By Corinne Flax

December 18, 2006

Update On My Mental State

I know I haven’t been keeping up with this Blog the way I used to, and unfortunately I don’t have a good reason for this. Would that I could tell you about my fabulous new job, or amazing new opportunity, or even a somewhat interesting renewal of a previous experience. Nope, none of the above. I’ve just gotten swept away with the pre-holiday work and jerk of daily life. I just finished my final draft of my last project and all that remains is some grueling editorial work and some collating and fact organizing and I am done with my second full semester at Bank Street. Hallelujah and Amen! I don’t think I could have made it much farther this semester. I’m totally burnt out on my classes, and if I never have to look at my Observation and Recording notebook again it will be too soon.

That being said it was a good semester overall. I learned a lot about myself and about schools (blah di blah blah). One thing I’ve learned is that I view human beings as inherently flawed creatures. I do not think that we come into the world good, I think we come into the world as animals. Animals are not altruistic, they do not do ‘good’ out of the kindness of their hearts. Children are pretty much the same way, in my opinion, and we socialize them so that they will do good. School is essentially socialization with some skill building and fact dissemination built in for good measure. To a large extent the ability to participate on a social level is dependent on the abilities and aptitudes of an individual. It is up to the schools (and hey let’s not forget parents)! to make sure that these abilities and aptitudes are formed into socially acceptable and desirable behaviors.

My advisor thinks that children all come into the world good. She thinks that the negative behaviors and tendencies are learned, that parents, teachers, adults, and older children warp and shape the behavioral patterns we find in kids. In her mind anything a child does is done out of ignorance, and therefore innocence, or something like that. This is a big source of debate between the two of us, and one that I will never win, and wouldn’t want to. Knowing someone who feels the way my advisor does makes me have hope, especially since she is in her seventies and still manages to see the good in everything , and I certainly don’t.

As vacation draws nearer and nearer I get more and more excited. I’m going to Paris for New Years and this is so thrilling it’s hard for me to concentrate on what’s going on in my day to day life. Everything has a ‘when I’m in Paris’ counterpart. For example I went to Pearl Paint yesterday and then to a little Chinese bakery. As I sat eating my pork bun and sipping water I thought “in Paris I will eat pastries of the most delicate and delicious sort accompanied by espresso so black it stains my mouth.” As I walked around Pearl Paint I thought about what art stores might look like in Paris and if their writing tablets would be of a higher quality. Even something as simple as going to the ATM provokes a Paris thought “when I am in Paris I will use ATMs to get Euros, not twenty dollar bills.” Just seven more days and I’m off!

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