Just start calling me Rip Van Meridian

Your correspondent's arrival to last Tuesday's department meeting? Naah--it's really Tompkins H. Matteson's Rip Van Winkle's Return (1860). Image found here.

Apparently, part of turning 50 (which for me will occur next week) is that one feels the uncontrollable impulse to begin lots of sentences with "In my day . . ." or "I remember when"--not to mention, in my particular instance, a certain rueful recollection of earlier times when I'd hear someone older begin talking like that and think, "C'mon, old man--stop living in the past."

(There's a strange poetry of confluence between that impulse and the upcoming annual colo-rectal exams I'll soon begin undergoing, but I'll leave that for another time.)

During Tuesday's meeting, at which we walked through the process by which we are to build not a single, department-wide e-text but our own, individual customized e-texts for use as anthologies in our rhetoric/research classes beginning this fall, I felt a lot like that hunched-over old guy in the painting above. I found myself wandering back in time to my undergrad days (almost 30 years ago now) when I first seriously used an IBM Selectric typewriter and wondering how producing a text would get any cooler than that and, later, when working on my master's, trying to compose a short paper on an Apple IIe--in those days, you just about had to program the thing to produce text (by this time, Macs existed, but we didn't have one in the tutoring office)--and thinking, Man, screw this: I'll just keep using a typewriter for my work once I get to a doctoral program. In short, I of course clearly remember how things got done back when I first entered college, but in comparing that time to this one, we might as well have been monks in medieval monasteries.

(Mind you, I don't feel nostalgia for those days, enjoyable as they were--after all, I wrote a fair number of terms papers and my dissertation using WordPerfect 5.1 . . . for which, every time nowadays that I wrassle with Word's presets, I admit to feeling more than a little nostalgia.)

But then again, maybe I'm still dreaming . . . As I played around with the software for my own e-text, I ran across an article titled "Could Written Language Be Rendered Obsolete, and What Should We Demand in Return?." It speculates that as researchers perfect mind-to-machine interfaces, we can someday (perhaps by 2050) essentially do away with that clunky old technology known as written language and convey what we want to communicate via just thinking it. I will have more to say about that piece later on in another context. For now, though, I'll just say that, that day, as I played around with the interface and read this article, I found myself wondering, "Just what kind of place are we preparing our students for? I am having trouble imagining it."

Read More...

Summary only...

Back to school . . .

Thanks, FailBlog

It's back to back-to-school meetings this week. The chief activity has been to coin yet another phrase for what we need to be doing that means "assessment" and yet sound different enough that our various constituencies will believe that we're doing something different. Anyway: I have syllabi to write, so I hope to have something of substance next week.

Read More...

Summary only...

Welcome to students; Arendt on technology, thought and thoughtlessness

A young Hannah Arendt. She looks like she could make philosophy fun; about 20 years later, though, she would coin the phrase "the banality of evil." Image found here.

Last week was the first week of classes for me; in all the busyness of that time, I didn't have time to post a Welcome to students here on the off chance that they might possibly visit here. Consider this, then, a belated but no-less-heartfelt welcome. I am very much looking forward to the new semester, and I hope you are as well.

As has been my custom for a while now on first days, last week I asked students to introduce themselves by telling the class why they're in school, something "interesting" about themselves, and to ask me a question. Someone asked me what was the wildest, craziest thing I ever did in college; before I could answer, some wiseacre said, "He probably left a period off a sentence." Hardee-har-har. What I told them was that, good old Texas Lutheran College being only about 3 hours away from Laredo, there were occasional very spontaneous road trips down to the border for, as Gary P. Nunn once gracefully described it in song, "cultural exchange." (The days of a barely-closed border are now long gone, alas.)

Anyway. Someone else asked me what I do for fun. Well, sometimes I try to learn some things on my own for fun, which is where Arendt comes in. Long ago, I once mentioned a couple of passages from the prologue to her book The Human Condition; for a Comp II assignment I wanted to look up something from the prologue and, one thing leading to another last night, I've up and decided to try to read the rest of her book. Am I a fun guy, or what?

Arendt's book is an attempt to answer a deceptively-simple question in a world where labor (broadly defined), once culturally-esteemed, seems in the past half-century or so to be something to escape: "What are we doing?" Note how you can read that question as both genuine inquiry and in a rhetorically-despairing way. What follows is another excerpt from the Prologue that I'd forgotten, one that points in the direction of the rhetorically-despairing. Arendt's book's immediate occasion is the launching of Sputnik, but the following passage seems especially prescient, given that she wrote her book a year before the invention of the integrated circuit. For Arendt's "thought," by the way, substitute "contemplation":

[I]t could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is. (3)

Worth pondering, students, as you use SpellCheck while editing your work. (Hint, hint.)

Read More...

Summary only...

On the desire to knock GPS devices out of my students' hands

I'm still here; I've been tied up with settling in, still, into the new place and, this past week, attending meetings that might actually, this year, help me become a better teacher for my students--since, this year, I've heard some things that actually speak to me directly as a teacher.

This weekend, I hope to post something a little more substantial here. In the meantime, ponder this statement, which, though taken a bit out of context, will be my mantra for the coming year: "This is no place for fast-food intellectuals."

(Speaking of Mr. Coates: He has a recurring series of posts titled "The Civil War Isn't Tragic" that in this, the sesquicentennial of the firing on Ft. Sumter, are well worth your time. Reading this man's engaging with James McPherson's writing on the origins of the war and, inspired by that, how a socioeconomic system can shape the thinking and choices of, even, those people not directly invested in the maintaining of it, have been a bracing tonic for the mind of late. You might find that to be the case as well.)

Read More...

Summary only...

A stretch of river LX: Inaugural dispatch from the Stretch of River School of the Dismal Science

Note: My computer still needs replacing, but at least it's no longer threatening to crash on me. So, maybe we can limp along here for a while yet.

My sole formal training in economics consists of a single Intro. to Macroeconomics class that I took in college (of which about all I remember are supply/demand curves). However, as you'll see, this isn't about economics per se except in the figurative sense of an intellectual economy--in particular, the one that exists at my place of employ. Yes, wiseacres, I do teach at a community college, but we do have an intellectual economy, even if we don't talk about it in any formal way. Which is part of the point of this post.

Some context first: The combination of Kansas' state budget having an estimated $500 million shortfall for this fiscal year and the state's electorate's having put into office an especially-conservative Republican governor, former U.S. senator Sam Brownback, means that public education will see some funding cuts. My school is better-situated financially than some and so should be okay, but neither are we about to go on a hiring binge, either, despite increasing enrollments.

