스카이콩콩

내 나라를 두고 다시 방문한다는 말은 조금 어색하게 들린다.남이 내 집을 찾아오면 그렇게 말할 수 있겠지만 내 집을 내가 찾아가는 데 방문한다는 말이영 이상한 것처럼. 하지만 어쩌랴, 내가 여기 미국 동네에 산지도 어느새 다섯 해가 지나간다. 가기 전부터 일부러사람들 보러 멀리찾아가지 않고 대신 집에 계신 부모님과더 함께 시간을보내려 생각했다. 그렇게 하고 싶었다.한 달이라는 시간이매우 짧았기 때문에.비자를 갱신하고 선생님을 찾아 뵙고, 여기에 오는 후배를 만나고, 이 곳 출신 커플이결혼하는 일이 지난 달 말에 연달아 있어 그 때 서울에 잠시 갔고, 그 이후로 쭈욱고향에 머물렀다.왔는데 연락이 없다고 서운해 하는 지인들에겐 양해를 부탁했(한)다.

겨울에 왔을 때보다 늦은 봄 무렵에 오니 우선 나들이 하기 좋았고 근처의 산과 호수가 있는 월명공원을 찾아가는 일이 좋았다.가로수에서 클래식음악이 흘러 나오니 걸으며 듣기 좋더라. 밤에 석범이와 찾아간 은파 호수도 중간에 다리를 놓아 많이 세련되졌다. 영어 선생이 된 막둥이가충남 한산의 한 고교에 근무하길래 심부름으로 찾아갔는데 군산과 그리 가까이 있는지 여태 몰랐다. 이모들을 뵈러 전주와 김제에 들렀다가 중간 중간에 외국인 둘이 "이 차 김제가요?"라고 능숙하게 한국말로 물어와조금 놀라기도 했고. 오랜 만에 얼굴을 보니 이모들이다들 내가 늙었다고 한다. 어렸을 때 귀염둥이가벌써 서른 후반이라는 게 믿기지 않으셔서 그런가 보다. 그러나 두해 반이 지난 후 부모님의 모습을 뵈니, 마음이 조금 서글퍼졌다.세월의 어쩔 수 없음이란..난 뭘 고생하고 왔다고 어머니한테 이것 저것 해달라고 조르기만 했다.

다시 미국에 돌아왔지만 어째 그 곳의기억과 잔상이 이번엔 꽤 오래간다.

정확히 말하자면 다음 주에 구술 시험이 있긴 하지만 제일 힘겹게 하는 논술 시험이 오늘 끝났다.

총 네 시간이 주어지고큰 에세이 문제 세 개, 그리고 아이디문제 여덟 개를 다루면 된다.

더 잘 쓸 수 있었는데 하는 맘도 있지만 끝나니, 오, 정말 개운하다.

한국에서 석사할 때도 종시 때문에 좀 애를 먹었는데, 여기 와서도 남들처럼 그리 빨리 끝내지를 못했다.

가장 큰 이유는 나의 나태함과 더불어 지금 스물 대 여섯장 되는논문 프로포잘 쓰는게 퍽이나 힘들었기 때문이다. 정말 여러 번 고쳤고, 구술 시험이 끝나면 또 샘들은조언을 던져주면서 고치라고 할 게 뻔하지만, 까다로운 지도 교수의 안목에이렇게 까지 오래걸리는 게 정말 지긋 지긋했더랬다. 물론 원인 제공자는 나다. 뭐, 그런 골치 아픈 주제를 골랐나 이런 생각도 들었으니깐. 물론 나잘 되라고 하는 거니깐지금 와서 생각하면 정말 감사하다.그리고 그 전에 써놓은 글들이 다어디 가는 게 아니니 논문에서충분히 써도 된다 (는위안을 한다^^;;)

아, 이젠 정말 조지 엘리엇과 쿳시만 파면 된다. 그래, 난 이렇게 한 군데에 몰두하는 게 더 체질에 맞는 것 같어. 이제 좀 잘 먹고 잘 자고 운동도 좀 해야지.앞으로 내 인생에시험을 볼 경우가 얼마나 있을꼬. 아무튼이젠 그런 시험 안녕~

부학과장이뉴욕 타임즈에 실린 스탠리 피쉬의 글을 한번 보라고 관련 링크를 교수 및 대학원생 전체 회람 메일로보내왔다. 조금 시간이 지나긴 했지만지지의 표현으로 게재한다.

