blog.shimer

The High Coup

In an effort to illustrate the sublime aestheticism of the Shimer classroom, I have essayed to capture some of the more salient moments of recent class discussions in that most ephemeral of poetic forms, the haiku. Feel free to contribute everybody. Also, to avoid in-joke snobbery in this public forum, the poet’s comments will be provided if solicited.

 

From Soc1:

   Anthropology?

      Fieldwork is so tedious…

   Rely on Fortune.

 

   Ego Projection,

  Confirms this cosmic struggle.

   Back offa my yams!

 

From Hum1:

 

   Oh passionate Bach,

    In was für Missetaten,

       Bist du geraten?

 

And from IS2:

 

   Like, ~[E ^ (~R)],

      =>(~E) v R.

    E=>R, man!

 

Where E ≡ Santa Claus has elves

and R ≡ Santa Claus has reindeer.

 

Translated:

 

   Santa Claus does not

  Have no elves. The Reindeer sitch?

     It’s looking good.

 

(thank you Dorothy for this bit of unassailable logic).

An Introduction of Sorts

Greetings and salutations, hopefully gentle readers.  My name is Hillary Woods.  I am a fourth-year student.

I love this school.  I have ever since my sister’s boyfriend told me of it.  They are not together anymore, but I am still at Shimer.  I suppose I could create some sort of fun analogy from this, but I will save that for another evening’s ruminations. 

As I said above, I love this place.  I feel a far greater attachment to this school than I ever did high school.  I suppose, to a certain extent, that has to do with the fact that I am at Shimer by choice, and no one ever seemed to care whether I wanted to be in high school.  I find myself feeling a much larger range of emotions over my pending graduation from Shimer than I ever did high school.  There, I was eager to be done and there was nothing else to it.  While I am also eager to be done with my undergraduate studies, I am not as enthusiastic to end my stay at Shimer.

The school has been a major part of my life for the past few years.  I have had the Shimer experience and all that entails take over my life (and I have been happy to allow it to) during semesters and I have worked here over every break.  There have been very few periods of my life for the past four years that have not involved Shimer in some way. 

I will miss the atmosphere.  I will miss having a community of people with whom I can have, at almost any moment, an interesting and intellectually stimulating conversation.  I will miss being able to refer freely to a large variety of works, knowing that they have also read them.  I will miss seeing the faculty and staff as well as having the benefit of their wisdom just an office visit away.  I realize, as Kant tells us in What is Enlightenment?, that all periods of tutelage must come to an end or we risk mental stagnation.  How can we expect to grow if we are always looking to someone else to further our process of enlightenment?  We can, and must, learn to provide direction for ourselves outside of college.  I suppose the additional challenge for someone that comes from a community so focused on understanding is finding a group of people outside of school with whom we can work in furthering our intellectual pursuits.  I hope that the friends I have made here will help with the process.

I will spend the next year cutting the apron strings that tie me to Shimer.  I will prepare myself for the test that waits for me after May.  I expect this year to be fun, frustrating and yet quite rewarding.  Perhaps I will be able to entertain some of you along the way.

*snip* *snip*

A Bittersweet Adventure

As I write this, I am sitting outside on my front stoop near midnight, waiting for Brigid and her friend Dylan to return from parking Brigid's truck. I'm out here because I'm watching four boxes of books and some rather good artwork. We're going to take it inside and sort through everything as soon as they return.

Where did we get these treasures? Well, that's a sad kind of story. There was a Craigslist posting about boxes upon boxes of books tossed out on the curb, free for the taking, and, shirking all responsibility, we decided to go. Who would turn down free books?

But when we got there, it was more than just books. Someone had lost their house, and everything they had was piled on the curb with a sign reading "Free, take all you want." It was not the fun adventure we'd planned, but we were glad we went. We managed to rescue four boxes of books, and a lot of artwork done by one of the people who had been living there. These things hold memories, and we've saved them from ruin. 

Most of the books, of course, are going to a place where we know they'll find love. The Shimer take-a-book, leave-a-book shelf has been so lonely, after all. We are a community of people who love books, and so these books will be in good hands. They will be loved.

After we sort through the art to toss out what's gotten moldy, we'll start finding homes. We know plenty of people with apartments that need things to liven up their walls. This artwork, which someone put so much effort into creating, will be appreciated. 

And so I'm glad we went. It's terrible that something like that happened to someone, but we've saved what we could, and we're going to make sure it all finds its way into a new loving home. I just wish there was some way we could tell those poor people. It's not going to waste, it's not being thrown out... it's being adopted into new families. We may never know the memories attached to anything we saved, but they will gain new memories. And that, at least, is something to appreciate. 

