Float On

Of the collaborative essay Floating Foundations, many of my highlighted sentences with asterisks in the margins came from Joe's third of the piece. For me, Joe captures the distinction between the two individual floating foundations, physical space and rhetoric, and then shows how they are intertwine. Additionally, he draws a great parallel to his cocooning and denial. He uses his own rhetoric to expand the thesis of vitality of rhetoric within a post-Katrina community in order to grow.

He continues saying that oftentimes it is easy to distance ourselves from something of the same category. Wordy, I know, but, for example, going to school in Madison, I rarely walk outside the six block vicinity of my classes. That is, I am never really off-campus. I understand this is a far larger city than what I know, but I confine myself inside invisible boundaries. In the past, it was scientific method that hypothesized that humans were divided into subcategories, supporting racism and slavery. The idea that people with different physical features could still be civilized and human, too, was denied. Underlining the goal to rebuild the Tulane english department, a stronger significance the authors portray is this idea of redirecting thought from temporary, specific to floatable and general. To me, this meant the ability to see past the current, the blend the boundaries of one place to another, because one may become the other, because they are continuous. And this is the most important thought because the connection between critical thinking as a floating foundation and the idea that separation is actually indistinct is clear.

It is hard to articulate my thoughts of the essay, but I do not feel comfortable restating their, very true, very eye-opening arguments. I can only agree.

The article “Floating Foundations” emphasizes the point that school can be used to reunite people in any circumstance. In the case of New Orleans, the teachers used education and school to bring community together as well as reflect and make suggestions for post-Katrina. Judith Kemerait Livingston thought, “Katrina so radically de-familiarized the United States that it exposed issues like economic inequality, failing public schools, and crumbling infrastructure in a way that simultaneously educated us and demanded action from us.” This is what struck me as most important within the article. Education can be seen as a fix for anything because education demands new solutions and thinking. By directly linking education and course material to the world around us, the students were more actively engaged, like in the article we read “Living Savage Inequalities.” It is important to note the class material is always changing though due to changing times.

Floating Foundations - Livingston

While reading it wasn't hard to draw parallels between the examples of course material in the article and those of our class. We write responses to recently published articles and comment on others posts in a blog, which is similar to the professor's wiki assignment for Tulane students. We're assigned topics for writing that fall under a main category and are expected to develop critical conclusions in those essays, also much like the students at Tulane. Though the structure of our course was not as a restructuring in response to a natural disaster, I feel it's possible that our class, too, has been designed as a 'floating foundation' of sorts. Many teachers now see as the sole possibility for keeping students actively engaged in the coursework, and rightfully so.

Upon reading about the students who were not exposed to the surroundings of New Orleans during the devastation, I found myself agreeing with their nonchalance. Post-Katrina, I also felt that there was too much coverage of the event, and discussion of it got old. I was not directly exposed to it and felt no connection to the event. It would have been torture to write about it for a whole semester. The way that the professor went about redirecting the course in order to better incorporate those who felt this way was a much more suitable option. While Katrina was obviously a large shaping factor of everything in our nation that year and following, Livingston's comment really sums up how quickly our generation moves on. "Looking back, I recognize that I underestimated the pace at which students adapt to a changing present: how much, as adolescents, they are already at home on foundations that float."