All of which made my ears perk up the other day when I heard my colleague's outburst from his office: "It's gotta be a grant! It's gotta be!" I wandered over and asked him what was up; he said that the college had just posted job opening notices for not one but two full-time Economics instructors. Yes: Economics. When, from a strictly utilitarian point of view, we could really use a couple more English (or Mathematics or Biology or Chemistry or even (formally-trained) Philosophy or Religion) full-timers. My colleague knows all this; hence his exclamation.

I had class to go to just then, so I couldn't linger. The next day, though, I asked him if he'd found out any more about these mysterious positions; he said No but that he would right then. So, we go to the college's job openings list on the website, and here's what we found, excluding the less-exciting stuff like, you know, salary and such:

Economics Instructor (2 positions)

Full-time

Full-time Economics Instructor will be responsible to teach Economics courses. Knowledge of Austrian Economics expected and preferred. Prospective candidates must be willing to incorporate Austrian capital theory into their macroeconomic classes. Prospective candidates must be skilled in a variety of instructional techniques and technologies, with a demonstrated commitment to student engagement and learning outcomes assessment. May teach evenings and at multiple sites. Teaching experience and Master’s degree required.

(Here's a summation, and here's a detailed discussion of Austrian business-cycle theory (which incorporates capital theory).)

Now, my interest was really piqued.

Those of you who've followed this blog can probably guess that I'm not a fan of (what I understand of) the Austrian School. Not only is it not especially well-regarded as an economic theory, it meshes in distressing ways with other systems of thought (one in particular) that are either (take your pick) laughable or odious but which seem to be making inroads into mainstream conservative politics in this country. I would hope, though, that my eyebrows would raise if the position had specified the hiring of someone committed to Marxist or Chicago School economic theory or was a really big fan of Paul Krugman. It's the specificity of the call that is so odd, especially given that it's a call put out by a community college.

So here's a list of what's at issue for me as an instructor at a community college as regards these announced positions; as you'll see, they overlap, Venn diagram-like:

1) In all our talk as a faculty about assessment and incorporating technology into our teaching and the transferability of courses to in-state 4-year schools (a whole other blog post, I assure you) and all the rest, in my 11 years at my college we have never had a formal, faculty-wide discussion about our sense of ourselves (and I'm including our students here, too) as an intellectual community. Do these new positions signal that we now have such a vision, and will future hires reflect it? Or, will they lead to formal discussions of a vision?

2) If these positions are part of achieving a long-term goal of developing our faculty's intellectual diversity, I'm all for that. As the Wikipedia entry makes clear, the Austrian School has some powerful advocates even if most mainstream economists find their theories suspect; students need to know about these theories (the better to be able to discredit them, I would hope). But that does lead one to wonder whether, as my colleague fantasized, our next hire in Economics will be a Marxist--that is, given that as of right now we offer two courses in Economics, Principles of Microeconomics and Principles of Macroeconomics, how will achieving this intellectual diversity mesh with the larger goals of what are, after all, introductory-level courses?

3) If the answers to my questions are something along the lines of, "The Austrian School bit was just a string attached to some money we're after; no need to be concerned," well, that to my mind begs the question of why I or my colleagues wouldn't or shouldn't be concerned about our particular version of inculcating in our students some sense of what it's like to be engaged in intellectual work. Perhaps the fact that, as I mentioned before, we've not had that sort of discussion as a faculty indirectly answers that question. I would hope not, though; to say that that lack of discussion is its own answer reflects poorly on both our administration and our faculty.

4) Aaaand, I think I'd better stop here for now. As I have stated many times before on this blog, I have deep admiration and respect for my administrators and fellow faculty. To pursue things further here would be purely speculative and potentially unfair to them. But I'll conclude by saying this: I understand and accept and enjoy being part of the roles that community colleges play relative to 4-year schools and the regional economy. Speaking for myself, though, there's a danger in letting our vision of ourselves be determined too much by others (as embodied, for example, by the "student as customer" model of education) and not enough by our sense (not the state's, not would-be donors') of what it means to be educators and how best to model that for our students, no matter their particular ambitions. Part of that would seem to be not being beholden to any one particular ideology--not our own, and especially not that of someone outside the college.

Read More...

Summary only...

A stretch of river LIX: On the difficulty of conceiving

Thoreau's shaque d'amour? Naah--but he did do some conceiving of Walden here.

I tried talking to Scruffy about all this on our morning walk, but he was more unresponsive than usual. Sometimes, every once in a while, blogs are man's best friend.

On Monday at 9:00 a.m., I'll meet a class of around 15 unsuspecting freshmen in English Comp. I, and my 18th year as a college professor will begin in earnest. Beyond passing out the syllabus and engaging in some sort of let's-get-acquainted activity and, in some cases, make a first assignment, I don't know what my colleagues do on the first day of class. Aside from our deans' insistence that we have a syllabus ready to pass out on the first day, we're not obligated to do anything. Early on in my career at my previous school, though, I got it in my head that it's a good idea to offer up my version of an "Aims of Education" talk, in which I try to convey, in some way that I hope will be accessible and at the same time intellectually challenging, my sense of what we are talking about when we are talking about Education (as opposed to Training, which is, alas, what has become the default setting for thinking about undergraduate education). This talk changes from year to year, but for the past couple of semesters it has begun this way:

Before anyone arrives, I go to the classroom and write the following on the board:

"Let us spend our lives in conceiving then."

The rest is below the fold.

While we're doing the housekeeping stuff of the first day, I don't say anything about that statement; I just let them think they know what it means, along with whatever attendant lascivious thoughts may come to their mind (I'm not accountable (yet) for what or how they're thinking); if anyone asks about it, I tell them that we'll discuss it later. Then, the housekeeping done, I tell them that that statement is from Thoreau's Walden and that he, a life-long bachelor, wasn't talking about making babies. Rather, he was talking about those other, less-familiar meanings of conceive, "to understand" and/or "to imagine." Then I provide them with the following passage from near the end of chapter 2 of Walden, "Where I Lived, What I Lived For," a bit of writing that never fails to move me:

Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

. . . . Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.(source)

(That second paragraph is just amazing, isn't it?)