Effortless Chicken Dinner

The past few weeks we've seen a lot of new writers and guests on the Shimer Blog as we start our new school year. As I've been settling back into Shimer I've been thinking about the blog quite a bit. If my roommate ever gets her camera working we have lots of things to share with you: a dress we made for a party in an hour and a half entirely out of things we had lying around, our Julia Child inspired kitchen organization, and a dorm picnic of potato and leek soup, to name a few things.

This year I'm living with Katelynn on campus and we're both off the meal plan, enjoying the exciting adventure of feeding ourselves without the aid of a cafeteria. So far it's going well, I got to Chicago around the 21st of August and I've only had to eat out once since then. I don't appear to have scurvy so I'll call the whole thing a success so far.

As eventful as my summer was (re reading In Search of Lost Time, reproducing 16th century English court dress to name two activities), I really prefer the pace of activities at Shimer.  And while I don't have any of those pictures I mentioned to prove that I enjoy what I've been up to, I can share a recipe with you.

Effortless Chicken Legs

4 Chicken legs
6 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
8 carrots, cut into thirds of about equal length
1 medium onion, chopped fine
Vegetable Oil
Salt
Pepper

1. Rub the chicken with salt and pepper, making sure to get the seasoning all over the chicken legs and under the skin. Let the chicken rest for about ten minutes.

2. Meanwhile set your oven to 250(Fahrenheit) and place one of your racks in the lowest setting.

3. Heat about two table spoons of oil in a large Dutch oven or any large-ish, oven safe pot with a lid. The tighter fitting the lid is, the better this will work.  

4. Brown chicken legs on both sides, over medium heat until golden brown, about 5 to 7 minutes a side.

5. Remove pot from heat, add garlic, carrots and onion, season with some more salt and pepper.

6. Since no pot has a perfectly fitting lid I find that it is helpful to cover the pot securely with foil so as little moisture and air can get our and then securely place lid. Next put the pot into the preheated oven.

7. Let the chicken cook at 250 for about an hour and 50 minutes in which time the chicken should shrink away from the bone, shed a lot of liquid and turn white. I've found a good way of checking to see if chicken is done is to pierce a piece in some way and make sure the juices that run out are clear rather than rosy.

8. Serve, with mashed potatoes if you like, and enjoy.

Nat Sci 3 is fun

Hi all! I'm exhausted and still have lots of reading to do, so I'm writing this blog post instead! The main motivation behind this post, however, is my Natural Sciences 3 class. It is hard, fries my brain, and the reading are confusing as the dickens, but the class... the class is amazing!

I've started writing down amazing things that were said in class and posting them to my Twitter account with the tag #NatSci3isfun. See the screencap of it below:

 These quotes were all part of the same conversation about the difference between pounds and kilograms. Happening chronologically from the bottom up, I give credit to Jill Leslie, Jesus Aviña, Marielle Heidebrink, and Ben Pardo. We were on topic, really! (The two at the top of the list were just my own thoughts after our field trip to the elevator and recalling after class that my wonderful friend Michaela, who is an IIT student, and her insistence that one must leave a revolving door at a tangent.) 

It's conversations like these that offer a much-needed breather in the middle of dissecting Galileo or Newton. It's tiring to try to pull apart and understand proofs, and a little bit of laughter is just what lets you keep going sometimes. And I mean, really, class is supposed to be fun, right?

Also, we were attacked by water in the following NatSci3 class. It climbed right up the sides of the spinning bucket and jumped out at us! Hooray for Natural Sciences 3! Who knew physics could be so fun?

Why am I so ridiculously happy?

Shimer is my special brand of drug. No, seriously. It has this insane ability to give me an incredible rush of energy whenever I walk into the building or start talking to anyone who goes/has gone/wants to go here.

Looking at all the stupendous new folks going here, reading the stuff I read two years ago for the first time, or posting Facebook statuses like, "--brain is blown. Apparently this happens a lot at Shimer," just makes me ridiculously happy.

I am also ridiculously happy because I finally have "data," to take a leaf from Jim's previous post, that the Shimer experience is not only life-changing and mind-blowing and addictive, it is practically useful! This came in the form of my experience with my internship at the Writing Lab in Harold Washington College this summer (see previous posts for other details!). I didn't even realize until later that I was taking the same approach to examining students' writing and asking questions as I do in class. Not only that, but I could grasp the underlying structure of the Writing Lab, see its purpose, and interact with folks to further that. It felt to me a great deal like Shimer. Perhaps the Writing Lab is unique in that, but it is part of a public school and the "real world," as I think of it, and I learned a great deal because, as I do at Shimer, I leave myself open to it.

