Getting in tune

Calgary, Alberta

I’m usually pretty skeptical about New Age healing and complementary medicine -- I've always thought astrology is hooey and the couple of times I’ve gone to a naturopath seemed like a waste of time (I wouldn’t even go to a chiropractor). I prefer to stick with remedies that have been subjected to scientific research. I’m not a spiritual person, I don’t believe in a higher power, and I think I’m basically a big sack of chemicals and electrical impulses.

But it makes sense to me that such a sack is profoundly affected on a physical level by the emotions experienced in the brain that controls it. And if thinking about Paul Gross's butt can cause a physical reaction in my body, or thinking about her baby can cause a mother to produce more breast milk, or grief can cause somebody to curl up and die, then the idea that our thoughts affect our bodies and vice versa is hardly farfetched. The studies on stress hormones and the immune system are hard to ignore. Is it completely wacky to suggest, then, that our bodies might be affected by the physical properties of our surroundings? The forces of gravity teach us that they are. It wouldn’t surprise me that there are inexplicable physical ways in which we are connected to the planet and to one another.

Having gone through a bout of severe depression and anxiety a few years ago, which seemed to cause all kinds of mysterious ailments culminating in breast cancer that I persist in believing would not have grown so rapidly had my immune system not been compromised by stress, I’ve learned to understand the concept of the mind-body connection. “It’s all in your head” is no longer an excuse to me, since I think at some level most things are all in our heads, which in turn affects the rest of our bodies, which in turn affects our heads. (You wouldn’t say to a person who has broken her leg, “Oh, it’s all in your leg!”)

In any case, I’ve looked with mild interest from afar at the increasing popularity of Chinese medicine, in particular the acceptance of acupuncture by many mainstream physicians. I hear of more and more people who’ve found acupuncture effective in curing migraines, back pain, etc. I've never purposely tried it, although more than 20 years ago an osteopath in England shoved a few needles in my back without warning, which I simply found upsetting.

As it happens, I am currently renting a room in Calgary from an acupuncturist. She’s a lovely person, very generous, but her talk about chakras and meridians and chi energy was meaningless to me. When she mentioned a New Age video she wanted to watch about a healer who predicts the world is facing a physical calamity of huge proportions and that we could forestall it with positive thoughts and energy, I, uncharitably perhaps, suggested that turning off lights when you leave a room and driving your car less might be more useful than positive thoughts in preventing the impending calamity (also wacky science in the eyes of some, I know).

Last night I walked home from school. It is unusually humid in Calgary, and so my plan to be released from my hot flash nightmare here has been foiled. As usual after exerting myself in hot, humid weather, I felt dizzy, weak and a little nauseated, and was drenched with sweat. This usually passes in a few minutes (I had my heart checked out last fall -- supposedly it's fine -- and the cardiologist told me the cause of my weak spells in hot weather might be low blood pressure). But an hour later I still felt lousy. I began to wonder if it was the accumulated stress of some family pressures, taking these intensive master’s degree courses and being away from home -- my stomach was nervous and jumpy and I felt vaguely depressed.

But I’d agreed to go out to a club with some friends, so after getting ready I sat in the kitchen waiting to be picked up, wondering if I should just stay home. My landlady could tell I wasn’t feeling well; she asked to see my tongue. I showed her. She suggested that she could do some quick acupuncture on the “stomach” points on my legs. I politely declined; my friend would be showing up at any minute. Besides, I didn’t want to make myself more nervous and jumpy by subjecting myself to invasive needles when I wasn’t accustomed to such treatment.

Then she suggested something called tuning-fork therapy. Not an ancient Chinese practice, she told me, but something developed in the U.S. that would tap into vibrations or something, and could boost energy. It would only take a few minutes and was not invasive. Sure, I shrugged, completely skeptical and somewhat amused. So she got out a set of large tuning forks, explaining that the brown one was for the earth, the green one for the trees, the white for the moon. Yeah, right. She banged them on a rubber pad she had strapped around her knee for that purpose, caused them to vibrate and placed the ends of the forks at various points around my knees. I could feel the vibrations locally, but a mild feeling of well-being seemed to spread throughout my body, and in a matter of minutes I felt much better. By the time I got into my friend’s car I felt completely normal, and very calm. I had a great evening listening to a honky-tonk band in a funky little club, and stayed out till 12:30 (I rarely stay out that late, and often feel antsy and cross when I’m in a strange place till all hours with people I don’t know very well).

Placebo effect? A positive response to somebody paying attention to me? Maybe.

