Set design for Blackbird Theatre’s
Uncle Vanya
Today’s class began with introductions and outline reviewing, as well as a two-part discussion on the ways in which graduate schools could or must change. To better understand what each of us are getting ourselves into, we read as much of the one of these two articles: Nicolas (2008)’s optimistic Researcher for Tomorrow and the seemingly more pessimistic Taylor (2009) End of University as We Know It. Both express ways in which graduate schooling has to keep up with present-day demands for research and job opportunities. The key phrase comes from the mechanical engineer Nicolas, who advises in a workmanlike way, to have graduates who know where to dig, rather than digging the same holes as their mentors. Sounds very much like Tapscott and Williams (2007) were investigating in the book Wikinomics‘ chapter on Goldcorp.
Having been introduced to the methods and readings that in weeks to come, I took the thoughtful lessons about becoming a professional language and literacy educator and went to see a show with my dad, Blackbird Theatre’s production of Uncle Vanya. In an eerie way that has started with my master program, everything I come into contact with outside of the classroom has some relation to what I am studying. Here it becomes obvious with Anton Chekhov’s caricature of a professor past his prime: Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov. Ageing and aching from gout, he returns to his wife’s country estate to wreck havoc on the remaining inhabitants (his wife, Vanya’s sister, having passes away and the professor remarried to a much younger woman) who he partly ruined by leeching off them during his studies and long process towards retirement. Of the many people he has upset along the way, Serebtyakov’s worst habit is his disregard for the lowly farmhand, Ilya Ilych Telegin, the only character who took an active interest in what the retired professor has to say. I have seen that look, the confused “who is this person?” brush-off that seems to be a bad habit of surrounding oneself with ideas rather than other people.