Third year will be busy--as Simon mentioned below, we have research papers to do. I suspect most of the busyness will be taking place in November, which is also National Novel Writing Month. Writing a novel and a 15-page research paper together? And taking three classes, two of which are cores (Hum 3 and Soc 3) and one of which is Feminist Theories? I see sleep disappearing over the horizon.

I also have a nice shiny new (hyperbole) five-bedroom house off-campus with four other roommates from Shimer (one who posts here, Sam), which I happily upkeep (or try to; please, people, sweep those floors!) in between everything else. Although this is what was going through my head when I got it:

Lease, from xkcd.com. The rollover says: "You should talk to that girl down the hall; I think you'd like her. Lemme know if you find out why she's ordering all those colored plastic balls."

Cue the Supertramp Record

Hi.  I'm Kieran.

Like many, I came to Shimer through a circuitous, non-traditional route. After High School, I spent a few years finding myself, then a few years out in the “real world” (which I can’t wholly recommend). In that time I took classes at Harold Washington College, part of Chicago’s city college system. I took whatever classes caught my fancy and fit my schedule, while listlessly working towards some vague goal of a degree.  It was through Harold Washington that I was introduced to Shimer; last spring six students from HWC’s burgeoning Great Books program took a single course at Shimer. Any of you who’ve spent time at both types of institutions can imagine a bit of culture shock. I don’t mean that statement to disparage HWC in any way. I expect some of my classes there will remain fond memories of the life-long variety, and I must admit that Professor Richardson’s Existential Lit class formed the entire basis of my Shimer admissions essays. But learning at HWC often proceeds somewhat a posteriori. Of course Aristotle will tell you that all learning and teaching must proceed this way, though I suspect Aristotle’s predilection for analyzing posteriors was perhaps not entirely decent. Regardless, we usually knew where we were going, so figuring out how to get there wasn’t much of an issue.

So to suddenly find myself sitting around a an octagonal table with 12 other people, all actively breaking apart and digesting the profoundly obtuse phrases of the pre-Socratics, was a little frightening. Yet even more unsettling was the realization that we weren’t necessarily working towards any concrete, final answers. Certainly we were gleaning a better understanding, and in that understanding finding some answers. But those answers inevitably asked more questions than they resolved: you know that feeling of lingering anticipation you get when a musician leaves off at a 7^th interval? This sense of incompletion was further compounded by Harold Stone’s impeccable knack for asking simple questions that thoroughly rattled any perch we might try to cling to. So then, how could we climb a peak with no summit? To be so confronted with a seemingly infinite distance between myself and that mythical land of universal answers and platonic forms and rainbows and unicorns was beyond frightening. How many times in life do we use a grand totality, a sweeping absolute, to put off the dread that life’s terrible uncertainty fills us with? The experience brought to mind Socrates; not Socrates the guide who gently leads us to a better life through examination, but Socrates the smug jerk lurking around the corner, ready to confound our most firmly held beliefs.

Flashing forward half a year to my first class as an official full-time Shimer student, we are discussing none other than Socrates’ dialogue with Euthyphro. And we’ve just raised the question of the pragmatism of the Socratic method; as my classmate Ben succinctly put it, “Why hit the forms?” Will we really live a better life through constant self-examination, or will we just descend into endless navel-gazing, lost in Daedalus’ labyrinth? At some point, someone’s just gonna have to take out the trash because it stinks, without first finding the true nature of either stinkness or trashiness. It doesn’t seem that we can live in a world without absolutes, and yet it doesn’t seem that we can ever reach those absolutes.

Then the words of Socrates came blaring into my thoughts (oddly, in my mind Socrates’ voice sounds just like Steve Buscemi’s): “I prefer nothing, unless it is true.” If we read these words without the smarminess usually assigned to the man, there is something insightful in them.  If we consider truth as a tantalizing object, always just out of reach, these words compel us always forward towards that truth, even knowing we might never find it absolutely. It’s not the ends that matter here, as there’s a certain periodicity to it; when you get to the bottom of something you find yourself back at the top (hmmm, someone should write a song…). Suddenly what was terribly frightening before became terribly comforting; what before seemed the height of futility now appeared infinitely purposeful. We climb the mountain not to find the summit, but to make the ascent.  It now felt a little clearer why it is so important that we each make the ascent ourselves. What was it that Goethe said? “Let everyone sweep in front of his own house…” I can’t vouch that this will make the whole world clean, but at the least it is a first down payment on the debt of our humanity.

