Peter Marmorek '70
Blogging Independent Activities Period
Peter Marmorek '70. Image: Diana Meredith.
For the past 32 years, Peter Marmorek '70 has been teaching high school English, world religions, media, and occasionally physics and math in alternative and traditional Ontario schools. For a time, he even headed his school's gifted program. But by 2003 Marmorek decided to retire from teaching while he still enjoyed it in order to seek out new challenges in life.
Part of this new discovery process is his blog, which he updates regularly, as well as MIT's 2004 Independent Activities Period (IAP). Marmorek spent the entire month of January attending IAP sessions while writing about his experiences on the site. The following is an except from this blog.
January 10, 2004
Two courses yesterday, and what a fascinating contrast between them! The first was Edward Dolan's "Storytelling Concert", which took place in N42, (one of the things that hasn't changed in either me or in MIT is the habit of referring to everything by number. In a lesser world, I would have had to say "in the center for advanced visual studies" rather than N42). There were 30 people of various ages sitting below 40 identical styrofoam snowflakes. I checked carefully, but here at least all snowflakes were alike.
Edward smiled at us, gave a one page handout with three quotes, and told us by way of introduction that we could find out more about storytelling at www.lanes.org [The League for the Advancement of New England Storytelling]. Then he launched into his three stories: "One Zero Charlie," "Blue Fire," and "Chiaroscuro: Freedom and Shadow." Launched is the accurate term—he didn't read from a text, but spoke from memory, which given that the three stories were over fifty minutes in combined length is a very impressive feat. He was an excellent storyteller: powerful and dramatic. The stories were good, though heavily theme driven and perhaps overly flavored with dramatic contrasts.
My biggest disappointment was that there was no discussion, no question and answer, no explication of what Dolan saw as the difference between the experience of reading stories and hearing stories, or why he chose to have us hear them. I would have loved a discussion of how the audience experienced the characters and theme, as contrasted or compared to how the author intended us to experience them. But it was one, two, three striking stories and we were out, which seemed a bit of a wasted opportunity.
Then it was on to "A Discussion of Prayer and Meditation from the Hindu Perspective," led by Swami Tyagananda, the MIT Hindu Chaplain. It was tricky to find this session, which had been moved from the chapel (faith alone was not enough to warm the chapel on this night), and the Go To sign referred to the session as the meeting of the Hindu Student Council rather than by its IAP name. But I tracked it down in the women's dorm, McCormick Hall, in a penthouse with a lovely view over Boston.
The class had about 20 students, three-quarters female, and/or undergraduate. So it wasn't that different a group from many of my classes, which were also largely female and only a year or two younger. About the same percentage of this class was South Asian. I hugely enjoyed this session on many levels. The first was that after 20 years of teaching Hinduism in World Religions it was delightful to hear that I'd gotten so much of what I'd said about it right. (So all you ex-students reading this, you were right to trust me. Just like I told you!) The Swami was clear and erudite and often left spaces in his presentation where questions could be asked. It was so much more involving to have a 90-minute class with questions and answers than the earlier hour without. I was intrigued that the level of questions weren't higher in terms of the questioners' Hindu awareness, but the responses were always gentle and appropriate.
The class also had some brief experiential periods in which we tried mediation following specific breathing suggestions. Along with the question periods, the mediation helped to both to break up the lecture, and to re-energize us. Alan Watts once introduced meditation in a film (unfortunately titled Zen and Now) by saying that just as in order to have something to talk about you sometimes have to not talk, so in order to have something to think about you sometimes have to not think. Certainly even these bite-sized introductions to mediation helped my awareness in the lecture part. And it was the first class I've been to in which there was some informal discussion among the students afterwards, which I enjoyed even if (because?) it gave me an excuse to skip my last class and get home earlier in the bitterly cold weather we're going through.
Nowadays, Miller plays medium stakes games about five to ten hours a week. At his peak, when playing 40-60 hours a week, he could win (or lose) as much as $5,000 a day. His fourth book, Professional No-Limit Hold 'em: Volume 1 (Two Plus Two Publishing), coauthored with Matt Flynn and Sunny Mehta, was published in July 2007.
Published January 2004