But now comes the "difficult" part: No matter the meaning of conceive, each has in common the dynamic of two unalike entities combining to make something that had not previously existed. So far, so good. But even under the best of circumstances, there's more than a little luck involved in that dynamic. Estimates vary widely, but scientists say that anywhere from 30% to well over half of all fertilized human eggs will never result in a full-term baby, only a very small percentage of those "failures" being the result of some sort of human intervention. As all of us who have ever dreamed up some idea or theory that literally or figuratively blows up in our face can attest, the success rate with the non-biological kinds of conceiving are probably not very high, either: speaking from experience, most of my ideas don't even make it to the stage where they have a chance to blow up. In retrospect, that's probably for the best.

In the realm of intellectual conceiving, information-storage and -retrieval devices always mediate this dynamic of unalikes meeting and creating something new, especially in terms of the Internet's ability to access vast quantities of data (see Neil Postman's work--in particular his notion of "information") and, as Nicholas Carr provocatively argues, how we assess the quality of all that information--specifically, what the implications of the 'Net are for those subjects, and they are many, which don't translate easily to web-friendly environments.

It's here that the first-day talks will diverge. Comp I students will get to hear the "spell-checks only check spelling!" speech, along with the story of why "defiantly" has become such a common typo for "definitely;" I'll tell them flat out that such errors mean that they are truly not reading their work when such errors occur. I want them to think about the concept that good writing (read: conceiving) occurs when the subject becomes more important than the writer and that requires patience and focus and attention. Comp II students will get the "we need to think not just about the information from the source but also the source itself" speech: we'll look at and talk about the medieval maps you see here (each reflecting the faith of its maker), a 1530 map (part fairly accurate, part complete guesswork) of the Western Hemisphere that I'd link to if I could find it online; and, at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, a GPS device. I'll try to say some things about context (or its lack, in the case of the GPS device) that will make sense with regard to understanding, mastering, being able to make observations, and writing well about a subject. All that, too, is part of conceiving.

As I said, Scruffy was unresponsive as I talked with him about all this. Perhaps my students will be a bit more engaged.

Read More...

Summary only...

Back to school

Faculty meetings for the new semester began yesterday, and in today's presentation our guest speaker, yet another in a long procession of guest speakers over the years whose job it has been to tell us about Kids These Days, told us about Kids These Days. One of the things about Kids These Days: They have all these gadgets whose chief purpose seems to be to enable their tendencies toward ADD-ness. Moreover, as we know, their most frequent encounters with written language occur not via paper but via electronic screens of various sorts.

I get that, and I am comfortable with that. Or I thought I was until, via The Daily Dish, I ran across this article by Alan Jacobs, in which he announces that he's begun to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest on Kindle.

Here's the bit that tripped me up:

So I bought the Kindle version. All the above problems [chiefly, the paperback's bulk] solved . . . but . . . I found that I was missing the visual cues that codexes offer. I don't often miss them, or not all that much anyway, but in this case I miss them. Wallace goes off on these long riffs, but on the Kindle it’s hard to tell how long they are; whereas when holding the codex I could flip ahead to see how long I should be prepared to keep my concentration before I can expect a break.

In case you didn't catch it, Jacobs does not use the word book; he uses the word codex. To see why this pulled me up short, have a look below at the definition I know for codex, along with a picture of one:

co·dex (kdks)
n. pl. co·di·ces (kd-sz, kd-)
A manuscript volume, especially of a classic work or of the Scriptures.
[Latin cdex, cdic-, tree trunk, wooden tablet, book, variant of caudex, trunk.]
Word History: Latin cdex, the source of our word, is a variant of caudex, a wooden stump to which petty criminals were tied in ancient Rome, rather like our stocks. This was also the word for a book made of thin wooden strips coated with wax upon which one wrote. The usual modern sense of codex, "book formed of bound leaves of paper or parchment," is due to Christianity. By the first century b.c. there existed at Rome notebooks made of leaves of parchment, used for rough copy, first drafts, and notes. By the first century a.d. such manuals were used for commercial copies of classical literature. The Christians adopted this parchment manual format for the Scriptures used in their liturgy because a codex is easier to handle than a scroll and because one can write on both sides of a parchment but on only one side of a papyrus scroll. By the early second century all Scripture was reproduced in codex form. In traditional Christian iconography, therefore, the Hebrew prophets are represented holding scrolls and the Evangelists holding codices. (Thanks, Free Dictionary; image found here.

Add to this my recent reading in which Aztec codices get mentioned with some frequency and, well, maybe you can see why seeing a novel published in 1996 referred to as a codex was a bit startling. You can gather that this usage is brand new to me. Is it for you as well?

But more to the point, I found myself wondering about the implications of this term's application to an object that's usually not called a codex. Books are indeed an ancient technology, but are books themselves ancient--which is to say, passé? Is the choice to call them codices meant to honor them or to draw attention to their jalopy-ness? And what might be implied here regarding those of us who still prefer to read off paper rather than off screens? Are we just slightly-hipper versions of these guys?



As you no doubt have determined by this point, I have no conclusions one way or another about this, aside from the usual truisms: Usages change. But it's hard not to be tempted to read this particular one as a kind of commentary on the position printed text now holds in our culture, that now some (many?) consider it to be on some sort of par with hand-written and illuminated manuscripts. That is a strange thing to contemplate as I once again face the necessity of explaining to students why having a book for the class is a good, if quaint, notion.

Read More...

Summary only...

Attention, "John Henry" fans (a bleg)

A painting by Palmer Hayden of John Henry's death. Note the positioning of his body. Image found here.

First of all, welcome to my new students. It was a pleasure meeting you and talking with you about the next eight weeks.

Second, the bleg: for this summer's class I'm working on pulling together a little unit built around the American folk song "John Henry": (some of) its many different versions; the historical case for John Henry's existence and the two places that lay claim to being the site of the confrontation between John Henry and the steam-driven machine; some speculation as to why this legend and the songs about it hold the place it does in American folk culture; some images; etc. The goal is to use these materials as a kind of laboratory for different acts of interpretation. It could be fun or disastrous--but hey! It's the summer!

Here's where the bleg comes in: I'm looking for leads on either old recordings (or recordings of old versions of) "John Henry," along with a couple of more contemporary re-writings/updatings. In addition to the four versions I listed in this old post (though the Mississippi John Hurt piece is something of a ringer since it's more like a response to the legend rather than a version of the folk song), I also have a version by country blues performers John Cephas and Phil Wiggins. I'm toying with including Johnny Cash's version on his At Folsom Prison album. Here is a list of other performances, along with some contemporary updatings. I'm looking for around six versions of the song in all.

