introduction to 19th century botany and the cases, Dave and I decided to focus on discussion questions. The convenient thing about discussion-based pedagogy is that you don't have to prepare nearly as much material for presentation. While the other groups presented their research like a seminar paper, Dave and I hadn't done half the work they must have, well, maybe Dave had (who am I to say?). After the class, Dr. Winkle came up to me to talk more about the presentation and he was really excited about it. He loved it. He'd been more fascinated by it, apparently, than the "Myth of Acadia Constructed in Longfellow's Evangeline" or "Barbwire as a Refutation of the American Narrative." I'm not really trying to toot my own horn (well, maybe a little). The point is, I feel I did much less than anyone else and yet it was my idea and presentation that the professor was most taken with--someday all this positive affirmation of my slacking will catch up with me. I am setting myself up for failure. Which all brings me to a thesis I've long harped on: negative advisors. Clearly, many teachers are unable to sort out slackers from overachievers. So, in addition to the cheerleader-supportive-advisors universities assign students, we should have negative advisors who tell us we will be failures and no matter what we do is never enough to please them. Biographies of "great" people are replete with the archetypical narrative: Mr/Ms Successful was once told they would never make it and then they work even harder to prove that authority figure wrong. How can schools expect to produce future cults of personality if they fail to discourage students?

Posted by Scott on 16 November 2005 at 11/16/2005 09:24:00 PM | Permalink