Mistakes and Safety

In keeping with the all-over-the-map quality of this blog (to its detriment, probably, but, hey, it's my blog and I'll be electic if I want to), I'm probably going to post a few things on adult education since that's where my head is right now.

One of the courses I just finished here at the University of Calgary is called Adults as Learners. Another student and I gave a presentation on the theories of Carl Rogers, whose client-centered form of therapy grew into his theory of student-centered learning. Because he was one of the founders of the "encounter group," my partner and I dressed in Sixties gear (headbands, love beads, my first pair of flared pants since 1977) and played the opening strains of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" to introduce our topic. To illustrate Rogers's ideas, we tried to model his style of teaching by giving the class the choice to pursue a storytelling task any way they wanted to or to not pursue it at all, which led me to write this (partially edited) critical reflection paper:

I was struck by something a fellow student said during her presentation on Mezirow: she was surprised at how many of her colleagues had concluded that a research study they were conducting had gone wrong because the method and findings had not worked as predicted. “If our study had gone perfectly,” she insisted, “we would have learned nothing.”

This made me reflect on my own role as an adult learner and how much I learn from making mistakes. I admit I’m a perfectionist and I don’t like taking courses in anything I’m not already fairly good at. I suppose Adults as Learners has not been a huge stretch for me — not like learning to drive (I can’t) or swim (nope) or speak Mandarin (not a chance) would be. But still I had a lot to learn, and some of it came from being forced to do things I wasn’t good at and observing the gap between my performance and where I’d like to be.

[During our attempt to model a student-centered class on storytelling] I decided to provide the students with some suggestions (because I felt Rogers might have done that, based on what I read in his Freedom to Learn) for students who don’t like having the freedom to choose — they could tell stories to one another, either in pairs or in small groups, or they could write stories on their own, and I included the option to do nothing at all if anybody so wished. I am embarrassed to say it never occurred to me that the class would not be interested in any of my suggestions!...

But if my experiment with the task had gone perfectly, I wouldn’t have learned anything about what Rogers’ theory was really all about, or how it felt to practise it. I knew — or thought I knew — it was going to be unplanned but I hadn’t predicted how unplanned. It’s hard to prepare for the plan of no plan.

Earlier in my teaching career, I learned that making mistakes in order to learn has an impact on the maintenance of a safe learning space. When I was teaching at a community college, my students were 17 and 18, not very academically inclined and from very diverse backgrounds. One day a young man announced loudly to the class that he hated “queers.” My first instinct was to shut him down, but instead I asked him why. So he told the class how he had been hit on by gay men a lot, because, he thought, he was very boyish-looking. I commiserated with him on how uncomfortable it is to fend off unwanted advances. I hoped my comments would accomplish two things — I wanted to show the class that inappropriate sexual behaviour can be exhibited by people of every gender and sexual orientation; and I wanted to validate the young man’s experience.

But I was nervous as the discussion progressed: I was not going to let the subject pass without showing the students in no uncertain terms that I support gay rights; I felt strongly that my students should not be exposed to hatred or abusive speech in my classroom. Still, my support of free speech, particularly in an academic setting, is always stronger than my desire to be politically correct, mostly because I know that when we verbalize our opinions and find them hanging out there in the air for all to hear, that’s when learning occurs. People who keep their inchoate thoughts to themselves sometimes never change them because they’re never forced to fully form them. It’s in the expression of our thoughts that we are sometimes transformed, when we observe the gap between what we’ve just said and the evidence around us. I don’t usually even know what I think about something until I’m forced to put my thoughts into words, and often I don’t realize how ill-informed or silly or illogical my thoughts are until I hear them or read them (which is one reason I've edited this reflection before posting it on my blog). The learning doesn’t always happen immediately. Sometimes it takes days or weeks or years for me to respond to what I said.

On that day in my class, I clung to my desire to make my student feel safe enough to explore his opinions — even at the risk of creating an unsafe space for his classmates. I don't know if my students learned anything from that discussion, but I know I did. The boy's homophobia came from a place that was very real to him, a place that I could understand; we had more in common than I'd thought. (I confess I wasn't so supportive to the student who announced in class one day that "fags should be boiled in their own blood...")

Hiatus

For anyone who's paying attention, I've been too busy to post for the past couple of weeks -- I'm in Calgary taking graduate courses toward my master's degree in workplace and adult education (here's the program), and the workload is intense. I'm exhausted. But I'm having fun -- just finished two courses, Adult as Learners and Theory of Groups, that were interesting and challenging in ways I didn't expect, and my fellow students were a mature, intelligent, experienced, friendly, easy-going group. The entire program can be pursued online, but I decided to do my first three courses in what they call "face-to-face" mode, and I'm glad I did. I hope that, as I pursue the rest of the courses from my basement, I'll encounter students online whom I've already met in the flesh. Profs, too. In my Theory of Groups class, my group has to do a study proposal on whether a sense of community can be formed in virtual courses, where people aren't in the same room and never meet except through email and maybe audio software. It's pretty clear from the research that having some face-to-face contact at some point in the program helps that happen.