The goal is not to overwhelm but to suggest something of the variety of these songs, a variety nevertheless contained within a fairly firm narrative framework. I have a few weeks for this; I've scheduled it for July 1. Any advice/questions any of you might have would be most welcome.

I'm in the midst of writing up a post on Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666; that should appear here either later on today or tomorrow.

(UPDATE: The truly John Henry-obsessed can thank me later for being pointed in the direction of this and this. A tip of the hat to River's Invitation for leading me to both those places.)

Read More...

Summary only...

Something to read while I'm away

I'm still around. Various distractions have arisen since I last posted and Finals Week is next week; thus, I'll be scarce for a while yet.

In the meantime, though, I wanted to direct your attention to "A Lonely Kind of Courage" by Elizabeth D. Samet, a professor of English at West Point. The immediate occasion for her piece was President Obama's address to the cadets on Tuesday, but it is really about two larger things: A quick survey of how presidents have addressed cadets in the past; and, as the passage below puts it, the cultivation of "sympathetic knowledge" in the cadets of "the processes by which non-military life operates." If that sounds to you like the space of the humanities and arts, you would be correct. Samet's piece conveys strongly not only the relevance of that cultivation but the richness of that experience for both the cadets and their faculty.

This piece piqued my interest on two levels. Back in my job-market days, I'd see ads for jobs at the military academies and find myself wondering what it would be like to teach literature in such places. It's rather embarrassing to look back now on what I had assumed and recognize how uninformed my assumptions were. Reading Samet's piece, I couldn't help but envy her--talk about a context-rich environment! And that leads me to the other way this piece engaged me: As long-time readers here know, my primary teaching assignment is at my college's branch at McConnell Air Force Base. The vast majority of the military personnel I've taught are enlisted men and women, many of whom aspire to become officers one day, and this particular base's airmen have not faced anything like the dangers and strains of war that, even, airmen at other bases have faced. (McConnell is home to an air refueling wing.) But they are grave and thoughtful about warfare, whether they will make a career of the military or have plans to leave after a while, and no matter their politics--which, I assure you, pretty much mirror the political spectrum in this country.
Samet's piece is brief but meaty; all of it is well worth your time. The concluding paragraphs are so elegant, though, that they're worth quoting here:

[President Franklin] Roosevelt regarded another attribute as essential to an officer’s successful negotiation of complex responsibilities, namely a “sympathetic knowledge of how other men’s minds work and of the processes by which non-military life operates. There is no greater quality of discipline than the ability to recognize different techniques and different processes, and by persuasion and reason to bring these divergent forces into fruitful cooperation.”

It is to the growth of that “sympathetic knowledge” in cadets that I look forward each day when I head to class. When we meet shortly to look at Robert Lowell’s meditation on the Union dead, the cadets will seek to understand the workings of the poet’s mind and perhaps the workings of that of his subject, Robert Gould Shaw, the 25-year-old colonel of the Massachusetts 54th, a regiment of African-American soldiers, over 70 of whom died along with Shaw in the assault on Ft. Wagner, South Carolina, in the summer of 1863. In the image of Shaw in St. Gaudens’s memorial on the Boston Common, Lowell perceived a “wrenlike vigilance, / a greyhound’s gentle tautness.” William James, speaking at the dedication of the monument on Memorial Day in 1897, discovered in Shaw a “lonely kind of courage,” a courage beyond even that required to “storm a battery.” I’m going to ask the cadets what they think that means.

Read More...

Summary only...

Actual questions my students asked me on the first day of class

[Now: Updated with answers to said questions!]

We're two weeks deep into the new semester. So far, so good. The classes are full, and most of my students seem to want to be in class. Of course, next week my first set of papers comes in . . .

Anyway. On the first day of class, I tried something that a colleague of mine shared with our department: after I'd talked about the syllabus, I called roll by asking them what brings them to college and invited them to ask me a question. I challenged them a bit by saying that the R's through the Z's would have great questions for me because the A's through the Q's would have already asked all the lame questions. End result: I got lots of really interesting questions from the get-go.

Here are some of them:

"Do you think you could survive by yourself in a wilderness area for a month?" (Once my student said it would be in Alaska in the summer, I said that if I knew enough about the (edible) fauna, I thought I could--I know how to build a solar still and how to build a fire using flint and steel.)

"What animal would you like to be?" (A seal.)

"Do you own a muscle car?" (No.)

"What is the name of your subconscious?" (This was the question that, out of all of them, truly stumped me. I decided that mine doesn't have one, but I described what it looked like; I then described the stereotypical college English prof.)

"Robert Cormier or William Faulkner?" (What do you think?)

"What were you like as a student before college?" (Answered in part here.)

"What would you be doing if you weren't teaching?" (Running a bookstore.)

"What book did you read that made you want to teach English?" (The first prose fiction that really stirred me intellectually as well as emotionally was that part of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the beginning to the Christmas dinner scene; the book that made me want to teach, though, was As I Lay Dying.)

"What is the most interesting place you've ever visited?" (I told the class that I'm not what I would consider well travelled; given that, I told them, "Mexico City.")

Read More...

Summary only...

In which the Meridian briefly plays Col. Kurtz

"He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct." Image found here.

The above is how I characterized myself yesterday at our department meeting as the sole full-time English instructor at my school's teaching site at McConnell AFB. (Some context is here.) My school's organization is a bit strange: we have several campuses, but they have, relatively speaking, little administrative autonomy, even though one of those branch campuses actually serves more students than even the central campus. Yet, it's the central campus that has ultimate authority in determining things like the look and much of the content of the syllabus, what text(s) we use, how many and what kinds of papers we assign, the fact that we must have some sort of graded activity on the last day of class, etc. My self-characterization aside, though, I'm actually observant of these guidelines: there are good reasons for them, even if those reasons have little or nothing to do with me. The maintaining of order in the ranks is not solely a military good.

Yes: it's get-ready-for-school week for us at my place of employ. I confess to feeling a bit adrift for the past couple of days: glad to be back but, for various reasons, not fully "present" at our meetings. Fortunately, nothing is so radically different this fall that I have needed to be fully present. Moreover, you'll be happy to know I've not been broadcasting meditations on snails crawling on razorblades . . . or, um, you know, doing other stuff that would cause my department to terminate my command with extreme prejudice.

To hear some students tell it, though, you'd think I have some of their peers' heads on stakes outside my office . . .