----------------<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/deep-in-the-heart-of-texas/?emc=eta1>-----

A number of responses to my column about the education I received at Classical High (a public school in Providence, RI) rehearsed a story of late-flowering gratitude after an earlier period of frustration and resentment. “I had a high school (or a college) experience like yours,” the poster typically said, “and I hated it and complained all the time about the homework, the demands and the discipline; but now I am so pleased that I stayed the course and acquired skills that have served me well throughout my entire life.”

Now suppose those who wrote in to me had been asked when they were young if they were satisfied with the instruction they were receiving? Were they getting their money’s worth? Would they recommend the renewal of their teachers’ contracts? I suspect the answers would have been “no,” “no” and “no,” and if their answers had been taken seriously and the curriculum they felt oppressed by had been altered accordingly, they would not have had the rich intellectual lives they now happily report, or acquired some of the skills that have stood them in good stead all these years.

The relationship between present action and the judgment of value is different in other contexts. If a waiter asks me, “Was everything to your taste, sir?”, I am in a position to answer him authoritatively (if I choose to). When I pick up my shirt from the dry cleaner, I immediately know whether the offending spot has been removed. But when, as a student, I exit from a class or even from an entire course, it may be years before I know whether I got my money’s worth, and that goes both ways. A course I absolutely loved may turn out be worthless because the instructor substituted wit and showmanship for an explanation of basic concepts. And a course that left me feeling confused and convinced I had learned very little might turn out to have planted seeds that later grew into mighty trees of understanding.

“Deferred judgment” or “judgment in the fullness of time” seems to be appropriate to the evaluation of teaching.

And that is why student evaluations (against which I have inveighed since I first saw them in the ’60s) are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance: they measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.

But sometimes (although not always) effective teaching involves the deliberate inducing of confusion, the withholding of clarity, the refusal to provide answers; sometimes a class or an entire semester is spent being taken down various garden paths leading to dead ends that require inquiry to begin all over again, with the same discombobulating result; sometimes your expectations have been systematically disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment, while extremely annoying at the moment, is the sign that you’ve just been the beneficiary of a great course, although you may not realize it for decades.

Needless to say, that kind of teaching is unlikely to receive high marks on a questionnaire that rewards the linear delivery of information and penalizes a pedagogy that probes, discomforts and fails to provide closure. Student evaluations, by their very nature, can only recognize, and by recognizing encourage, assembly-line teaching that delivers a nicely packaged product that can be assessed as easily and immediately as one assesses the quality of a hamburger.

Now an entire state is on the brink of implementing just that bite-sized style of teaching under the rubric of “customer satisfaction.” Texas, currently in a contest with Arizona and South Carolina for the title “most retrograde,” is signing on to a plan of “reform” generated by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank dedicated to private property rights and limited government. Backed by Governor Rick Perry (yes, the one who thinks secession is a viable political option), the plan calls for college and university teachers to contract with their customers — that is, students — and to be rewarded by as much as $10,000 depending on whether they meet the contract’s terms. The idea is to hold “tenured professors more accountable” (“A&M regents push reforms,” The Eagle, June 13, 2010), and what they will be accountable to are not professional standards but the preferences of their students, who, in advance of being instructed, are presumed to be authorities on how best they should be taught.

