I signed up today for Community Law, also known as "Street Law," which is a program out of USF in which law students teach a course on law to high school kids. I remembered the few times I’ve taught or spoken in a classroom setting. Once as a substitute teacher in my old middle school in Singapore, as well as the times I’ve been on speakers’ panels in American high schools on the peninsula. I’ve also tutored high schoolers and elementary school kids on the peninsula.

It’s old hat by now for teachers to say that we learn more from our charges than they do from us (or at least, we learn as much). I’m not entirely sure what this statement could mean - how do you know how much your students are learning from you? Are you comparing your present experience with your remembered experience of learning at a younger age? Are you perhaps leaving out all the social roles you learned from your teachers along with the stuff in the books?

I think this "we learn more from our students" line might be more of an emotional and social indicator than a meaningful statement of fact. I know that the times I’ve said it, what I really wanted to convey was my excitement at interacting with students, and the surprise and delight that comes from being with people who are learning. I also wanted to indicate that I belonged to the group of "idealistic young teachers" who seemed to be the ones saying this the most.

"The Loop"—the three and a half mile sidewalk paved behind Stanford—is especially crowded on sunday mornings.  Cars are parked on both sides of Stanford Ave often almost all the way to Peter Couts Road.  It’s couples pushing a stroller, or mothers gossiping, or headphoned middle-age men gasping for air; they all pass me coming and going.  I’m mostly here for the view (and to step briefly away from my dissertation).

But if you come here for any reason other than “the exercise” you’ll find that you are out of place.  It’s telling that the only location in Silicon Valley that has a clear sweeping view from San Francisco to San Jose should not have one bench or even a carved out place to sit and think it over.  No one stops on the sidewalk.  No one sits on the wooden fence or on the grass.  No one stays still longer than the time it takes to tie a shoe.  Entering ‘the loop’ is a commitment to keeping you body in motion for the duration.  I wonder if stopping up there isn’t implicitly looked upon as a sign of weakness.  Occasionally the grazing cows look over at the moving, speaking mothers.  Does this continuing flow of people give these cows a complex?

All kinds of animals are on the move up there: falcons, hawks, mountain lions, crows, squirrels, spiders, gophers.  All of them on the look out for each other, each one is another one’s dinner.  A falcon waits a few seconds before diving into the brush amidst a parade of circling exercisers. 

But this isn’t even the irony I wanted to point out.  I wanted to point out that in this ‘wildlife preserve’ the major attraction is the gigantic satellite dish intently aimed up at the heavens.  As one of the few local gathering places not embedded within a shopping district, the loop is the most fascinating place in Silicon Valley, and I’m predicting now that this is only the first of many posts on this subject.  But for now let’s add up what we’ve got going down in the foothills perched between Stanford and the 280.  One cement sidewalk providing the much-needed exercise for local laptop carriers; plus one sky filled with screeching red-tail hawks hungry on the hunt for nesting field-mice and squirrels; plus one twelve-story satellite dish imaginably receiving signals from a galaxy far, far away; minus any place to sit, relax, reflect, or lay down.  Equals:  La Piazza de Silicon Valley.

So in my previous post on entrepreneurial city I talked about softness and blurring boundaries, but I just realized, after a particularly bad fallout with a friend (although in his new world view, we were never friends to begin with - somewhat reminiscent of judges who, in engaging in a novel reading of a law, say that it was always this way), that I am mister compartmentalizing.

By that I mean that I have certain roles that I want people to play and that I play in return, and in those roles I feel quite safe. For example, I think that when I have straight male friends, I feel freer to admit to myself my emotional attachment to them, because I’ve ruled out the possibility of sexual contact, and thus the possibility of sexual rejection (a big source of anxiety for me, apparently). Conversely, with some friends that I have sex with, I don’t feel free to admit to emotional attachment, or the mixture of shame, pride, joy, despair and desire that such arrangements often entail for me. This means that I have a script for those arrangements too. That script is "It’s Just Sex, And That’s Okay." As if anything could ever justify sticking a "just" in front of a complex social interaction like sex. It would be like saying "It’s Just Rocket Science" or "It’s Just Hegel." One could imagine a rocket scientist or Hegel scholar maybe saying such things, but to say "it’s just sex" brings a whole new level of arrogance to the table.

Compartmentalizing is a reaction to totalizing worldviews (like "all sex is bad except within a monogamous heterosexual non-transgendered marriage," or even "sex without love is bad" - which just sort of shifts the question to "what is love?"), but I think it’s time my pendulum started to swing back. No penis jokes please.