In some ways, actually, I'm the negative image of the good colonel: whereas most of my colleagues, to put it politely, can find better uses for their time than to drive out to the main campus (for me, a 60-mile round trip) for two days of meetings, I actually like going to them; they provide almost all of the very rare occasions that I get to see my other colleagues in the department over the course of the year. I like to think I'm good at what I do, but I'm also smart enough to know there's more than one way to be a good teacher. So, these meetings give me the chance to learn from my colleagues and/but also be reminded that my methods have not (yet) become "unsound."

So: I'm off to write syllabi. I should be back "here" in a day or so. In the meantime, here's a very nice mash-up of scenes from Apocalypse Now and Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day:

Read More...

Summary only...

Students in the Hands of an Angry Grader

Jonathan Edwards. The Man. Image found here.

Ah, yes, the end of the semester: that time when young graders start channelling Jonathan Edwards:

The bow of pedogogical wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of the Grader, and that of an angry Grader, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with red ink. The grader holds you much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent.

Read More...

Summary only...

"She just read it to us": On the importance of seeing "The Red Wheelbarrow"

Image found here (along with a pretty good commentary on the poem).

so hard to talk
about

"The Red Wheel
barrow"

to one's smart
daughter

by phone and not
see it.

In all my excitement about envisioning middle-schoolers building a bed of nails, I forgot to mention that G. related to me that her language arts class is in the midst of a unit on poetry and that as part of one day's discussion her teacher read (and, apparently, only read) William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" to the class. Now, G. is not immune to feeling delight in the pleasures of words. For all I know her teacher isn't immune, either; but I do wish she had lingered a little longer, or at least in a different way, over Williams' poem.

Maybe what follows below the fold is a useful way to think about this poem. Your mileage may vary. All I know is that it works for me in the classroom.

G. began telling me all this by asking a question that, I strongly suspect, everyone who has taught this poem has heard many, many version of: "Why is this poem so important?" She said her teacher told the class that college professors make their students read "The Red Wheelbarrow" all the time, and then she read the poem to the class. End of discussion, apparently. So G. asked me what the big deal was about this poem, and as we talked she revealed that they hadn't actually seen how the poem is laid out, either on the page or on the board: "She just read it to us."

It may sound a bit odd to say of a poem justly famous for its single intense image that seeing the poem itself is important as well, but I think this is the case with "The Red Wheelbarrow." At least, I know that in my classes we talk its layout a fair amount. Though not technically a concrete poem, the temptation is strong to see the layout of each two-line stanza as schematized wheelbarrows. I wonder if that fact works at a subconscious level in the reader: the stanzas' visual shape quietly aids in reinforcing the image created by the poem's words. In addition to talking about that, we focus on the second stanza:

a red wheel
barrow

Notice how Williams breaks into its original pieces a compound-word that has existed in printed English since at least the 14th century: just for an instant, we read/see "a red wheel" and then "barrow." We thus have to spend a bit of time in mentally assembling and re-painting this thing (usually, it's the barrow's color and not the wheel's that determines the wheelbarrow's "color") and, in so doing, have the image reinforced in our mind's eye yet more.

As G. pointed out and as I confirmed, wheelbarrows are ordinary things. But they are so ordinary precisely because so much depends upon them--yet, human beings being what we are, we take them for granted: we leave them exposed to rain and chickens. But just saying that isn't enough, either. So the poem itself--its appearance on the page--is engaged in a kind of work analogous to the wheelbarrow's: almost unnoticed yet, if it weren't present, that work wouldn't get done. This fact serves as a reminder to me--someone who is always encouraging his students to read their assigned poems out loud--that seeing the poem itself and not just what the poem describes matters too.

Now: whether talking about all of this would have helped a few hormone-addled 8th graders to a greater appreciation of the poem is another matter. I do wish, though, that G.'s teacher had given it a shot by, at the very least, letting her students actually see the poem. You never know what might have happened.

Read More...

Summary only...

No pun intended

Meet the new board of education!!

(Okay--that pun was intended.)

Image found here.

Let's just dispense with the one patently-obvious question you are almost certainly going to ask by answering in this way: I don't know what the hell she was thinking.

I talked with my older daughter G. on the phone tonight, and she caught me up on all the goings-on at her school. But she led off our conversation with the pronouncement that she thinks her science teacher has gone crazy and proceeded to provide a fair amount of evidence that, even allowing for typical 8th-grader flights of hyperbole, I think would persuade most people who know how things should run in a school. I strongly suspect that she (the science teacher) will not be back in the fall. Well, neither will G., but that's because she'll be starting high school.

Wow. "High school." I just typed that.

Anyway. One of the more interesting pieces of evidence G. supplied was that this teacher, without parental or administrative knowledge, much less their approval, recently planned to have her classes build and then try out a bed of nails. Yes: I understand how beds of nails work. So, if you don't see what the big deal is, then envision middle-schoolers, with lots of sharp things and tools, building something like what you see in the picture. No approval. From anyone.

But never mind all that. You're reading about this at all because of the teacher's name:

Ms. Pierce.

UPDATE (Tuesday the 10th): So as to reassure my tens of readers, in these days of stimulus packages, that I don't just blindly assume that throwing lots of money at public schools will suddenly cause school district administrators to acquire Solomon-like powers of discernment, in this same conversation G. noted that her school has both cut "by half" (she says) the number of copiers and purchased and installed "several" flat-screen TVs in the school cafeteria.

Why is it that technology--or, more precisely, its acquisition--causes otherwise intelligent people entrusted with purchase orders to become glassy-eyed with desire and yet not think about, you know, how its acquisition will benefit teachers and/or students? Sometimes it actually does aid in learning, yes; sometimes, though, it turns us into bipedal raccoons.

Read More...

Summary only...

Writer's block: the paper

[EDIT: Welcome, visitors from Douglas and Main. Just a note of clarification: While I wrote about a brick, my students are free to choose for this exercise any object, photograph or short piece of music that, for whatever reason, they have in their possession and has meaning for them. If you're curious, this post has the assignment.]

As promised a couple of days ago, below the fold you'll find my effort, which I'll also share with the classes that have this assignment. The strange thing is that, even at 1257 words (you've been warned), it feels like it is less than it could be. The more one tries to describe, the more one begins to notice things.

I make no claims as to its merits, but I will say again that I'm very glad I both made the assignment and took it on myself. If I learned some things by virtue of having done it, I feel pretty confident that my students will, too.