One of my classmates is from Kosovo. CIDA (the Canadian International Development Agency) is active in helping rebuild the education system in Kosovo (some University of Calgary academics are involved), and is paying the tuition of a group of Kosovars who are pursuing their M.Ed. online. A worthwhile investment, I'm sure, and apart from the benefit to the people of Kosovo, our class gained a lot from her cultural perspective.

As for Calgary, though it's a lovely city, it's awfully spread out, the traffic is terrible and without a car I'm not able to get groceries very easily. But the room I'm renting is convenient to the university. The best thing is the climate. It's been unusually hot -- 31 degrees in the afternoon -- but it's not humid, and at night it goes down to 12 degrees. A big shift from Toronto, where a 31-degree day leads to a 29-degree night, and you feel like you're moving through mouldy soup.

Yesterday I turned 49. When I woke up the first thing I heard on the radio was that Israel's bombing of Lebanon had killed 300 civilians including 100 children. So I started my 50th year in tears.

Really Fake

More fuss today in The Globe and Mail (think you may need a subscription for that link) about the veracity, or lack thereof, in Prairie Giant, the CBC docudrama about Tommy Douglas that aired a few months back. People have taken the creators to task for not letting the facts get in the way of a good story, in particular the descendants of the late Saskatchewan Liberal politician Jimmy Gardiner, who object to his portrayal as a redneck drinker. Shirley Douglas (mom of Kiefer Sutherland, daughter of Tommy) also apparently withdrew her support from the project after finding the script played fast and loose with facts. The CBC has withdrawn the mini-series from repeats and DVD sales. The director and screenwriter, as well as the Directors' Guild on their behalf, are trotting out the usual argument that because it's a drama, it doesn't have to be accurate. They're crying censorship.

While I see their point, I admit I'm getting tired of the degree to which history is knowingly distorted in the service of dramatic exigencies. I know it's hard to create a script that sticks to the facts while at the same time making the film easy to follow, entertaining, and affordable. And no one's version of the "truth" is ever the truth. But I think deliberately changing verifiable facts about real people is dangerous, at least when you sell your product as docudrama. A novel that speculates about the inner life of a real person is one thing, and so is a theatrical film based on such a novel. But a CBC miniseries about a politician whose story is intricately tied up with that of the nation raises certain expectations in the viewer that, if not met, will come back to bite the producer in the ass.

Perhaps there's nowhere to draw the line with drama. But I did watch Prairie Giant, and was much more bothered by the anachronistic details that I find so common to these productions, where people in a historical context exhibit the social behaviours of today rather than of the period. For example, there's a scene where a boy, perhaps in his early teens, accompanies Tommy Douglas, then a Baptist minister on the Depression-racked prairie, to bring a box of old clothes to a poor farm family. As they approach the house, the boy says to Douglas that Mrs. So-and-So "must be pregnant."

When I was growing up in small-town Canada in the 1960s, no boy would ever have used the word pregnant when speaking to an adult, much less the Baptist minister. He'd have died of embarrassment first. In fact, no adult I knew ever used that word in front of children. Possibly boys might have used it when speaking to each other, but I can count on one hand the number of times I heard that word from an adult in the first 18 years of my life. A woman was "expecting," in the parlance of the day. Saying "pregnant" was a little bit like saying "toilet," an awkward word for Canadians. And adults avoided pointing out a woman's condition at all to children if they could possibly help it. Am I mistaken in believing that the 1920s and '30s would have been even more conservative than the '60s? (When Demi Moore appeared pregnant and naked on the cover of Vanity Fair in the early 1990s, it marked the first time I'd ever seen a pregnant woman's body, and I was in my mid-30s at the time. Today women's bared, pregnant midriffs are everywhere in the celebrity mags -- I think they're quite beautiful -- and famous women's "bumps" are magnified on tabloid covers. That's a whole other topic.)

There were a number of other gaffes of that nature in Prairie Giant that didn't jibe with my experience of how people used to behave, especially church-going people. Part of the series was dull, and part was rather exciting. Realistic? I don't know. I voted for Tommy in the CBC's Greatest Canadian competition (and he won). He deserves better.