Hi, My Name is [THOMAS]

Hi there. I'm Thomas. It's nice to meet you.

A little bit about myself: I am from Iowa. I like to write and act and play music and make movies. There are other things I like to do too, but I think those characteristics are enough for you to get a sort-of-kind-of idea of me.

I should probably mention that this is not my first year of doing the college thing; I'm actually a transfer student from a much larger institution in the city. During my time there I met some great people who I'm still friends with to this day, but it didn't take me long there to realize that it wasn't the place for me. Though a "traditional" college education in a large institution is an a-okay way to go for many, it just didn't bode well with me. It seemed to me that many students at said first institution were interested solely in getting out of there with a degree rather than actually learning stuff. Though one could say that how a person handles their college experience is their own business, whether you like it or not your show-up-without-doing-the-work-and-hope-for-a-C-at-least students quite often have an impact on everyone else's educational experience. As Heraclitus says, "Even sleepers and workers are collaborators in what goes on in the universe."

And here's the thing about Shimer that I've discovered in just a few days: you can't sleep your way through this place. By that I mean two things: one, that for any mere mortal it's impossible to put in a minimal amount of effort and still make it out of here alive. And two: it's too darn interesting here. The people and the discussions that have ensued are way too interesting for me to fall into any sort of sleepwalking state. I realize that sounds kind of hyperbolic, but it's completely true - not to mention that in the busyness that is the first couple of weeks here at Shimer, I've been a wee bit on the sleep deprived side. But hey, that'll change once I get a more concrete schedule in place.

So anyway I suppose I'll be posting here about my experiences regarding what goes in and around this place. But in the meantime it's nice to meet you.

Wherein Brad introduces himself, and references David Bowie a few times.

    Hello, dear readers.  You know that quiet, weird kid who only talks when he actually has something important to say?  That would be me, Brad.  I'm going to be chiming in here occasionally about how life here in Shimeria is going and whatnot.  I'm a transfer student coming from a large, impersonal community college in the suburbs about an hour away from Chicago.  I happen to have Cerebral Palsy, ergo some of my writing may have to do with that.  Shimer's elevators and I do not get along, and we have much to work out.  I enjoy reading (obviously, or I wouldn't be at Shimer!), obnoxiously loud music, tea, coffee, David Bowie, and rambling incoherently.  That picture to the right would be me, surrounded by books.  Appropriate, no?

    Whew!  That's the first word that comes to mind when I think about my life since August 23rd, which was move-in day for freshmen.  It's been an interesting ten days, to say the very least.  It's definitely been a story of extremes, from "I want to go home, whyyyy did I decide to go to college? (and you can feel free, dear reader, to imagine that said in a particularly whiny voice)" to the other extreme of that sudden feeling of "getting" parts the Shimer experience, which would be expressed by an excited and disturbingly cliche warm, fuzzy, "eeeeek I love Shimer!" 

    What happened in the past eleven days?  Let's see, my phone decided, two days after I arrived on campus, that it would be an awesome idea if it broke.  So I'd been around Chicago for quite a while without a functional phone.  However, my awesome friend Neel, a fellow first year (an early entrant, actually), went on an epic adventure with me, where we relied on his phone to get us to the Sprint store, and I got a business card with a website on it.  Awesome!  Did I mention that this epic adventure climaxed in terrible $8 chili?  It was a fun day!  I, however, have a phone again, so it was productive.

    The other fun thing was attempting to get to class in excruciating pain, and then finding the elevators didn't particularly feel like going to the second floor that day.  It was fine, though, I could take the stairs.  Or not, as that door was locked.  I do believe my Facebook status on that day was, "Dear Universe: Please stop throwing me curve balls, as I am a cripple and cannot catch them. Yours sincerely, Brad."  It seemed appropriate.  So, Harold, in case you were wondering why I was an hour late to Hum 1, that was why!  Oh, how I despise technology sometimes.

    So, what did I do that was FUN?  I am actually finding the entire experience of Shimer to be enlightening, challenging, and in a way, changing.  It's certainly forcing me to open up and talk.  Meeting all these people that I had previously interacted with only via Facebook or texting has certainly been a highlight.  I've been convinced that boring Shimerians don't actually exist. 