I will be describing a brick. This brick measures 3 ½” high by 8 ½” wide by 3” deep and weighs 7 pounds and 8 ounces. Most of it is coated with a thick glaze, dark caramel in color. On two sides, though, the glaze is either missing or has been worn away. On one of those sides, the exposed clay is a red the color of iron that has just begun to glow from being heated. The other side also shows red clay, though its red is considerably darker. The brick’s longer edges are beveled. Some of its shorter edges appear to be beveled as well, but others are sharper edged. Its form is not perfectly rectangular: one of the 3 ½” x 3” ends is not quite perpendicular to the brick’s other planes; thus, when stood on that end the brick tilts slightly off what should be its true latitudinal axis.

The brick is mostly intact. Much of one corner is gone, and three other of its eight corners are chipped as well, though not nearly as much. A deep chipped groove almost bisects one of the 3” edges; other edges reveal smaller dings resulting from wear and weathering. One of the smaller corner chips reveals something not otherwise visible anywhere else on the brick: the clay appears layered, and a small piece of clay that protrudes from the bottom of the chip wiggles a little, like a loose tooth. Traces of grayish-white mortar remain on three of the brick’s six surfaces.

One of the 3 ½” x 8 ½” surfaces, which I will refer to for convenience’s sake as the front of the brick, features two raised ridges, one at each of the two narrow ends of the surface, and writing embossed into the surface. The ridges measure approximately 2” in length and are located about 1” from, and run parallel to, the 3 ½” edges. The ends of the ridges are about ¾” from the 8 ½” edges. The writing is centered in the large space between the ridges. It consists of three words, one word per line; the letters are approximately ½” tall and are all upper-case letters: “MESCH / PITTSBURG / BLOCK” The words PITTSBURG and BLOCK are difficult to read because mortar partially or almost completely fills many of the letters of these words. The upper-left corner of this face is the most damaged of the brick’s eight corners. The chipped portion forms a rough right-triangle measuring approximately 2” x 1 ½” x 2 ¾”. At its lowest point, the chip is about a quarter-inch below the surface. The hypotenuse of this triangle just grazes the end of the ridge closest to it. Tilting the brick at just the right angle reveals that about halfway along the 1 ½” edge of this chip (the side on the upper edge) there is a small piece of a mineral that reflects back a bright-red light. The lower-left corner of the face is also chipped, though the damaged area is smaller and more irregularly-shaped.

From here, I will describe the remaining three larger surfaces, rotating the brick so that the surface on which the brick has so far been resting becomes the next surface to be described. Thus, the next surface is the 3” x 8 ½” surface that is perpendicular to the front’s bottom edge (that is, it is closer to the word BLOCK). It is distinct from the others in that it is pocked with numerous small cavities of various shapes, sizes and depths more or less evenly distributed across the surface (the other surfaces, by comparison, are remarkably smooth). The majority of these cavities are lighter in color than either the red clay or the caramel-colored glaze. None of these cavities is very deep, and no cracks radiate from any of them. This side has no visible traces of the dark caramel glaze on its surface. One of the larger pocks, located at the right end of the surface, stands out from the others because it is filled almost to the surface with a very dark material that does not appear to be clay; around the edge of this dark material appears a hairline gap between it and the space within which it rests.

The reverse of the brick is the 3 ½” x 8 ½” surface on the side opposite that which contains the ridges and writing described earlier. Its surface is the smoothest of the brick’s larger surfaces. Some thin traces of mortar appear on this surface. Under strong light, one can see that the dark caramel glaze coats only about a third of this surface and, indeed, is quite thin here as compared to its apparent thickness on the brick’s other surfaces. A shallow concave chip measuring a little over 1” at its widest appears near the exact center of the upper 8 ½” edge; near the upper-right corner, there is a shallow notch at the base of which appears a hairline crack--one of the few genuine cracks appearing anywhere on this brick.

The fourth and last of the larger surfaces is the second 3” x 8 ½” surface. This surface’s roughness results from the combination of a very uneven coat of glaze and two large chips of material missing from its left and bottom edges. The glaze has formed ridges on this surface, one running more or less parallel to and about ¾” from the left side, the other running at a slight angle to and along almost the entire length of the bottom side. At its most prominent point, this second ridge protrudes about 1/8” above the surface. These ridges reveal that the glaze is not of uniform composition but contains bits of lighter-colored material within it, a fact not revealed by those surfaces where the glaze is intact. The exposed brick on this surface is that which is the color of heated iron that I mentioned in the first paragraph.

To the left of and perpendicular to this surface is the first of the 3 ½” x 3” surfaces I will describe. This surface’s right edge and lower-right corner bear considerable damage--these correspond to, respectively, the left edge and lower-left corner of the surface described in the above paragraph. In addition, the lower-left corner is chipped, and the entirety of the top edge shows damage from wear and weathering. A large clump of mortar and two smaller clumps appear on this side as well; the large clump is on the surface‘s right-center, and below it the smaller clumps serve as two points on a line almost exactly parallel to the bottom edge, thus forming a triangle with the large clump serving as its apex.

The reverse 3 ½” x 3” surface, which forms the perpendicular to the right edge of the front of the brick, has chipped upper-left and lower-right corners as its most distinctive features. The lower-right corner almost appears, from this perspective, as though it had been cleaved off; the chipped portion follows the left edge to about the halfway point of that edge. The chip at the upper-left corner, though, spreads chiefly in the direction of the surface’s center up to about an inch at its longest point. The lower quarter of this surface has a few pocks. What appears at first to be a long hairline crack located about a third of the way down from the top edge proves, on closer inspection, to be a space where the clay simply didn’t quite fill the form prior to firing.

Read More...

Summary only...

Writer's block

Just so you know . . . writing 1,000 words about a brick is hard.

I need the work this exercise requires as much as my students do, which is why I am doing it as well. I introduced the assignment on Wednesday and, along with them, began making some initial notes in class; today after my morning class I began working on it in earnest.

So far I have about 500 words. The problem, if that's the right way to put it, is not exactly a shortage of things to say but, rather, how most accurately to describe those things for a reader. A brick is a rectangular solid, a geometric form; I've spent a considerable amount of time, therefore, just figuring out how to make distinctions between and among its six surfaces so as to describe certain things found on one surface but not on others. What's also been interesting to me is how I will write a sentence, think it's done, get ready to move on to the next one, then "watch" as that sentence I've just written seems to expand from within. In other words, the actual features I'll describe won't be all that numerous; the word count will come mostly from words that serve to orient the reader as to where those features are and from the nature of the descriptions themselves. (As one example: one surface of the brick is "a red the color of iron that has just begun to glow from heating.")