A corollary proposal is to shift funding to the student-customers by giving them vouchers. “Instead of direct appropriations, every Texas high school graduate would get a set amount of state funds usable at any state university” (William Lutz, Lone Star Report, May 23, 2008). Once this gets going (and Texas A&M is already pushing it), you can expect professors to advertise: “Come to my college, sign up for my class, and I can guarantee you a fun-filled time and you won’t have to break a sweat.” If there ever was a recipe for non-risk-taking, entirely formulaic, dumbed-down teaching, this is it. One respondent to the June 13 story in The Eagle got it exactly right: “In the recent past, A&M announced that it wanted to be a top ten public university. Now it appears to be announcing it wants to be an investment firm, a pharmaceutical manufacturer, and a car dealership.”

The people behind this cockamamie scheme wouldn’t be fazed by this description or regard it as an accusation. They actively want their colleges and universities to be like car dealerships, with an emphasis on the bottom line, efficiency and consumer choice. This means that the middleman has to be cut out, and in this case the middleman is the faculty member. Jeff Sandefer, whose presentation at a 2008 meeting with Governor Perry and the university Board of Regents established the tone and contours of “reform,” makes no bones about it. Professors, he complains, seem to believe “that our colleges and universities belong to them” (“Public Universities Belong to the Public, Not the Faculty,” Texas Public Policy Foundation, May 6, 2009). It’s time, he says, to stop writing “blank checks” to faculty members who occupy themselves “writing academic journal articles that few people read.”

That of course is an accurate description. Senior faculty members do in fact write articles that only their peers at the top of very rarefied disciplines can read.

That is what academic research is all about: highly qualified scholars working on problems that may have no practical payoff except the unquantifiable payoff of advancing our understanding of something in philosophy or nature that has long been a mystery.

More than occasionally in these columns I have mocked the pretensions of those faculty members who cry “academic freedom” at the slightest infringement of what they take to be their god-given liberty. But academic freedom does in fact have a meaning and a legitimate purpose: it protects faculty members from external constituencies intent on taking over the enterprise for mercenary or political reasons. The Texas “reform plan” is just that; its so called reforms would be funny were they not so dangerous. And it all began with student evaluations, or, rather, with the mistake of taking them seriously. Since then, it’s been all downhill.

며칠 전 보스턴에 있는 미술관에 놀러갔다가 작년 독일에서 스위스 여행 가는 길에 보게 된 라인 폭포를 그린 그림이 눈에 띄었다.전에도 한 번 이 곳에찾아 와 본 적은 있지만 그 땐 저 그림을 그냥 무심히 보고 넘어갔는데 잘 모르니까그랬을 것이다. 이번엔 실제 본 광경을 다시 그림으로 보게 되니 우선 반갑고 신기한 기분이 들 수밖에. 내 기억에 남은 인상과 비교해서약간은 조금 더 과장해서 그린 건 아닌가 하는 생각도 들었고, 터너(Joseph Turner)의 나중 그림들과 비교하면 그래도 조금은 점잖게 보인다.아무튼 이국적인 느낌을 이렇게 받을 수도 있나 보다.

그림 옆엔이런 안내문이 붙여 있다.

Turner was among the most original landscape painters of the nineteenth century. In 1802 he visited the Swiss Alps, making more than four hundred drawings that he used for decades as source material for grand paintings. Turner captured the force of the famous waterfall at Schaffhausen by flattening thick paint with a palette knife, so that the water seems to have the solidity of the rocks whose shape it echoes. In the foreground, a mother rushes to protect her child from fighting cart horses; the scene provides local color, but also underscores the insignificance of human concerns before the power of nature—a romantic theme very much to Turner's taste.

저 곳에서 여러 사진을 찍었는데 저 화가가 그린 곳의 위치에서 찍은 건 안보이네. 암튼 사진으로도 다 담지 못하는 저 모습은 직접 보면 "우와~ "라는 탄성이 절로 나온다. 유럽에서 제일 큰 폭포라고. (근데 왜 원본 사진 확대가 안되는겨?)

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