    Classes are absolutely awesome so far, as I have learned about and discussed everything from music (Hum 1) to how the earth was created (Nat Sci 2) to cultures far different from our own (Soc 1).  Some of the reading is frustrating when one doesn't understand entirely what the author means at first, but that actually is one of the uses of the class discussions -- to ask questions about things that didn't quite "click," and to bounce ideas around the room, until, hopefully, someone says something that causes a loud "Eureka!"  It's a fine art, though, as the discussions, so far, have been rather like labyrinths, with David Bowie/Jareth as the ultimate mastermind, of course.

    OK, so it's entirely possible that I just wanted to make a reference to David Bowie here, but honestly, the art of discussion is certainly tricky sometimes, and communicating what I want to say clearly has so far been the most challenging aspect of Shimer discussions.  It's an art form that I've heard is not mastered in the first semester, or even the first year. 

    All in all, it's been a whirlwind of emotion and confusion -- especially in navigation of the campus, let alone greater Chicago -- but I think I like it here!  I'm being facetious, actually, as love would be a better, more accurate word.

Honey, I'm home!

I had a long summer. Not in a bad way, but not in a particularly good way either. I was teaching swimming at a day camp for about 40 hours a week. I've never worked full-time before for more than two weeks in a row, and that was a lot to get used to. I was also taking Integrative Studies 2, which is a fantastic class--tied with Nat Sci 1 for my favorite so far--but that tied my neurons in knots.

And, strangely, I was largely alone. Especially at the beginning of the summer, after all my Shimer friends had left and before a handful of others had come back, it was lonely. This was strange to me, after a year of living in the dorms, eating meals in the Commons, having class with the same people I saw in the elevators and dancing in my living room at 2am on random Wednesday nights. Living in the dorms was too close for comfort, but living in solitude made me hold conversations with the cat.

And now I find myself back again, still living off-campus but in a hustle and bustle of people, classes, and trips to tiny Chinese bakeries. I don't wake up to an empty house, there's a swarm of familiar faces and the stellar new first-years when I get to Shimer, and it seems like there's something happening somewhere every evening. Among all the casual gatherings and boatloads of reading, I'm hoping to participate in an IIT one-act play (mainly because I don't have the time to do justice to being in Shimer's production of Endgame), I'm working at the campus coffee shop, and I'm drowning in Soc 3.

Oh, did I forget to mention that? Yeah, Soc 3 is putting me through the wringer. I'm doing the reading, and I love it. De Tocqueville and Mills are fairly easy to read, although the assignments are long, and I like the way they present ideas. But unlike Sara, my confidence is failing me. I'm hesitant to speak up, I rely too strongly on extended direct quotes, and sometimes I can't manage a coherent sentence. No, really. But I'm getting better.

The first class was disastrous. I could hardly focus, my ideas were half-formed, and my sentences always seemed to stop somewhere in the middle. The second class was better, I spoke some but felt awkward and somewhat terrified. The third class was better yet, and today's class was the best of all. At this rate, somewhere around next week I should start feeling fairly comfortable. But right now, it's all I can do to push forward and say anything.

This was my fear, as a prospective. That I'd come off like a moron, that I wouldn't make any sense, that I'd be so far out of my league a facilitator would kindly take me aside and tell me to go home now. Except, despite how hard this class is so far, none of that's completely happened.

I mean, okay, I feel like a moron, but I suspect that's a confidence issue. And, yeah, I'm not speaking up much, but that's largely because I'm listening. The discussions are fascinating! And my other classes are better. German's great, I love studying languages. And Nat Sci 1 is superb! I love the Presocratics.

And when I talked to Stuart, my Soc 3 facilitator, he didn't tell me I should go back to high school or that he was recommending my Early Entrance be revoked. (Can that even happen?) He said yeah, you're fine, and it'll get better. He said try to distill authors' ideas to support my own points of view, rather than simply reading quotes. He was glad I was so connected to the text, and thought I could move forward. He wasn't worried about me. After the meeting I promptly dissolved into tears onto two other students, but I did feel better.

It's just hard, you know? When the primary issue is confidence, not taking risks, not speaking up, it's harder to fix than when I'm simply not finishing the readings or I'm falling asleep in class. This isn't just about getting my act together; I need to be bold.

Ah, well. I know it will improve, partly because it always does and partly because I can see each class getting less and less terrifying. It's just a stretch. And, when I think about it, that's why I left high school: I had no room to stretch.

So,  okay, here I go. Let's stretch.