I'm sure my tens of readers are just dying to read 1,000 words or so that describe a single brick; so, when I finish up I'll post it here. In the meantime, I would encourage those of you casting about for a good writing exercise, whether for a class or for your own edification, to give this one a try. It's a healthy reminder of just how much we gloss over when describing things or people, even when we think we're doing a good job of it.

Read More...

Summary only...

"You're not looking!!!" Part II

The previous post was a bit sketchier than I had intended.

Here, very briefly, are the sorts of assignments I have in mind that will build on what I described here (the order subject to change):

#2a--Narration: Relate some story connected to the object you described in paper #1. Some possibilities: the story of how it came to be in your possession; (if it's a photograph) the story of the event documented in the picture, or a story about a person in the picture; (if it's a song) the story of how it came to be meaningful for you, or a narrative suggested by the song's lyrics or, even, melody; (if it's a painting) create a narrative suggested by the scene depicted in the painting. The one requirement is that the narrative you write have the object as its starting place.

#2b--Process: If you made the object in question, describe the procedure for either how you made that particular object or how one would go about making other objects like it.

#3--Compare-Contrast: What are some of the similarities and differences between this object and another, comparable object? This other object, by the way, doesn't have to be in your possession, but you need to be very familiar with it in order to do this assignment well.

#4--Division/Classification: Your object is unique unto itself, yet we're able to identify it as something because it shares characteristics with other, more or less similar objects. Those other objects, however, have attributes that allow us to say they are different in degree from others (as one simple example, my brick is a paving brick; what distinguishes them from bricks used for buildings are their weight and their one large, smooth side). What systems of classification (large groupings within a general area, such as "Visual Art"'s containing the classifications of Painting, Sculpture, Photography, and Film) or division (categories within a classification: "Photography" contains the divisions of daguerrotype, film, and digital) does your object participate in? Describe those classifications/divisions, being sure to provide examples for illustrative purposes.

#5--Cause-Effect: This one I admit to having some troubles with regarding the nature of the assignment. Good thing it comes toward the end of the semester, eh?

#6--Argument: This one could head in any number of directions, some only distantly related to, though traceable back to, the object in question. In the case of my brick, for example: it was part of the fill used for the small levee along the Little Arkansas. Infrastructure issues, such as the merits vs. the liabilities of brick streets in "age-appropriate" parts of cities; the future of water use in the area: those are two topics that immediately come to mind. A family photograph might suggest to someone a course of action s/he (or someone else) might take with regard to some issue that someone in the picture is facing. By this point in the semester, my students will have spent so much time thinking and writing about these objects and things associated with them that they should have all sorts of ideas floating about that can possibly work here. I'm not looking on think tank-quality policy statements here, just some evidence that the wheels are in motion.

As with the previous post, comments are welcome.

Read More...

Summary only...

"You're not looking!!: A possible (sequence of) writing assignment(s)

By Leonardo Da Vinci. Click to enlarge. Image found here.

Many of my students are fond of saying that they like to get "right to the point" in their writing. While in some instances that's an admirable trait, I don't think it's one that they are consciously striving to achieve--it's reflective of either a hurry-up-and-get-it-over-with attitude regarding the assignment (this also reveals itself via a preoccupation with word or page counts) or, more likely--and sadly--a genuine lack of practice in developing their ideas. Whichever the case, these mindsets not only are not helpful ones to have when confronting many if not most writing assignments for college courses, they also produce dull, even lifeless writing . . . and puzzlement, not to say frustration, for students who get their papers back with queries from their instructor such as "Can you develop this more?" or (in the case of narratives, where the problems with this mindset really reveal themselves), "Where is this happening?" or "Who are these people?" or, in literary analysis papers, "Where in the text does this idea come from?", etc.

I'm going to be more optimistic here and say that what my students lack is, first, practice in closely observing something and then writing about it, and second, making connections between the particular and the general (as opposed to often mistaking the former for the latter). So, I've begun working out a series of interrelated assignments for my Comp I students that should give them practice in both these areas, sketched out below the fold. Feedback always welcome, by the way.

I usually give my students a range of options for each assignment, but this first one, tentatively titled, "You're not looking!!!", will be mandatory. If you're at all curious, it's inspired in large measure by the bit in this post about the brick, which will also serve as my demonstration for the assignment. And speaking of bricks, I also have in mind a moment from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when Pirsig, frustrated with a student who isn't terribly imaginative, tells her to write an essay about the facade of the opera house downtown--specifically, to begin by describing one of the bricks in the facade--and she responds by writing a paper far in excess of the required length.

[Note to self: Yes, Pirsig eventually went nuts, but I don't that was attributable to teaching Freshman Comp.

The things we tell ourselves.]

I'll work out the precise wording later, but the essence will be this:

Choose an object--not a machine or device or animal or person--that, for whatever reason, you have around you and, for whatever reason, inspires curiosity in you or has meaning for you. The object can be any self-contained 3-dimensional entity, preferably one without moving parts, a photograph, a painting, or a song (the song can be part of a larger work, but it shouldn't itself contain multiple sections, such as a concerto or symphony).

Describe this object. Don't tell how it came to be in your possession or relate its significance to you or compare it to other, similar objects. Describe it. In the case of photographs and paintings, where are people/objects it depicts located in relation to each other, and what do those things look like? In the case of songs, remember that songs exist most fully when performed and thus exist in time as well as in space; also, if the song has lyrics, quote but do not interpret them.

Minimum length: 1000 words, firm. Papers shorter than this will not fulfill the assignment, period. You are, of course, welcome and encouraged to write more (that's what "minimum" implies, after all)--if you feel the need to write more in order to describe your object, by all means do so. In any case: start early!

Something like that.

The word-length requirement is a big deal for me: it's the first time I've ever set a specific requirement like that for a writing assignment. The goal is to get them to write more than than most of them would be likely to write and, paradoxically, get at least some of them to see that what will seem like an awful lot of words initially will in fact prove to be inadequate.

(He says as he crosses his pedagogical fingers.)

Here's what I'm thinking: I hope my students will a) gain a little practice in paying attention to what they see and/but b) an object in isolation, devoid of context, is semantically inert (that's a point, by way of analogy, that I want to get across when I talk about maps and GPS units on the first day). I hope they'll feel a little frustration by being restricted to description, that they'll spend a little time thinking about the fact that these things acquire meaning only in association with something/someone else. That's where the other rhetorical modes--narration, division/classification, cause-effect, compare-contrast--and argument will come in.

If this were the best of all possible pedagogical worlds, I'd insist that all their subsequent writing assignments be linked in some way to this object they've chosen. Those assignments would contain suggestions, but the starting place would be the object they use for the first paper. But I can't quite insist, especially when, as I've been thinking about my brick, I've had a bit of trouble coming up with one or two possible subjects for papers that would fulfill the assignment. But then again, I want them to be imaginative, to not take the easy way out. I also suspect that lots of possibilities will suggest themselves as they work on that first paper.

Comments?

Read More...

Summary only...

Wherever you go, there you are . . . but where is that?

From top: A "T-in-O" map from a 1472 edition of the Etymologies of St. Isidore (7th cen., Seville) (image found here; a map created by Muslim geographer Al-Idrisi from the 12th century (image found here; a copperplate facsimile of the Western Hemisphere of a globe by Johann Schöner, 1520 (Image found here); a Tom-Tom One XI (image found here)

As I blogged about at this same time last year, I'm interested in the relationship between technology and my students: to put it a bit crudely, whether they really use it or it seduces them into thinking they're really using it. And during our in-service this week this issue got raised for some of us, this time from the faculty/administration side of things. In the past couple of years we've made enormous investments in that big thing called "computers"--not just new hardware and software, but in the "meta" side of things: course and equipment intended to teach students how to set up and manage databases and servers, and how to keep them secure. We've also spent a lot of money acquiring technology for classrooms that teachers can use when presenting material.

So, there was this gee-whiz haze that my English department colleagues and I walked through on Tuesday as the entire college's faculty took a morning tour of all that. But in our department meeting that afternoon, one of us spoke to something I'd been thinking about that day and yesterday, too: There for a little while, Wichita seemed to have escaped the worst effects of the recession, but this week Cessna announced that it would be laying off 3,000 workers in March at all salary levels (for some perspective, the metropolitan area has around half a million people). Given the general downturn in aircraft manufacturing, other layoffs or work slowdowns are sure to come. And as goes aircraft, so goes this town. So my colleague's question was, in effect, how do we in the very un-sexy English department make or keep ourselves relevant to our students, many of whom are already living at or below the poverty level?

Good questions. And here's my answer: On the first day, I think I'm gonna talk about really old maps and GPS units.

I got to musing about GPS units during that tour, for some reason, and it struck me that at some essential level the user doesn't have to know where s/he is relative to anything else. If you can turn left and right when told to do so, that's all you need to know. There's no assertion of the user's will on the device once the coordinates are entered--you don't get to choose from multiple routes; you get The Way, the One True Route ("No one comes to the Grocery Store (or wherever) but by me"). Most of the time, that's not a problem, but we've all heard of instances when one of these devices has given directions that don't correspond to the physical world: "You can't get there from here!" Also, I've already mentioned that the device doesn't propose alternative routes. In either case, if something goes awry and you truly don't know where you are in physical space and you either don't have a conventional map or can't locate where you are on it, well, as I am fond of saying, You can only know what you know.

Enter the old maps. As I wrote about this past summer, the top two maps' depictions of space are determined at least as much by ideology--specifically, religion--as by a desire to represent the earth's surface in a useful manner. It's easy enough to see that these competing ideologies produce two very different maps of the same geographical space. But, at least for the pre-Renaissance Christian, there was no distinction between between sacred and secular knowledge. The Bible did more than reveal God's Will for His people; it was also the one accepted source of knowledge about the world--"world" in those days referring specifically and only to the then-known landmasses referred to in the Bible. That which was not in some way accounted for in Scripture either could not be or was in error or simply dismissed because of its (pagan) provenance.

That was the cultural world Columbus lived in and under whose assumptions he undertook his voyage to Asia in 1492. Add to that the complicating factor that he thought the world's circumference was actually 1/3 that of what most people estimated it was, and it's easy to understand why he died, in 1506, insisting he had found Asia, even though by that time most people realized that he had found something else instead. In a sense, the presence of these landmasses was no problem for Columbus: he simply said that what he had found a part of Asia that no one had known about before. But for the growing number of people who realized otherwise, they had a very real problem: how to talk about this Something Else--something clearly NOT accounted for in the Bible--without calling the Bible's accuracy into question? Simply saying the Bible was mistaken was not an option--these were the days of the Inquisition, recall. And consider that the problem created by this other land mass was simple compared to the problem posed by the people found there: Who were they? What were they?--that is, they appeared to be humans, but were they fully human? (read: Did they have souls?)

This was a problem that neither simple observation nor technology could solve--indeed, technology (here, the ability to sail across an ocean) had created this problem. The problem was more than one of simple ignorance. It was a problem of conceptualization, of coming up with a new way of thinking about not just this new place but about the place we had come from (something often forgotten is how Columbus' voyages changed Europe's understanding of itself, too). In other words, this was a problem that only language could solve.

Language is a tool, too. The work it performs is the most important work of all: the work of explaining and making sense of our life and our place in the world--and, if we're both good and lucky with language, shaping and influencing our respective corners of the world. Seen in this way, the term New World, coined by Peter Martyr, is one of the most powerful tools ever made.

Mastery of machines is a crucial skill to have. But more important, if we don't want to feel like people who knows no more about where we are than the fact that our GPS unit has guided us there, is looking up from our machines and seeing how what we do fits with the world beyond our machines. A map is (still) pretty useful for doing that sort of thing, and writing--another sort of map-making--is, too. In Comp I, we'll work on learning how to make better maps than the ones we're making now.

Read More...

Summary only...

Your chance to help further my students' education!

I'll be away from "here" for a few days--reading/writing/grading call--but in the meantime . . .

A few days ago, I posted that I'd be requiring my students to keep blogs on the subjects of their research paper topics. Well: if you're interested in this at any level, here is a link to a list of their blogs that I have so far, along with brief descriptions of their subjects. As you'll see, there's quite a range of subject matter, and some are further along in their thinking and/or content than others. But I hope that those of you with time and inclination will go and have a look and maybe find a blog whose subject interests you enough to comment on it. As I say over there, it's my hope that my students become more self-conscious of themselves as writers if they know that someone other than their prof is reading their work.

It takes a blogosphere to educate a class.

Thanks in advance, and I'll see you back "here" sometime next week.

Read More...

Summary only...